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On the whole, his ideological restraint pays off even better than his atmospheres. His characters are no glib pup pets but urgent, confused human beings, moved by vast forces they understand only in the cruel, simple terms of privation and passion. Odets' sense " of cinema, like his emotions, is sometimes unprofitably florid, but there is hardly a shot and never a scene in the film which does not testify to his boundless desire to crowd the screen with genuine people in their right surroundings.
A solid testimonial is the fact that virtually everyone in the cast, from bit-players to stars, is at his best or beyond it. Gary Grant makes a gallant and winning fight against such natural handicaps as maturity, physique, handsomeness and the conditioned expectations of his audience. June Duprez' subtle, deeply touching Ada is something new in movie heroines. Ethel Barrymore, with her grandeur of presence, her goose-pimpling voice and her magnificent eyes, calmly knocks you flat and forces you to believe everything you see.
In fact, her return to the screen in itself would make None But the Lonely Heart an event. —
Happy Time. When Ethel Barrymore left Hollywood more than a decade ago after working in Rasputin and the Empress, it was clear enough that she would never come back. She had a wholehearted love for the stage and a less than halfhearted interest in pictures; a community which felt quite otherwise had given her rather cavalier treatment; and she had been driven half witless by the eternal twiddling over the eternally unfinished screen play.
Credit for getting her back into pictures, and making her happy once she was there, is due about equally to Messrs. Hempstead, Odets and Grant. First of all, they had the good sense to present her with a finished script, one which was bound to appeal to her ("it read," she recalls with pleasure, "just like a play"). Better still, they presented her with a new kind of Hollywood. Producer Hempstead is a cultivated and charming young man, full of plans and hopes for the sort of films Miss Barrymore respects. Director Odets is from the theater himself, and also knows far better than to get bossy with one of the great veterans of his art. As for Actor Grant ("one of the finest young actors in Hollywood"), he insisted that she take over his dressing room until hers was ready, and was perhaps most instrumental of all the young men in seeing to it that she was treated with the respect due her quality and her long-earned professional right—i.e., like a queen.
Besides that, there was Assistant Director Ned Slott, an ex-prizefighter with whom she spent many hours talking about fights.
In short, as Miss Barrymore says, "I had a very happy time." She even lost her years-old conviction that the screen, compared with the stage, is necessarily child's play.