[Krutch was an American drama, literary, and social critic who wrote esteemed studies of Samuel Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau. In the following review of Stage Door, he attributes both the strengths and weaknesses of the play to George S. Kaufman, and laments the fact that the play itself is far less intelligent than its many witty lines and gags.]

It is unfair, of course, but anyone as good as George S. Kaufman must pay the penalty for not being a great deal better. He has paid it before and he will have to pay it again in connection with Stage Door which he has written in conjunction with Edna Ferber. Since the penalty generally includes an extremely profitable run, it is perhaps not too severe, and yet Mr. Kaufman must have heard "It's enormously amusing but—" too often not to entertain very melancholy convictions on the subject of human ingratitude. The scene is a boarding-house for aspiring young actresses somewhere in the fifties, and all of the play's very good best is strictly topical in nature. Underneath is a sentimental story and a familiar sentimental moral—that the real actor would rather starve in the theater than live in luxury anywhere else, even in Hollywood—but what really counts is the succession of what would have been called in the seventeenth century "the humours of a boarding-house."

It is true that even these may not be strictly new. One could easily guess beforehand that one was going to meet the girl who could play anything if she was given a chance, the girl who thinks that men are dreadful, and the girl who goes wrong in mink. But Mr. Kaufman and Miss Ferber have hit them off with such crisp, amusing strokes that they seem quite fresh, and the whole thing moves with such perfect ease in such a perfectly calculated tempo that one is carried irresistibly forward on a ripple of laughter. All the gags, whether expressed in words or embodied in "business," are as smart as a night club which won't open till tomorrow and as quotable as what the New Yorker will say next week. The proletarian playwright who goes Hollywood is "one of those fellows who start off on a soap box and end in a swimming pool"; the austere young lady who is sure "Kit Cornell isn't seen at parties" gets "Yeh, Bernhardt was a home girl, too" in reply; and the bit of business in which the irreverent flapper throws the peel of a banana she has been eating in front of the top-hatted proletarian renegade and then beckons him forward with a finger deserves to win a place in the standard repertory of gags. "It's tremendously amusing but—."

The real reason that it is impossible to enjoy one of Mr. Kaufman's shows without feeling a certain undercurrent of resentment is, I think, that the lines are not only much better than the play itself but also actually upon a much higher level of intelligence. At its best his wit is pretty nearly everything which wit ought to be. It is smart and sophisticated and crisp; it is also based upon shrewd insight and a keen sense of sham even in its most modish embodiments. Why is it that the plays themselves must be fundamentally incompatible with the spirit of their dialogue, that they must be based upon hokum of the very sort which the man who writes them was born to expose? How merry he himself could make with the thesis he is preaching and with the more sentimental of the scenes through which he develops it! Or could he? Perhaps, after all, the answer is that his intelligence and his power of criticism exhaust themselves in a phrase, that the part of him which speaks in epigrams cannot make any whole of itself.