Paddy Chayefsky, it has been said many times, is the Clifford Odets of the 1950's, and the differences between the two playwrights largely reflect a shift in popular attitudes since the 30's. Chayefsky's theatrical world is the same Bronx evoked by Odets twenty-five years ago, and his fundamental note, too, is the pathos of the lower middle classes. Like Odets, Chayefsky writes mostly about immigrants and their children, draws heavily on Jewish folk humor, and is more inventive at comedy than at serious drama. The aspirations, passions, and defeats of his characters are usually minor in scale; and, even more than Odets, Chayefsky likes the up-beat ending, the note of triumph over the "forces" which bedevil the "little man."…

Yet there is a striking difference between Chayefsky and Odets, and it is ideological. Both writers are evangelists or millenarians: their plays work toward a single magic revelation which will end the dreariness of day-to-day life and announce a vision of redemption. But where Odets's inspiration was Popular Front Communism, Chayefsky's is popular psychoanalysis. Odets's key word was "strike"; Chayefsky's is "love."

In Marty, The Big Deal, The Mother, Middle of the Night, The Bachelor Party, and The Catered Affair (all of which present recognizably Jewish types although their names are non-Jewish), Chayefsky has shown an alert topicality, keen humor, and a rare ear for the common speech. But these gifts only partly explain his popularity. For, a little like Odets, Chayefsky seems to be speaking for his time. His message of love is certainly modish in the commercial theater now…. (p. 523)

Chayefsky's message of love has some of the tone of "positive thinking" and is part of the popular culture of psychology. It soaks all real conflicts—personal or social—in a murky rhetoric of good intentions, "mutual understanding," and self-limitation. Chayefsky's most popular works have no villains. Love's enemy is an internal state, the inability to love; and the quality of this affliction doesn't vary much, whether a man and woman are concerned, or parents and children, or whoever. In his happy endings, in which the will to love finally breaks through, much must be taken on sheer faith—wishing will make it so—and much remains open to very diverse interpretations. The mistiness of Chayefsky's view of love is most apparent in … The Tenth Man; but it has also kept his best work, such as Marty, on this side of the line which divides popular entertainment from art. (pp. 523-24)

[For] Chayefsky and others for whom the "capacity to love" is an issue, the emotion is not the beginning of the play, but the end—a goal to be reached, if at all, in the final scenes. This kind of dramatic structure, which uses monologues and flashbacks in place of a sequence of action, is not inevitable in a play which employs psychoanalytic insights….

Actually, the structure of Chayefsky's plays rather suggests the old Christian religious dramas, which celebrated the triumph of grace over original sin and worldly temptations. And, indeed, the "love" which Chayefsky's characters pursue seems an idealized state of mind. It has nothing to do with passion, but is a rather low-keyed, diffuse sentiment which seems appropriate to all occasions. If it has any definable quality at all, it is that of the kindliness with which a parent consoles a hurt child—or perhaps that feeling as the child will sentimentalize it in later years….

Only in The Goddess, his most ambitious work …, has [Chayefsky] ever detached himself from the love-seeking reveries of his characters. The self-centered heroine of that film attempts a new, loving relation with her selfish mother; it lasts only a few weeks, after which each woman reverts to type. (p. 524)

In The Tenth Man, Chayefsky returns to the simple old love-faith, and tries to associate it with Jewish traditions. Transposing the dybbuk superstition to an Orthodox shul in Mineola, Long Island, he plays Hasidic mysticism off against psychiatry, seems to express affection and skepticism toward each, and—in the closing seconds—attempts to wrap both up in the religion of loving, Bachelor Party style.

Chayefsky does this by surrounding his two young protagonists—neither of them particularly appealing or credible—with a group of earthy old East European Jews who pray, eat, dance, laugh, and argue with one another in a vivid manner that must evoke, nostalgia if not affection. He invents enough comic business for them to stretch what dramatically should be one act into two…. [This] helps distract us from the action, as opposed to the atmosphere, of the play.

What actually happens? A psychotic teenager named Evelyn Forman is brought to the shul by her grandfather, who fears she will be returned to an asylum, and who has heard a dybbuk speak through her lips. (pp. 524-25)

To complete the morning minyan, the sexton has collared a young lawyer, Arthur Brooks, who is the Crisis of Civilization personified…. [He] calls life "meaningless"; and he views love only as an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. At first young Arthur opposes the idea of an exorcism, but the synagogue atmosphere, the old men's busyness, and the girl's avowals of love wear him down….

Arthur's mixed motives, and Evelyn's mixed-up madness, show the irony with which Chayefsky treats both religion and psychiatry, permitting the spectator to believe what he pleases. (p. 525)

At the fourth sounding of the ram's horn, while Evelyn stands unmoved, young Arthur falls in a dead faint. "All this trouble, and we've exorcised the wrong dybbuk!" Within a few seconds, Arthur has told us that he has been reborn, that he will marry Evelyn and care for her forever, psychotic or no. He has gained, he says, the capacity to love. But not, someone points out, belief in God. "Is there any difference?" is the comeback as the play ends.

How are we to take the miracle we have just witnessed? Until the last few seconds, Chayefsky seems to have covered all flanks. But the pretentious sentimentality of that final moment reveals his condescending attitude toward religion, psychiatry, thought generally, the Jews, and his own creations.

Had Evelyn rather than Arthur been "saved," we might have accepted it as a kind of fantasy-romance…. In that case, Chayefsky's irony would have held up to the end. We wouldn't have much cared precisely what cured Evelyn, since her rather ridiculous hallucinations would have been just a pretext to live, and laugh, among the colorful old Jews in the shimmering half-light of the shul. This sort of play could easily have become a musical.

But Evelyn is a mere object, a foil, for Chayefsky. It is Arthur who is saved, and his very character and demeanor announce a serious message—a prescription for all the complex malaises of modern times. The prescription turns out to be a sugar pill. In barely a dozen lines, at 11:10 P.M., we are asked to believe that Arthur's new-found "capacity to love," which allegedly absorbs the essential wisdom of both psychiatry and Judaism, will succeed where education, hard work, his first marriage, bedhopping, drink, power, and the Communist party have all failed. The switcheroo is just too abrupt; the pretension just too overarching. We simply refuse to be let off, even in a comedy, with a few quick verses from the old love lyrics. What may have sufficed for Marty the meat butcher in his little corner of the Bronx will not do here. (pp. 525-26)

Arthur, with his education, his skepticism, his frustration with the whole range of secular values, signifies the rational person in a complete funk. Chayefsky, "exorcising" him with a wave of the love-wand, seems to be saying to all people who have ever recognized a single intellectual or moral contradiction: "See how simple it is? Why waste our time with your brains, when we common folk knew the secret all along?"… Chayefsky, off the evidence of The Goddess, knows better—or, at any rate, knows otherwise. In his graceless parody of Arthur, he is pleading no deeply felt cause, but appears merely to be striking what the English call the mucker pose….

This kind of sneering seems to me implicit in the cult of loving, which pretends to sweep away all life's dilemmas and the very need for thought about them. But such sentimentality, no matter how it is enveloped in comic cotton, inevitably betrays an artist. In the light of Chayefsky's shabby conclusion, his previous mockery of psychiatry, religion, and life generally no longer appears to be so clever. Rather, it seems to be—as so deliberate an irony often is—an aggressive self-pity, which masks an essentially low view of man and his possibilities. And at this point we feel that the synagogue, the Jews in it, and the dybbuk myth have been used cheaply. (p. 526)