Word: wooley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Despite the reputation the play holds in academic circles, it has never seen a professional performance on Broadway. The only New York appearance of "Troilus and Cressida" occurred 20 years ago, when Monty Wooley directed a group of Yale undergraduates in the drama of the Trojan...
...dominant tone is one of moderation. David Niven is moderately crotchety as the bishop; Grant is moderately supernatural as Dudley; Loretta Young registers a variety of moderate emotions as the wife; and Monty Wooley is only moderately Monty Wooley as an old professor. And the total effect, despite the unhesitant acceptance of "just Dudley" and his miracles, is moderately good. As the redhead decided, summoning all her critical forces into play, "I liked...
...other half, namely the story, is distinguished mainly by the good taste of its omissions from the film-musical-biography formula. There is, for instance, no prophetic publisher, music teacher, wife, mother, or Monty Wooley to rasp "millions will thrill to your voice some day, Al." Instead, the gradual development of a star personality is shown, with little sentimental emphasis on either the ups or the downs. Again, although there is the usual trumped up battle between the hero's music and his wife, it is less ferocious and more human than in the Gershwin and Porter epics, and ends...
...student playgoer and his companion aren't particularly anxious to see a third-hand version of a second-rate Broadway production in which the favorite college wit unsuccessfully attempts an imitation of Monty Wooley or Victor Moore. Nor are they cheered to the point of unharnessing two dollars to listen to a short-haired female with a ereased face speak several languages miserably in a baroque drama by a rococco Slovene mystic. Shakespeare and Jonson may seem hackneyed to the man whose camp-chair bears the words "Director," but they are being done weekly in the classroom with great success...
Leading the latest procession from parlor to bedroom is the incomparable mountebank, Clifton Webb, gracefully balancing Noel's sheaf of tarts and darts. He hits the razor's edge with every gesture, shrug and intonation. Up against this kind of finesse Monty Wooley would be made to look like a blundering clod. Portraying the actor whose life aim begins and ends with his own convenience, Webb does a pungently sophisticated job of lechery and of molding the lives of the satellite circle of blustering men and urbane women who serve as his foils...