Vive Boyer

Lord Pengo, which S. N. Behrman has modeled on the late Lord Duveen. high-priced art purveyor to U.S. multimillionaires, is, dramatically speaking, a 2 1/2-hour still life. The play has poise, grace, urbanity, but it lacks any inner dynamic of change, conflict or direction.

In the plush, colonnaded picture gallery, Lord Pengo (Charles Boyer) wheedles, cajoles, amuses, and stimulates a cultural lust for owning Giorgiones and Masaccios in the blank-walled minds of crotchety, sulky and pinchpenny plutocrats. But, as someone says, for him selling is "a kind of disembodied activity, like praying," and disembodiment is the felt mood of the evening. Behrman dutifully tries to fire Pengo and Co. with emotions. Pengo rages at his petulant and priggishly high-minded son (Brian Bedford). He feels pity for a twitchily neurotic moneybag (Ruth White), for his loyal secretary (Agnes Moorehead), and for a lonely press-maligned monopolist (Henry Daniell). The wet cardboard will not ignite. Only Charles Boyer, the actor, ignites. He is a fountain of eternal charm, a foxy grandpa of stage presence, an animated bundle of Continental gestures who makes the typical U.S. actor seem about as vibrant as a hat tree.

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