New Plays in Manhattan

The Big Knife (by Clifford Odets; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman) is Odets' first play in seven years, and probably his poorest ever. A kind of savagely spluttering memoir of Hollywood, where Odets has spent most of those seven years, it is a lament for crushed ideals and identities, a screeching indictment of vicious methods and heartless men. Its anger is real; everything else about it is contrived.

The play's central figure is Charlie Castle (John Garfield), onetime idealist and now such a whopping movie star that he is being asked to sign a 14-year contract. Fed up, Charlie wants to leave Hollywood; his wife (Nancy Kelly) is so fed up she has left him. But Charlie is being blackmailed by his bosses. A while back he had run over and killed a child, and he had been saved from prison by the studio's wiliest finagling. Now, when he balks, the studio threatens jail. Later, when things get messier, the studio doesn't blink at plotting the murder of a blabbing witness. Charlie finally feels driven to suicide.

Not all of Odets' rage and revulsions are wasted: some of his Hollywood villains--including a cynical hatchetman and a ruthless cinemagnate (well played by Paul Mc-Grath and J. Edward Bromberg) are vividly caught or caricatured. Now & then, along with some "poetic" writing that is as unpleasantly conspicuous as a nose ring, a lively crack comes forth. But most of The Big Knife is as unfocused as it is violent; it is full of curses not deep but loud, of intemperate and untidy theatrics. And Castle's particular predicament is far too unusual to mean anything. He is surely one of very few heroes in history--even Hollywood history--who have been forced to choose between a prison sentence and $3,744,000. The whole evening, moreover, is an artistic blur--half morality play about saving Castle's soul, half melodrama about saving his skin.

Both too lurid and too grandiose, The Big Knife writes of lost idealists, in whom there was always something of the ham or the hack, as though they were fallen archangels. It stirs little real sympathy for them. Designed as scathing tragedy, it emerges as botched melodrama which often suggests an ugly farce.

Anybody Home (by Robert Pyzel; produced by Phyllis Holden) describes and at length adjusts the marital difficulties of a Mr. & Mrs. Howard of Westchester County, N.Y. Its own difficulties baffle description and defy adjustment: Broadway has seen nothing worse in years.

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