(3 of 3)
Thinking to sidestep the mess, Blent deliberately flunks two exams and makes himself ineligible for the big game. But this brings the entire college whooping around the two professors who do the flunking. As the two men on the ethical seesaw, Marc Connelly and Hans Conried make their subplot the play's amusing high spot. Pulitzer Prizewinner (The Green Pastures) Connelly, returning to his first acting role in a dozen years, is a portly wisecracker-barrel philosopher who knows that to stretch a point is sometimes to expand a viewpoint. Actor Conried, as a prim and absolute rationalist in home and classroom, achieves a kind of lemony grandeur. Here is a man who can purse up not only his lips but his entire face to ask: "Would Thomas Aquinas, under pressure, have changed a C— to a B + ?" Inevitably, this ethical icicle is melted down in time to let Ray Blent save the day for Custer.
Tall Story is the kind of comedy that counts heavily on making its characters so lovable that they will be forgiven their bad gags. In context, some of the lines are fresh and funny. But too often the humor comes from the old joke factory ("Behave yourself, and have a good time —if that's possible"). Old theater Pros Lindsay and Crouse have sprinkled Tall Story liberally with corn, but half of it never pops.