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It goes without saying that the Guild has mounted its production with brilliance, employing Lee Simonson to do simple and notably effective scenery. Making plays out of novels, however, is risky business. Playgoers will probably find The Good Earth long on austerity, short on entertainment.
I Loved You Wednesday (by Molly Ricardel & William DuBois; Crosby Gaige, producer). Victoria Meredith (Frances Fuller of The Animal Kingdom) and Randall Williams (Humphrey Bogart) are lovers. They part after a winter in Paris when his rich wife (Rose Hobart) arrives with big plans for him. Five years later they meet in Manhattan. Victoria has become a famed dancer. Randall has made money as an architect, acquired, according to his wife, the reputation of being "a sybarite with the morals of a tomcat." Follows a long, spurious sequence with everybody saying very hard, wise things to everybody else in the pat, brittle, wisecracking manner used so facilely by Philip Barry and so embarrassingly by his followers. You do not have to be supersensitive to cringe at the scene where the wife and ex-mistress meet in the speakeasy, both very gallant and willing to thrash out their mutual problem drink-for-drink.
The tasteful setting, capable direction and talented impersonations of I Loved You Wednesday seem considerably more important than the ultimate decision which the dancer is to make: whether to go back to Paris with the tomcat or go to Java with another man.
Rendezvous (by Barton MacLane; Arthur Hopkins, producer) begins in "A Dugout. Somewhere In France." Private Oakley (Playwright MacLane), a sturdy character who takes to bloodshed like a cat to mice, is called upon to shoot down an officer who has shot his friend. Thereafter the play progresses from one burst of gunfire to another.
Back in civilian life, Private Oakley and some of his Wartime companions, still excited by their martial experiences, organize a bootlegging business along military lines. Their warehouse is built like a fort, they sleep in barracks, military discipline prevails. The character of an Oakley gangster is one part Legs Diamond, one part Boy Scout. The Oakley crowd is righteously at war with a very unAmerican competing outfit headed by one Tony Rossalino. This campaign culminates in a six-corpse shooting scrape during which Rossalino's girl helps the Oakleys. Private Oakley is sent to the death house with Rossalino's girl, marries her just before going to the electric chair. Critics wondered what smart Producer Hopkins could have been thinking about when he fostered this silly melodrama.