Word: plot
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...regards acting, the honors are all Von Stroheim's. The former stormy petrol of Hollywood has in exile created a far greater characterization than ever he did before. His performance would seem to be the one great thing of "Grand Illusion." Although neither plot, treatment, direction, or his fellow actors maintain the superbly high standard that Von Stroheim sets, the picture is far above average...
...Minister Colonel Songgram became Premier. Few days before his promotion the Defense Minister dined with his wife, daughter and a few friends. Soon after dinner they all took sick. Doctors were summoned and found the food had been poisoned. All the diners survived. Last week news of the poison plot leaked out through diplomatic channels when British Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax sent Colonel Songgram official British condolences over the "cowardly attempt of an individual or individuals to destroy the lives" of the Premier and his dinner party...
...Thornton Wilder on a lark. The play, like the word, is rather out-of-date: Wilder has rewritten an old Viennese farce with no thought of streamlining it. The scene of The Merchant of Yonkers is Manhattan in the '80s. but old as the European theatre is the plot of the sweated apprentices who sneak off for a holiday, of their miserly old master (Percy Waram) on the hunt for a wife, and of the obliging Mrs. Fixit (Jane Cowl) who fixes things to suit herself. The slapstick is the same that, 200 years ago. drew tears of laughter...
Unfortunately in the last two acts the careless laughter begins to sound more like an old maid's skittish giggle. The characters become a little giddy, the author turns a little cute, the plot turns a little silly, and Director Max Reinhardt's German sense of gaiety turns alarmingly roguish. But the wonder is not that Wilder's old horse finally breaks down. The wonder is that it trots so gaily, canters so jauntily, for as long as it does...
...Composer Grieg, for all his fame, remained one of music's flower gardeners. Most of his best compositions were light songs and piano pieces, small, lyric, orchestral posies. There was no room on his plot for big symphonic and operatic hedgerows and shade trees. For this situation his biographer blames not Grieg but the character of the national soil. Norway's folk idioms were wild flowers, not acorns, and even the ablest husbandman could not make them sprout into oaks...