DVD/150: GOLDEN BOY (Rouben Mamoulian, 1939)

Two years after Clifford Odets' play proved to be The Group Theatre's most successful production, Hollywood came calling - and promptly changed it's downbeat ending to one of redemption.

Four screenwriters changed the story from urban melodrama to urban hokum, but Mamoulian gives the film enough colour to see it through, helped immeasurably by an excellent cast.

Seven years later, Odets was working in Hollywood and ripped off GOLDEN BOY for the Joan Crawford / John Garfield film HUMOURESQUE.

Both feature a young Italian-American from New York's lower East-side who is a natural violinist but who turns his back on his family's hopes - here he becomes a boxer to earn big money but at the expence of his true calling.

Initially Joe is signed to failing boxing manager Tom Moody and looked after, with growing affection, by Moody's mistress Lorna but when gangster Eddie Fuseli buys his contract, Joe loses sight of his principals.

Shelf or charity shop?  A keeper in my plastic dvd storage box limbo.  It's an interesting film for the stories behind the camera: many left-leaning performers from the Group Theatre were later tormented by The House Committee on Un-American Activities but Odets and GOLDEN BOY's star Adolphe Menjou both named names to the Committee.  Lee J Cobb gives a wonderfully detailed performance as Joe's heartbroken father - despite lines like "You maka me sad Joey" but he was only 7 years older than William Holden.  The casting of film star Frances Farmer in the stage production was viewed as stunt casting to get a film actress involved to sell tickets, but when the film was made she lost out to Barbara Stanwyck.  At the start of filming, Columbia Pictures were unhappy with Holden as Joe and were on the verge of sacking him but at Stanwyck's strenuous insistance he was kept on - something he always praised her for.  The most eye-popping performance is Sam Levene as Joe's cab-driver brother-in-law Siggie, the film bounces to life whenever he is on screen.  Sadly my favourite line from the play was cut - the gangster Eddie Fuseli is overly-interested in Joe which in the play is signposted by his line "I dunno which I hate most, women or spiders".