New Faces of 1930

Act One, as more than a million people who read the book know, is the rags-to-nouveau-riche story of the late playwright-director Moss Hart and his historic subway trip from The Bronx to Broadway. Hart was a shrewd, witty, candid and flamboyant theater man. As played on the screen by George Hamilton, he seems reserved, artless, uncertain. The movie audience is asked to imagine him as the boy wonder who collaborated with Writer-Director George S. Kaufman on the 1930 comedy smash, Once in a Lifetime. It's hard.

The fault lies less with Hamilton, perhaps, than with Dore Schary, who wrote, produced and directed this static movie version of Hart's book. What was unflinchingly straightforward in print has been sentimentalized, rendered limp and lifeless on film. Hart's parents, who never understood their ambitious son, become stock figures of Jewish folk comedy. The late, irascible Kaufman is ably impersonated by Jason Robards Jr., whose perpetually aghast eyebrows seem to sense the serious trouble in the script. Appearing at intervals are a galaxy of vintage celebrities, such as the Algonquin Round Table in toto and a struggling actor named Archie Leach (played by Bert Convy), who later became Gary Grant.

All sorts of things have been added: fantasy, turgid humor, breathless monologues. "It's happening, Moss, all of it . . . It's all true!" Hamilton whispers to himself. But the muse that spurred Moss Hart to fame has clearly strayed. If this were an out-of-town tryout, the closing notice would have gone up in Boston. As they say on the Main Stem, Act One needs work.

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