Word: tragical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...played by Jane Darwell, Ma is a great tragic character of the screen, even her victory is tragic. She can win it only by losing everything. But faced with hunger, homelessness, death, she sees that none of these was important. Ma is the incarnation of the dignity of human being, and the courage to assert it against odds...
Main problem of this picture, which Robert Sherwood scripted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, is the same as the play's: how to create a tragic mood when almost nothing tragic happens. As in the play, Scripter Sherwood tries to turn the trick with a series of biographical episodes, Lincoln's easygoing frontier life, the death of Ann Rutledge, his unhappy marriage, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, his election. As in the play, Actor Raymond Massey turns the trick for him. But there are also shrewd playwrighting touches: reluctant Mr. Lincoln symbolically taken in charge by the soldiers...
...emotion." She had great energy, great sincerity, great generosity, and on occasion great good sense. Even when she became a fixture of yellow journalism, her spontaneity remained untainted by cynicism. What was it that led her on into the self-deception that finally broke down in her last tragic years? ("I shall be forgotten," she said, "while more careful and conscientious artists live in the memory of the world...
Juno and the Paycock shows a family meeting a tragic fate through the weaknesses of a comic character. The Paycock's artful dodges and arrant hypocrisies, his braggart airs and grandly drunken delusions, are uproariously funny. But eventually his besotted dance is over and the piper must be paid. Then the light falls on Juno, who-her son murdered, her daughter betrayed, her home destroyed-goes forth, heart crumpled but head high, to begin life over...
...tragic last act of Juno and the Paycock is spoiled by wanton melodrama. Too late, too violently, O'Casey pushes the son and daughter into the limelight. Their fate-not having the full force of the play behind it -seems manipulated, its effect on Juno mawkish. But it is proof of O'Casey's real power that his Paycock should remain comic from start to finish. The Paycock is a callous wastrel for whom O'Casey has only bitter scorn; but he is a born "character," and O'Casey lets him cut his capers without...