Word: jeeter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...great 1940 classic is with us once more--this time without its inevitable companion feature, Grapes of Wrath. For those who have missed the film the first twenty-three times around, Tobacco Road, based on a novel by Erskine Caldwell, concerns a poor-white Georgia dirt farmer named Jeeter Lester who tries to dig up $100 so he can keep his depression-haunted homestead out of the clutches of the bank. Not a man of boundless energy, Jeeter's attempts to secure the money, which include the theft of his son's car, turn out to be more or less...
...acting is concerned, the picture is almost a one-man show: it belongs to Charley Grapewin, who plays Jeeter. While some of the other performers, such as Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, are better know today, Grapewin's part overshadows theirs both by its size and the capability with which it is handled Alternately sly and humerous, his Jeeter is a captivating old man who in one monologue--a prayer in which he warns the Lord to hurry up with delivering help or beware of the consequences--achieves something approaching magnificence. And Grapewin's performance, unlike some other aspects...
Died. Sam Byrd, 47, actor, producer and novelist, who set a Broadway record with 1,151 consecutive performances (1933-36) as Dude Lester in Tobacco Road, during which time he bounced 18 squash balls to shreds against Jeeter Lester's poor-white shack; of leukemia; in Durham...
When Tobacco Road closed its seven year New York run, it was playing to capacity. The present revival makes me wonder how the original lasted a month. Starring John J. Martin as Jeeter Lester, this production shows how an amusing book can fail to balance incompetent performances by mediocre actors...
Since the play hinges on Jeeter, Martin's share of onus for the show's failure is greatest. His role is a delicate one because the curtain scenes in acts two and three feature more drama than comedy. About to lose his land in act two, Jeeter pleads with the new owner to let him stay on; and at the end, his wife dead, he realizes that the land is no longer his. These scenes are maudlin bathos without a sympathetic treatment of Jeeter, and Martin's un-modulated buffoonery throughout the play kills audience feeling for him. His Jeeter...