This same scene is almost as poignant when it was filmed again, 70 years later, by actress/director Meg Ryan.Īlex Neustaedter as a brand-new telegram delivery boy. In one touching scene, for instance, Rooney’s character delivers a telegram from the War Department to a woman who can’t read English. Unlike the novel, the film makes us care about its characters. Then there is the war itself, and this film is a desperate plea to support the American War Effort. He gives a pitch-perfect performance of a teenage boy grappling with his place in a world at war. First, there is the charismatic Rooney, on whom the film rests, and he carries it effortlessly.
The 1943 film, The Human Comedy, is powerful. The author turned his film treatment into a novel, while MGM reworked it and cast Mickey Rooney in the Starring Role. MGM felt the treatment was too unwieldy, and Saroyan swore off Hollywood. In 1941, MGM hired Saroyan to write a film treatment, but the studio became disenchanted with the writer, and vice versa.
Mickey Rooney (R) and Frank Morgan in The Human Comedy (1943). These lectures can be just as cringing in the 1943 film. Folks in Ithaca love to lecture each other, and it’s not an endearing quality. We meet a lot of interesting people, but because we don’t follow them through an evolving story, we don’t develop an attachment to them.Īdded to this are Lectures. It has flashes of brilliance and humour, and it feels like we’re peeking through the windows of Small Town America. It’s a novel concerned with the Goodness in people. There is a daughter, too, who wants to help the War Effort. Here is a widow with three sons: one is in the army one delivers telegrams and one is very little and asks lots of questions. The novel is (mostly) about a family in the fictional town of Ithaca, California. American author William Saroyan, for instance, didn’t follow this rule in his 1943 novel, The Human Comedy. We (as in, yours truly) are fond of this formula it’s what we’ve come to Expect.īut not everyone cares about it. Remember that rule in Creative Writing 101 about every story having a Beginning, a Middle and an End?
William Saroyan, author of The Human Comedy.
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