Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

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14 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 3 often the way with well-made plays, artificial. It is intense at moments, but, for melodrama, it lacks incident. It borders on psychological melodrama, but it never rises above theatrical artifice. Most of the dialogue is cliched, but now and then there is a witty line. “This is so legit,” says the gangster (more of him later), “that it’s not on the level.” The story? This is a venerable plot about a mother’s sacrifice for a son unaware that she exists. The mother is an ex-Follies girl, and the son, now a returned war hero, had been adopted in infancy by wealthy friends of his mother. His real father, also unknown to him, a gangster wanted on a murder charge, who has escaped to South America, gets the idea that he can now return to New York, establish his claim to his son, and count on the clemency of a jiu’y because his son is a hero. The father arrives and announces his intention to the boy’s mother. Though separated from them, she still loves both father and son. Because she loves them, she sees only one solution — to kill the father before he can shatter their son’s peace of mind and tranquil life with the parents he believes his own. Hers is a thrilling, though easily predicted, moment of decision. June Havoc, who here makes her debut as a straight dramatic actress, gives a lively though obvious performance as the exFollies girl. Neither her body nor her voice, however, is yet attuned to dramatic nuances. Edmund Lowe, returning to Broadway after a 23-year truancy, is vivid as the gangster even though he is at times aloof from his own performance, looking on as it were and saying: “I don’t believe in this tough guy.” Una O’Connor, one of Dublin’s distinguished Abbey Players, gives a remarkable performance as a faithful old servant, a Cassandra-like figure who hovers in the background from which she protects those whom she serves. "THE ASSASSIN" Some ten years ago Irwin Shaw wrote a play called Burij The Dead, a one-acter in which he cried out passionately against war. It was clear that the new playwright’s idiom was strong. Expectations rose high. Fulllength plays followed, and the idiom continued vigorous, but the earlier promise was never quite realized. In no three-acter could Shaw sustain the intensity he showed in his first play. Repeatedly the structure was faulty. Shaw showed greater strength in his short stories, which are sharp vignettes of contemporary life. All this is by way of preamble to the fact that The Assassi)), Irwin Shaw’s new play presented by Carly Wharton and Martin Gabel in association with Alfred Bloomingdale is one more example of the frustrating of first promise. The new play deals with the historically as yet unexplained motives of the young zealot who murdered Admiral Darlan and with the factional fights in France among the De Gaulists, the Blumites, the Bourbons, the Bonapartists, the Communists, and the Croix De Feu. Shaw’s message — and he has always been a moralistic writer — is that the quality of a man is more important than what he believes. The hero, a royalist, assassinates Admiral Marcel Vespery, the stage Darlan, partly in the hope of thus helping a king to the throne, but also because, by so doing, he can secure the release from prison of a small group of his friends of all political faiths. This hero is one who dies, wanting to live, and who commits the murder in the certainty that his own escape is assured. The plot to save him miscarries, and he is executed. His last gesture, before he is led out of the prison cell, is to chalk the date of his birth and the date of his death on the prison wall. This cinematic touch is the final, lugubrious bravado of the romantic young man. There is a love story, too. An attachment sprouts spontaneously between the hero and a girl who considered herself dead ever since her husband was killed at the front. She finds that the living do not die with the dead. When her lover is executed, she wishes she had in fact been able to remain dead to love. This is the stuff of poetic tragedy, but Mr. Shaw muffs his opportunity. Except for moving moments toward the end of the second act and in the third act, the play is pallid, diffuse, and structurally weak. The action starts too quickly, before the audience cares anything about the characters, and the characters who wander around are stereotypes. Likewise, Martin Gabel’s direction is chaotic. Except for Frank Sundstrom, the gifted Swedish actor, who makes his debut as the assassin, and for Harold Huber, who plays a sinister aid of the Vespery forces, the acting is uninspired. These two, however, give first-rate performances. "THERESE" Victor Payne-Jennings and Bernard Klawans have assembled a distinguished cast headed by Eva Le Gallienne, Victor Jory, and Dame May Whitty, and engaged Margaret Webster to wield the directorial baton for Therese, Thomas Job’s adaptatioii of Zola’s Therese Raqidn. But keep your expectations