Nobody Loves an Albatross

Despite the title, playwright Ronald Alexander has male the albatross, Nat Bentley, a talentless television writer-producer played by Robert Preston, the only lovable aspect of his play. Bentley is the same sort of appealing, good-natured fraud that Preston played in The Music Man. He cons other people into doing his thinking and writing for him, but he has no self-delusions.

The head of Preston's studio assigns him to produce a new series: if it succeeds, he gets promoted; if it fails, he loses his job. There is the plot. Alexander tries to use it as a vehicle for a comedy and also, I suspect, to raise some ethical questions about Honesty. On the first score he bets .333; on the latter .000.

The only thing impressive about Nobody Loves an Albatross is Preston's acting. The audience knows he's unscrupulous, but loves him anyway. Surrounded by stock characters--a saucy maid, a smart little daughter, a nervous young writer, and a stacked secretary--he keeps Act I from collapsing altogether by the sheer force of his personality. The act is little more than a prolonged series of semi-funny jokes; for example: "Go play with your dolls like I told you--sticking the long pins into Mr. Whitman." Multiply this by 500 and you get an idea of what Preston salvaged.

Act II utilizes the limited potential of the plot. Depicting a brainstorming session on the proposed TV series, it tosses some barbs at the television industry ("the smallest show on earth"), and provides a rollicking scene of vitriol and mass confusion among the show's writers. Preston is surrounded by a fine supporting cast in this scene, particularly Leon Janney as the executive of a rival studio and Phil Leeds as the inventor of a machine which provides canned laughter for TV shows.

Preston finally rejects all the proposed scripts, and his studio in effect tells him to write it himself or drop dead. When at the outset of Act III, he does produce a good script, he basks in a few short moments of glory until his fraud is discovered: he stole the story from a Shirley Temple movie on the Late Show. At precisely this point the humor drains out of Nobody Loves an Albatross, for the audience begins to realize just how pathetic Preston is. His friends all deliver homilies to the effect that honesty is the best policy; his secretary (she loves him and he wants her) turns her back on him. To Preston, though, life is a floating con game, and he dupes another producer (through means so far-fetched you wouldn't believe it) and wangles another lucrative contract.

Nobody Loves an Albatross fails as a moral lesson. Preston's remains a countryish buffoon from beginning to end; his plight never forces the audience to examine the necessity for honesty. The pathos raises no ethical questions; it simply dampens the already soggy humor.