Whatever else "Born Yesterday" may have to offer above the general level of prefabricated comedy (and I am one who thinks it hasn't very much), Garson Kanin's play contains a wonderfully engaging study of a young woman in the throes of a belated literary and political education. The pattern of her development—from a cheerful moral vacuum like the one in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" to a state that almost seems to prophesy another congresswoman from Connecticut—is not quite new to art…. [The heroine here], however, undergoes an even more astounding change than any of her predecessors and she is drawn in fascinating detail.

In the beginning, Mr. Kanin's girl … is shown with her protector, one Harry Brock, in a hotel in Washington, where he has come to buy enough senators to set up a cartel in scrap metal…. The lines and the philosophy provided for her by the author are … handsomely in character. Her benefactor isn't terribly polite, generally referring to her, in fact, as a damn, dumb broad, and his physical demands are often fairly exasperating, but she is established in a suite that costs two hundred and thirty-five dollars a day and her wardrobe more than matches it. "Gee," she says, when asked about her dreams, "I got everything I want. Two mink coats. Everything."

Her rebirth is brought about by a writer for the New Republic, a cultivated muckraker of rather more professional integrity than personal charm, who has been employed by Brock to polish her up a little socially. Soon she is grimly marking up all the things she doesn't understand in her newspaper with a red pencil, wrestling hopelessly with her instructor's prose in the New Republic, and even learning to tolerate the music of Sibelius, at least as kind of a nice change from boogie-woogie. Mr. Kanin occasionally falls back on the classroom-boner school of wit … [the heroine] speaks of a country inhibited by Indians, defines "peninsula" as the latest medical miracle, and expresses surprise that "The proper study of mankind is man" should have issued from the Vatican—but for the most part he has handled his heroine's indignant struggle with the language with ingenuity and charm…. In the last act, when her pretty head is addled by some vague notions about civic virtue and she betrays the scoundrelly Brock to the journalist, whom by now, of course, she loves, her fascination for me is a little diminished, along with that of the play. It is a disappointment I've known with a good many reformed characters on the stage, however, and I don't hold it particularly against Mr. Kanin, who, after all, works in a moral medium and has his little message to get in. (pp. 46, 48)