Word: ferberization
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...been one of the worst seasons in a generation. Such big names as Maxwell Anderson, Somerset Maugham, Kaufman & Ferber were rubbed out weeks ago. In over five months, not a single original play by a U.S. playwright has scored a real success. Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and Patrick Hamilton's Angel Street are by Englishmen; Junior Miss is a hack dramatization of surefire short-story material. Only healthy child of Broadway this season is musicomedy, with Let's Face It!, Banjo Eyes, Sons o' Fun, Best Foot Forward, High Kickers...
These new novels by Edna Ferber (who writes-just-like-a-man) and Louis Bromfield (who writes almost like one) have three things in common: both use New Orleans, both will sell well, and both are so predigested for celluloid that they hardly sit still on the page. But one of them is pretty good, and the other pretty...
...Edna Ferber is more adroit. Her Creole heroine, Clio Dulaine, is not only beautiful, but hard, in the manner of Scarlett O'Hara and other cut-rate Becky Sharps. Clio takes up with Gambler Clint Maroon: "He was magnificent, he was vast, he was beautiful, he was crude, he was rough, he was untamed, he was Texas." He was also a gambler, but Clio soon seduced him into larger ambitions...
After Miss Ferber has warmed the pair up around New Orleans of the early '80s, she takes them North to Saratoga's United States Hotel. There, as the Comtesse de Trenaunay de Chanfret (incognito), Clio sets the town by its ears. She breakfasts at six in the stables, eats potato chips outdoors, sets other new styles. She also sets her cap and her talons for railroad multimillionaire Bart Van Steed, the most eligible bachelor in the Western Hemisphere...
...Miss Ferber's noisy, flashing manner never really gives you a period, but always makes you enjoy the fraud. Saratoga Trunk is so neatly made that the scenarists need only bracket the non-dialogue as stage direction, and call it a half-day's work...