The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Jan. 4, 1954

Dead Pigeon by Lenard Kantor is a three-character melodrama that is constructed like a superhighway: the audience is never in any doubt where the play is going; it is beautifully landscaped by Joan Lorring in various stages of undress, and —though everything moves along briskly enough—there is a certain sensation of monotony.

The plot concerns two detectives assigned to guard Joan at a seaside hotel during her 24-hour release from the penitentiary in order to give information to the district attorney about her recently murdered gangster lover. Both detectives are on the gangsters’ payroll, but one of them (Lloyd Bridges) falls in love with the girl. The other (James Gregory) is determined to kill her. With this suspenseful situation established in the first five minutes, Playwright Kantor then all but ignores it until the final curtain when the relatively good detective disarms the completely bad one in a technically skillful stage brawl.

The long interval between is filled with an uninspired but dogged probing of the personalities involved. Kantor’s wordy persistence is partially rewarded. Joan Lorring emerges as an earnest simpleton who so yearns for freedom that she risks her life in return for a brief holiday from jail. Lloyd Bridges painfully grows in stature from a conniving cop to a man ready to count his world well lost for love. But, as often happens in the theater, it is Villain Gregory with his unrepentant, double-dealing philosophy who comes most alive on the stage: the only unconvincing note in his performance is his being outwitted by the hero at the play’s end.