For a long time, "Mourning Becomes Electra," which premiered on this day in 1947, was treated like a cinematic afterthought.
It was seldom seen on TV and unavailable in video tape or any comparable format (such as laserdisc) until it was finally released on DVD about a dozen years ago.
Why was that?
Well, it could have been the movie's performance at the box office. It lost more than $2.3 million.
I've read some reviews in which critics dismissed it as "stagey" and "wordy." I could understand that being a problem today. If it seemed that way to critics 70 years ago, I can only imagine what today's critics would say.
But it was adapted from a play written by Eugene O'Neill so it was to be expected that it would seem stagey. After all most of the action took place on a single set. And it would also be expected that it would be wordy. Plays tend to be driven by dialogue, not flashy explosions or car chases.
And, for its time, the movie was rather long — nearly three hours. But when it performed poorly at the box office and failed to win an Oscar, RKO Pictures made a decision that made matters worse — to slice about an hour from the film and re–release it. The original version, while long, made sense; the chopped–up version did not.
Fortunately, the movie has been restored to its original length — and, while it is not ordinarily my policy to promote a particular TV network, I must say that you can count on seeing that original version on Turner Classic Movies, which airs it fairly frequently. That is where I saw it, and I was impressed.
As a matter of fact, TCM will be showing the restored version on Tuesday, Nov. 28 at 3 p.m. (Central). Do not — I repeat, do not — watch the pared–down version. You have been warned.
In case you aren't familiar with the background of the movie, it was an adaptation of O'Neill's 1931 play that was, in turn, a re–telling of Aeschylus' Greek play "Oresteia" set in post–Civil War America.
Rosalind Russell's performance as Lavinia was so good it was a foregone conclusion she would win an Oscar; according to Oscar lore, when the Best Actress nominees were recited but before the winner was named, Russell rose from her seat, only to sink back down in it when it was announced that Loretta Young had won for "The Farmer's Daughter."
The comedic actress was nominated for Best Actress four times but never won.
Michael Redgrave was nominated for Best Actor that year but lost to Ronald Colman in "A Double Life." That was a pity, too, because it was his only Oscar nomination in a long and distinguished career on the stage and screen.
Redgrave, incidentally, is the only Best Actor nominee to have two daughters who were both nominated for Best Actress as well.
For some Russell's performance may seem overblown, and maybe it was, but I thought the character called for some of that, and Russell was good at it — better than Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis, both of whom reportedly were considered for the role.
Kirk Douglas and Raymond Massey were great, as always. In fact, the acting on the whole was superb.
O'Neill's play has long been regarded a jewel of the modern American stage so it was no surprise to me that the actors turned in top–notch performances, and that can be enthralling on the stage, where the play can easily run twice as long as the movie.
Producer/director Dudley Nichols adapted the play for the screen, and as a writer I can appreciate his fealty to the original work. If you have ever seen the play and the movie, you know he tried to resist the temptation to stray from O'Neill's work.
But that may have worked against him. As New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther observed in his review, "It is one thing to watch a group of actors hiss and scream their deep emotions on a stage; it is quite something else to see the same thing done at great length by a group of photographs."
Motion pictures were still evolving in 1947, and filming adaptations of plays was still something of a mystery for many. That is why so many such movies appear now to be little more than films of stage productions — because that is essentially what they were. Shakespeare's plays have always been great on the stage, but it took considerable adaptation and experimentation to successfully bring them to the silver screen.
That was still a problem for O'Neill's plays 15 years later. By all accounts, director Sidney Lumet did a great job with "Long Day's Journey Into Night" — it even brought Katharine Hepburn an Oscar nomination — but, because that play, too, was largely confined to one set, even Lumet could not break past the impression that he had filmed a stage production.
