Word: cohan
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Fulton of Oak Falls (adapted by George M. Cohan from a play by Parker Fennelly; Cohan & Harris, producers). The theatre is less convinced than the cinema that there is magic in a formula, and in the theatre sequels are comparatively rare. Fulton of Oak Falls, however, shows every sign of trying to be a sequel to Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness, with a daughter instead of a son as the trouble focus...
Fulton of Oak Falls is certainly far less than that, as even admirers of Actor Cohan could not deny. In the O'Neill play the wise and sunny character of the small-town father was allowed to grow naturally out of the story. In Fulton of Oak Falls it seems necessary for other members of the cast to butter him incessantly with such adjectives as "good," "gentle," "saintly," "grand" and "steady." He tells his next-door neighbor, a clergyman, that he was in love when he was young, that the girl went to Heaven, that although he has carried...
Fulton of Oak Falls does nothing to soften the fact that Mr. Cohan's delivery is a nasal, almost snarling monotone which is the epitome of Broadway and has no more modulation than a piccolo rendition of Yankee Doodle, or that his famed chuckle derives much of its effect from its irrelevance to the context. Ed Fulton likes lilacs and Tennyson's poetry, wants his family to be happy. His daughter is unhappy because she is treated like a child, and because her sweetheart's father is an old enemy of Ed Fulton's. When...
...proof of his enduring identity, Mr. Cohan is exactly the same person as he was last year in "Dear Old Daddy". A steady, solid, unstartling business man with a constant flow of good humor and dessicated sentiment is again overwhelmed by a rush of romantic events, with which he has had no experience of coping. The first scene sees him happily free; the middle of the second act sees him thoroughly enmeshed; the final scene sees him once again disengaged, through no dramatic denouement or artistic solution, but rather through the magical effects of Mr. Cohan's simple integrity, aided...
...Cohan, the one-role actor, has selected for his one role a character that both appeals to a wide sector of every audience, and gives free play to his peculiar talents. The modesty of the character in his circumstances and of the actor in his histrionics are bound to be winning. Ant then a certain embarrassed chuckle, sometimes developing into a full-grown roar, is the answer to every complex situation and is just as effective in provoking mirth as lines of clever comment could be. While Mr. Cohan's horse sense and homely goodness are well-calculated to captivate...