Word: warded
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...picture follows Virginia's progress through the various wards, divided into descending degrees of misery, like the circles of hell. Throughout, it preserves the novel's sharply observed minor touches of asylum life-the nurses' way of speaking in front of inmates as if they weren't there (as some adults speak in front of children); the strange snobbery of the sick who look down on their sicker fellows; the large-looming small idiocies of institutional bureaucracy, such as the clean carpet in one ward which must not be stepped on (and the wonderful old woman...
...greatest merit is its memorable types: the inarticulate young girl whose frozen, dangerous fear seems to choke her like a stone lodged in the throat; the nurse whose own mind has worked loose in the buffeting, jarring atmosphere of the asylum and who now wanders through her ward, forlornly keeping imaginary records...
...Litvak, a strong believer in psychoanalysis, tells his story with great simplicity and sympathy. There are times when the simplicity verges on the obvious. But his best scenes are superb. The finest, based mostly on Litvak's observations in the asylums he visited, is laid in the "disturbed" ward. There, amid the weirdly unrestrained babble, the camera makes its way from figure to figure: the girl who slinkily dances about in a pathetic imitation of an evening gown, the woman crouched praying on the floor, the girl with the Ana Pauker haircut pleading "in the name of the Party...
Anne of the Thousand Days (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by the Playwrights' Company & Leland Hay ward) is yet another shot at history for Maxwell Anderson, and very likely another hit. From the turbulent story of Henry VIII's Anne Boleyn, Playwright Anderson has made a plump and gaudy stage piece, a thing of fierce desires, clashing wills, momentous acts. For love or lust of Anne, Henry divorced Catherine of Aragon, broke with Rome, opened an age of bloodshed; while the insolent and ambitious Anne would be Henry's queen or nothing at the start, still his queen...
...account of the means by which the Kremlin (with little resistance from the U.S. Government) took over the Polish state. Political pundits had a sure-fire topic in Russia v. the Western democracies. Most crisp and provocative of a spate of books on the subject was bright, British Barbara Ward's The West at Bay, in which she argued that Western Europe must have Western Union or "we are for the dark...