It was this petit-bourgeois, almost lumpen viewpoint, that explained Rodrigues' antipathy towards the higher middle-class intelligentsia that made much of the political Left of the period ("I'm not moved by marches of the ruling classes", was he to say before a march of protesters against the military dictatorship). Conversely, for those Brazilian writers that equated modernism in literature with support for social change, Rodrigues' longings for a lost old order made it impossible to accept the reality of his formal innovations: for the great modernist Oswald de Andrade, Rodrigues' literature was "nothing but a wretched newspaper feuilleton", and Rodrigues himself "an ill-educated, illustrious, pervert". However, in 1962, Rodrigues' 1958 play "Boca de Ouro" (The Golden Mouth) - the tragedy of a mobster of the illegal Brazilian animal lottery (jogo do bicho) known for his set of gold false teeth, hence the title - was to be adapted to the screen by leftist director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who tried to meld Rodrigues' moralizing streak with Brechtian social drama and American mob film.