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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: VHS Tape EAN: 9780769726168 Format: Color, NTSC ISBN: 076972616X Label: Kultur Video Manufacturer: Kultur Video Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Kultur Video Release Date: February 04, 2002 Running Time: 160 minutes Sales Rank: 20868 Studio: Kultur Video Theatrical Release Date: March 06, 1974
Description: Clifford Odets' portrait of the Depression, Paradise Lost, was premiered by the Group Theatre in a ground-breaking 1935 Broadway production directed by Harold Clurman and starring Luther and Stella Adler, Yiddish theatre legend Morris Carnovsky, Elia Kazan and Sanford Meisner, among others. It became one of the Group's most controversial plays and remains Odets' favorite. Set in 1932, Paradise Lost unfolds in the modest two-family home of Leo and Clara Gordon as misfortune strikes them and the people running with them. Less concerned with plot so much as characterization, it conveys what one critic calls Odets' "rich, compassionate, angry feelings for people." "It is my hope," wrote Odets, "that when people see [it], they're going to be glad they're alive. And I hope that after they've seen it, they'll turn to strangers sitting next to them and say 'hello.'" "A moving evocation of an apparently lost genre." --The Christian Science Monitor. With Bernadette Peters, Eli Wallach, Fred Gwynne, and Jo Van Fleet.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Clifford Odets' Paradise Lost
Thank Kultur and Broadway Theater Archive for making this wonderful TV production of Clifford Odets' play "Paradise Lost" available on DVD. First saw it over 30 years ago and never forgot it. Riveting. [ASIN:B000067IYM Paradise Lost (Broadway Theater Archive)]
Rating: - Saved by Eli & Jo
Clfford Odets play with a lot of depression and hopeless scenarios. Setting is in 1932 Depression era . No money,no hope & future. Business in the Eli Wallach and Jo Van Fleet family goes under. One Son dying of sleeping sickness. Another Son married to a Tart killed in crime attempt. Bad times get worst day by day finally culminatng in forfeiture of home-sweet-home mortgage and dispossession.One feels Odet's purpose in writing this play was to make his audience reach a level of guild and depression.Undoubtedly a classic work of genius, but if your looking for a cheery or happy moment in this ... Read More
Rating: - The scintilla in all of us
Clifford Odetts dramatized the American depression in a way that transcends time and space. It is of a rare and refined beauty which one must experience and absorb in order to fully appreciate. Depression seems to be the order of the day for the protagonists as they contend with life, memories and ineptitude. Intellectual superfluous men abound and political radicals skirt the staging of a home where its residents cope, carry-on and troop along suffering tragedies and circumstances, unable to accept their fate and forever awaiting a turn in their luck. All the while there remains a confused but ever ... Read More
Rating: - Great performance! Don't overlook it.
I can't commend this highly enough. I saw it on the local Public Television station here in Chicago when it was first broadcast in the early 1970s, and it made a tremendous impact on me. This play, and the very similar "Awake and Sing," are depression era dramas written by Clifford Odets and originally produced for the stage in the mid 1930s, when they were the cutting edge of contemporary theatre and dealt with contemporary issues. These new DVDs contain television productions done with top-notch casts in the early 1970s. I found them unforgettable, and am delighted to be able to savor them again ... Read More
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