Summer Session Kansan Tuesday. July 23,1957
- Two On The Aisle -
With "Man on Fire,""Fire Down Below," and Marilyn Monroe sizzling at the Varsity, downtown Lawrence is glowing even more brightly than when the city fathers entertained Quantrill and his band of mervymakers.
Jayhawker
Now "Fire Down Below" claims the talents of Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, and histrionic abilities of child-actor (relatively speaking) Jack Lemmon. As the senile lovers, Mitchum and Hayworth give the impression of Scarlet and Rhett in a Home for the Aged. Visually, the only distinction that can be made is that Mr. Mitchum has a beard. They both weigh about the same, though Miss Hayworth may have a slight edge in the number of facial verescue veins.
Both stars waddle about convincingly in this saga of pathos and bathos in the Caribbean. Rita plays an itinerant and cosmopolitan nymph of the pavement. Robert is a perspiring slob who agrees to smuggle her away from the police via his boat. Juvenile Jackie as the first mate completes the square triangle.
Though the plot is slow motion, there is much balmy beauty to be seen in the background. The film marks the reincarnation of Miss Hayworth and her ultimate "comback." Filmoers over sixty, who remember her graceful dancing of yesteryear, will be charmed during one sequence in which she shimmies like an expectant ostrich to a hot calypso tune.
If somewhere there was indeed "Fire Down Below," Miss Hayworth failed to give us our third degree burns. But if you are in a charitable mood, this is the film to see; Rita obviously must need the money.
Granada
The indefatiguable Harry Crosby as the "Man on Fire" undeniably has a wet fuse. Since his dramatic debut in "The Country Girl," the old groaner has decided to grunt rather than sing his way to oblivion. However in this melodramatic story of a father's fight for the custody of his son, his wheelchair is ably oiled by newcomer Inger Stevens. Now Miss Stevens is pert, pretty, and an adroit actress. Though at times she (along with the rest of the cast) bogged down in gooey platitudes afforded by the plot, she did not strain our credulity as the heroine. Mary Fickett, as Crosby's divorced wife, was sympathetically sickening during her long scenes of blubbering.
The point of the whole affair was whether or not Miss Fickett or Mr. Crosby was to have possession of their son. They both want him, then they both don't want him, and finally they both want him. As the human ping-pong ball, Malcolm Broderick spent most of his time stepping on his own toes to indicate youth and the remainder trying to hide the fact that he is probably a spoiled Hollywood brat.
Bing doesn't sing throughout the action, but in view of a weak story badly done, it might have been a welcome relief. As in all Crosby vehicles, one feels that all will be joy if you only start each day with a song. The same effect can be had by sitting down to a meal of two quarts of sorghum.
Varsity
At the Varsity is "The Prince and the Showgirl." Except for flagrant gaps in the story and the scenery, it is one of the most ludicrous funny pieces of flam-flop ever to grace the silver screen.
Orson Welles has lost his title to the consummate ham Sir Laurence Olivier who produced and directed this pageant. Boasting a monocle and an accent willed him by Erich Von Stroheim, Olivier appears as the His Royal Ducal Highness, the Prince Regent of Carpathia.
The action concerns the coronation festivities of England's George V in the London of 1911. And it must have indeed been a gleeful, laughing Larry who mixed shots of the anointing ceremony with close-ups of himself and with equally close views of Monroe. There are hilarious love scenes between the two during which Marilyn manages to keep her lips wet and to keep wiggling.
The film has fair dialogue furnished by playwright Terrence Ratigan and excellent comedy characterization furnished by the redoubtable Dame Sybil Thorndike as the Dowager Queen. Olivier's comic touch shines throughout, though it is doubtful whether this justifies his risking his reputation with the twitching La Monroe. But then the whole affair is so ridiculous that no one cares.
Tom Sawyer
TV Notes
The date for presentation of Irving Berlin's stage hit, "Annie Get Your Gun," on NBC is Nov. 27. It will get two hours, starting at 8:30 p.m. Mary Martin and John Raitt are the stars, and they will come to TV fresh from playing the show on the stage as part of the Civic Light Opera seasons in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Thus it will have careful preparation similar to that which marked one of TV's greatest triumphs—Mary Martin in "Peter Pan," which also came to the home screen after a thorough testing on the stage.
. . .
Mike Todd's theater movie, "Around the World in 80 Days," an Oscar winner this year, has inspired Screen Gems to create a TV filmed series called "The Further Adventures of Phileas Fogg." Production will start in Hollywood in June. Casting has not been announced.
David Lowe, executive producer of NBC's educational TV project, will take a leave of absence to produce and direct a one-hour color film portraying activities of American doctors around the world. "The March of Medicine" program will present the result on NBC at 9:30 p.m. Dec. 3.
Bob Hope has a sponsor for six one-hour variety programs on NBC next season. Dates and time periods will be announced later. Hope's first TV show was in the spring of 1950.
"Armstrong Circle Theater," which has alternated weeks with the "Kaiser Aluminum Hour" on NBC this season, will be on CBS next season every other Wednesday, alternating with "U.S. Steel Hour." The "Kaiser Aluminum Hour," an important live drama show, seems destined to fade from the picture entirely.
The Finest Stories of Sean O'Faolain (Atlantic-Little, Brown) is the author's own selection of the cream of the short fiction he has produced, along with three novels, a play and half a dozen works of miscellaneous non-fiction, in a prolific 30-year career as a professional writer.
...Books...
O'Faolin is a chronicler of Ireland, and his stories are overwhelmingly Irish. One in this collection, "A Born Genius," reflects the knowledge of New York and Boston that the author acquired as a Harvard student 30-odd years ago, but even that is laid mainly in Ireland.
The author loves his country, but he is sometimes exasperated by his countrymen.
"When it comes to writing about people who, like the Irish of our day, combine beautiful, palpitating tea-rose souls with hard, cooly calculating heads, there does not seem to be any way at all of writing about them except satirically or angrily," he says in a foreword.
The British submarine Seraph sank its share of Axis shipping in routine operations in the Mediterranean during World War II, but it achieved its greatest glory as a "passenger ship."
"Once a writer's eye gets chilly about their beautiful souls he becomes like the only sober man at a drunken party, and the only decent thing to do then is either to get blind drunk . . . or else to go home and scrub himself clean in a raging satire."
The Finest Stories are very fine indeed—vignettes of Irish life that are sometimes amusing, sometimes touching' and sometimes both. . . .
The Ship With Two Captains by Terence Robertson (Dutton) is a history of Seraph, with special emphasis on the cloak-and-dagger operations that gave it its greatest fame—the secret landing of Gen. Mark W. Clark on the North African coast, the rescue of Gen. Henri H. Giraud from occupied France and the dropping of the anonymous corps of "the man who never was" off the coast of Spain.
During most of World War II, Seraph's captain was Lt. Norman L. A. ("Bill") Jewell. It acquired its second master, U.S. Capt. Jerauld Wright, during the Giraud mission because the French general insisted that he must be pleked up by an American submarine. Wright's captainy was purely nominal. Jewell continued to run the ship, and the two men became fast friends.
Seraph is now the oldest submarine still in service, part of a squadron commanded by Jewell, who is one of the youngest full captains in the British navy. Wright is a four-star admiral, supreme allied commander in the Atlantic.
Robertson tells the story of Seraph's remarkable wartime career in the same pleasant, forthright prose with which he chronicled the exploits of U-Boat Ace Otto Kretschmer in Night Raider of the Atlantic.
Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto in generally considered to be the first historical novel as such in English history. The fact that it was preceded by two years by the anonymously published Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (New York University Press) makes the latter deserving of—at last—one reprint every century.
The Earl of Salisbury wanders off to the wars in the 1220's; is shipwrecked coming home; his child-bride remains Penelope-virtuous despite the attempts of evil (lowborn) suitors to "contract an adulterous marriage with her by force"—besides, she's had a tip the Earl's still alive.
As editor John C. Stephens remarks in his introduction, the book has not seen print since 1840, and there only in a 20-page, triple-columned, nine-point-type anthology.
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
(Published Tuesdays and Fridays)
Ed. Phone 251 Bus. Phone 376
Editors... Dale Morsch
John Eaton
Business Mgrs... Colby Rehbert
Bill Irvine
Reporters... Martha Crosser
John Husar
Janet Jimeau
Manager... James E. Dykes
Dr. Francis E. Townsend introduced his old-age pension plan in 1834. U.P. was the first American press association to serve European newspapers directly, starting in 1921.
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