Much has been said over the years regarding the deservedly much celebrated American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of four Pulitzer prizes (still the record for drama). Considered by many to be the father of the modern American theatre, he was also the father-in-law to Charlie Chaplin. His works span many years and many places and times, but also having a tinge of brutality about them in their truths and representations of real life, whether that be through his more artistic and expressionist works or his comedies or his straight dramas.

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Today I wish to look at three of his film adaptations. Varying in quality, but still working for us today as a nice sample of looking once more at how playwrights work are adapted for the screen, as we did previously with Tennessee Williams. For I feel that this is always a rather odd field in the realm of adaptation where directors and adaptors see their only goal as to move certain scenes outside. Let’s look at three such adaptations now. 

Mourning Becomes Electra (1947, Dir. Dudley Nichols)

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Updating the myth of Orestia to New England in the period after the American civil war, the film follows Rosalind Russell as Lavina Mannon in this three play cycle about the recent death of the patriarch of her family. Delivered in three acts titled; Homecoming, The Hunted and The Haunted, the film plays out elegantly as a tragic family drama saga. This was the third and final film directed by Dudley Nichols, acclaimed screenwriter of such films as Bringing up Baby and Stagecoach. Nichols does an excellent job at adapting O’Neill and even disclaimed screenplay credit on the film, feeling it improper as he only abridged the script to the screen, leading to his original cut of the film running over four hours. The biggest strengths of the film lie in O’Neill’s text here, whereas in late choices the filmic choices and certain performances will take the cake, here O’Neill’s text is the all-out winner. It’s not that film choices aren’t great, but Nichol’s takes the position that he is simply bringing the text to the screen and that he need not get in the way, which leads to a certain amount of static in the cinematography, which doesn’t exactly help with a film of this length and depth of material. It’s also not that the performances are bad, the performances are largely stellar. The film received two Oscar nominations, for Best Actor and Best actress for Russell and Michael Redgrave respectively, ultimately losing both. The old story goes that Russell was so certain that she would win that she had already risen out of her seat to accept the award, ignoring the fact that Loretta Young’s name had already been read out. Russell’s mild delusion is justified however bringing such a brilliant steel to the role of Lavina. I’m not exactly sure whether or not Katherine Hepbrun or Bette Davis, the two original considerations for the role, would be better suited, but Russell is wonderful in the role all the same. For me the only slightly off key performance, bar some of Redgrave’s later in the film melodramatic turns, is Katina Paxinou as Christine Mannon. Paxinou really overacts and although the film works as a tremendous melodrama, it also has so many moments where Russell and other performers in the film (such as a marvellous early Kirk Douglas role and Leo Genn as the cunning Brant) bring us back to the brutal realism of certain stretches of O’Neill’s work. Nichol’s belief that the film would fail ultimately manifested itself and the film lost around $2,310,000 according to modern sources. But now we can remove this assumption of failure and look at the film as a more than worthy adaptation of an excellent O’Neill play.

Desire Under the Elms (1958, Dir. Delbert Mann)

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Irvin Shaw’s adaption of another of O’Neill’s classical tragedy modernisations is a taut and dour feature brought to the screen with great starkness by Delbert Mann, who won the best director award at the Oscars three years prior for his jovial classic Marty. This is an entirely different beast however dealing with great themes of desperation, obsession, passion and ultimately the most tragic of murders. The film follows a bizarre love triangle between Anthony Perkin’s Eben, his 76 year old father Ephraim played by Burl Ives, and his father’s new bride of Eben’s age named Anna played by Sophia Loren. Perkins is his usually excellent self, giving Eben a stout quality in a world of chaos around him, whilst also adding great vulnerability and conflict in the later stretches of the film where his character is distinctly caught between his father and his new step-mother. Ives is similarly superb, bringing the aged quality of Ephraim to the screen brilliantly, whilst never letting go off the character’s raucous qualities. Loren, who left the Cannes film festival early and furious that the film received no such evening screening as per her requests, is wonderful in the film and I can understand why she would feel that her performance needed to be viewed as it may just be her finest screen performance. In a career that swiftly branded her a sex symbol, albeit completely justified to no end, this film gives her a chance to highlight her dramatic acting chops, which at the time many didn’t especially know she had. The film was rightfully nominated at the Oscars for its truly beautiful cinematography by Daniel L. Fapp, this was however it’s only nomination and I feel that in many ways the film has been slightly lost to time. I’m not declaring it as some great lost masterwork, but it certainly deserves another appraisal, even if the film doesn’t wholly drive home the immense tragedy of its plot, feeling always to be holding the darkest elements of the film at arm’s length, rather than embracing them. Perhaps with a more fervent embracing of such darkness, the film may have succeeded that bit more. But the film we receive all the same is a powerful and stark piece, with great performances and, with no surprise, great writing.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962, Dir. Sidney Lumet)

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With no doubt, this is the finest film of our triptych today. This seminal and iconic adaptation of what is wildly referred to as O’Neill’s finest play, is an absolutely stunningly told film from Sidney Lumet (who had previously adapted The Iceman Cometh for television). Filmed entirely in sequence following three weeks of intense rehearsal (the furthest from the norm of regular film scheduling you can get), the film was Lumet’s piece de resistance when it came to a career showing an absolutely uncanny aptitude for adaptation. The film comes from O’Neil’s posthumous and deeply auto-biographical play about his family’s experiences with addiction to morphine and alcohol, aswell as the illnesses that plagued his family time and time again. The film follows a day in the life of the Tyrone family as they come to terms with the recent diagnosis of consumption for their youngest son Edmund, played by Dean Stockwell. The person taking this news the worst is Katherine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone, Edmund’s mother, who has fallen into a debilitating morphine addiction that has all but consumed her whole. The other two parts of the family are James Tyrone Sr., played by Ralph Richardson, and the older son Jamie Tyrone, played by Jason Robards. Both of whom are dealing with their own alcoholism. Across the day secrets are made bare and the troubled nature of the fragile relationships between each character and their relatives is brought to bear in a rather tragic fashion. The tagline read; “The most shattering... shocking journey the screen ever took into the human soul!” And it may just be. Lumet’s wholly faithful adaptation of the text and his beautifully poetic camera work takes us into this day with the Tyrone’s with a touch of class, but also an overwhelming sense of doom. This is underpinned by the tremendous black and white cinematography of Boris Kaufman (12 Angry Men, On the Waterfront, Splendour in the Grass).  The film takes a larger focus on Mary than most stage adaptations do, perhaps this was down to the casting of Hepburn, who is so excellent in the film as the damaged beauty who is riddled with anxiety, before coming back from downstairs as light and joyful as any other graceful woman. The repeated build up of anxiety, release and disappearance for morphine of the character is brought to tragic light by Hepburn with a degree of subtlety that doesn’t nessecerilly read on the page of the original text. Many times Mary could come off as a borderline absurd character, but here her nuance is so marvellous and so pristine that the character is brought to life with immense ease. Hepburn, who received the film’s only Oscar nomination incredibly, went about some familiarly chaotic flights during her time on the set, including a moment of extreme disgust for her co-star Dean Stockwell. After finding out that Stockwell was drinking vodka from a large bottle to warm himself up on the set, she sent him a coat, which he later found in his dressing room. This off-screen tension however is never present on screen and the two share some truly touching moments of great familial love and compassion amidst the pain and misery of the current light of both their circumstances.

Ralph Richardson as the patriarch of the family brings all the gravitas and frivolity of a past as a prime actor that you would expect, with the character constantly fawning over past memories of better days upon the stage. At a certain point during rehearsals for the play Lumet pulled Richardson aside, worried that he wasn’t getting the complete depth of the character. After a 45 minute lecture on the character from Lumet, Richardson simply replied; “I see what you mean, dear boy, a little more cello, a little less flute”. It’s Robards however who steals the show, in a role originally offered to Marlon Brando, following Robard's similarly excellent previous O’Neill on screen performance as Hickey, again under Lumet, in 1960’s The Iceman Cometh. The intense bravado of his drunken final hour extended scene has such a power about it that it unnerves the audience to no end. All in all, the film strikes that perfect and painfully uncommon balance in adaptation of servicing the text whilst delivering an entertaining film (something Lumet was repeatedly successful at). The film’s beautiful final moments zoom out and zoom out until the expansive home set has all but disappeared into darkness, and our four leads are simply illuminated by the passing light of a lighthouse, whose foghorn has filled us with dread intermittently for the past 3 hours we have watched. This beautiful and elegant slow crane away is suddenly broken by 4 remarkably harsh close-ups of our characters, each one painterly and starkly harsh. Lumet and O’Neill force us into the real world and what a painfully brutal real world it is for the Tyrone family.

The legend goes that on his death bed O’Neil exclaimed loudly; “Born in a hotel room, and godammit! Died in one!” Never could so few words illuminate a man’s entire literary oeuvre than the ones he uttered. With the words perfectly encapsulating all the pain and joy of life and the hope lost and gained that can occur in the span of one’s existence. As much as O’Neill was a playwright delving and returning to his own life, he was always a man highlighting the human experience time and time again. His fourth Pulitzer prize for the posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night did all but further solidify and already immensely solidified reputation. In many ways there are any playwrights alike O’Neil today, but I feel that the exploration of the human state on such a grand and epic scale will remain the thing of the past, and the work of Williams and Miller and the like. We do at least have O’Neill and the plentiful work that he has given us will remain viable and vital for the rest of our lives, and onward and onward.

- Thomas Carruthers