[In the following review, Krutch objects to what he sees as a lack of warmth and merriment in The Man Who Came to Dinner although he recognizes that it is funny and skillfully crafted.]

Not even the obvious virtues of farce as the Messrs. Kaufman and Hart have learned to write it seem quite adequate to explain the boundless enthusiasm with which their successive works are received. A very large and very mixed audience has taken them to its heart in some special way and greets them with a warmth seldom exhibited upon any other occasion, grave or gay. The glow begins at the first hint that a new piece is to be expected, and as the great night approaches, the elect assemble in the best of their good clothes ready to greet one another with happy smiles which say, “This is going to be good.” When the curtain goes down upon the first act, the applause which breaks forth is as unanimous and as inevitable as the plaudits of the Reichstag, and yet it is not from the members of any single party. One touch of something—it probably isn't nature—has made the giddiest of debutantes and the tiredest of tired business men one with the critic. This, they all say, is what we really like. And thereby they confound the gloomiest critics of our civilization. Who says that the modern world acknowledges no “principle of unity”?

There is no doubt about the fact that The Man Who Came to Dinner (Music Box Theater) is one of the best and funniest of the farces which Mr. Kaufman has written with either Mr. Hart or any of the other numerous collaborators with whom he has worked. In a very general way it belongs in the category of The Royal Family and You Can't Take It with You, though it is technically smoother than either, and doubtless owes part of its effectiveness to the steadily accelerating tempo and the mounting complications which ensue as one character after another is introduced to keep the pot a-boiling. And yet, sound as the workmanship is, it is still, I think, not entirely clear just why the enthusiasm of an audience is quite so unreserved, unanimous, and unqualified as it actually is, just why the plays of Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart should be treated as absolutely sui generis and find audiences whose applause is not so much a judgment as the confirmation of a foregone conclusion. Perhaps the fact that they are so treated helps to give the authors an air of confidence, helps them to be what it is already taken for granted that they are. Perhaps Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart are made funnier by being thought funny, just as a beautiful woman is said to be made more beautiful by the knowledge that she is loved. But that probably does not prevent other comic writers from asking themselves what the unloved are said to ask: “What's he got that I haven't?”

The answer is as difficult in the second case as it is in the first, but part of it probably is that Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart have a certain power of suggesting that they are very much in the know, that to laugh with them is to laugh in the most up-to-date company, and that, contrariwise, to fail to see the point in this satiric thrust or that is simply to confess that one does not know one's way about the metropolis. The Man Who Came to Dinner has, that is to say, something of the warm, cosy malice of a gossip column. Of course the man in question, a man who came unwilling and stayed for weeks because he broke a hip on the doorstep, is not really Alexander Woollcott; Alexander Woollcott does not wear a beard as this man does. But were it not for this essential incongruity, that intimate inner circle—strictly limited to forty or fifty million persons—which shares the carefully guarded secret of the Town Crier's habits, tastes, and mannerisms might suspect that this sentimental egotist with a serpent's tongue was intended as a far from flattering portrait. Even as it is, one may speculate wickedly upon the question whether or not the British jack-of-all-theatrical-trades was intended to bear some resemblance to Noel Coward, and when a much-discussed character—a practical joker from Hollywood most mysteriously known as “Banjo”—finally appears, one may nudge one's companion and say, “That's probably Harpo Marx. ‘Harpo’ and ‘Banjo.’ Get it?” The play does, to be sure, poke fun at just the sort of celebrity worship to which it appeals, and on Christmas morning the gifts received by the man who came to dinner include, among others, little remembrances from Shirley Temple, William Lyon Phelps, and Admiral Byrd. But though you may laugh as you will, neither you nor I really know so many people whom any autograph hunter would prize.

Perhaps I am merely being perverse, for my laughter was as loud and as long as that of the audience about me. Perhaps Mr. Kaufman is only an Aristides who has been called “the funny” once too often. But I do not think that it is merely that. The Man Who Came to Dinner is too bright, too hard, and too competent. It is funny without being gay, and it leaves no pleasant chuckles behind. I do not mean merely that it is cynical, though, except for a few inevitable and incongruous passages of sentiment, it is as loveless as tinkling cymbals. I do mean that there is no ebullience even of cynicism, no real joyousness, in it. Laughable it certainly is; merry it certainly is not. And the best of comedies are somehow merry. All the parts are played with suave expertness, only one, I think, with more than that. Carol Goodner, an American whose successes have been mostly in London, brings to the part of the professional siren a human warmth lacking in the well-disciplined performances of the rest of the cast.