Word: yarn
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...Story for Strangers (by Marc Connelly; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman) is told, via flashbacks, to a traveling salesman in a small-town barbershop, and is quite as dull, and ten times as long, as the usual barber's yarn. Subtitled "A Parable," the play is concerned with an undisclosed miracle that has transformed a rascally, coldhearted community into a garden spot of virtue and brotherly love...
...screen, this unpretentious yarn has been given standard Hollywood treatment, i.e., the daydreamer is now an heiress and her moderately subtle character is interpreted, with full brass, by rambunctious Betty Hutton. Playing her bookish boy friend, Macdonald Carey behaves more like the president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. All in all, the movie manages to destroy the original play's tenderness and its moral ("facts are better than dreams"*). Dream Girl gets by, with little to spare, on the strength of some frantically energetic scenes showing Betty as a flaming señorita, as a South Seas trollop...
Sleepy Hollow (based on Washington living's Legend of Sleepy Hollow; book & lyrics by Russell Maloney, Miriam Battista and Ruth Hughes Aarons; music by George Lessner; produced by Lorraine Lester) is passably tuneful and monumentally tedious. Washington Irving's famous yarn of lanky, spindle-necked Ichabod Crane-who was as ill-starred in love as in looks and was chased into immortality by the Headless Horseman-would seem likely material for a musical. It comes equipped with standard light-operatic fixtures: period atmosphere, picturesque locale, broad humor, folkish fantasy; it seems a cinch to wire for dancing...
...yarn's hero is a Molnaresque playwright. Its presumable moral: when it comes to finding a happy ending for a sorry mess, only a playwright will do. The playwright's young godson is engaged to a beautiful prima donna. Late one night, godfather and godson overhear the lady, through thin walls, in a vocal and vigorous love scene with an actor. While the godson threatens suicide, the godfather hits on how to save the day: the guilty lovers had really been rehearsing-a play which has still to be written...
...with some timely advice from Coach Mikkola, he smashed his way out of the box and ran down Joe Hall in the final sprint into the yarn. Other features of Saturday's meet: Dave Hamblett's win over IC4A champion Hall in the 440; Harvey Thayer's 22-foot broadjump, the best by a Crimson athletic in several years; the good showing of Mikkola's sprinters; hurdler Pat McCormick's performances is the 120 highs and 220 lows...