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This Week's Revivals
By Richard von Busack
Apartment for Peggy/Claudia
(1948/1943) A postwar couple (William Holden and Jeanne Crain) move in as lodgers with an old and lonely professor (Edmund Gwenn). BILLED WITH Claudia. Dorothy McGuire stars as a young bride who has to adjust to the stresses of being married. With Robert Young. (Plays Nov 22-23 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)
Margie/Pinky
(1946/1949) In 1920s Ohio, the high school class's best debater (Jeanne Crain) gets crushed upon her French teacher (Glenn Langan). This sweet nostalgia eclipses the more real-life struggles of the author. It's based on stories by Ruth McKenney (My Sister Eileen), a journalist and one-time Communist who wrote about the labor struggles in her hometown of Akron. (www3.uakron.edu/schlcomm/womenshistory/mckenney_r.htm) BILLED WITH Pinky. Elia Kazan's once notorious tragic-mulatto drama was made when Kazan was still very much a stage director with a camera. Jeanne Crain stars as Pinky, a black nurse of the segregation era who passes for white. When a white doctor proposes marriage up north, she has a crisis and heads back South but finds little comfort from her grandmother (Ethel Waters): "Denying yourself like Judas denied the Good Lord!" As penance for her deception, Pinky is forced to work as a nurse for the crotchety old lady (Ethel Barrymore) of the local manor. Pinky went from masterpiece to embarrassment faster than any other film in movie history. Except Philadelphia, of course. (Plays Nov 24 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing/I'll Never Forget You
(1955/1951) Interracial love, of a sort, in Hong Kong, where a newspaper correspondent (William Holden) falls for a half-Chinese doctor (Jennifer Jones) as her relatives fret over the impropriety and the hit theme song plays. Also stars Torin Thatcher (the villain from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad). BILLED WITH I'll Never Forget You. 1951's anticipation of The Fountain. Now this one is novel: nuclear scientist Tyrone Power falls asleep in London and dreams he's in the 1700s, and falls in love with his cousin (Ann Blyth), who is the only one who understands that he's a chrononaut who can make inventions to help the suffering poor of the past ... but then the authorities decide he's a mental and toss him in Bedlam. (Plays Nov 25-26 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)
Thank You, Jeeves/Curly Top
(1936/1935) Oddly, Bertie Wooster (David Niven) has to commit himself to an endeavor—tracking down some spies, with the help of his better self, his butler Jeeves (Arthur Treacher). BILLED WITH Curly Top. Shirley Temple as an adorable orphan, performing "Animal Crackers in My Soup." (Plays Nov 29-30 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)
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