Word: idiotic
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...Idiot's Delight (by Robert Emmet Sherwood; Theatre Guild, producer), though all about the next World War, is nothing so pretentious as the film of Herbert George Wells's Things to Come (see p. 43). Playwright Sherwood got a belly-full of fighting in the last War, is now afraid that another Armageddon is forthcoming. In the printed version of Idiot's Delight,* there is evidence that he had misgivings about his work's presentation before hostilities actually began. "What will happen before this play reaches print or a New York audience," says...
...Sherwood's views on world politics approximate those of a great body of contemporary writing men who habitually seek from their hearts instead of their heads the answers to pregnant questions arising outside their profession. As stated in the postscript, the lesson contained in Idiot's Delight is that ''by refusing to imitate the Fascists in their . . . hysterical self-worship and psychopathic hatred of others, we may achieve the enjoyment of peaceful life on earth rather than degraded death in the cellar." Happily, the solemn depths of this shopworn text are instinctively bridged by Mr. Sherwood...
...cinema theatres were flooded to their balconies. Above the flood line, the William Penn and Pittsburgher Hotels were jammed. Guests ate by candlelight, toiled up stairs and found their rooms by flashlight, washed and shaved with bottled spring water. At the dry Nixon Theatre, Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne played Idiot's Delight by flickering lights to a half-filled house...
...same time, some of the most telling effects are gained through a tongue-in-the-cheek subtlety. When the doddering idiot of a king is told to account for the presence of the soldier class by explaining that they are the conquering subjects, he innocently announces that they conquer the subjects. And when this same monarch is called upon to speak to his pugilistic parliament, his crafty prime minister starts a phonograph going beneath the royal robes. This is quite impressive until the minister in his vehemence breaks the record and the needle keeps repeating in the same...
...revealing commentary on the progress of cinematic fashions that the principal figure in the current version is a personage as unlike Matinee Idol Reid as it would be possible to find: Pantaloon Joe Penner, whose alarming ability to simulate the appearance and behavior of a congenital idiot has rapidly made him one of Hollywood's most admired comedians...