Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Oct. 5, 1936

Reflected Glory (by George Kelly; Lee Shubert, Homer Curran, producers) exhibits temperamental Actress Tallulah Bankhead cast as a temperamental actress, stalking about on her heels, slapping the furniture to accentuate her outbursts, lowering her voice to a sepulchral baritone, leaning backward at an angle of 30° while combing her hair, ordering a midnight supper of two pork chops, Julienne potatoes, buttermilk, salted peanuts. Written seven years ago by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Craig’s Wife and The Show-Off, Reflected Glory at least has the distinction of being Tallulah Bankhead’s most creditable vehicle since her repatriation five years ago.

On her way to the top, Muriel Flood (Miss Bankhead) is alternately berated and praised by her hard-boiled and single-minded manager (Clay Clement), is tirelessly pursued by a stodgy suitor from her home town. The sympathy with which she receives his proposals of marriage is discouraged by the manager, by the acrid philosophizing of a fellow trouper (Ann Andrews) and the appearance of a more appealing admirer (Phillip Reed). Although she achieves success in Manhattan, she seems perfectly willing to give up her career to marry this charmer until he is exposed as an actress-chasing cad with a concealed wife & child. When the home-town suitor reappears, Muriel Flood greets him with great enthusiasm, but by this time he has a wife of his own, too. The manager consoles her by reading a review which credits her with “the most illuminated acting since Sarah Bernhardt.”

So Proudly We Hail (by Joseph M. Viertel Shapiro; James R. Ullman, producer). Author Shapiro, 21, is the son of the proprietor of the French Casino, a Manhattan hotspot. Young Mr. Shapiro attended Staunton Military Academy in Virginia for four years with a brilliant record, was graduated from Harvard last June magna cum laude. So Proudly We Hail, Mr. Shapiro’s first attempt at professional playwriting, lacks craftsmanship, balance and subtlety. As a propaganda piece, however, it is as brutally effective as a meat-ax, contains enoughobviously first-hand documentation, along with its exaggerations, to deter hundreds of parents from sending their sons to schools which they may suspect of resembling Stone Ridge Military Academy (“You Give Us The Boy, We Return You The Man”).

To Stone Ridge goes a sensitive, friendly and musically inclined youth named Jim Thornton (Richard Cromwell). After some months, tired of parades, catchwords, “discipline” and adolescent savagery, he dons civilian clothes, tries to leave, is slapped in the face by the commandant of cadets, discovers that he is a prisoner. While he is serving 30 days in the guardhouse, one of his roommates, whose notions of duty prevent him from reporting a cold to the infirmary, dies of pneumonia. In Thornton’s hearing the conscientious medical officer tells the commandant that the school ought to be prosecuted. The commandant hints that if Thornton ignores this incident, he will be made a sergeant next year.

Fulfillment of this promise finds Thornton transformed into a callous and ugly-tempered bully. Preparations are made for a beating to be administered at Thornton’s direction, to a onetime friend of his who “failed to salute the War Dead” and was tattled on by a toady. An officer who might have intervened leaves the room with the admonition: “Be careful, fellows.” The victim is then tied to a double-deck bed, burned with a cigarette, given 18 lashes with a whip, hospitalized. The outraged medical officer demands that Thornton be expelled, threatens to resign and expose the school if he is not. In the course of his tirade it appears that because the school heads wink at the manly dissipations of a soldier, six of the boys have contracted syphilis. The commandant retorts that if the medical officer resigns and talks he will be a pariah unable to earn a living for his family. At the following commencement it falls to the medical officer to deliver the address awarding highest honors to Cadet Thornton.

Bright Honor (by Henry R. Misrock; Jack Kirkland & Sam H. Grisman, producers) is another play about a boys’ military school. This one, depicting a school called Newtown Military Academy, better administered and more sleekly appointed than Stone Ridge (see above), presents detailed cross-sections from the daily life of its tin-pot Napoleons and apprentice Casanovas. A kindly teacher of English who considers Browning sonnets more important than Browning machine guns is tormented by the boys until he loses his job, to the detriment of his love life. Bright Honor points out that education at Newtown is smothered under the pressure of military mumbo-jumbo, a fact of no importance to parents who send their boys there to get rid of them, or because they will not eat their spinach.