594
DWIGHT MACDON 'ALD
the Museum of Modern Art's film department paying tribute
to. Samuel Goldwyn because his movies are alleged to be
(slightly) better than those of other Hollywood producers-–
though why they are called "producers" when their function
is to prevent the production of art
(cf.
the fate in Hollywood
bf .
Griffith, Chaplin, von Stroheim, Eisenstein and Orson
WelIes) this is a semantic puzzle. Midcult is the venerable and
once venerated
Atlantic,
which in the last century printed
Emerson, Lowell, Howells, James, and Mark Twain, putting
on the cover of a recent issue a huge photograph of Dore
Schary, who has lately transferred his high-minded senti–
mentality from Hollywood to Broadway and who is represented
in ·the issue by a homily, I'To A Young Actor," which synthe–
sizes Jefferson, Polonius and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, con–
cluding: "Behave as citizens not only of your profession but
of-the full world in which you live. Be indignant with injustice,
be gracious with success, be courageous with failure, be patien.t
with opportunity, and be resolute with faith and honor." Mid–
cult is the Book of the Month Club, which since 1926 has been
stipplying its members with reading matter of which the best
that can be said is that it could be worse, i.e., they get John
Hersey instead of Gene Stratton Porter. Midcult is the transi–
tion from Rodgers and Hart to Rodgers and Hammerstein, from
the gay tough lyrics of
Pal Joey,
a spontaneous expression of a
real place called Broadway, to the folk-fakery of
Oklahoma!
and
the orotund sentimentalities of
South Pacific.'
Midcult is or was,
4. An interesting Midcult document is the editorial the
N .Y. Times
ran
August 24th last, the day after the death of Oscar Hammerstein 2nd:
.... The theatre has lost a man who stood for all that is decent
in life. . .. The concern for racial respect in
South Pacific,
the
sympathy and respect for a difficult though aspiring monarch in
The King and I,
the indomitable faith that runs through
Carousel
were not clever bits of showmanship. They represented Mr. Ham–
merstein's faith in human beings and their destiny....
Since he was at heart a serious man, his lyrics were rarely clever.
Instead of turning facetious phrases he made' a studious attempt
to write idiomatically in the popular tradition of the musical the-
