Word: themes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Like Abe Lincoln in Illinois, American Landscape sounds the trumpet for free dom, tolerance and democracy. A timely and impressive theme, Mr. Rice has hag ridden it into a loud and loquacious ser mon. In its few good moments the play rises to ringing eloquence, but far oftener sinks to stagy gestures and sentimental shenanigans...
...almost silly," Odets went on, "to have to be defending the theme of love for a play. Popular songs and motion pictures are occupied with practically nothing else. But in a serious play ... it apparently strikes some as not being enough; it doesn't 'count.' It isn't 'important.' . . . The roots of love and the meaning of it in the present world need surely to be comprehended as much as the effect of a strike on its activists. (In fact, I am hoping to prove in a future play, The Silent Partner, that love...
...reason Odets has gained and held a public that, by & large, does not share his Leftish ideas is obviously not the ideas themselves but his rich, compassionate, angry feeling for people, his tremendous dramatic punch, his dialogue, bracing as ozone. In every Odets play, regardless of its theme or its worth, at least once or twice during the evening every spectator feels that a fire hose has been turned on his body, that a fist has connected with his chin...
...plays Odets has drawn people who are confused because a materialistic society pulls them one way, their instincts another. But in Rocket to the Moon psychological dislocations result from a clash of temperaments, a lack of drive. And Odets will not stay with his plot. He pursues a mystical theme which overrides it: the need for love to vitalize human lives. Inoculated with this virus, his characters cease to be individuals in a specific situation, turn into orators, poets, philosophers who halt the action to harpoon the cosmos...
Unimaginative directing by Michael Curtis doesn't do much to redeem the triteness of this theme. And when Mr. Cagney turns out to have a heart of gold the picture degenerates into another blurb about the nobility of gangsters. "Down on the Farm," a Jones Family feature which concerns corn, both of the cob and jug variety, is naive but rather amusing...