Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

December, 1945 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE 13 she plays it with knowing blandness. Edmund Gwenn as the old toper is just plain wonderful. One can complain, perhaps, that the Gwenn style is always the same, always predictable. Yet it is always engaging. Here it is at its best — broad yet wry, abandoned yet full of quiet pathos. The play as a whole is not so good as its parts — as its sharp moments of psychological revelation or its vivid vignettes. The parts, however, are imaginative gems. "DEEP ARE THE ROOTS" Arnaud D’Usseau and James Gow, the team that two seasons ago gave us the anti-Nazi Tomorroiv the World, now pack a fresh wallop in Deep Are The Roots, produced b y Kermit Bloomgarden and George Heller. Newspapermen before they became playwrights, the Messrs. D’Usseau and Gow have a keen sense of the topical. In both plays they have presented slices of contemporary life with earnestness, vigor, and at times even passion. The slice of life of the new play is cut from below the Mason and Dixon line, but it is meat for the whole nation. “What happens,” the playwrights ask in effect, “when a Negro soldier who has risen to a lieutenancy, has been decorated for bravery, and above all has been accepted as an equal by Europeans, returns home, and finds that home is the same South he used to know, seething with the same prejudices he now sees in a new perspective?” Brett Charles, the young soldier, returning to the home of the retired Southern senator, where his mother is a servant and where he has grown up, faces the bigotry of the senator, the pseudo-friendship of Alice, the senator’s elder daughter, and the unquestioning love of Nevy, the younger daughter. The roots of prejudice are deep in the senator, who, brooding on the Negro threat to white security, fancies that the soldier has stolen his watch, and orders Alice to have him arrested. In Alice prejudice is more complex. Always she has posed as an enlightened liberal. She has been interested in Brett because of his ability; has even helped him get a job as the principal of the Negro school. But hers has been benevolence on a pedestal. When the pedestal is threatened, benevolence turns venemous. When her father orders her to call the police to arrest Brett, she follows his orders — follows them even though she knows Brett did not steal the watch. But she wants him out of the way because she knows what her father doesn’t know — that her sister Nevy and he are in love with each other and have been seen together. Questions are posed, but no answers follow. The only answer to the dilemma, given by Alice’s future husband, a Northerner and a writer, is that daring to face confusion is itself an answer. As a whole, the play is good theater; the second act is particularly absorbing. It is too pat, however, and too self-conscious. At times one can almost hear the authors conferring ; “Let’s bring a Yankee in; he can talk for us. Let’s have one of the daughters pure-in-heart, so that we don’t paint all the Southerners as evil.” In the end, Brett is released from prison and Alice makes peace with him. This metaphorical handclasp is theatrical rather than real, stated rather than achieved. Elia Kazan, who has directed major assignments like The Eve of St. Mark and The Skin of Our Teeth, brings his customary incisiveness to the direction. Gordon Heath gives a subdued but moving performance as Brett. Charles Waldron successfully combines physical frailty with psychological cruelty in his portrait of the senator. Lloyd Gough plays the Yankee writer with quiet intensity. Carol Goodner, in the last few years saddled with a succession of roles as a tough woman which she played vividly, now brings assurance to the role of the genteel Alice, not tough enough to fight down the prejudice she has inherited. Above all, it is Barbara Bel Geddes who rates a paragraph all her own. Her growth in the last few years is incredible. From an obscure juvenile, she has become an actress of great assurance, sensitivity, and emotional power. The maturity she showed in playing Nevy is astounding in one so young. I don’t think I shall ever quite forget the poignancy with which Nevy tells of the lynching she saw as a child and the cruel, warped faces of the crowd which stayed with her even after the image of the man lynched had faded. Miss Bel Geddes’s portrait of Nevy will, in fact, remain an unforgettable characterization in my mental theatre files. "THE RYAN GIRL" The Ryan Girl, presented by the Messrs. Shubert in association with Albert De Courville, is, to be perfectly frank and admittedly trite, a good evening in the theatre. There is plenty of corn to be gathered on the stage of The Plymouth, but there are also a few thrills. Edmund Goulding, last represented on Broadway by Doncinf) Mothers in 1924, is the author. His play is well-made and, as is