![]() But his play, a delight to its tuxedoed audience, doesn’t matter a whit to the two working stiffs backstage. “Fink”, of course, means a snitch, an informer, and Barton plans, in a way, to rat out the common man, to tell the world about him. What the offstage scene tells us is that Barton Fink, for all his pious jabber about “the common man,” doesn’t know beans about that overworked personage. ![]() Kaufman, but he writes like Clifford Odets-think Waiting for Lefty or Awake and Sing!-leftish plays that celebrate the values of FDR’s New Deal: unions, labor rights, welfare, aid to workers and farmers, public works, all those things today’s politics have lost sight of. As James Mottram points out (in an excellent study of the sources and themes of the Coens’ films), Fink looks very like playwright George S. ![]() One stagehand, bored, reading a newspaper, yells on cue an offstage line, “Fish! Fresh fish!” The play ends, curtain comes down, big applause, curtain calls, cries of “Author! Author!” and wretchedly shy and nervous Barton Fink brings himself to come a few steps onstage.īarton Fink (wonderfully played by John Turturro) is a decidedly Jewish-looking young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a table-top of frizzy black hair that adds a couple of inches to his height, giving him a not-inappropriate swelled head. A couple of stagehands are working the ropes that lower the curtain, while the playwright, Barton Fink, watches the finale from the wings. We are backstage watching a Broadway play. ![]() In Barton Fink, as in any good movie, the opening scene sets the theme and tells us what it is about. ![]()
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