Woman Bites Dog
Sam and Bella Spewack comedy "Woman Bites Dog," opened on April 17th and closed after five performances thanks to negative reviews. The Spewacks had a spotty Broadway track record. The featured stars, Taylor Holmes, Royal Beal and Ann Shoemaker, were stage veterans but not box office draws. The younger members of the cast, Kirk Douglas, Mercedes McCambridge, Frank Lovejoy and E.G. Marshall, were not yet names. Producer Kermit Bloomgarden had been general manager of several hits and produced "Deep Are the Roots," playing at that time on Broadway, but was not the hit maker he would become. This was the first time at the helm for director Coby Ruskin. In all this was not a stellar assemblage that could survive a critical thrashing.
Holmes, Beal and Shoemaker played caricatures of the Patterson newspaper clan, publishers and editors at the time of the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and Washington Times-Herald. Colonel Southworth (Holmes) was portrayed as an "infantile egocentric," in the words of William Hawkins of the World-Telegram, who claims to have invented the atomic bomb some years back (but dropped the project when the Navy insisted on details) and orders his secretary to have a baby when he learns how many Asians there were. Lewis Nichols in The Times wrote that Southworth spent his time fighting "Stalin, the New Deal, FDR, Britain, Truman and Wallace," launching crusades, inventing absurd gadgets and writing bad poetry. In the play he dresses in academic robes, in a uniform or for polo (the Times review said he was dressed for "polio"-- a typo, no doubt) as he sat astride a mechanical horse. Despite his aristocratic pretensions, he claims to be "of the common people." His brother, who owns the New York paper, is pictured as a former idealist turned reactionary cynic while their sister, who runs the D.C. operation, is a flighty matron in extravagant hats who is concerned more with finding a new society editor than in politics. The family members delight in double- crossing one another.
Kirk Douglas played a returning veteran, formerly editor of a small-town newspaper, who despises the colonel and his political diatribes. He concocts a prank, pretending that his Midwestern town has been taken over by Communists, knowing this will provoke the Colonel into one of his editorial tirades. Southworth dispatches a reporter (Mercedes McCambridge) to check out on the situation. Quickly discovering the whole thing is a hoax, she decides to play along after a fight with her editor/boyfriend (Frank Lovejoy). Then she falls for the veteran. Hilarity ensues. Or so the Spewacks intended.
Douglas was not yet a name. After receiving a medical discharge from the military in 1945, he had returned to the Broadway stage, where he had made a modest start before the war, to replace Richard Widmark in the hit "Kiss and Tell." He appeared in "The Wind Is Ninety," a drama with a war theme that played over the summer in 1945. He had already been to Hollywood. but his movie debut, as Barbara Stanwyck's weakling husband in "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers," would not hit the screen until July. McCambridge, who had replaced Elaine Stritch as the reporter after the Philadelphia tryout, and Lovejoy were both established radio actors. McCambridge's previous Broadway engagement, in "A Place of Our Own," had lasted eight performances. Lovejoy had been in several flops over the previous decade. Both would fare better later in other media. Another actor who would achieve later fame, E.G. Marshall, who had a small role as Southworth's idea man in "Woman Bites Dog," had a more impressive stage résumé at the time with roles in the hits "The Petrified Forest," "The Skin of Our Teeth" and "Jacobowsky and the Colonel."
The Spewacks, who had been responsible for a string of Broadway flops, had written one smash-hit comedy, "Boy Meets Girl," a spoof on Hollywood, that played for 669 performances in the mid- 1930s and the book to the hit Cole Porter musical “Leave It to Me,” which made Mary Martin a star. They were also successful screenwriters, earning an Academy Award nomination for "My Favorite Wife" in 1940. Both had emigrated as children from Eastern Europe and grown up on the Lower East Side.