Word: booth
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...come-hither eye; the other (Rosalind Russell) has a go-to manner. Based on the humorous New Yorker short stories by Ruth McKenney, the show has had a long dramatic history: it was a 1940 Broadway hit as My Sister Eileen, starring this year's Oscar-winning Shirley Booth (see CINEMA). Rosalind made the movie version in 1942 and has played the role of Ruth in a dozen radio broadcasts. Though always successful, the show was never the smash that it is today, dressed up in Leonard Bernstein's bright music and with the addition of gracefully ungainly...
Oscar for 1952's "best actor" was presented in absentia to durable Gary Cooper for his performance as the cow-town marshal in High Noon. In Manhattan, Broadway's Shirley Booth, whose slatternly housewife in Come Back, Little Sheba was her first screen role, stumbled excitedly up the steps to the stage. But the Hollywood audience, watching the big-screen TV, also saw her gracefully walk off with a well-deserved award for "best actress...
Come Back, Little Sheba. Burt Lancaster as a reformed drunk and Shirley Booth as his slatternly wife in a film version of William Inge's play (TIME...
More impressive than the obvious import of Miss Booth to play Lola is Hal Wallis' choice of Daniel Mann, the director of Sheba on Broadway, to film the screen version. Mann makes William Inge's portrait of frustration and wasted lives even more harrowing on film than it was on the stage. With few close-ups, the camera prowls the squalid little home of the Delaneys like a fascinated eavesdropper. It hides at the bottom of the stairs and catches the plump disarray of Lola as she wanders sleepily down to answer the door-bell; it watches the young boarder...
...Miss Booth's performance is, of course, the highlight of the film. A strangely static character, Lola passively reacts to the hell around her but never really comprehends it. With wistful comfort from a distant but remembered past, she plods through the present listlessly, leaving her hair-brush on the breakfast table and her girdle in the bureau. A less gifted actress would make Lola only repulsive, infuriating for her aimless sloppiness, her complete lack of intellect and sensitivity. Miss Booth, however, draws an infinitely pathetic portrait of a lonely and well-meaning, but painfully limited woman unable to cope...