Word: villainous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Much Ado About Nothing (by William Shakespeare) has a contemptible hero, a motiveless villain, a tediously improbable main plot. Happily, what academics term the subplot-the prickly-pear romance of Benedick and Beatrice-is one of the most delightful things in all Shakespeare. And it can never have seemed more a delight than when John Gielgud and Margaret Leighton are swapping insults and moving blindfolded toward the altar...
There was another villain in the Deadwood legend: fire. Any flicker of flame in the bottom of the valley would feed upward to the houses above. And every Deadwood youngster knew that the gulch was a natural chimney when forest fires swept through the adjacent piny hills. A fire starting in a bakery charred Deadwood in 1879. The town was rebuilt with a water barrel on every roof, survived three big fires in 1951-52. Last week, for 24 hours, Deadwood (pop. 4,000) broiled under the windswept fingers of a forest fire that threatened to cook it once...
...rest is one long cuckold-doodle-do. The husband explains by flashbacks how he secretly learned of the infidelity and how he reacted with something more than a Gallic shrug. His grandfather might have shot, whipped or choked the villain straightway. But a man of the husband's generation intends no violence. Instead, he wants to stretch the lovers on a psychological rack, then leave the actor there and reclaim his wife. As a starter, he hires a private detective to make keyhole photographs. For divorce proceedings? "Mais non. For the family album...
Wagon Train (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).*One of the more successful efforts to boost a western out of the wagon ruts of mediocrity. Rerun of old (70) Movie Villain Sessue Hayakawa's magnificent failure to cross the plains as a sword-swinging samurai (TIME...
...high handed dispatch, he breaks up an affair between his luxury-loving cousin and a fifth-rate actress. Only when he gambles with his own son's life and loses, does so much as a shadow of remorse flicker across his cynical, craggy old face. And does the villain finally get his comeuppance? Not really. Presumably he goes on making bigger deals by day even if, in the wake of his son's suicide, he does not sleep well by night...