All that screaming and hollering and swearing, with Donald Duck noises of indignation thrown in, down in the neighborhood of the National Theater in Forty-first Street, are not the patrons of the Aviation Grill next door or even the bus depot across the street. They are largely attributable to an absurd playright named Clifford Odets, who has contrived a stupefying mishmash of treachery, murder, and suicide out of a story of Hollywood which, in the hands of anyone with his blood pressure under control, might have made a very considerable play.
Mr. Odets made himself a reputation around Broadway some years ago as a playwright of some competence with pronounced leftist leanings, and for the last seven years he has been accepting a fantastic Hollywood salary and getting ready to denounce the films good and proper in something called The Big Knife. Mr. Odets' favorite part of the anatomy for lodging knives is the back.
Not that he hasn't got something when he comes to create the character who, as a film actor of terrific box-office power, loses his friends and his wife and, being a fellow of slightly unbalanced genius, is eventually driven to suicide in a noisy and spurious offstage carnival of wrist-cutting. In addition, however, to this macabre but still possible setup, Mr. Odets so complicates his play with a multitude of internal plots, villainies, and malfeasances that his main thesis, which is that Hollywood is a corrupter of honest folk, is totally lost in the screams and recriminations of the actors.
An actor of vast capacities for expert characterization has been recruited for this disorganized scuffle in the person of John Garfield, but not all Garfield's excellences of technique can make his role, after the first act, at any rate, anything but pure corn of an almost unbelievable proof.
Not content with fouling up his script with a farrago of matters entirely irrelevant to his plot, Mr. Odets is possessed of the conceit that in the Hatfield-McCoy assassinations of Sunset Boulevard he has found a mirrored image of the entire world's insanity of the moment. This would be more valid if it weren't fairly widely acknowledged that, whatever else it may be, Hollywood is probably more totally divorced from any reality and more completely unlike the rest of the world, in any aspect whatsoever, than any other community or social hierarchy known to man. The Big Knife is, in a word, just plain preposterous, and Garfield was being had when he was induced to become involved in such a shabby charade.
That's the explanation of all those low tumults downtown. Just a street accident.
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