Clifford Odets

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Clifford Odets 1937

Clifford Odets (born July 18, 1906 in Philadelphia , † August 18, 1963 in Glendale ) was a North American playwright and screenwriter and actor. The avowed communist was one of the most successful and influential US playwrights of the 1930s. The rebellious street spoke from his plays, albeit in a poetic way, at times overloaded with metaphor. The characters and their beliefs were more important to him than the plot. His excellent use of colloquial language, including Yiddish , is often praised . Less notable was the role Odets played around 1952 when, like so many left-wing artists, he was summoned to the McCarthy Committee . Afterwards his work lost noticeably in bite. Hence the bon mot of his colleague George S. Kaufman : "Odets, where has your sting gone?"

Life

Childhood, youth and first successes

Odets grew up in a Jewish family who immigrated from Eastern Europe. His father had made a successful businessman. The sensitive son, however, dropped out of high school at 17 to become an actor. In 1931 Odets joined the New York Group Theater , for which he also wrote his first plays Waiting for Lefty , Awake and Sing and Till the Day I Die . He already caused a sensation with Lefty , who brought a taxi driver strike on stage. In this one-act play, enriched by flashbacks, Odets included the auditorium. In contrast to Brecht , he did not want the critically distant, but rather the affected audience. In fact, it joined the actors' choirs when it was first performed. In 1934 Odets joined the Communist Party. He had his breakthrough as a playwright in 1937 with Golden Boy , a play that had 250 performances and was filmed in 1939 with Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden . All of these pieces deal with the devastating consequences of the Great Depression . Other plays by Odet were also filmed later: Before the New Day , which was staged again in 1952 by Fritz Lang with Stanwyck and Robert Ryan and the young Marilyn Monroe , and The Country Girl . This 1954 film adaptation earned Grace Kelly , who played the title role alongside Bing Crosby and Willam Holden, the Academy Award for Best Actress. Odets died of stomach cancer at the age of 57.

Work in hollywood

Clifford Odets also worked in Hollywood , where he wrote the script for the film The General died at dawn in 1936 . In 1944 he took over the direction of None But the Lonely Heart , in which Cary Grant, a seedy petty criminal, desperately tries to change his life. Ethel Barrymore won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Grant's dying mother . In 1946, Odets was involved in the script of Humoresque , in which Joan Crawford had one of her most intense roles as the society lady who commits suicide due to unhappy love for a young man. The most well-known script he wrote in 1957 for the film Sweet Smell of Success , in which he cast a concerned look at the manipulation of facts by the press and used Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in the lead roles. In the court film Sensation on page 1 , he directed a film a second and last time.

Rogue time

The playwright Arthur Miller deals in his memoirs, among other things, with Odets, who influenced him not insignificantly. In addition to Odet's importance as a rebel and innovator in the theater, Miller also addresses his questionable behavior in the McCarthy era. Miller portrays Odets as a contradicting, ambitious, vain, yes basically megalomaniac, but always sincere and never spiteful man. Of course he had his illusions. With regard to the communist beliefs, which he proclaimed so vehemently, Odets himself lacked certainty; he was basically an "American romantic". What wonder if he succumbed to the lure of fame. He misjudged the pressure to adapt in Hollywood, where he made a lot of money with harmless scripts. When he was summoned to the McCarthy Committee in 1952, he lacked the courage to refuse the required "cooperation" with the witch hunters (in contrast to Miller and, for example, Lillian Hellman's companion Dashiell Hammett ). His appearance was ambivalent. Sometimes he criticized the process, but "without even changing his indignant tone, the next moment he revealed the names of people who he knew had been in the party." However, he later regretted that.

In the memories of his colleague Lillian Hellman , Odets comes off even worse in this regard. "Odets, who had to appear before the committee the day before me, apologized for his old beliefs and called many of his old friends communists."

Private life

During his time in Hollywood, Odets met actress Luise Rainer , with whom he was married from 1937 to 1940. He later married the actress Bette Grayson . In addition, he was in love with a number of other women, including the actresses Frances Farmer and Fay Wray . He was friends with the French film director Jean Renoir .

Filmography (selection)

script
Literary template

literature

  • Harold Clurman: The Fervent Years: The Story of the Croup Theater and the Thirties , New York 1945.
  • Joseph Mersand: The American Drama Since 1930 , New York 1949, pp. 61-90.
  • RB Shuman: Clifford Odets , New York 1962.
  • E. Murray: Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After , New York 1968.
  • Margaret Brenman-Gibson: Clifford Odets. American Playwright. The Years from 1906 to 1940. Atheneum, New York NY 1981.
  • Jürgen Gross: Protest and Prophecy. The early dramas by Clifford Odets , Frankfurt / Main 1985.
  • Gerald Weales: Odets, the playwright , London 1985.
  • Gabriel Miller: Clifford Odets , New York 1989.
  • Christopher J. Herr: Clifford Odets and American Political Theater , Greenwood Pub Group, 2003.
  • Vidya Dass: Clifford Odets in the Depression Era , in: The India Review of World Literature in English , Volume 2, No. 2, January 2006.

Kindler's Neues Literaturlexikon cites further sources, including on individual pieces .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kindler's New Literature Lexicon , Munich 1988 edition.
  2. ↑ Time curves. One life . Frankfurt / Main 1989 (original edition New York 1987).
  3. ↑ time curves , especially pp 299-307.
  4. ↑ Time curves , especially pp. 310-320.
  5. ↑ Time curves . P. 533.
  6. ↑ Lillian Hellman: The Time of the Villains . Frankfurt / Main 1979 (American original edition 1976), p. 33.
personal data
SURNAME Odets, Clifford
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American screenwriter and actor
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Philadelphia , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH August 18, 1963
Place of death Glendale , California