Mourning Becomes Electra

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA             C-                   

USA  (173 mi)  1947  d:  Dudley Nichols 

I prayed for him to be killed in the war. Oh, if he were only dead.               

—Christine Mannon (Katina Paxinou)

I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself.

The only love I can know now is the love of guilt for guilt, which breeds more guilt, until you get so deep at the bottom of Hell that there’s no lower you can sink. You rest there.

Don't cry. The damned don't cry.                    —Orin Mannon (Michael Redgrave)

Eugene O’Neill is a theatrical revelation, the greatest American playwright whose breadth of work, four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, seems to only scratch the surface in terms of showcasing the true intelligence and depth of his work, introducing a searing realism into American theater while also creating experimental works that remain avant garde well into the next century.  Known for his deep characterization of shattered souls, battered consciousness, and disillusioned characters that face the bleakest of circumstances, his blisteringly realistic dialogue is like no other, often expressed in lengthy monologues, spilling one’s guts over drink and agonizing despair, where a night in the theater with O’Neill is one to remember, as the viewer can expect to be steamrolled into painful submission by the elegant poetry used to lay one’s soul bare.  His plays are never easy, are among the most difficult to endure, but can be revelatory in their confessional honesty.  Despite all the attempts to film O’Neill, and on IMDb there are nearly 100 such attempts, none provide the full breadth of dramatic reach as sitting in the theater and experiencing it for yourselves.  Having said all that, watching this 3-hour film version of MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA is like watching a painfully obvious trainwreck that screeches and jolts out of control as it continually rides off the rails.  Dudley Nichols worked as a screenwriter with director John Ford on 16 productions, the last being THE FUGITIVE (1947), when they had a falling out, never to work together again.  At about the exact same time, Nichols made his third and final attempt at directing with this film, writing scripts for another decade but never to direct again, so one can surmise this was not a particularly proud period in his life.  How many things can go wrong in one production?—this film continually asks that question.  First off, it is horribly miscast, using actors who aren’t remotely familiar with O’Neill character or dialogue, which is evidenced immediately, where despite being a lengthy family drama, there is nothing remotely similar about anyone in the cast.  And what about the acting?  Nichols exerts no control whatsoever over his actors who are allowed such free reign to overact in hysterical and melodramatic acting school fashion so that the film plays out as high camp, as if they are all channeling Gloria Swanson. 

For a man who worked with Ford, who was such a perfectionist on the set, Nichols shows no signs of understanding sound, as conversations are drowned out by approaching trains, or lighting, as much of his interior scenes are poorly lit, camerawork, as there’s little to speak of, but often the camera is either too far away or too close, never figuring out a cohesive pattern of bringing it all together.  And what about the acting?  Both Rosalind Russell and Michael Redgrave give cringe-worthy performances, yet both were inexplicably nominated for Academy Awards, one supposes for simply getting through the lengthy material, where they are onstage for the length of two films, but their wretchedly overwrought tone simply ruins the picture, turning this soap opera into a viciously cruel melodrama filled with backstabbing gossip and longstanding family squabbles, where it’s like watching cats squawking at one another continually trying to draw blood.  The intense bloodbath in the mother/daughter hatred between scheming matriarch Christine Mannon, supposedly sophisticated Greek actress Katina Paxinou who later appeared in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), and her spitefully spoiled and contemptuous daughter Lavina (Rosalind Russell, in real life only six years younger), play out their scenes like B-movie horror camp, as their arms flail back, as if in fright, while their eyes grow deliriously huge, as if seeing a monster, where the threat is so pronounced that they are at each other’s throats simply by entering a room, as if they can detect each other’s odor.  This paranoid and deluded catfight behavior is explained in the clearly dysfunctional family history, where Lavina is a daddy’s girl, worshipping the ground her father, General Ezra Mannon (Raymond Massey, never duller), walks on, while her brother Orin (Michael Redgrave), is coddled and pampered by his mother, where for each, their one and only love is their chosen parent to adore and idolize, while despising the other parent with corrosively poisonous venom.  Dudley Nichols is a career screenwriter, so it’s obvious he understands the complex literary ramifications of the words, but his idea of what constitutes theatricality is painfully overwrought self-indulgence.  Everyone in the cast has a wildly different accent, yet they’re all supposedly one distraught family.    

One other technique, often used in O’Neill plays, is hearing inner thoughts spoken out loud, supposedly representing what the characters are really thinking, but there’s no rhyme or reason to how this device is used in the film, so it just appears oddly weird, or in O’Neill’s vernacular “queer,” as we hear the sound of the voice but they’re not talking to anyone, nor is what they’re saying of any particular importance.  Onstage, especially in Strange Interludes (1928), this is a hilarious device, used as savagely satiric thoughts that are so devastatingly candid, one could never speak those words out loud.  Culled from the earliest period of Greek tragedy, a reworking of the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, where each play serves as a chapter in a continuous dramatic narrative, O’Neill has reset the period to the end of the American Civil War, divided into three parts, each cut in half from the original play to about one hour in length, Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted.  The film flopped terribly at the box office and was quickly recut from 173-minutes to 105-minutes, where a 3-part drama was reduced to only 2-parts, eliminating the final sequence altogether.  But even when revived to its overlong original form, this is clearly a massive failure in every respect, as the overwrought tone never changes, becoming stiflingly predictable and repetitive after awhile, an exhaustive rehashing of the Freudian Oedipus complex and Electra complex, played out to the extremes, where it’s just more and more of the same tortuous agony, each character haunted by their carefully calculated mistakes, which drives them to deplorable behavior, where a similar guilty conscience theme is much more beautifully developed and tangibly connected to the historical and poverty stricken times in John Ford’s The Informer (1935).  Without a trace of humor anywhere to be found, excerpt perhaps in the malicious nature of the gossiping Greek chorus seen at the beginning, housewives on the loose, the exaggerated overacting often leads to unintended chuckles, where it’s easy to laugh at just how ridiculous this is, where the plantation-like New England estate resembles a bank vault, a monstrous mansion with carefully kept secrets locked behind closed doors, where characters are continually locking personal items in locked drawers, and when family members have a private chat, they continually lock the doors behind them so other family members are intentionally shut out.  After awhile, Katina Paxinou had to enjoy slamming the door in the face of Rosalind Russell.  Unfortunately, these small pleasures are few and far between, making this a worst case scenario for viewing an O’Neill play on film, better stick to Sidney Lumet’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962) or his made-for-TV version of THE ICEMAN COMETH (1960), both films starring the incomparable O’Neill stalwart Jason Robards. 

Marnie

MARNIE         A                    

USA  (130 mi)  1964  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

I would say myself, and this may sound provocative and even arrogant, but if you don’t like Marnie, you don’t really like Hitchcock. I would go further than that and say if you don’t love Marnie, you don’t really love cinema.

—Robin Wood, British-Canadian author, educator, and film critic

One of the more progressive-minded films in the entire Hitchcock repertoire, and one that stands alone in exhibiting such deeply problematical insight into disturbing sexual trends within the confines of marriage, especially in earlier eras when divorce was not an option and so many marriages were forced or family determined and *not* the choice of the woman, expressing the psychological horrors faced by so many women who abhor the idea of having to have sex with a man they neither love nor even like, where forced sex is paramount to rape.  Way ahead of its time, this film delves into that subject matter with a cold analytic intelligence, without the least bit of salacious material ever shown onscreen.  Unlike Psycho (1960), which was thrillingly entertaining, this is one of the few Hitchcock films without any graphic sex or violence (until a finale), yet the audience remains riveted to the screen throughout based on the complicated depth of character development in one of the director’s longest and most troublesome films.  While something of a critical and commercial failure at the time of its release, where critic Pauline Kael called it “scraping bottom” or The New York Times “the most disappointing film in years,” its standing has only grown over time, with profits more than doubling its original budget, where some, like film critic Robin Wood in his book Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, now consider it Hitchcock’s last masterpiece, a view I’m inclined to share.  Starring Tippi Hedren from his previous film The Birds (1963), it is the last time a trademark cool, icy Hitchcock blond would be the centerpiece in one of his films, the final film working with legendary composer Bernard Hermann, who wrote an excellent score, also the final film working with Robert Burks, who became known as Hitchcock’s cinematographer, having worked with him on nearly every film since Strangers On a Train (1951).  The use of color plays such a significant role in this film, especially the color red, which reflects Hedren’s deeply repressed traumatic memories, used in much the same way by Nicolas Roeg in Don't Look Now (1973), where red is boldly and expressly used to reflect the psychic visions of a blind girl.  As MARNIE is a perverse love story, the film may hold up a mirror to Hitchcock’s own personal obsession in his relationship to actress Hedren, who allegedly rejected the director’s advances, though it plays out onscreen in a decidedly different fashion.            

To hear Hedren’s side of it, she considers Hitchcock a misogynist and claims the overcontrolling director effectively ended her career by controlling the terms of her seven-year contract, refusing to cast her and preventing her from working anywhere else immediately following this film, where she’s worked steadily afterwards, but never again approaching this level of prominence.  She has called Hitchcock a “sad character, evil and deviant, almost to the point of dangerous.”  Her views are shared by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who concluded an interview with Hitchcock puffing continuously on his cigar at Cannes, as he was there for the premiere of The Birds in 1963: “With all your cordial humor, your nice round face, your nice innocent paunch, you are the most wicked, cruel man I have ever met.”  Interesting, then, that monstrous male behavior, real or imagined, is the subject of the film.  Something of a more intimate exposé of Janet Leigh’s petty larceny in Psycho (1960), Tippi Hedren as Marnie is a terrific character study, where only Vertigo (1958) goes as deeply into the human psyche, playing a sexually repressed, compulsive liar and thief, a consummate crook with no references, whose secretary skills and poised professionalism on the job are too good to be true, working under assumed names, becoming familiar with a company’s overall operations until after a few months she embezzles funds from her employer, usually only several thousand dollars, keeping it small enough to keep the stories out of the newspapers so as not to draw attention to herself, then moves on to another distant town where she assumes yet another identity.  The twist here is that under a different name, she is recognized by a perspective employer, Sean Connery as Mark Rutland, who has full knowledge of her latest theft and curiously decides to hire her anyway.  Something of an amateur zoologist who studies the habits of animal behavior, he becomes fascinated with Marnie’s criminal predatory practices, taking a more personal interest in her as well, spending time together where he observes she has a strange unnatural fear of thunderstorms, knocking on the wall, and the color red. 

Nonetheless, after stealthily catching her in the act of stealing from his company as well, rather than turning her into the police, he coerces her to marry him instead, which is against every instinct she has, but she’s blackmailed to understand it’s either that or jail, whereupon Rutland proceeds to scientifically place her inside a box like a specimen and place her under a microscope.  Marnie, of course, feels violated in every conceivable way imaginable and continually expresses her disgust with him, literally loathing the day they ever met.  Yet they’re off on a honeymoon sea cruise where the happy couple will literally disappear off the face of the earth for a few weeks in a state of wedding bliss.  After making it painfully clear she despises the sexual touch of a man, Rutland honors her privacy for awhile, attempting to win some degree of trust, before eventually having his way with her in an insinuated offscreen rape, leading to a subsequent failed suicide attempt the following morning.  Adapted from a 1961 novel by English author Winston Graham, where female screenwriter Jay Presson Allen replaced the original writer Evan Hunter who found it difficult to write the sexual material, believing the rape scene was unconscionable and would make Rutland an unsympathetic character, but this is precisely what drew Hitchcock to the material, where so much of this film provides a woman’s embattled point of view, uniquely different from the male perspective in Vertigo.  The irony, of course, is that Connery had already played two roles as the ever seductive, impossible to resist James Bond in DR. NO (1962) and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963).  Nonetheless, Marnie remains adamantly defiant in her resistance to Rutland, never being able to make a move without him, feeling suffocatingly restricted by his constant presence, where in many ways she feels like a caged animal.  Hedren brings a certain repulsed indignation to the accumulated tension in her character that feels altogether real and psychologically captivating, becoming almost unbearable at times due to the level of her utter contempt for Rutland’s continuing persistence.  There’s literally nothing in Hitchcock that has ever delved as deeply into such personally hostile and forbidden territory, where as Marnie rightly points out, “I’m sick?!  Well, take a look at yourself!” 

This is extremely provocative material coming prior to any cultural debate on feminism or the Women’s Liberation Movement, which certainly challenged existing Freudian views, where one must acknowledge the film illustrates a truly painful portrait of a male paternalistic view and the effect it has on women, refusing to accept no for an answer, literally forcing a woman to comply with male demands, where if anything, Mark and Marnie’s out of control, dysfunctional relationship resembles that of a jailer and his prisoner.  The fact that she’s a thief does not justify such extreme aberrant behavior, where rape offers no potential cure.  The act is sufficiently unpleasant that it leads Marnie to make a desperate attempt on her own life.  The film makes no attempt to address the possibility that Marnie could simply be a lesbian, as if she could be fucked into male submission, but instead suggests she’s frigid and cannot experience pleasure from sex, but only through her compulsive need to steal.  Hitchcock’s film deserves praise for refusing to conform to expectations, as he instead takes us into suppressed emotional hysteria territory, literally delving into Freudian extrapolation where Marnie’s internal world spins out of control, much of it shown using German Expressionist techniques, such as the use of color and light, also the artificial look of the thunderstorms and the looming presence of an over-sized ship at the end of the block, all but blocking the exits, creating the illusion of a trapped existence.   

One would have to suggest Freud’s equally paternalistic views provide yet another layer of the male dominated need to control, albeit one reflected from the erudite, ivory tower world of academia, continuing Hitchcock’s class consciousness argument raised in Dial M for Murder (1954), where intelligentsia is used to manipulate, and in this case control women in society.  Freud acknowledges that sexuality is a crucial problem of modern life, but his rationale for analysis and treatment have largely been disavowed due to the prevailing societal acceptance of male superiority in the era that he lived, continuing to straightjacket the views and feelings of women through a kind of psychoanalytic prism that doesn’t exist, unable to comprehend, for instance, the widespread unhappiness of traumatized women in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, despite living in material comfort. Hitchcock’s film brilliantly disturbs the hornets nest, as sexual relations are no better understood today than when this film was made.  Due to the depths of the alienated exploration, however, in many ways Hitchcock’s MARNIE is like a female version of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).  Even if she were to somehow regain some sense of balance in her life, like Norman Bates smothering mother in Psycho, her emotionally cold and distant mother along with terrifying childhood experiences have left her imprinted with multiple layers of lifelong trauma that would be very difficult (but not impossible) to overcome.  What largely stands out about the film, however, is not Marnie’s individual neuroses, but the symptomatic suppression of women as a societal ailment, which coming from an overcontrolling, male dominating director like Hitchcock is simply astonishing.   

A Dangerous Method

A DANGEROUS METHOD                           C+                    

Great Britain  Germany  Canada  Switzerland  (99 mi)  2011  d:  David Cronenberg

Sort of like watching paint dry, as this ultra repressive, interior chamber drama moves with the glacial pace of Chekhov, usually stuck inside the sanctitude of one of many rooms but without his power of observation and social dissection.  Instead, this is a historical costume drama that presupposes the meeting of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) at the dawn of the psychoanalytic age around the turn of the 20th century.  The film is a Christopher Hampton adaptation of his own play called A Talking Cure, which was adapted from John Kerr’s book using the film title.  As such, all action is advanced by dialogue, much of it through patient to therapist sessions, but also person to person discussions and through various letters sent between the two colleagues, who after striking up a rich personal friendship and professional associative relationship fell out of favor with each other, basically ending all communication.  Since the two are known to have fathered what is known today as the practice of psychoanalysis, it’s ironic that in their own relationship they couldn’t practice what they preached, falling instead into utter dysfunction.  While there is no doubt this raises intelligent issues, it will be hard to find an audience that is moved or actively interested in a cold intellectual discussion of their methodology as a science.  Unfortunately, this was reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE (2001), his animated, color-coated, drug fantasia that becomes a dull soliloquy of endless ethereal monologues spoken as if in a perpetual daydream that brought back memories of being lectured to, as the tone of the entire film here is as if what it has to say is so extremely important that it begins to sound entirely self-serving instead of interesting.  Both of these men, Jung and Freud, seem so arrogantly self-centered and full of themselves that it’s hard to believe anyone ever listened to either one of them.  

The two actors are among the best actors working today, but here both are toned down and restricted to emotionally straight jacketed performances, especially Fassbender as Jung, who always looks like he’s framed in a picture book of some kind or an upscale magazine devoted to the elegant lifestyles of the wealthy class living in the luxurious mansions along beautiful Lake Zurich.  His wife inherited money, so his ultra civilized dress and manner represents wealth and status, but also social rigidity, where one can suffocate in the righteous air of theoretical ideas, almost as if the body is completely cut off from the head attached to it.  Freud’s studies in Vienna, Austria led him to the conclusion that all neurotic behavior was caused from sexual repression, leading to a dialogue between patient and therapist in an attempt to discover the root of the problem, using dream analysis and a discussion probing the unconscious mind in an attempt to unlock the key to a healthier life.  Jung followed in his footsteps in Zurich, Switzerland, but refused to single out sex as a cause of repression, believing there could be a myriad of other possibilities.  Both believed in intensive dream analysis, which they shared with one another, holding nothing back about their private lives in their intimate discussions until eventually something happened to change all that.  Enter Keira Knightley, aka:  Sabina Spielrein, the patient.  If ever there was a hysterical, overacted performance, it is this one, which is barely watchable at times.  Add to this the phony accents and you’ve got yourself a turkey of a performance in a film that’s already difficult to engage with due to the sometimes studious and at times professorial content of the endless discussions. 

When Sabina describes her abusive family history, which has left her in an apoplectic state of continual hysteria, no one needs a degree in psychology to understand what a fragile and terrible condition she is in, where her body is filled with uncontrollable spasms reacting to her personal fears of continually being beaten by her father.  Making matters worse, she enjoys the punishment.  Promoting his inner calm, Jung is successful at getting her to accept herself as she is, an exceptionally well-educated woman unafraid to delve into the intellectual matters at hand, joining the psychoanalytic profession, though taking issue with both her colleagues.  While this speaks of the success of therapy, no one believes Sabina is ever cured due to Knightley’s sprawling performance which is all over the place, always eccentric, never really losing the hysteria, just the flinching body spasms.  While there’s not a lot to see and nothing particularly engaging, only lines of trust that are continually crossed, the film really dovetails off the charts, perhaps entirely miscast, where no character is the least bit interesting or sympathetic, made worse by the stifling oppressive tone of scholarly reserve, where anything outside this artificially passive world of stately elegance and manners is already seen as out of the ordinary and eventually out of bounds.  It well describes the fissure that came between the two men, all of which precedes the advent of World War One, a crisis of unthinkable proportions which would change the thinking forever about battle fatigue and chronic stress syndrome.  But these terms hadn’t yet been invented as Freud and Jung continue to squabble like children about their self-professed techniques in combating psychological relief.  Both men are out of  favor today due to advancements in the use of medicine for mental health treatment, which has all but replaced the idea of dream analysis and free associative psychoanalytic therapy sessions which are now largely based on an accumulation of family history and circumstances.  The elegance and classical style used by Cronenberg never varies, matched by the music of Howard Shore who steals excerpts from a Viennese composer from the same era, the uncredited Gustav Mahler.

Post Script – The irony is not lost to viewers, as any therapist who would actually do what is suggested here by one of the founders of the field would likely lose their license, be thrown out of practice, and receive a hefty jail sentence.  But of course, they were pioneers slogging their way through the wilderness.