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Theatre Week
Benefit of Clergy 
by George Jean Nathan

Let us come to the point without the usual preliminary acrobatics where in a critic elaborately stamps his feet in the resin, jumps up and down several times, rubs his hands with his hanker-chief, [[Image-Julie Haydon]] and otherwise imposingly pre-pares his customers for the big act to come. Paul Vincent Carroll's study of the conflicting faiths of organized religion, Shadow and Substance, is not only far and away the outstanding dramatic importation of the current season, but a play that would lend beauty and distinction to any season. In it you will find a gentle humor, and that infinite sensitiveness that is the legacy of the Irish drama, and a share of that finest of all dramatic attributes, intelligent emotionalism. 

It is the weakness of so much of present-day drama that its emotions are fundamentally little more than moving-picture emotions in dinner jackets. Its passions are the puny tremors of puny hearts and spirits to which puny playwrights seek to give size by funneling them through a ceremonious polysyllabic dramaturgy. It lives like a worm; it thinks like a Hollywood movie director; it loves either like a eunuch or a rabbit; it feels like a gig-olo; and it dies like a ham Cyrano. In it one finds none of the bewildered nobility and splendor of the higher reaches of the human heart, none of the pain and doubt and ecstacy of the human mind, none of the tortured but sometimes ringing music of the human search and despair and triumph. Into the theatre of such a drama Carroll's play comes with the reassurance of a doctor's pat on the back, with the warmth of a glass of port against the chill, and with all the welcome melody of a familiar "Hello" in a strange and lonely land. 
And yet it is no masterpiece, not by a long shot. But though a considerable distance this side of a masterpiece it synchronously touches the feelings and the imagination as no other play this year, save alone the native "Of Mice and Men," has succeeded in doing. What is more, as we now get it on the stage, it is an even better play than Carroll's script promised. From that script wise hands have deleted the author's misguided little excursions into vaudevillism (Paul Carroll's idea of comedy is sometimes not markedly different from Earl's), and wise direction has further improved the play by softening the Canon's last-act character violating irascibility and by eliminating the tedious breakfast-service business.

Except for the actor engaged for the role of the challenging schoolmaster, the difficult matter of casting has been happily accomplished. As the Canon arrogant in his conception of the only right catholic view, Cedric Hardwicke gives one of his ablest performances, one agreeably rid of most of that arbitrarily slow timing and that heavy pausing before picking up cues which in combination occasionally in the past have invalidated the very effects he was set upon achieving. To the role of Jemima Cooney, the small-town spinster, Sara Allgood, of the older and memorable Abbey company, brings all the warm humor in which she excels. And as the young slavey whose buoyant and uncompromising purity of faith at length hints the way out of chaos to the muddled faiths of the others, Julie Hayden presents a figure of spiritual exaltation and inner radiance which is both aglow with loveliness and deeply moving.

hame, and Hugh Sothern, "The Buccaneer's" inevitable success at the box office will be owing principally to the glamour and swagger of its colorful theme. From the British capture of Washington to the heroic, but futile battle fought and won fifteen days after the Anglo-American peace treaty had been signed at Ghent, De Millie has staged his version of patriotism and pirates with shrewd showmanship-and a George M. Cohanesque penchant for the Yankee Doodle and the Stars and Stripes.

It's the Same Mae West, But Nowadays She's Putting a Curb on Het Wit

Last month Mae West went on the winter air and raised the temperature several degrees. Her "Adam and Eve" radio sketch with Don Ameche, and a subsequent not very cheerful little leerful of innuendo with Charlie McCarthy, brought the National Broadcasting Co. a flood of protests from offended listeners and a stern reprimand from the Federal Communications Commission. Not until the echo of reproaches and apologies had dwindled to a distant rumble did Paramount* release

*Mae West is no longer this studio's problem child. Last week Emmanuel Cohen, president of Major Pictures, and Adolph Zukor, Paramount head, climaxed a four-year feud by voiding a contract that linked the two studios. Mae West and Bing Crosby are under contract to Cohen.
[[Image - Edmund Lowe and Mae West]]