Word: wife
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...time to time word would come from the Young & Rubicam experimental kitchen, of which Miss Arfmann is the director, that a recipe had turned out extraordinarily well and would somebody from TIME like to come down and taste it. Somebody always did, and took the recipe home for his wife to try. As Miss Arfmann's list of approved (as both unusual and practical) recipes grew, we began mailing some of them out to food stores to be displayed with their goods. Customers tried them and asked for more. So did many of us here at TIME...
...subject is ghosts; the treatment is neither scary nor funny--merely heavy-handed. James Mason, as a retired businessman, and his wife, Barbara Mullen, bring their 40 years experience in the drapery business to battle with a frustrated young ghost who haunts their newly-bought country house. Local gossip whispers that an attractive girl was smothered to death there 40 years before by some avaricious caretakers who wanted her inheritance. Mason and Mullen are unimpressed until she begins to whistle in the speaking tubes and bother the help...
...wife has hired a young woman (Margaret Lockwood) as a companion, and the ghost, apparently seeing a psychic likeness, takes her over body and soul. Miss Lockwood heaves and sobs in demonic possession for most of the rest of the film, until she is saved for the world of sunlight and for that Nice Young Man by the intervention of another and even less convincing apparition...
...could easily be done away with. The dialogue doesn't seem very important, but serves the purposes of the plot well enough. The plot, by the way, concerns an unemployed man who has lost faith in himself and is hovering on the brink of insanity. His loving and loyal wife is trying to get him into an asylum for treatment when the play begins. The entire play covers only the next few hours...
Alexander Knox, in addition to having written the play, is co-starred in its along with Doris Nolan (who is also Mrs. Knox). Both are very talented actors, thought it seems that Miss Nolan gives the better performance. Of course, as the wise and kind wife, she has the more admirable part. Mr. Knox portrays the demented man as a fumbling, bewildered person rather than a maniacal killer. What in "The Closing Door" seems like underplaying by Mr. Knox, may be an authentic interpretation of a particular type of insanity, but it is not effective on the stage. Eva Condon...