Word: childress
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Andy for 25 years were still worried by the bleak -but unconfirmed - rumor that Gosden & Correll will retire at the end of this season. But, in any case, Amos 'n' Andy will live on in TV: the TV version (alt. Thursdays, 8:30 p.m.), with Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams in the title roles, is now a CBS package...
...filmed show after a talent search that took four years. Heading the cast of characters originally created in blackface by Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden in a quartercentury of radio shows: ex-Vaudevillian Tim Moore as the posturing Kingfish; ex-Teacher Spencer Williams as Andy; Actor (Anna Lucasta) Alvin Childress as Amos, the taxi tycoon. The opening show served up the most rudimentary of plots (the Kingfish gets a draft notice by .mistake), but embellished it with slapstick situations reminiscent of the better two-reel comedies of silent movie days. The dialogue is above average; the sight gags...
...American before him, he has fallen in love with the Old World. To his French and Arab friends, who look upon Americans as Roman-style imperialists come to organize and barbarize their cultivated Greek-style world, Childress is "the nice American," a surprisingly sensitive soul...
...Childress' problem is whether to stay where he is and marry his French mistress, or go home and patch things up with his former wife, Mollie. On the scene descends Mollie herself, breathing high-powered charm and making a distressing show of her lack of sensitivity and moral cultivation. When Childress quarrels with a crusty old U.S. Senator for international rabble-rousing, she mocks him as naive. When he talks about settling down to a career as an art photographer, she urges him to devote himself instead to "getting ahead." Mollie lives by what Novelist Sykes bitingly calls...
...Childress is rocked back on his heels by Mollie, but something deep inside drives him to the grim decision to remarry her and go back home. A European friend explains the deep-inside part for him. "The American woman is a barbarian by comparison . . . She's a Roman next to a Greek. Forgive me, but you're a Roman too, with a Greek sensibility, and that's why you must tame your Roman woman before you'll be happy...