Review of Saturday's Children

So the title card claims, and it's based on a play by Maxwell Anderson, a distinguished American playwright who tackled tough subjects--fascism, apartheid, congressional dysfunction. I don't know this play, but whatever it was, the Epstein brothers utterly standardized it in their thin- blooded adaptation, a weak domestic drama where co-workers John Garfield and Anne Shirley meet, fall in love, marry, and suffer small-people problems. He's polite and mild-mannered and uninteresting, and she's pure ingenue, and watching them trod along the well-worn path of conventional screen romance has no bite. Even Claude Rains, as her father, seems disengaged. At least Lee Patrick, as her scheming sister, and Roscoe Karns, as her cynical brother-in-law, provide a little bite, and George Tobias is on the periphery, playing what he always played. But, despite an attempted suicide, a hidden pregnancy, and penny-ante deceptions in the young pair's marriage, it's slow, repetitive, and unfelt. And it needs edge. Oh, how it needs edge.