Word: wildernesses
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...FORTUNE COOKIE. Director Billy Wilder (The Apartment; Kiss Me, Stupid) tackles that great pastime, cheating the insurance company. His anti-hero is a leering, sneering shyster lawyer, played by Walter Matthau, who pulls the strings for the supposedly injured party, Jack Lemmon, and ends up stealing the show...
...always wishes that Thornton Wilder were as intelligent as he is theatrically gifted. After his stagecraft enchants and grips you, you're left with the truisms and slightly awry profundity of his philosophy. He converts the theatre into a sympathetic, subtle medium and then ignores its potential to sermonize. But his humor is so warm, and his juggling of conventions so hypnotic, that you're a hundred steps out of the theatre before you realize you've been hoodwinked into sentimentality...
...Skin Of Our Teeth, as Stephen Nightingale directs it at Lowell House, carries off Wilder's con game with only a few pratfalls. The play is a loosely conceived Everyman telling the never-ending story of Mr. George Antrobus (Stuart Beck), his wife (Mary Belle Felten-stein), and two kids (John Sansone and Jody Adams). Wilder places this New Jersey family in the Ice Age, the flood, and the end of World War II (which wasn't over in 1942), revelling in anachronism and exploded convention...
Nightingale could have used bolder, more purely defined directorial strokes. But if fuzzy, the production is also funny. And in Wilder's characteristically ephemeral way it is moving theater...
...FORTUNE COOKIE. Director Billy Wilder (The Apartment; Kiss Me, Stupid) tackles that great pastime, cheating the insurance company. His antihero is a leering, sneering shyster lawyer, played by Walter Matthau, who pulls the strings for the supposedly injured party, Jack Lemmon, and ends up stealing the show...