Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...institutions like Brook Valley help strangle decent impulses. Unfortunately it has not let bad enough alone, but has gone at ticklish human problems with the red hot pincers of melodrama, and has so loaded itself down with wiles and theatrics that it finally caves in. There is so much plot that there is no real plight; the words, like the deeds, smack at times of garish melodrama...
When he actually tries out the murder plot he has imagined so smoothly, he bungles it hilariously. Having spent too long arriving at his gag, Sturges cannot resist overworking it. Harrison is so funny stepping through a cane-bottomed chair that he is allowed to do the whole routine a second time...
...first act was a little disconcerting, for two reasons. First, the characters and plot revealed a lack of originality, as mentioned. Second, the difficulty of adjusting oneself to seeing the same actors, who only last week were so exciting as members of Shaw's Heartbreak family, reduced new to the hum-drum bickerings of Mr. Savory's Garth-Banders...
...suitable repertory material, but it is the "pleasant and amusing" comedy the directors said it would be. It is even uproariously funny is two or three instances, not a bad average, certainly. The acting couldn't be better and goes a long way towards covering up the pedestrian plot and characters...
...small children knew that at this very minute Paul Revere and Mother Goose were sharing the same plot of ground, they would be sadly disillusioned. But if they took the trouble to walk down Tremont Street past Park Street Church and look in to the left, they could see the place for themselves--the Old Granary Burial Ground, where the tombs of Paul Revere and Mrs. Mary Goose, who wrote the famous verses for her grandchildren, lie only 50 feet apart...