Cinema Audiences Do Want Realism

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 4, 6 January 1937, Page 5

Cinema Audiences Do Want Realism

PLAYWRIGHT SAYS THAT THEY SHOULD HAVE IT Clifford Odets has “never met a happy man.” The 29-year-old ‘‘boy genius of playwriting,” who skyrocketed from poverty on the New York East side to tional fame within the last two years, declares human fulfillment seems to be impossible in modern civilization. “Now and then one reads of a happy man,” he said recently. “But personally I’ve never met one. “In motion pictures, of course, the story is that everything is rosy. Boy meets girl, life is fine —that sort of thing. But it’s not true and we all know it’s not true. “Truth can be presented on the screen and made appealing just as it can be on the stage. One doesn’t have to b© gloomy about it. People can be given a sense of problems, a heightened perception of life and at the same time be entertained and even gripped. Yes, I’m talking about movie audiences. All that’s needed is plenty of action.” Author of “Waiting for Lofty,” “Awake and Sing” and other successful New York stage hits of the two seasons, Odets was sought virtually by every Studio in Hollywood before he succumbed to a Paramount offer to do the script of “The General Died at Dawn,” which co-stars Gary Cooper and Madeleine Carroll. The picture is at present proving a great attraction in New Zealand.

Douglas Scott and Freddie Batholomew shared several of the opening scenes of “Lloyds of London” now iu production at 20th Century-Fox and as a result of this work Douglas has been given a long-term contract. Madeleine Carroll has been assigned the feminine Jead in “Lloyds of London.”