Second-rate Queen
’M quite in favour of directing Holmes fans to Baker Street, and I would like to see New York patrolmen primed with a penthouse address downtown so that they could perform a similar service for patrons of Ellery Queen; but I am not in favour of installing Ellery Queen in a Sydney studio to act as a custom-built compére for his own stories -it out-oscars Oscars. The material is certainly not first-rate Queen, even if Manfred B. Lee did select it-itg storyline wobbles, its solutions’ leave one dazed with indifference, and one has to Pick one’s way through many a wet patch taken up by secretary Nicky’s plaint that Her Heart Belongs to Queenie. But the thing that embarrasses me most is seeing those modest Notable. Australians harnessed, like Tamburlaine’s captured kings, to Ellery Queen’s chariot. Especially. when he makes it so obvious that he can pull the thing better himself. "2 Happy Ending HE MERCHANT OF VENICE (1. heard the BBC version on Sunday) is, romantically speaking, a nice play, with three sensible girls getting the men they’ve had their eye on from the beginning, and all of them with a fair chance of living happily ever after. In so many of the other comedies, I am disconcerted by what seems like an artificial pairing off of the characters which sacrifices psychological probability to biological neatness-poor Hero (continued on next page)
and Claudio, for example, and Phoebe and the gormless:Silvius. The romantic rightness of the BBC Merchant of Venice owed a lot to the delightful playing of Bassanio by Tony Britton. He gave the role an engaging boyishness, so that we had the appealing diffidence in the Casket Scene to balance what can be the unsympathetic hysteria of the Trial. Michael Redgrave played a satisfyingly venomous Shylock — the snarling of the Trial Scene sounded in our ears long enough to scramble any sympathetic chords aroused earlier, thus leaving us emotionally free to enioy the
Happy Ending.
M.
B.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 824, 13 May 1955, Page 10
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331Second-rate Queen New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 824, 13 May 1955, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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