Posted 10:45 AM by Gene

Dick Schick -- for the moment we'll relent and call him Richard Schickel, but we can't forget the tricks he's played on his readers -- has published a biography (through RUPERT!!!!!!!!!!?) of Elia Kazan, and one sentence of Charlotte Allen's review struck us instantly:

It is not until Schickel reaches the 1940s, when Kazan had his first Broadway hit with The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), a Thornton Wilder opus about the history of the world that is almost as dated as Thunder Rock but was regarded as deep literature back then, and his first Hollywood success with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) that Schickel's book finally becomes anecdote-rich and engrossing.

This "history of the world" business is news to us, for heretofore we hadn't the foggiest idea what it was about, except that it's long been the favorite of certain grade-double-A eggheads, and is quite unreadable. What is it about, anyway? War, the Bible, Atlantic City? It unfolds like one long and relentlessly unfunny practical joke on the audience. And yet it was acclaimed a masterpiece, and inevitably won the P-Ulitzer prize (though the acclaim was not unanimous), and it had an extraordinary cast, with Fredric March, and Tallulah Bankhead, and E. G. Marshall, and Montgomery Clift (THAT must have been something), and even little Dickie Van Patten as a telegraph boy; and if it weren't for colleges doing it to death no one would remember it, or want to.