Clifford Odets - Legacy

Legacy

Odets has been looked on by many as an icon of the American theatre. According to Arthur Miller, ″An Odets play was awaited like news hot off the press, as though through him we would know what to think of ourselves and our prospects.″ Marian Seldes writes that, ″Paddy Chayefsky, who felt competitive with Odets, . . . told an interviewer, ′There isn't a writer of my generation, especially a New York writer, who doesn't owe his very breath–his entire attitude toward theatre–to Odets.′″

Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Paradise Lost, in particular, have enjoyed numerous revivals since the 2008 economic crash. The Flowering Peach became the basis for the 1970 musical Two by Two. Golden Boy was made into a 1939 film and became the basis for a 1964 musical of the same name. Odets's screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success became the basis for the 2002 musical of the same name. Rocket to the Moon, directed by Daniel Fish, was produced by Long Wharf Theater in 2005. Lincoln Center's 2006 revival of Awake and Sing!, directed by Bartlett Sher, won that year's Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Golden Boy, with Bartlett Sher again directing, is scheduled for a late Fall 2012 revival at Lincoln Center. The Roundabout Theatre Company will present Odets's 1949 play, The Big Knife, in the Spring of 2013 at the American Airlines Theatre in New York. Doug Hughes will direct Bobby Cannavale in the lead role of Charlie Castle. The role was originated by Odets's former Group Theatre colleague, John Garfield.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Barton Fink contains a number of indirect visual and historical references to Odets’s personal appearance, background and career. But, according to the Coen brothers, the film is not meant to be biographical in relation to Odets. A minor character in the 1982 film Diner speaks only lines from Odets' screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success. The Odets character was played by Jeffrey DeMunn in the film Frances, and by John Heard in the 1983 biography, Will There Be A Morning?, both about Frances Farmer.

Odets's name is mentioned in an episode of the NBC series Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, "The Wrap Party." The episode's subplot dealt with The Hollywood Ten.

Odets was the subject of a critically acclaimed biography by psychoanalyst Margaret Brenman-Gibson, wife of playwright William Gibson: Clifford Odets – American Playwright – The Years from 1906–1940. It was one component of an umbrella project undertaken by Brenman-Gibson on the subject of creativity. The biography was intended to be a three-volume work, with the second and third volumes to cover the final twenty-three years of Odets's life. Brenman-Gibson died in 2004, leaving the project unfinished. Apart from Brenman-Gibson's work, six critical biographies have appeared by the following authors: R. Baird Shuman (1962); Edward Murray (1968); Michael Mendelsohn (1969); Gerald Weales (1971); Harold Cantor (1978); and Christopher J. Herr (2003).