Word: wilderness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...choice. A poll showed that the students favored modern plays over classical ones by 5 to 1, and harbored a definite antipathy to student scripts. As to specific playwrights, the poll yielded the following, in order of preference: Shaw, Shakespeare, O'Neill, Coward, Ibsen, Wilde, Anderson, Odets, Chekhov, and Wilder...
...Matchmaker (Don Hartman; Paramount) is Shirley Booth, and no one can match her when she is on the middle-aged make. Waving her umbrella like a fairy godmother with a poltergeistic wand, she stumbles, rumbles and cannily bumbles her way through the title role of Thornton Wilder's 1956 stage success in a manner that moviegoers with a taste for old-fashioned American farce will have no trouble savoring...
...merchant in all Yonkers in 1884. Her mission is complicated by the merchant's preference for finance rather than romance. "Marriage," he snorts, "is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." Even worse, the old skinflint seems set on marrying somebody young. Author Wilder's solution, which involves exploding tomato tins, a pair of Vandergelder's clerks uprooting the City of New York, a pretty milliner whose rival is purely mythical, and a demoniac dinner party, makes no sense at all-but does make scatterbrained nonsense...
...Wilder and Scriptwriter John Michael Hayes coat this slapstick with lavish layers of roguish dialogue. If Actress Booth blinks at the camera and confides, "Money is like manure-it's not worth anything unless it's spread around," Actor Ford is there a moment later to lament: "Oh for the days when women were sold for a few cows." Chief Clerk Tony Perkins, who seems to be trying to recapture Jimmy Stewart's lost youth, paws the ground and in that familiar marble-mouthed drawl reckons that he might try kissing a girl...
Died. Evelyn Varden, 65, character actress whose career began in childhood, ended in January when she left the company of the London hit comedy Roar Like A Dove; first Mrs. Gibbs in Thornton Wilder's Our Town (other stage credits: Russet Mantle, Candle in the Wind), cinemactress (The Bad Seed, Cheaper By The Dozen), radio serialist, familiar player on live dramatic TV; of a heart attack; in Manhattan...