Boxcars711 Old Time Radio Pod - The Campbell Playhouse "Private Lives" (4-21-39)

Noel Coward's very witty and often revived play is a mixed bag. On the one hand you have one of the master wits of the century, on par, say, with George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and on the other you have characters which I place near the top of my list of people I don't want to meet. Amanda and Elyot are those people. In a very clever premise, they play an ex-married couple, each newly married to another the very same day, each accidentally spending their honeymoon in the same French city, in the same hotel, on the same floor, and in fact in adjoining rooms. They meet on the adjoining terraces, reminisce over old times and decide it was a mistake to divorce. Leaving notes to their spouses (Reginald Denny and Una Merkel) they run off to a St. Moritz, Switzerland chalet, with their mystified spouses swiftly following to find them. My problem with the film is their persistent and maddening bickering - verbal violence - which they recognize they're guily of, and which each try to stem by using the expression "Solomon Isaacs" to remind the other to stop. It doesn't always work, and it sometimes results in physical violence too.