Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Though this plot idea leads conveniently to some amusing complications, it is a lot to ask an audience to swallow, even with Actress Ritter to make it palatable. Bravely insouciant, cracking wise until she finally cracks the whip, she dotes too much on her son to expose his shame, goes about instead captivating his bride and his boss (Larry Keating) and foiling the mean schemes of the boss's playboy son (James Lorimer). At times, the story pushes her role uncomfortably close to Stella Dallas; even then, she indicates that, properly used, she has a talent for pathos...
...theme is simple: the corruption of love by vanity. Moravia's plot comes to little more than the old one of the husband who nearly loses his wife because he neglects her. But from these familiar materials he has worked up a haunting story, in which the flesh and the sentiment of love have full play without becoming either nasty or maudlin...
...necessary to go into the complexities of Phelps' plot. "One need only explain that the setting is a "life-sized portrait of Melville's study" and that the people in the painting come to life and philosophize and indulge in banter with people of our own day who are looking at the painting. The philosophy got beyond me at times but it has to do with Time (represented by a grandfather clock) and white whales and is quite satisfactory; the banter, which I presume is meant to provide another frame of reference for the philosophy (besides the picture frame, which...
...Autumn Garden (by Lillian Hellman; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden) is a strikingly new kind of Lillian Hellman play. The plot is not at all striking and is secondary to the people; the people are pretty average people, neither vipers nor vixens. The scene is the South-an elegant summer boarding house run by a wellborn, middle-aged spinster. The guests are largely people of her own generation and kind-fiberless, frustrated people: a quiet, cynical drinker who has never married; a quiet-seeking general married to a fool; a confused young man halfheartedly about to marry the spinster...
What blurs and scatters the general effect is a need, not for a more dramatic plot, but for a more incisive pattern. The boarding house brings together numerous people not closely enough related to form a homogeneous group, nor sufficiently unrelated to create the diversified world-in-little of a Grand Hotel. There is not enough significant interplay; characters constantly mingle but seldom merge. There is rather the sort of populous, externally shared living that is the basis of social comedy. And the play offers effective social comedy through such types as a tart matriarch or a hen-brained gadder...