"Golden Boy," a play about an
Italian-American boxer, by Clifford Odets
The
ANNOTICO Report
Clifford Odets, a non Italian, wrote one of the most positive
and sympathetic plays, "Golden Boy," (1937) ever written
about an Italian American, in this case a boxer who is destroyed by the
sleazy agents, promoters and gamblers who take over his career. Joe Bonaparte is
a golden violin prodigy lured from practicing his scales to make some extra
dough on the side as a prizefighter by the sultry Stanwyck.
Unfortunately,
In 1939, "Golden Boy" as a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden in his "break out"
role, Joe went from a Bonaparte to a
In the
original final scene, Joe's father who all along has been opposed to Joe's
fighting, as Joe is preparing for a title fight,in
which he is intentionally "overmatched", sensing Joe's
impending defeat, his father finally gives him the word to fight just as
he is to enter the ring with the Champ. Despite a drastic beating, Joe fights
back in a desperate, ferocious daze to KO Lopez. In the midst of the dressing
room celebration, Joe learns that Lopez is not only out, but dead. Immediately
the warnings of his father and the weaknesses of his own personal drive appear
before him. He never meant to injure or kill. His only goals were the rewards,
now empty desires. In desperation, he turns to the high speed of his Ferrari,
which adds his own life to his list of sacrifices.
Few will
remember the Italian American Stage version, but the Anglo and Black versions
are captured on film forever. :(
Need I
make the "obvious" observation, that when an Italian American is cast
in a sympathetic role, that in subsequent versions the
favorable
Italianism will be "purged".??!!!
"Golden
Boy" also happened to resurrect Odets'
career that had soared, and then stumbled with "Paradise Lost" in
1935.
Odets,
was born to an immigrant Jewish family in Philadelphia in 1906, with
a home life that was almost unendurable, with an abusive, philandering
father and a weak, unprotective mother, either
because of it, or in spite of it, shot to fame in the 1930s on the basis of two
fiery leftist scripts, "Waiting for Lefty" (about a taxi drivers'
strike) and "Awake and Sing!" (a lower
middle-class Jewish family in the
The plays
summed up the nation's restless, distraught mood during the Great Depression.
Critics hailed him as the country's "most promising playwright" and
the "proletarian Jesus." In 1938, he was even featured on the cover
of Time magazine.
Yet by the 1950s, his reputation was in decline, tarnished by his perceived
sellout to
Yet his plays have received few productions over the last half-century. In this
year of his centennial, Odets can once again be found
on many stages, and once again, critics and scholars are debating his stature.
AMERICANS
REDISCOVER A STAGE PIONEER
The New York Times
'One is born with talent or with
genius, but one makes himself an artist. Nothing is more difficult than this
process," the playwright Clifford Odets worte in 1940. "The creative road is strewn with wrecks, a veritable junk yard of old rusted bodies."
Odets, born to an immigrant Jewish
family in
Yet by the 1950s, his reputatio! n was in decline,
tarnished by his perceived sellout to
Yet his plays have
received few productions over the last half-century. In this year of his
centennial, Odets can once again be found on many
stages, and once again, critics and scholars are debating his stature.
Andre Bishop, artistic
director of Lincoln Center Theatre - which is presenting "Awake and
Sing!" - thinks Odets is overdue for rediscovery
as "up there" with the 20th century's greatest American playwrights.
An opposing view is
articulated by Robert Brustein, a former dean of
Still, there is little
doubt that the influence of Odets on American culture
has been immense. At roughly the same time that William Faulkner, John
Steinbeck and Thomas Wolfe were publishing their first major novels, Odets enabled the Group to create the first t! ruly indigenous American theater.
"Waiting for
Lefty," his one-act play about a taxi drivers' strike, exploded like a
depth charge in the audience; in his autobiography, Elia Kazan,
who was one of the actors, called the rousing 28 curtain calls "the most
overwhelming reception I've ever heard in the theater." "Waiting for
Lefty" was immediately taken up by more than 100 theater groups throughout
the country, marking a shift in American culture that has been compared with
the Woodstock Festival of 1969; it became the rallying cry of a generation.
When Odets wrote "Awake and Sing!" - the
story of a lower middle-class Jewish family in the
"Awake and
Sing!" started as a play about Beethoven until Odets!
decided that he should write about something closer to
home. Some of its scenes sound almost like verbal fugues in their depth of
emotion and polyphonic use of dialogue.
The main character, Ralph
(played by Pablo Schreiber in the
"Awake and
Sing!" was a revelation to Jewish audience members, who were accustomed to
seeing Jews presented as comic stereotypes in the mainstream theater. The
critic Alfred Kazin exulted that seeing the actors on
the Belasco stage, where everyone was "furious,
kicking, alive," was like watching his "mother and father and uncles
and aunts occup! ying the stage by as much right as if they were
Hamlet and Lear."
Odets's biographer, the psychoanalyst
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, found that his home life was
almost unendurable, with an abusive, philandering father and a weak, unprotective mother. Still, he managed to infuse his
characters' expressions of self-pity with an often hilarious dose of irony.
Bishop recalls hearing gales of laughter while listening to a pirated recording
of the Group Theatre performing "Golden Boy."
With "Paradise
Lost" in 1935, his sprawling, deliberately "de-Jewished"
portrait of a crumbling middle- class family, Odets
bid to be the John Dos Passos of the American stage.
But critics complained that his endings, in which characters decide to fight
for a better world were tacked on and that Odets himself, who moved to
He redeemed himself in
1937 with "Golden Boy," a play about an Italian-American boxer wh! o is
destroyed by the sleazy agents, promoters and gamblers who take over his
career. Many viewed the play as an allegory for the playwright's own struggles
with fame and fortune.
Odets never completely adjusted to
the change in the national mood that accompanied renewed economic prosperity.
And he never forgave himself for giving the House committee the names of Communist
Party sympathizers in 1954. He died of stomach cancer nine years later, having
joined to some extent the materialistic "junkyard" that he foresaw in
1940 as trashing his genius. Given the long list of Odets
productions this year, he might at least be comforted to know that his work
escaped the same fate.
Ted Merwin,
theater critic for The Jewish Week, is the author of
"In Their Own Image:
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