New Play in Manhattan

A Slight Case of Murder (by Damon Runyon & Howard Lindsay; Howard Lindsay, producer). The world of Damon Runyon is no less unique, apart and unreal than that of Lewis Carroll or P. G. Wodehouse. For one thing, it has a language of its own, in which a prison is a college, a horse is a beetle, an I. O. U. a marker, a child a punk. And in the lawless cosmos of this oldtime Hearst sportswriter, fictionist and cinema scenarist, criminals are regarded as diverting eccentrics; slaughter, a mere irrelevancy and the underworld, a sort of jocular never-never land. With Howard Lindsay, Depression's most prosperous collaborator (She Loves Me Not, Anything Goes), Writer Runyon has in A Slight Case of Murder made his legitimate theatrical debut by telling a monstrous tale of Saratoga and the high & low life attracted thither by August racing.

A mob of touts, thugs, politicians and demimondaines has for its sphere the mansion rented by Remy Marco (John Harrington). Marco has been a brewer for some years, but only legally since 1933. It is consequently of some embarrassment to him when his faithful retainer Mike (Joseph Sweeney) discovers upon arriving at Saratoga that an upstairs room is occupied by four "parties." These parties, Mike reports, have firearms in their laps and poker cards in their hands, but their sport has been spoiled by someone's having shot them all dead. It subsequently develops that the parties had just knocked off an armored truck full of bookmakers' money and were waiting to see Marco about an old matter involving a hijacked brewery. It occurs to Marco at once that it would be a funny prank to distribute the cadavers over the lawns of various visitors at the resort who have in times past offended him. All this becomes vastly complicated when Marco's daughter suddenly returns home with the news that she is engaged to a rich young aristocrat from Dutchess County, and when the rich young aristocrat appears in the natty uniform of a member of the New York State Police, whose forces he has joined for adventure. Meantime, Marco is about to lose his brewery to unscrupulous bankers, and his house is additionally beset by one Douglas Fairbanks Rosenbloom, a beer-drinking orphan for whom Marco has taken a fancy.

All those who know their Runyon need not be told that the criminals are made to feel ludicrously uneasy by the State trooper, that the orphan proves invaluable in thwarting the bankers and bringing the course of true love to a satisfactory conclusion. As has already been demonstrated on the screen (Little Miss Marker, Lady for a Day), the more involved a Runyon character is written, the harder it is to act. Actor Harrington seems to interpret Marco not so much as a droll picaroon but as a bumbling slob. But as Mike, Actor Sweeney is a soft-spoken Runyon killer of the first order. If A Slight Case of Murder outlasts Three Men on a Horse, its aging kinsman in the theatre next door, it will be due largely to Mr. Sweeney.

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