Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hardly another "Oklahoma!", "Sing Out, Sweet Land!" is a handsome, spirited, and highly appealing production in its own right. Walter Kerr's idea is a winning one and two acts of second-rate script writing cannot overshadow the warm American tone...
...script writer for M.G.M., she had given up her Hollywood career to go to the Far East. She was at her husband's side in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked, lost everything but the sweater and slacks she was wearing when they bombed Manila and burned her home to the ground. On New Year's Eve she made a last-minute getaway to Bataan-caught a little island freighter at midnight as the Manila docks went up in flames...
Newman's reason was "to find out things never noticed before"; his reaction, "truly incredible boredom." The most trying period was "the latter half of the first 25 performances. Then I got my second wind." Newman learned to sleep open-eyed, but the slightest deviation from the script would wake him up "with a jerk." Slight differences in intonation or timing came to be "minor events." When Newman occasionally slipped out for a breath of air, "the actors who resented my continuous presence most . . . objected to my temporary absence even more." The acting, Newman found, was highly intermittent...
...Cockney hero, Ernie Mott. It got a propitious leg-up when young Producer David Hempstead called in Clifford Odets to do the screen play. It got itself and Hollywood a new and gifted director when Odets took on that job, too. For still more luster, Producer Hempstead-and the script-enticed Ethel Barrymore back into pictures...
...full of surprises. Surprise No. 1 is that the slow opening scene never comes to an end; surprise No. 2 is that the second scene reaches truly hilarious proportions; and surprise No. 3 that the end result is a very pleasant bit of fantasy with an occasionally inept script but a winning idea and the excellent Josephine Hull and Frank Fay in the leading roles...