October 1973: O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh
American Film Theatre. Academy of Music, Northamton.
This is the first of a series of films to be shown over the course of this year, once a month, mainly to subscription audiences. A piece in this past Sunday Times drama section suggested that this would be institutionalized culture, addressing itself to affluent audiences who want to see safe classics, not to another, allegedly more vital and disparate audience, a more democratic audience, which (the author argues) ought to be sought. Whether this will prove true for the series as a whole remains to be seen; certainly the audience of what seemed to be mainly university and college faculty and spouses and associated persons last night bore out the justice of the writer’s accusation.
But possibly only such an audience could have been willing to endure such an ordeal. This film gets the series off to a ponderous and heavy (as my students use the word) start. O’Neill wrote the play as a sort of marathon playgoing bout, and this uncut film version keeps every word, remaining true as well to the single setting, the back and front rooms of Harry Hope’s saloon in lower Manhattan, and apparently to every pause and modulation in the action of the play as well. I found myself taking a goodly number of random notes, most of which can be set down here seriatim.
The color of the film was nicely done, rendering a fine, “old fashioned” effect as if this were a sort of sepia in color. Lots of heavy shadow, under-lighted subjects, and combinations of light and dark images in deep focus gave decent variety, visually. There were numerous deep focus shots, many of them medium or long shots involving a composition of three or four actors, each carefully positioned and postured so that no one was sitting or facing or standing in exactly the same direction or at the same angle. There was so much of this, in fact, that close shots were a noticeable rarity, and had a good emphatic effect when used. There were lots of low angle shots; these and other horizontal shots often framed a subject in medium or far distance by introducing at the side the profile of a second person. As the showing went on, I gradually became aware that these shots, especially long shots with a character in profile in the near distance, served (if hesitantly) some sort of truth: something like the cinematic equivalent of O’Neill’s overall sense of human society — namely, that human beings find, or fail to find, the truths of their existence by having been forced or led into conjunction with one another — but that these truths are finally grasped only in some sort of ultimate spiritual isolation.
Perhaps this is what O’Neill meant when he said, somewhere, that his greatest interest was not man in relation to other men, but in relation to God.
One notices very quickly a sense that O’Neill is a playwright of and for the theatre. His work does not sit well, I think, with the cinematic aesthetic. I was first awar