Old Play in Manhattan

Golden Boy (by Clifford Odets),though perhaps the most popular of Odets' plays, scarcely ranks among the best. Its theme --the demoralizing values that go with quick, flashy American success--is as vital today as it was during the '30s. But Odets' treatment, though often dramatic, was always prefabricated, and at times now it seems both dated and flat. The brutalization through big-shotism and the defeat through victory of Joe Bonaparte, who becomes a prizefighter and breaks his violin-playing hands, is given a copybook patness. Joe's violent racing-car death merely adds a crude exclamation point. John Garfield's Joe, moreover, never for a moment suggests a guy with music in his heart, let alone in his fingers. As staged by Odets, the production, which co-stars Lee J. (Death of a Salesman) Cobb, does not quite come together as a whole.

In terms of virtues and faults, Golden Boy is like something in a child's drawing book, where the picture is already printed and only the coloring is the child's own. Down here, up here, in that corner, with this detail, Odets' coloring has fine individuality. It is not his key figures but his semi-grotesques, not Joe but some of Joe's trainers and relatives, who seem most alive. It is not where Odets tries to be poetic but where, in hurried scribbles and scrawls, he forgets to try, that he brings a kind of impassioned feeling to life itself. His violin music is mostly pretentious, his trumpet notes today seem shrill; where he seems uniquely vivid and vibrant is on a mouth organ he pulls out of his pocket.

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