“Where is Thy Sting?”: Clifford Odets and the Problem of Audience
On September 6th 1936, The New York Times went to print with an article entitled: “Odets, Where is Thy Sting?”[i] Reflecting on the recent reception of Clifford Odets’s The General Died at Dawn (1936), Frank Nugent described the enthusiasm of the audiences who had come to see the Broadway playwright’s first Hollywood feature: “[T]hey had come to hear their prophet of social reform in his first sermon from a cinema pulpit. They were prepared to cheer, they were anxious to cheer, and, by every soapbox from Union Square to Columbus Circle they did cheer”.[ii] But they soon fell silent, however, upon realising that the film offered them very little to cheer about. While many hsad come with the hopes of catching a glimpse of the sharp political edge which had made Odets’s plays something of a sensation, it quickly became apparent that the film offered very little in the way […]