The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Nov. 15, 1937

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Golden Boy (produced by the Group Theatre) came last week fresh from the vigorous, maturing pen of Playwright Clifford Odets to put up a convincing argument for plain speaking in the spoken drama, for the serious play as a good show. Its dozen scenes sketched the tragic story of a U. S.-Italian family caught in the toils of the prizefight business. Though it sometimes teetered on the brink of bathos, Author Odets' robust sincerity kept it from toppling over.

Golden Boy is not in the mass-attack tradition of the typical Odets power play. It singles out cross-eyed, spiritually tormented Joe Bonaparte (Luther Adler), studies his indecision between the violin and pugilism, traces the gradual disintegration of his character in the brutish environment of the ring, and brings him finally to the realization that the false ideals and broken hands of the fight game have ruined his chances for happiness, broken his father's heart.

Spark plug of the Group Theatre in recent seasons, with his outspoken Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Leftist Playwright Odets took to Hollywood last year, turned out melodrama that veered neither left nor right. That Hollywood has improved the Odets technique is apparent in the swift mounting of scenes, the extravagance of dramatic energy in Golden Boy. That his experience in the cinema has not lessened his power as a playwright of the masses is equally apparent. The Italian family of the play might have been sketched from behind the portieres of its own flat.

Odets' characters are most forceful when they speak the salty idiom of the street, least effective when he hoists them on flights of unnatural rhetoric. Most idiomatic performers in Golden Boy were: Robert Lewis, as the flat-voiced, grasping fight promoter, Roman Bohnen, a typical shoestring manager, and Jules Garfield, recruited from the lead of Having Wonderful Time, as a wisecracking taxi driver. Despite the handicap of an unbecoming Italian accent, the Group Theatre's veteran Morris Carnovsky is the convincingly pathetic Old World parent, bewildered by a reckless new generation. Hollywood's Frances Farmer, who spent the summer in barn repertory preparing for her Broadway stage debut, was inappropriately cast as "a tramp from Newark," her fresh-faced prettiness belying every tough trait she tried to show.