Hellman strikes me as one of the most overrated writers in American history, and this 1941 opus [the recently revived Watch on the Rhine] has aged not as works of the imagination, but as cars, threshing machines, and other like contraptions, do. (p. 71)

Watch on the Rhine would creak in every bone if it had any bones and were not entirely made of the skin of simplistic ideology, the gristle of melodrama, and the grease of facile gags. Yet through it has the black-and-whiteness of melodrama, it does not even have its steady suspense, rising menace, and rousing climax; though it purports to be of the genre "well-made play," it falls into such clumsinesses as having a fastidious aristocrat and his wife fight out the terminal battle of their marriage in front of gawking strangers; though it is meant to be profoundly moving, it hauls out every conceivable, unconscionable...