Word: boye
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mirth seemed inappropriate; the nation turned to anger. The Government, always an available whipping-boy, again bent over to receive the lash. Righteous indignation rose to the occasion. Scientists, soldiers, journalists, and cracker-barrel sages fired their salvos at the nearest targets. Though the smoke hasn't yet lifted, it isn't difficult to see that the army has been fighting only itself...
Except for Sonny's moments of inspired brathood and tantrums, the only really bright, vital character is an extremely likable boy who appears in Act II to take the reluctant Reenie to a dance. He commits suicide before Act III. Depressing as this may be, it is the strongest act in the play, and it brings into sharp focus an otherwise loosely meandering world...
...action is fully directed by Elia Kazan, whose extremely skilled hand is, if anything should be said against it, somewhat obvious. Thus the exaggerated poses of the boy toward his mother--for example, covering her body with his on the floor--are sometimes strained. But as a whole, especially in getting actors to work together, Kazan reaffirms his right to his reputation...
From this prose Noah's ark aglut with fish and fowl, an olive branch of insight occasionally extends. The Old Man has a grave regional piety towards nature, and the Boy glows with a spontaneous, open-eyed wonder before it. The cycle of the seasons takes on a sensuous reality never suggested by the city-dweller's falling calendar leaves. But Author Ruark's major trouble is suggested by his title. Page after page of The Old Man and the Boy is mock-Hemingway in style and he-boy sentiments. Indeed, if Ernest Hemingway did not exist...
...Game Catch. In Littlerock, Calif., Abraham Burton, informed by reporters that his 32-year-old son Clifford had been arrested on bigamy charges (nine wives, ten children), thoughtfully observed that the boy's hobbies had always been hunting and fishing...