Word: magic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Heartbreak House is quite marvelous in bits and pieces, but too miscellaneous and uneven as a whole. In the long final scene, where the immemorial charm of the English countryside is charged with the tensions of an approaching air raid, Shaw achieves for a time a kind of magic. But even here, more in the style of an old morality play than an English Cherry Orchard, it is the dawdling leisure class Shaw spares when the bombs fall, and the thief and the tycoon that he kills...
...performances by Pamela Brown as Shotover's snooty upper-class daughter, by Diana Wynyard as his masterfully radiant one, by Alan Webb, despite the hurdle of being the good man of the play. But there was merely competent performing too. And the last scene lacked any touch of magic, partly because it wore too lively an air, partly because Ben Edwards' all-purpose set placed it in a well-lighted sort of courtyard instead of a dusky, dreamlike garden. All the same, after a 21-year absence from Broadway, a play boasting so many good things...
...success of Treasury Secretary Anderson's magic fives caused many private money authorities to think that the worst pinch in the money market may be over and rates may level off. While Anderson will be competing with the heavy seasonal demand by business for funds to finance the building of Christmas inventories, the fact that the issue was so heavily oversubscribed suggests that the 5% note was anything but a one-shot wonder...
...dull married sister, and her experience of life is a dreary vacuum. It is almost like liberation when Dr. Montague takes her on as one of three assistants to check psychic phenomena at a haunted house in a grubby small town. Author Jackson, a self-confessed dabbler in magic, sets her scene with professional care. The big old house is a crazily built warren of odd rooms and twisting corridors. For 80 years it has witnessed a variety of human disasters, and now it is deserted by its owners; the caretaking couple refuse to stay beyond 6 in the evening...
Great Confession. Volume II ends after Casanova has been imprisoned by the State Inquisitors (possibly for dabbling in black magic), has dramatically escaped and returned to Paris with a year's dammed-up energy...