Word: saroyans
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...Time of Your Life (United Artists) is William Saroyan's rosy look-in on a San Francisco saloon and, in the late Charles Butterworth's enduring phrase, its habitues and sons-of-habitues...
...league saint (James Cagney) who tries to make people happy; a dim Man Friday (Wayne Morris); a B-girl* (Jeanne Cagney) who claims to have been prominent in burlesque; a fine old pathological liar (James Barton) in fringed buckskins; an itinerant sadist (Tom Powers) who has to supply, singlehanded, Saroyan's conception of the power and proportion of evil in this world...
...dull and slack on the screen. On the other hand, those who made the picture have given it something very rare. It's obvious that they love the play and their work in it, and their affection and enjoyment are highly contagious. They have done so handsomely by Saroyan that in the long run everything depends on how much of Saroyan you can take...
...Saroyan is an entertainer of a kind overrated by some people and underrated by others-a very gifted schmalz-artist. In the schmalz-artist strength and weakness are inextricably combined-the deeply, primordially valid, and the falseness of the middle-aged little boy who dives back into the womb for pennies...
...schmalz-artist requires more belief, more wishful thinking on the part of his audience, than better artists would dare require. Reality is as much his deadly enemy as it is the superior artist's most difficult love affair. At his best, Saroyan is a wonderfully sweet-natured, witty and beguiling kind of Christian anarchist, and so apt a lyrical magician that the magic designed for one medium still works in another. At his worst, he is one of the world's ranking contenders for brassy, self-pitying, arty mawkishness, for idealism with an eye to the main chance...