Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Gerald Weales

Critical Essay by Gerald Weales

Mr. Bonaparte was wrong and so was Marion Castle. No man is so simply made that he has a single nature which a wrong turn can violate. The violation, too, is in his nature. Both fist and fiddle were natural to Joe; both Hollywood and the escape from it were necessary to Charlie. The observer in Odets knew this; the idealist, the idealogue did not want to know. Alter the circumstances, rearrange the environment, brick off the false choices, said the latter, and the natural man will flower; home, love, happiness will become possible. This assumption had personal and artistic consequences for Odets.

He was a restless man. In his work and in his life, we can see the vacillation between a home which turns out to be a trap and a promised land that fails to keep its promises. That comic figure, the radical playwright in the fashionable Hollywood...
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