Move Over, Sammy Glick

Nobody Loves an Albatross has as its hero-heel a man who can kiss his own reflection in a mirror and really mean it. Nat Bentley is a television writer-producer in Hollywood, but his most inspired production is his ebulliently maleficent self. He is an imp of distilled evil. He is a triple-tongued double dealer, a glib Vesuvius of fantasy and falsehood, a perpetual-emotion machine with nary an honest feeling.

He can cheat a writer out of a credit line as if it were a selfless act of charity: "If I didn't have faith in you, do you think I'd put my name on your scripts?" He makes equivocation sound like grandeur: "I'm a man of great decision who can go either way." Except toward his twelve-year-old daughter, his cynicism is total, like love or war. Life and people are all frauds, he tells the nubile new secretary (Carol Rossen) who falls half in love with him, and in a world of phonies the way to win is to be the biggest, slickest phony of them all.

Played with prancing, gleeful guile by Robert Preston, the role of Nat Bentley is as magnetic as sin. Playwright Ronald Alexander has surrounded him with zany astrologers of the marketplace--hack writers, foxy talent agents, dubbed-in laugh effects men--who cast horoscopes under the sign of the dollar to see if the public will prefer the TV story of a myna bird that refuses to talk or a chimpanzee that plays Lady Macbeth. The dialogue is more quippish than witty, but the hip mass-media-men-at-work lingo scatters the laughs over an occasional drab patch of script. The life of the play is in the instinctive mendacity of its con-man hero. The Albatross flies where Sammy Glick once ran.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.