Clifford Odets

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Odets, Clifford (1906–63), playwright. The leading dramatist of left‐wing social protest in the 1930s, he was born in Philadelphia but raised in New York. His earliest professional work in the theatre was as an actor, including several seasons with the Group Theatre, whose theories of drama and staging he shared. When the Group mounted a special benefit performance of his explosive one‐act play about a taxi drivers' union strike, Waiting for Lefty, its reception made him famous overnight. However, before the troupe brought the play to Broadway, it first produced his landmark domestic drama Awake and Sing! (1935). A confused indictment of the emptiness of the middle class, Paradise Lost (1935) was so coldly received that Odets temporarily abandoned Broadway for Hollywood. On his return he offered what many have considered his best play, Golden Boy (1937). But a falling away of his dramatic abilities became evident with Rocket to the Moon (1938), Night Music (1940), and Clash by Night (1941). Eight years passed before Odets returned to Broadway with a highly colored attack on Hollywood, The Big Knife (1949). His last two plays suggested that the dramatist could still recover some of his earlier sureness: the backstage drama The Country Girl (1950) and the lighthearted Biblical Noah play The Flowering Peach (1954). At his best Odets was a powerful dramatist with a gift for sympathetic, memorable characterization, but his frequent rejections and returns to Broadway hint that his approach to writing was beset by the very conflict between commercialism and preachy idealism that was the essence of many of his works. Biography: Clifford Odets—American Playwright, Margaret Brenman‐Gibson, 1982.

A playwright, film scenarist, and director, Clifford Odets (1906-1963) was America's outstanding dramatist in the 1930s. His colloquial dialogue, vital ideological protests on behalf of human dignity, and feeling for the family were distinctive.

Clifford Odets was born on July 18, 1906, in Philadelphia, Pa. The family moved in 1912 to New York, where his father became a successful businessman.

In spite of his upbringing with his two sisters in a comfortable, middle-class, Jewish home, Odets was a melancholy child. His formal education ended after 2 years of high school. During most of the 1920s he acted with small theater groups and held various positions in radio stations, joining the Group Theater in 1930. Reportedly, he attempted suicide three times before the age of 25.

The theatrical approach of the Group Theater transformed Odets from a poor actor into a good playwright. While with the Group, he also joined the Communist party. As a result of his sensational writing debut in 1935, he received many offers from Hollywood. In 1937 he married the actress Luise Rainer.

Writings of the Thirties

Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Till the Day I Die, and Paradise Lost, all produced in 1935, quickly established Odets as a powerful dramatist. Waiting for Lefty, framed within a union meeting, is a series of indignant vignettes. Although the play has been criticized for simplistic views and characterizations, its raw power and anger are notable. Concerned with a family in the Bronx, Awake and Sing pinpoints the impact of the capitalistic economic structure on the people within it and the fraudulency involved in adjusting human lives to economic forces; the characterizations and use of symbols are well done. Till the Day I Die deals with conflict between Nazis and Communists. Paradise Lost focuses on the bewilderment of a middle-class family as their values shift in relation to changing social forces. Viewed as a realistic work, it is unsatisfactory; assessed symbolically, it is more convincing.

After Paradise Lost, Odets wrote the film adaptation of The General Died at Dawn. His next stage play, Golden Boy (1937), proved his most popular success. In selecting a career in boxing instead of in music, Joe Bonaparte goes against his nature; he becomes successful but destroys himself. Although Golden Boy contains social observations, its orientation is toward individuals rather than politics. (In 1964 it was made into a Broadway musical.) Rocket to the Moon (1938) deals with loneliness and the need for love, noting how conditions within and outside man impede attaining love.

Hollywood Years

When the Group Theater dissolved in 1941, it had produced seven of Odets's plays. That year, following his divorce, Odets returned to Hollywood to write and direct films. In quick succession he wrote Humoresque (1942), None but the Lonely Heart (1943), and Deadline at Dawn (1944).

In 1943 Odets married another actress, Betty Grayson; they had two children. In addition to his constant screen obligations (including more than 15 scenarios), he continued to write for the stage. In 1952 he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities because of his earlier Communist affiliations; his performance did little to enhance his personal reputation.

Odets's wife died in 1954. He started several plays after that but failed to complete them. His last film, Wild in the Country (1961), starred Elvis Presley. At the time of his death in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1963, Odets was working on a dramatic series for television.

Later Writings

The burning concern for poor workers that propelled Odets's early success became, ironically, something of an albatross. Though he had changed from his propagandistic style as early as Golden Boy and never really returned to extreme political postures in later plays, many critics had trouble accepting him on his new terms. Further, since he had initially championed the poor, his remunerative employment in Hollywood stirred insinuations that he lacked artistic integrity. Thus evaluations of his later writings are occasionally less objective than one might hope.

Night Music (1940), although realistic, has a strong poetic component. Steve Takis's loneliness and frustration have some socioeconomic aspects, but Odets's hand is uncertain. There is confusion in treating the subject and an imperfect development of structure. Clash by Night (1941) is a standard treatment of the eternal love triangle to which Odets adds nothing important. Pessimism permeates the work, and there is little hope either by an individual for himself or for understanding between people. Odets felt that his plays were always concerned with "the struggle not to have life nullified by circumstances, false values, anything." The Big Knife (1949), showing the annihilation of a Hollywood star, focuses on personal integrity in combat with practical necessity and perhaps displays something of Odets's own dilemma. His increasing craftsmanship, noted in The Big Knife, is clearly evident in The Country Girl (1950). The portraits of the alcoholic actor Frank Elgin and his confused wife are very effective. A fine piece of theater, the play shows Odets deeply involved in human psychology. The Flowering Peach (1954), his last produced play, is Odets at his mature best. His examination of the biblical Noah concentrates on the family, this time with an increased awareness of and tolerance for man's imperfections.

Further Reading

Two works on Odets contain biographical material and criticism of the plays: R. Baird Shuman, Clifford Odets (1962), and Edward Murray, Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After (1968). Among the many critical studies with material on Odets are Anita Block, The Changing World in Plays and Theatre (1939); Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties (1945); Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times (1946); and Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (1961).

Additional Sources

Brenman-Gibson, Margaret, Clifford Odets, American playwright: the years from 1906 to 1940, New York: Atheneum, 1981.

Weales, Gerald Clifford, Odets, the playwright, London; New York: Methuen, 1985.

(1906-1963)

1935	Waiting for Lefty. After acting with the Theatre Guild and helping to found the Group Theatre, the playwright's electrifying theatrical debut is based on the 1934 New York City cab strike, as union members (seated in the audience) come forward to debate a strike vote. When word comes that the union's militant representative has been killed, the workers join together chanting "Strike! Strike! Strike!" One of the most powerful protest dramas of the era, it establishes Odets's reputation. The play moves from a downtown theater to Broadway on March 26 as part of a double bill with another one-act play by Odets, Till the Day I Die, concerning the anti-Nazi underground. After the success of Waiting for Lefty, Odets reworks an earlier play, I Got the Blues, into Awake and Sing!--a social drama of a lower-middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx and the conversion of the son, Ralph Berger, from social isolation to activism. It is produced by the Group Theatre. Odets's fourth drama to be performed on Broadway in 1935--Paradise Lost, a scattershot attack on American middle-class life--is a failure. He departs for Hollywood to be a screenwriter, prompting accusations that he has abandoned his proletarian ideals for money.
1937	Golden Boy. After a screenwriting foray in Hollywood, Odets returns to Broadway with this drama of an Italian slum dweller who abandons the violin for a prizefighting career. It is one of the playwright's least explicitly political dramas but his most popular. It would be revised in 1964 as an all-black musical starring Sammy Davis Jr.
1938	Rocket to the Moon. Many critics date the decline in the playwright's dramatic ability to this Group Theatre production, concerning a young dentist's unhappy marriage and affair. It is Odets's final play to evoke comparisons with his earlier Marxist works.
1940	Night Music. The last of Odets's plays produced by the Group Theatre is a New York romance described by producer Harold Clurman as a "lyric improvisation... on the basic homelessness of the little man in the big city." It fails to win an audience.
1941	Clash By Night. Written at the time that Odets's marriage fell apart, this play portrays two characters, Mae and Jerry Wilenski, in the midst of a sordid love triangle.
1948	The Big Knife. The playwright tackles Hollywood in this drama about a movie star who struggles to retain his integrity.
1950	The Country Girl. Odets would later dismiss this backstage drama, about an alcoholic actor trying for a comeback and his protective, abused wife, as lacking his characteristic social critique and written solely for money. However, after Golden Boy, it is Odets's biggest success.
1954	The Flowering Peach. Odets's final play recounts the biblical story of Noah in which the patriarch and his family attempt to cope with the disastrous flood. The Columbia Faculty Committee votes to award the play the Pulitzer Prize, but their decision is overruled by the trustees, who grant it to Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

Quotes:

"There are two kinds of marriages -- where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband."

• Born: Jul 18, 1906 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: Aug 14, 1963
• Occupation: Writer, Director, Actor
• Active: '30s-'50s, '70s-'80s
• Major Genres: Drama
• Career Highlights: Sweet Smell of Success, The Country Girl, The Big Knife
• First Major Screen Credit: The General Died at Dawn (1936)

Biography

Clifford Odets was one of the most celebrated playwrights of the 1930s, and his work for the stage during that period and screenwriting in the '40s yielded some of the more interesting movies of either decade. Born in Philadelphia to immigrant parents, Odets' family was impoverished during his early years, although his father eventually succeeded with a Bronx printing company in New York. The boy was much closer to his aunt and uncle, from whom he absorbed not only a good deal of Jewish culture but also skepticism about the nature of the success that his father was pursuing. And by the time he had reached his teens, he was alienated from both his parents and sisters, all of whom, it seemed to the boy, equated success and happiness with materialistic pursuits.

Considered a failure by his father after he dropped out of high school, Odets plunged into literature, beginning with his favorite book, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. He also took up elocution, a favorite subject, and eventually became a performer on the Moss Vaudeville Circuit, earning a meager living reciting on-stage. Moving toward legitimate theater, Odets made his way through the network of tiny acting companies in New York, and eventually had a brief acting tenure with the Theatre Guild, the city's most celebrated mainstream company, although his main benefit seems to have been acquiring a thorough knowledge of theater production. In 1931, Odets co-founded a more radical offshoot of that organization: the Group Theatre, which was organized along egalitarian lines, almost in a socialistic or communistic manner. It was with this group that Odets shot to fame with a series of plays that he wrote during the early and mid-'30s. Its mission to find relevant and meaningful subjects for their productions made it the ideal creative home for the young writer, and, in 1935, he delivered a short play entitled Waiting for Lefty. Set against the background of a New York taxicab strike, it was a hit and won him his first significant award. This was a new brand of working-class theater, far removed from the upscale subject matter to which most established productions were devoted; the work spoke in the language of the common man, and it took critics and audiences by storm. Ironically, because it was a short work and he needed to fill a full evening's program, Odets had written another short play on the same bill: Till the Day I Die, which dealt with life in Nazi Germany. In one night, then, he went from near-obscurity to a Broadway sensation.

Odets went on to write other hits, including Awake and Sing!, which dealt with the consequences of the poverty of for one Jewish family in The Bronx during the Great Depression; Paradise Lost (his personal favorite), about an upper middle class Jewish family injured by the Depression; and Golden Boy, about a young man (portrayed by John Garfield in the original production) who must choose between a fulfilling, but financially unrewarding, career as a violinist or a potentially money-making one as a boxer. Golden Boy was so successful that it was bought by Columbia Pictures, which brought it to the screen as a vehicle for a young actor named William Holden. The play, itself, was a reflection of the choice that Odets felt he was being forced to make at the time; his earlier writing had elicited offers from Hollywood, but, at the time, he looked askance at the huge sums being offered for his talent. He was forced to accept, however, when the Group Theatre ran into serious financial trouble. To help bail them out Odets contributed to the screenplay of (and appeared in) The General Died at Dawn, which starred Gary Cooper.

He turned to directing with the Cary Grant vehicle None but the Lonely Heart (1944), which was one of the actor's finest dramatic films and best performances. In 1946, he collaborated with his Group Theatre colleague Harold Clurman in the latter's only directorial effort, the fascinating film noir Deadline at Dawn, starring Bill Williams, Susan Hayward, and Paul Lukas. It was also during this period that Odets' writing seemed to lose its edge and his stage work foundered. Following the Group Theatre's final production, Clash By Night, none of his plays had the old fury, passion, and piercing sensibilities. The Big Knife (1949) was a failure on-stage, although it made into a fascinating movie about the movies by Robert Aldrich in 1955, and reflected his own disillusionment with Hollywood and its allure. Odets was more successful with The Country Girl (1950), a play dealing with alcoholism that was made into a film four years later with Holden, Bing Crosby, and Grace Kelly.

The '50s also saw Odets' early politics catch up with him when he was called to testify before a Congressional committee investigating Communists in the entertainment industry. Although hardly a friendly witness, he did admit to brief membership in the party and named several of his friends and associates from the '30s. Odets seemed to regain his edge with the screenplay for Alexander MacKendrick's The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), but by then the damage had been done to his psyche. By the start of the '60s, Odets had descended even lower (in his view) when he signed a contract to write four screenplays for the television anthology series The Richard Boone Show, although, ironically, it was regarded as one of the finest dramatic television shows of the day.

While collaborating on a musical version of Golden Boy (which finally made it to Broadway in 1964), Odets died of cancer in 1963, having delivered only three of the four Richard Boone scripts. His plays remained in print in the ensuing years and continued to be performed on-stage, especially in college and regional productions. Some of them were revived for public television during the 1970s and '80s, and the best of his screenplays and film adaptations of his work -- including Deadline at Dawn -- were still shown periodically in various repertory screenings. Odets' early years in Hollywood were also the basis for the Coen Brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

The Country Girl Buy this Movie	Paradise Lost Buy this Movie	Awake and Sing! Buy this Movie	Wild in the Country Buy this Movie
Sweet Smell of Success Buy this Movie	The Country Girl Buy this Movie	Clash by Night Buy this Movie	Deadline at Dawn Buy this Movie

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