One thing that THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE surely has is charm. Its theatrical device is as simple as effectivea public place as the crossroad of a humbled and derisory humanity, embraced by Saroyan's sympathy and sentimentality. The losers and the social debris gather there, under the indulgent look of a contemplative, cool and amused Cagney, doing an exercise in moral insights. <br /><br />There's a month since a basically mysterious guy named Joe comes daily at a bar, stays all day, drinks champagne and spends money on all sorts of whims; and in that bar, I say, in that particular bar, he happens to meet all sorts of peoplethe bar fauna, they all seem to like him, or at least respect and obey him. Joe behaves like the quintessential bar sage. Occasionally, he helps others through their lives. He ceaselessly offers himself champagne, and sometimes cigars, following his own whims like a schoolboy. <br /><br />Someone who has majored in American dramaturgy, or at least has read or seen over the years a large number of American plays, will correct me on this, but I believe that Saroyan's dramaturgy, like O'Neill's, switches on atmosphere and melody, beyond words, on an inner pace accessible to the intuition; with O'Neill there is, of course, so much more, he was ampler, more ambitious (--like, in Europe, in the same epoch, in cinema, the French poetic realism, which had this side of atmosphere and melody but also the cinematographic brio, etc.--), but Saroyan develops one side of this American theater. We are fortunate to have an adaptation with Cagney of THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE. I wouldn't call it mindbending dramaturgy, but a nice and friendly (filmed) play, not deprived of a certain charm; in his way, Saroyan turned Gorky upsidedown. Both O'Neill and Saroyan were middlebrow; but while the first was experimental, _avant_guarde, Saroyan was popular and plain, so they're not really alike. Wouldn't Mme. McCullers be a basically highbrowminded authoress, I would call THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE a cross between O'Neill and Mme. McCullers. <br /><br />THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE stylizes the conventions of popular realism, moreover, being a play, its realism can not but be that of a play, that of a theater, which is, a highly artificial product; a likable and interesting movie, atmospheric, with an inner melody and pace, often comic, also of a certain sentimentality and selfawareness, its unsubtle style has charm and appeal. <br /><br />It's not the subject as such; it's the approachthe filmed play shows sympathy for the small people, for the disinherited and the marginal, for the pariahs. <br /><br />In my childhood, I loved a page of Saroyan's prose. His strength remains the sympathy people, as mixed with sentimentality and populism as it is. <br /><br />Paul Draper as the tapdancer and Jimmy Lydon as the anxious lover make the most out of their roles. <br /><br />Artistically, J. Cagney was only the tip of the clan iceberg; he had a brother and a cute sister also in the movies. <br /><br />This movie has been produced by William Cagney; to complete the Cagney clan, the sexy Jeanne Cagney has a supporting part. Physically, she reminds me of a blonde woman, a curvy delicious blonde I loved 15 yrs ago.