Men Must Fight (by Reginald Lawrence & S. K. Lauren; Joseph P. Bickerton Jr., producer) is an idea play. The idea is that if people really did not want wars there would not be any.
It is the year 1940. The U. S. is about to begin hostilities with a federation of South American States. Secretary of State Edwin Seward (claiming no relationship with Lincoln's Secretary of State) has signed the declaration. His wife and son are dead against Seward's folly. His son's chauvinistic sweetheart is all for it. Nevertheless, the younger Seward decides to use the family name and prestige to promote pacifism, declaring, amid a fluttering of applause from the audience, "If all the young men refuse to fight, there will be no more war." It is then that he hears the bad news. He is not a Seward at all. His mother had a lover in 1915 who died in the air service. So the boy gets married and puts on a uniform because—well, because everyone else is playing the game and he is expected to. The curtain falls as a squadron of airplanes drone.
Men Must Fight does not attempt to solve the insoluble. In its quiet, ironic way it is stirring. The able cast contains Erin O'Brien-Moore as the sweetheart. Douglass Montgomery as the son, Alma Kruger as caustic old Grandmother Seward.
Criminal At Large (by Edgar Wallace; Guthrie McClintic, producer). In the latest posthumous melodrama of prolific Edgar Wallace to reach this country are: an ancient English family seat where two murders have been committed; an imperious lady (Alexandra Carlisle) who goes about praising her ancestors and trying to hide evidence; her amiable son (Emlyn Williams), her frightened niece (Katherine Wilson); two plug-ugly footmen, one romantic, one comic and one effective police officer. Less vigilant spectators will be in anxious seats until Actor Williams begins to smile late in Act III. The cast of this loosely pasted thriller snoop, scream, poke their hands through false panels in professional manner. Actor Williams is particularly shrewd with his part. So is Actress Carlisle, who still commands the forensic gift with which she seconded the vice-presidential nomination of Calvin Coolidge in 1920.
The Good Earth (by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, Owen & Donald Davis; Theatre Guild, producer). Readers of Mrs. Buck's homely Pulitzer Prizewinning melodrama of Chinese life, now in its 23rd edition, will find the Guild's adaptation, which rang up the curtain on its 15th season, a brief paraphrase of the novel. Wang Lung, the hardy farmer, as greedy for more land as the soil is greedy for sun and rain, does not die at the conclusion as he does in the book. And he has not three sons given him by OLan, the big-boned, but one. It is OLan, with a hard knot in her womb from brutal child-bearing and brutal work, whose death climaxes with dignity this conscientious play.
Even when its stately Oriental pace tires, which it does particularly in the beginning of Act III, Actress Alia Nazimova as OLan commands respectful attention. It is her play. She it is who makes Wang Lung (Claude Rains) buy his first bit of land. Although Wang grows rich and soft as she grows sick and old, it is her death which brings Wang back to the good earth of his and her fore fathers.