The Pittsburgh Press (December 8, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
Witches’ brews are wafting whiffs of brimstone along Old Broadway
By Florence Fisher Parry
The French humor has always been sardonic, never more so than now. The Paris radio, in a recent juicy broadcast, announced with particular relish that the Dutch agent whom Hermann Goehring had appointed to amass his famous collection of Rembrandt, Vermeers and Halses, had turned out to have been a painter himself who took 17th Century canvases, removed the color from them, and then, upon these blank canvases, himself painted reproductions of great masters and perpetrated the hoax upon the great Goehring.
But the Paris radio lamented the lack of humor in the Dutch people, in having jailed their fellow countryman for having swindled Goehring; a monumental miscarriage of justice!
On the other hand, there is perhaps no other people who are capable of extracting such wormwood from the dregs of disillusionment.
Last week in New York there was presented a play adapted from the French and called “No Exit.” It is a play about three souls sent to hell and placed together in one room from which there is no exit. Claude Dauphin, popular French actor, pays the part of a collaborateur tormented by his horrible betrayals. Ruth Ford plays a nymphomaniac who has betrayed her husband and her lover; and Annabella, (whom the movies have spent lavish money presenting as a diaphanous angel) plays the role of a lost Lesbian, hideously repulsive.
Annabella’s sensational hit in this macabre role should give our Hollywood casting directors food for thought. Here is a girl who, had she remained in the movies, doubtless would have been consigned to one saccharine role after another. Now, however, she is doubtless besieged by importunate motion picture producers who suddenly see her as successor to Bette Davis if and when Miss Davis ever should relinquish her stranglehold upon Freres Warner.
“No Exit” is not the only witches’ brew to be savored by the Broadway theatergoers. Lillian Hellman has just delivered herself of another baleful exercise in crime and passion. Her new play, “Another Part of the Forest,” is said to be an even more unpleasant play than “The Little Foxes,” and deals with the same rapacious family. Those of us who remember Tallulah Bankhead as the devil-in-brimstone “Regina,” are bound to have a special interest in the same Regina, whom we see in “Anther Part of the Forest,” for the Hubbard family has been moved back 20 years and Regina is shown as a ruthless young woman who is a little more than the apple of his eye to her pathologically possessive father.
Incest, madness, disease and pure distilled evil saturate the action of this unpleasant and fascinating play. But under Miss Hellman’s practiced hand, hell itself cannot break loose, for here is a playwright who can be depended upon to hold the reins of the Hour Horsemen themselves and keep them under control.
Another play whose sparks seem to emanate from the same kind of super powerhouse is Moss Hart’s “Christopher Blake,” which opened in New York to a stunned audience. Here in 2½ hours Mr. Hart says more than all the moralists have ever said about the injury to children that is produced by divorce. It is a play about a young boy in a court room where the divorce of his parents is being tried. We see his problem subjectively through the imagination of this youngster, and from reports, here is your psychological dish.
Some of our more articular moralists are expressing unhappy concern over the fact that in at least three of our biggest Broadway hit inebriety is shown to be a very pleasant pastime indeed. No less a person than Helen Hayes celebrates ne ever-increasing binge throughout one whole hilarious evening, in her new play, “Happy Birthday.” As you know, Anita Loos wrote this comedy, which, from all reports, seems to be an elaboration of her immortal monologue, “Just a Little One.”
Indeed, I can think of no one who constitutes a threat to total abstinence as does Anita Loos, unless, indeed, it be Mary Chase, who, as you know, wrote “Harvey,” in which Frank Fay for some two years now has been softening the heart of the most adamantine teetotalers.
Then to make things still worse for the WCTU, Eugene O’Neill, high prophet of the theater, comes forth from his retirement to celebrate alcohol as the great panacea for all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In “The Iceman Cometh” practically every character in the play is a down-and-outer who could not face today, much less tomorrow, without the bottle.
And then, as though this were not enough, announcement comes that Bert Lahr is to appear on Christmas night in a revival of the famous comedy “Burlesque,” in which, as everybody knows, he plays the role of an endearing drunk.
Nor can the prohibitionists look for comfort in the current movie fare. I am told that the most delightful passage of Samuel Goldwyn’s picture, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” is that in which Frederic March, a returning veteran, somewhat abashed by the sudden and intimate reunion with his wife and daughter, takes refuge in a life-saving binge.
Pray do not ask me to editorialize upon this phase of current entertainment. Let me instead refer you to our most delectable advertisements. The most tempting edibles are those that are suggested to serve with drinks. The liquor advertisements themselves have never been so elegant or enticing. Glassware, linenware, silverware, kitchenware, devote their liveliest corners to the art and appurtenances of drinking, and no furniture department now is complete in any store without its fetching nooks for bars and cellarets.
Our hotels are known, not for their cuisines but for their café “lounges.” Our restaurants cannot exist without a liquor license. No butter, sugar or flour line at the time of our most critical food shortages could compare in length and fortitude with those which queue from our State Liquor Stores.
And if our play producers and our motion picture producers, merchants that they are, take their cue from us and themselves feature drinking in the merchandise they have to sell, who are we to moralize and hold them to account?