Word: barbara
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...Patty O'Neill, Moon's naive and unpredictable ingenue, who surprises a middle-aged lecher into an offer of marriage and an amiable young wolf into a promise of chastity, Barbara Bel Geddes shines and twinkles with an authentic radiance. Her give & take with Co-Stars Donald Cook and Barry Nelson is sharp, sure, and exquisitely timed. Her poise is unshakable. In 1941, when she first appeared on Broadway, critics had called Barbara a "plump" and "promising" ingenue. Now, trimmer, slimmer, and thoroughly resourceful on the stage, she is an accomplished, soundly competent performer...
Well-Scrubbed Schoolgirl. Few Broadway stars have failed so signally to look the part. As Patty, Barbara Bel Geddes (rhymes with wed us) looks and talks more like a Bryn Mawr graduate (which she is not) than the cop's daughter she plays, and more like Barbara Bel Geddes than either. In the navy blue pullover sweater, plain skirt, saddle shoes and white dickey collar which she wears about town almost as a uniform, she could easily be confused with a well-scrubbed Connecticut schoolgirl off to the movies...
...Barbara stands 5 ft. 3 in. tall, weighs a mere 113 Ibs., tosses her burnished, straw-colored hair in a girlish bob, and gazes at the world through clear hazel eyes. In a medium where pose and posture are the standards, she is almosl startlingly forthright. Painfully self-conscious under scrutiny, uninhibited among close friends, Barbara can cuss like a longshoreman and make it sound as offhand as a schoolgirl's "Jeepers." The effect of such artlessness on the stage is to make practically anything Barbara does seem credible and convincing. One mark of her real talent lies...
...satisfaction of most critics. As the simple, unaffected Southern belle of Deep Are the Roots (1945), she had shown her capacity for serious drama; now she has shown her mastery of the peculiar demands of airy farce. Cornell, Bankhead, Hayes and Lawrence will not have to give way to Barbara for a while yet. But the quiet radiance and well-trained competence that Barbara had brought to Broadway was enough to give the fabulous invalid plenty of hope for the day when her elders might retire. "Barbara has a terrific future in the theater," says Moon's Director Otto...
Three-Ringed Brownstone. Barbara's joint fear of and attraction to the limelight is a legitimate inheritance. For a generation before she entered the theater, her father Norman had rumbled and roared like an earthquake in the foundations of show business, making plans, productions, money, noise, friends and enemies on a gargantuan scale. The example of his unbridled imagination and breezy pressagentry taught Barbara early in life that the theater could be both sheen and shoddy...