Word: mazo
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Whiteoaks (adapted by Mazo de la Roche from her novel Whiteoaks of Jalna; produced by Victor Payne-Jennings). Chief distinction of Whiteoaks is its 101-year-old heroine, played to the age limit by Ethel Barrymore. A wealthy, imperious, chops-licking war horse, Gran Whiteoak is surrounded by an obsequious tribe worrying over who will inherit her money. Neither her fuddy-duddy children nor her horsy grandchildren are prepared to see it go to Finch, the family neurotic (Stephen Haggard), and they kick up quite a rumpus when it does...
...Mazo de la Roche's Jalna, novels are second-rate Forsyte Saga, gain nothing from being dramatized. As a picture of genteel rapacity, Whiteoaks does nothing in three acts it could not do better in one. Its sharpish characterizations never make up for its dragging plot. Actress Barrymore, looking like a cross between her Brother Lionel and the wolf dressed up as Red Riding Hood's grandmother, carries the whole play on her bent, centenarian back. Her expert performance gains in effect from the audience's kindly feeling that anything a 101-year-old woman says...
...kindly, has become one of the most popular characters in stock. But in Great Laughter Fannie Hurst has created an aged grandmother who seems destined to end ail aged grandmothers in popular fiction. In comparison with her, the teetering representatives of the oldest generation in the Jalna novels of Mazo de la Roche are just so many leaping adolescents, the doddering Forsytes of John Galsworthy are scarcely of school age. For Fannie Hurst's Gregrannie at the age of a hundred is still managing her fortune, fixing up the grandchildren when they get into those readily-soluble jams that...
Biggest single publishing award open to aspiring authors is the fat old Atlantic Monthly's annual $10,000 prize. First and most famed beneficiary was Canada's Mazo de la Roche, whose Jalna won in 1927. Last week another woman writer was similarly enriched when Mrs. Winifred Mayne Van Etten, 34, of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, received the 1936 Atlantic prize for a novel called I Am the Fox, which the Atlantic Monthly Press will issue in August...
Readers of Mazo de la Roche ought to be warned that Jalna, the current feature at the University, is not an exact reproduction of the book. But for those who can forget their preconceived conceptions of the various characters it is a film both moving and delightful...