Dutchman

An unattended package in a New York subway car, skillfully defused.

This was far beyond the competence of reviewers, even those who had seen Le Roi Jones’ play in New York, Frisco or L.A.

Variety came closest, understanding the breakdown.

This is well built-up, Shirley Knight takes this gung-ho in exactly the overblown notes required, she sits quietly to watch the bomb fizz.

The Baudelairean college poet, now a servant of “the corporate godhead”, has it in his mind that Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker would sooner have killed white folks, he has a long way to go and is dispatched thither.

Al Freeman, Jr. plays the part contrarily, very authentic and then tripping over the light fantastic.

A very amusing, masterful play brought to film by way of a second unit in New York and a perfectly realistic set in London, excellently photographed (Turpin) and scored (Barry).

The Lion In Winter

Old things have the precedence, Apollinaire found in the trenches, they were here first. Goldman sees that princes are the past, the king is new.

A wrestling match with what has been, for the supremacy, and with the vortex that is Eleanor.

But this is a marriage, to be sure, and one very close to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Be assured that whatever drama critics thought of it on the stage, film critics found it picturesque and dramatic, merely.

“I’m a match for anything,” says the king after his ordeal.

They Might Be Giants

To be in a supermarket is to be in hell, Beckett’s “mercantile Gehenna”, and there must be a Moriarty if such things exist.

A Harvard-trained jurist and a New York psychiatrist get right down to cases.

After all, there’s blackmail to pay for whoring, the money must be raised, a certain climate is created.

“Why is it analysts can’t ever analyze?”

The critics, that is.

Rudolph Valentino (whose resemblance to the junior Santa in Seaton’s Miracle on 34^th Street might be noticed), the Scarlet Pimpernel (a New York librarian), Sherlock Holmes (the jurist) and Dr. Mildred Watson, among others, solve the question of Don Quixote’s windmills.

“Holmes, why are you never wrong?”

The Glass Menagerie

The four integers of the play are more or less equal, Amanda who sells subscriptions to the Companion, Laura who keeps glass animals, Jim the shipping clerk in for Public Speaking and Electrodynamics, and Tom the writer.

Like The Lion In Winter, a recollection.

Grace Quigley

This is what you might call a sort of anti-Ladykillers, a bit of mortal melancholia and whimsy from a renowned and accomplished specialist in every sort and variety of very fine madness with a twist in it.