Broadway’s Best Bets (May 1930) - Uncle Vanya

Broadway’s Best Bets (May 1930)

Broadway and Hollywood Movies

Broadway’s Best Bets (May 1930)
UNCLE VANYA—Lillian Gish, one of America’s foremost screen actresses, is seen in this new play at the Cort Theatre in a comedy by Anton Chekov—produced by Jed Harris. Mr. Harris’ cast is excellent, his scene setting in perfect harmony and his direction unpretentious and intelligent, his adaptation by Rose Caylor modestly modernized.
“Uncle Vanya” is greatly helped thereby. Chekov demands such artful treatment in the American theatre. His passive stories and leisurely action focus attention upon  characters and moods. This is particularly true of “Vanya,” which is another of those simple recitals of love in the country and the irony of its arbitrary miscues in which Russian authors delight.
Lillian Gish - Uncle Vanya
Lillian Gish – Uncle Vanya
We have the placid and docile Uncle Vanya sacrificing his life, first for an unappreciative family, including a pompous molusk who trades on his learning and his poor health; and later for a handsome sister-in-law, who unfortunately loves another. And numerous sub-plots of other loves that are unhappily wasted on the wrong hearts, each demanding special emphasis in the playing.
Lillian Gish and Walter Connelly
Lillian Gish and Walter Connelly (Uncle Vanya)
Mr. Harris has selected for Vanya the excellent Walter Connelly, who suffers live pangs with convincing intensity. And for the chaste and unhappy Helena, the object of Vanya’s misplaced ardors, he has induced Lillian Gish, coldly perfect, a rare and charming personality in the playhouse, to return to what used to be known at the speaking stage.
Universal Images Group 1930 Uncle Vanya (Helena) Lillian Gish
Universal Images Group 1930 Uncle Vanya (Helena) Lillian Gish
If Miss Gish seemed a particularly youthful Helena the fault was rather in the picture than in the playing. Her Helena was mature and understanding, and as miserably unhappy as any Chekov could ask.
Bolstering these two were fine performances by Osgood Perkins as a sanely philosophical doctor of medicine, and Joanna Roos as a vibrant Sonya, whose love dreams were likewise nightmares. So, with these histrionic perfections as its greatest recommendation, “Uncle Vanya” should please the Chekovians mightily. There is a considerable public of them, as Eva Le Gallienne has proved.
Broadway and Hollywood Movies 1930
Broadway and Hollywood Movies 1930
Lillian Gish (promo - before Uncle Vanya)
Lillian Gish (promo – before Uncle Vanya)

Back to Lillian Gish Home page

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lillian Gish and Jeanne Moreau – Vanity Fair 1983

Image
Lillian Gish and Jeanne Moreau – Vanity Fair 1983 Vanity Fair – October 1983 Lillian Gish Jeanne Moreau This is a summit meeting: a queen paying homage to an empress. Of course, Lillian Gish, far right, is no truer a blueblood than any other homespun midwesterner. But wherever she goes now, she is treated like a monarch, acknowledging standing ovations in allAmerican palaces like Radio City Music Hall. Her admirers aren’t really applauding her 101 films (she has just completed the 102nd, about a sweet old lady and her sweet old dog). They may never have seen her slim but supernally intense performances in the D. W. Griffith masterpieces or in the Victor Sjostrom classics she made in the late ’20s at MGM. Lillian-Gish-Jeanne-Moreau 60s But they sense in her the grace, the purity, the wealth of symbolism that royalty sustains. Gish’s companion here, Jeanne Moreau, radiates a similar authority; what Gish was to the cinema of the ’20s, Moreau was to the cinema of the ’60s. “The
Read more

D.W. Griffith – An American Life (By Richard Schickel – 1984)

Image
D.W. Griffith – An American Life (By Richard Schickel – 1984) D.W. Griffith – An American Life By Richard Schickel – 1984 Griffith! Before him, the movies were a nickelodeon novelty, after him, they were an international art form and a powerful, glamorous American industry He was the first to codify the rules and techniques of screen storytelling, the first to establish the conventions by which the unique capacities of the movies for both sweeping spectacle and profound intimacy could be employed in long, complex narratives, the first to assert the director’s claim to primary authorship of a film Above all, it was Griffith who imagined the future of his medium, and with his driving energy, his taste for the grandiose and his flair for publicity, propelled that medium toward that future—only to be crushed by the very forces he had unleashed. D.w. Griffith (1875-1948) Painting; D.w. Griffith (1875-1948) Art Print for sale His story is, in huge measure, the story of how the
Read more

ART DECO FASHION – by Suzanne Lussier (2003)

Image
  ART DECO FASHION – by Suzanne Lussier (2003) ART DECO FASHION Suzanne Lussier BULFINCH PRESS AOL Time Warner Book Group Copyright © 2003 by The Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum The term Art Deco was employed for the first time in 1968 by the author Bevis Hillier. It identifies an aesthetic in vogue between 1909 and 1939 which was adopted in architecture, the decorative arts, textiles and fashion; it also influenced the fine arts, film and photography. Art Deco displayed stylized motifs and shapes borrowed from national traditions, folk art and ancient cultures, and was strongly influenced by the art of the avant-garde. Art deco fashion_Tamara de Lempicka 1929 Art Deco emerged from a unique artistic conjunction. From 1905, avant-garde movements sprung up one after another throughout Europe: the Fauves and Cubists in Paris, the Futurists in Italy, the Constructivists in Russia. Meanwhile the Ballets Russes were founded in Russia by Sergei Diaghilev who, wanting to re
Read more