Having here and there revealed that his young hero, when given a chance, has a broad ability to enjoy the simple things of life—he is at his happiest when attending a movie with his mother and her husband—M. Truffaut now leads us to a grim conclusion. One of our boy’s ambitions is to tell a story in the manner of Balzac; another, and more driving one, is to have a look at the sea. In the juvenile home, he is questioned extensively about a nonexistent sex life, regimented, and brutalized, and finally he takes off in search of peace and freedom—freedom to think about Balzac, if nothing more. Running with the strength of the demented, he finally comes upon the sea, and there M. Truffaut stops his camera, revealing to us, in one corrosive still-shot, a boy with no place to go. In fact, it could be said that the whole film is corrosive, for it leaves an etching on the mind that deepens with time.
The performances in The 400 Blows are all superior, but, in a cast of superb actors, the amateur Jean-Pierre stands out with authority.
WOLCOTT GIBBS
DECEMBER 2, 1950 (ON GUYS AND DOLLS)
DON’T THINK I ever had more fun at a musical comedy than I had the other night, when an association of strangely gifted men put on a Broadway epic known as Guys and Dolls. There have been loftier moral and aesthetic experiences, like Show Boat and South Pacific; there have been more enduring musical accomplishments, like Porgy and Bess; there have been occasions when the humor was clearly on a more ambitious level, like Of Thee I Sing; there have been more sensational individual performances, like practically anything involving Miss Ethel Merman. There has, however, been nothing I can remember that sustained a higher general level of sheer entertainment than the operation at the Forty-sixth Street Theatre. In form and content, the closest thing to it was Pal Joey, but even that fine essay in jocular corruption had its moments when I wished the cast would move on to something else. There were none such—for me, at least—in Guys and Dolls. The credits on the program note that the piece was produced by Cy Feuer and Ernest H. Martin; that the book was adapted, by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, from a story by the late Damon Runyon; that the music and lyrics were the work of Frank Loesser; that the settings were designed by Jo Mielziner and the costumes by Alvin Colt; that the dances were staged by Michael Kidd; and that George S. Kaufman was responsible for the direction. There isn’t a man on this list who hasn’t my deepest admiration and gratitude.
I haven’t any idea how closely the story Mr. Swerling and Mr. Burrows have chosen follows the original, since it is one of the holes in my culture that I have read very little Runyon, whose idiom I always suspected—wrongfully, I’m sure—of being more or less synthetic, like Milt Gross’s approximation of the vernacular of the Bronx, and whose plots, or at least the few with which I am familiar, leaned heavily on the old O. Henry switch at the end. Both these faults, if they are faults, are visible in the play version. The speech employed by the characters is a heightened parody, and not a very accurate one, of that used by the Broadway types, including a good many horseplayers, of my acquaintance, and the switch is certainly present, especially when the toughest gambler of them all turns up as a member of a mission band. I don’t think these things make any difference, and it may even be that what were flaws in fiction are virtues on the stage, where broad strokes and slapstick techniques are practically obligatory.
Mr. Swerling and Mr. Burrows, to get down to a rough outline of the facts, are primarily interested in two romances—one between Nathan Detroit, the impresario of the oldest floating crap game in New York, and a blonde, to whom he has been engaged for fourteen years, who heads the floor show in a joint called the Hot Box; the other between the gambler mentioned above, whose name is Sky Masterson, and the young lady in charge of the mission. Detroit, who needs a thousand dollars to rent a suitable site for his crap game, makes a bet for that amount with Masterson, who gambles on his ability to persuade the girl from the mission to accompany him to Havana. He succeeds, but, yielding to a soft impulse brought on by love, gallantly denies that he did, thus enabling the boys to get on with their game. Somehow or other (the details would just mix you up), everything works out satisfactorily, at least from the feminine point of view, and the final curtain falls on a rash of weddings. It is as simple as that.
I can list only a few of the brilliant and hilarious things that ornament this framework. Vivian Blaine, as the night-club singer, has two numbers, one explaining how emotional frustration can give a girl a bad cold in her head, and the other an indignant ditty known as “Take Back Your Mink” (“to from whence it came”), that are as funny and as impressively delivered as anything you’ll hear this season. Isabel Bigley, as the evangelist, has a face, a voice, and a figure that are all astonishing, to put it mildly, and her material, especially two sentimental songs called “If I Were a Bell” and “I’ll Know,” and a frivolous duet with Miss Blaine labelled “Marry the Man Today,” is well worthy of all these talents. There is a memorable scene in which fifteen or twenty gamblers are tricked somehow into the mission and presently find themselves carolling something called “Follow the Fold,” and another, involving some excellent dancing, in which they are all happily congregated in a sewer, shooting dice. The guys and dolls, in addition to those already named, bear such names as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Benny Southstreet, Harry the Horse, and Angie the Ox. They are all hoarse in their speech, disreputable in their ways, and seriously misguided in the matter of shirts and ties. The actors who impersonate Detroit and Masterson are Sam Levene and Robert Alda, respectively, and they are superb at capturing that indefinable blend of terrible sentimentality and brassy sophistication that characterizes the Times Square man of distinction. The others include Stubby Kaye, Johnny Silver, Tom Pedi, and B. S. Pully, and I found each of them awe-inspiring, too. Among the virtuous members of the company are Paul Reed, as a hard-boiled detective; Netta Packer, as the commanding officer of the mission band; and Pat Rooney, Sr., who, as one of her lieutenants, sings a song, called “More I Cannot Wish You,” that is one of the pleasantest things in the show.
APRIL 2, 1955 (ON CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF)
N THE WHOLE, this has been a barren year in the theatre (it has, in fact, been so barren that there has been scarcely a play I couldn’t imagine having written myself, suitably stimulated), and it is therefore a pleasure to announce that Tennessee Williams, well known to you, I’m sure, for The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, has written an almost wholly admirable play called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, recently unveiled at the Morosco.
The story Mr. Williams has to tell is hard to summarize very intelligibly, because it deals with emotions rather outside our common, or at least acknowledged, experience. The play begins with a scene between a young woman and her husband, who has withdrawn from any real participation in life. In college, he reached a kind of limited excellence as a football player, and had a never quite explicitly homosexual relationship with another student, which makes it impossible for him to accept a world that seems to fall so far and disgustingly (this word is Mr. Williams’) short of his adolescent dream. Anyway, he has taken to drink and has injured himself in a childish and drunken effort to recapture the athletic splendors of the past. His wife loves him, but her physical advances are repugnant to him and he is much too remote to appreciate the desperate humor of her conversation. There is no conceivable method of communication between them, and although it appears to me that Mr. Williams’ specific dilemma is a little bizarre, his underlying thought is just as simple as this: the profound and tragic mystery that every man is to every other man in the world, and even to himself.
The plot is not much more than a serviceable mechanism for conveying the author’s ideas. A rich old man, the hero’s father, has come back, on his sixty-fifth birthday, to the family plantation. While an erroneous laboratory report has led him to suppose that he still has a good many years to live, the fact is that he is dying of cancer, and when he finds that out, he is obliged to make a final settlement of his affairs. This involves choosing as h
is heir either a boy whom he recognizes as an alcoholic and probably a homosexual or a son who is a competent bore with five existing children and another imminent. In a way, Mr. Williams has stacked his cards a little too obviously, since his corrupted idealist is as picturesque and charming a figure as any the theatre has recently produced and his bore isn’t much more than a standard low-comedy caricature. There is never any question about the old man’s real emotional commitment, and I should say that in this particular, too much legitimate dramatic suspense may have been sacrificed for a kind of self-conscious literary integrity. Mr. Williams, that is, has in general scornfully declined to write anything that could possibly be defined as a “commercial” play, and has, indeed, turned out something that occasionally seems like a parody of one. There are villains, but they are far too ludicrous to concern anybody much. If you really care about who gets the ten million dollars and the twenty-eight thousand acres of the most fertile land this side of the Nile, the Morosco is not the theatre you’re looking for. The play there has to do with what an extremely sensitive writer has been able to make of a fragment of human experience. Any resemblance it may have to The Desperate Hours or any other shapely exercise of the year is the result of a compromise that I’m sure the author deplores exactly as much as I do.
Overlooking its mistakes, which seem to me many and important, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is unquestionably a distinguished play. The scene in the first act between the hero and his wife is an impressive tour de force (it amounts essentially to a half-hour monologue, in which a semi-literate woman gives the whole history of the disaster that has overtaken them both to a man who stopped hearing living people talk quite a while ago), and a subsequent encounter, between the hero and his father, is on a level that few playwrights can approach. Much of Mr. Williams’ thought is permanently inscrutable to me, but I think he intends to suggest that the partial knowledge men have of one another is infinitely preferable to the truth, which no one can face without seeing all the illusions by means of which he’s managed to sustain himself destroyed. In any case, it is a piece of writing to be respected, and it seems a long time since I’ve been able to say that of anything.
Critics are notoriously half-witted in their appraisals of performances, and I would like to report only that Barbara Bel Geddes understands the technique of her trade better than any other young actress I can name (this includes Audrey Hepburn); that Ben Gazzara, in a part that demands an odd quality of low vitality, plays the husband with what struck me as a decent regard for the author’s intention rather than any consideration of his own growing reputation; and that Burl Ives, as the father, is believable even when he is talking about the time he was seduced by a five-year-old Arab girl, which must have been quite a trick, on the whole. Among the others are Mildred Dunnock, Madeleine Sherwood, Pat Hingle, and Fred Stewart. They play more than acceptably the parts that Mr. Williams neglected to write, and Elia Kazan’s direction indicates only occasionally that he was aware he had a Master on his hands. Jo Mielziner and Lucinda Ballard did the scenery and costumes, in that order. They are very gifted people.
OCTOBER 1, 1955 (ON MARCEL MARCEAU)
HE TOPIC FOR discussion this week is the art of pantomime and, specifically, a Gallic practitioner of it called Marcel Marceau, who is now on exhibition at the Phoenix. This essay will be brief and, I’m afraid, unilluminating, partly because “mime,” which most of the first-night audience chose to rhyme with “steam,” is a special, hothouse art form that calls for a technical vocabulary a little outside my range, and partly because I suspect that the apathy I feel toward it is the product of a cultural inadequacy of my own and I am reluctant to expose it at any length. Several years ago, a Profile writer in these pages described his subject, Mr. Walter Winchell, as a “thrilling bore.” With the addition of the word “intermittently,” I think this odd phrase says approximately what is on my mind about M. Marceau. There were times in the course of the two-hour program when I was aware that he was doing something precise, difficult, and rather beautiful, in a manner rigidly stylized by tradition, and at those moments I was emotionally satisfied, in the direction of either comedy or pathos.
For the greater part of the evening, however, I found M. Marceau rather a trial. I had no doubt that he was performing in strict accordance with a set of ancient and remarkably exacting rules, but my appreciation of his work was academic at best. My attitude was presumably like that of a man at his first bullfight, who understands that a great and complicated ritual is involved but actually sees nothing except a man going enormously out of his way to kill a bull. This Philistine response was probably caused to some extent by the fact that a good deal of Marceau’s material has to do with Continental customs and backgrounds bafflingly outside my experience, but the monotonous exercise of a single and to me not particularly fascinating skill had a lot to do with it, too.
Several of my colleagues, who apparently had hell’s own time at the Phoenix, found occasion to compare the performer very favorably with Chaplin, and a similarity certainly exists, in the sense that the same technique is employed and the same essential personality created—a touchingly inadequate figure in conflict with a contemptuously hostile society. The primary difference, I should say, is in degree of talent, Chaplin being a man of delicate and subtle perception and extraordinary comic invention, and Marceau a far broader, more conventionally inspired, and considerably less appealing clown. The secondary one, of course, has to do with the method of presentation. The current exhibit is pantomime in its purest form. Marceau, that is, works alone, wearing a chalk mask and a variety of baggy costumes, and he employs no props except a wooden box or two. Chaplin, on the other hand, was assisted not only by elaborate scenery and a surrounding cast but also by a full-scale plot. It is obvious that the former is an infinitely more demanding form, and its self-imposed limitations probably put it in a higher category of art, at least in the eyes of proper aesthetes. It is my own opinion that no basis for serious comparison exists, but since it has been made, I can only say that I have an idea I will be remembering that little business with the forks and the rolls in The Gold Rush long after I have forgotten who Marceau was or what he did. I even suspect that I’ll still remember old Joe Jackson, too, but then, of course, he had that bicycle.
There were fifteen items on M. Marceau’s bill the night I was there. The eight that composed the first section were described in the program as “style pantomimes,” and among their titles were “Walking Against the Wind,” “The Public Garden,” “At the Clothiers,” “The Dice-Players,” and “Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death.” The second section was devoted to the activities of a character called Bip, who appears, variously, as a butterfly hunter, an amateur artist, a lion tamer, a tightrope walker, a railway passenger, a skater, a guest at a dance hall, and, simultaneously, David and Goliath. Most of these offerings are sufficiently defined by their headings, and I will describe them only to the extent of remarking that M. Marceau did indeed look amazingly like a man struggling uphill in a high wind or trying on a tight pair of gloves or annoying a lion, as the case might be. They were exact, polished, and particularly impressive to me in the feeling they gave of almost perfect timing and muscular control. Standing out above these feats of simple physical mimicry were “Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death,” which actually and miraculously compressed the essence of a lifetime into something like two minutes, and “David and Goliath,” which was one of the funniest and most ingenious double impersonations I have ever seen. I haven’t anything else to say about M. Marceau, except that every now and then, for a disconcerting instant, he reminded me very strongly of Miss Judith Anderson as Medea. I have no reason to suppose that this was intentional.
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