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Mourning Becomes Electra

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"Mourning Becomes Electra" is notable for many reasons.RKO Studios was trying to get the word out that it was a serious studio making serious pictures. The original film featured an Overture, Intermission & Entr'Acte, which explains various discrepancies in the running time. The DVD, long overdue, is fine, and in a 159 minute running time. This "prestigious" film still fell flat at the boxoffice, and subsequent cuts were made to make it more palpable to the Post WW2 public. O'Neill is not to be fooled with, not should his work be taken lightly. His works certainly were showcases for Actresses in Oscar-friendly performances (Garbo in "Anna Christie", Kate Hepburn in "Long Day's Journey Into Night", and Roz Russell in this one; all nominated). Indeed, Roz was expected to win the Oscar in 1947; there seemed to be no question about it, and when she lost to Loretta Young for "The Farmer's Daughter" (a comedy, no less) there was an audible gasp from the audience. Actually, Loretta probably deserved it, because Roz' performance is inconsistant at best. Surely, she handles the singularly amazing demands of this central character but often fell back into those hammy mannerisms that I've grown accustomed to from her. She was much better at comedy ("His Girl Friday", "My Sister Eileen", Auntie Mame"). It's admirable that she didn't succumb to any Joan Crawford histionics; rather gave a subdued, almost one-note performance. RKO also thought high-class demanded famous British actors, and there are a few; Michael Redgrave (also nominated), Leo Genn and a fine performance from Henry Hull (as the Greek chorus). Redgrave was inconsistant, and Genn was OK. Katina Paxinou, the wonderful Greek actress (Oscar winner in "For Whom the Bell Tolls"), was miscast, if only because of her accent. The performance was good, but you'd think a woman who'd been in this country for so many years would've shed some of that accent. It just felt out of place for this very American piece by a very American playwright. Maybe the powers-that-were thought a Greek actress would be appropriate for this up-dating of the "Oresteia". I didn't dislike the film. O'Neill is certainly an acquired taste, and I was never bored. Production values were fairly high, and I appreciated the generous close-ups (thanks to director Dudley Nichols) and the crisp b&w cinematography of George Barnes. His use of shadows and back-lighting add immeasurably to the proceedings. Despite the fairly elaborate sets, this is really a filmed play, and the dialogue is the driving force. Definitely a curiosity, I would recommend this film to fans of O'Neill, and forgotten Hollywood artifacts.

This is one of the most underrated, overlooked films of Hollywood's Golden Era, the 1940's. I cannot understand why this film has been lamblasted over the years. It is a compelling, superbly acted drama from a famous play. Perhaps it was a dud in 1947, but the years have erased that, and I applaud loudly to Image for putting it on DVD. Never on VHS or laserdisc, it is time it was available to the home video market. If you want to see motion picture acting at its best, watch Russell, Redgrave, Paxinou, and Massey here. It's all been done recently - all these plot elements have been done on "Dallas," "Dynasty," and "Knots Landing" and countless daytime soaps. But this is the ORIGINAL. Watch it and relish what great moviemaking and acting is.

The script reduces the stage original by approximately two-thirds. The cinematography is clunky and the production values are weak. Direction is indifferent and the acting styles are all over the map. Even so, the 1947 MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA is a startlingly powerful film, a melodrama that leaps and crackles and which will hold the attention of discerning viewers through two and a half hours to its remarkably bitter end.

Loosely based on the ancient Greek tragedy THE ORESTIA, Eugene O'Neill's 1931 drama was and is an extraordinary creation. Strangely ritualistic in tone and requiring approximately six hours to perform, it stunned audiences upon its debut, was a powerful factor in O'Neill's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and remains one of the great pinacles of American theatre to this day. It is also a warped, sick, and twisted tale of adultry, incestuous affections, blackmail, murder, and suicide, and as such it held Hollywood at bay for close to twenty years.

The story concerns the Mannons, a family that has dominated a small New England town for more than a hundred years, dominating through social status and supposed family and civic duty even as they conceal several internal scandals. The film opens with father Ezra (Raymond Massey) away from home, acting as a leader in the Civil War; in his absence wife Christine (Katrina Patinoux) has taken a lover who visits the house under the guise of courting daughter Lavinia (Rosalind Russell.) When Lavinia discovers the truth, she attempts to blackmail her mother into giving up the relationship--but the attempt backfires into a horrendous cycle of murder and revenge that ultimately destroys the family and drives Lavinia to her her doom.

The script actually does manage to encompass all the primary plot points of O'Neill's original, and although the result is a bit talky in a forced sort of way the story itself possesses a relentless quality that does indeed approximate the stage original. Even more surprisingly, the script makes no effort to soften the incestuous nature of the various relationships that characterize the tale, relationships that increasingly pervert and twist the family as the story progresses. This is dark, dark stuff indeed.

As previously noted, the cast is all over the map in terms of acting style and indeed each of the principles seem to be performing for a different film. Rosalind Russell is distinctly "classic Hollywood;" Michael Redgrave is distinctly "English theatre." Katrina Patinoux, a memorable performer, is Greek and therefore somewhat out of place as the matriach of a New England family; Raymond Massey, an equally memorable performer, seems to reprise his earlier portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. Each and every one of them, in their own different ways, play at white-hot intensity, and many find the resulting mix too uncomfortable. I myself did not: if anything, I felt it added to and intensified the overall strangeness of the piece.

Eugene O'Neill dramas do not, as a rule, film extremely well: they are too clearly designed for the stage and as such they work best in front of a live audience. All the same, and in spite of its numerous flaws, this is one of the few film versions of an O'Neill play that actually manages to capture the intensity of the stage original. Dark, brooding, and deeply disturbing, MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA deserves a great deal more attention than it has ever received.

When the film failed at the box office, RKO responded by cutting it in re-release. This Image Entertainment DVD restores those cuts, and that is a very good thing indeed. Unfortunately, it is also the only good thing that one can say for the DVD. The print quality is at best mediocre, a bit fuzzy, occasionally streaked, and riddled with artifacts. There are no extras of any kind. But just as the film transcends its own flaws, so too does it transcends this poor transfer. Strongly recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

"Mourning Becomes Electra" is not simply Eugene O'Neill's updated version of the "Orestia" by Aeschylus. The ancient Greek tragedy, which has the distinction of being the first dramatic work to be performed a second time, was a celebration of the Athenian system of justice. But what O'Neill focuses on in turning the story of the House of Atreus after the Trojan War into the Mannon family of New England following the end of the Civil War, is the cycle of vengeance. O'Neill changes the precipitating event for the cycle, forgoing an Iphigenia-like figure to talk about a Mannon ancestor being a judge at the Salem Witch Trials and to reinvent Thyestes as a disinherited relative whose progeny comes back for revenge. Likewise, the uplifting ending of the "Orestia," where Orestes claims his right to be forgiven, is foregone to place the onus on ending the cycle squarely on the Electra-character. Furthermore, with a justice system in place the first murder results from an act of remission, while another is covered up as a robbery and a third become a suicide, all of which play against the original tale.

This black & white 1947 film, directed and scripted by Dudley Nichols, runs 173 minutes, but given that the original drama is really three plays, just like the "Orestia," this is reducing the scope of O'Neill's work by half. Adding insult to injury, there is was a 105-minute edited version at one point (the mind shudders to think of reducing O'Neill's epic to about the length of a single, long act). Titles appear to let the viewers now when we are moving from one part of the drama to the next. First, is "The Homecoming," in which General Ezra Mannon (Raymond Massey) returns home from the war. His doting daughter Lavinia (Rosalind Russell) is happy to see him, but Ezra's wife, Christine (Katina Paxinou) is not. She has been having an affair with Adam Brant (Leo Genn), a sea captain who is son of the disinherited Mannon and a servant girl. Ever since Ezra went away to war, taking her beloved son, Orin (Michael Redgrave) with him, Christine has been wishing for her husband's death. When he comes home seeking to reconcile with his wife, she refuses his advances and with her confessions bring on a heart attack, she does not give him his medicine. But before he dies, Ezra points an accusing finger at Christine and declares her "guilty" in front of Lavinia.

"The Hunted" begins with Orin returning home, having recovered from a head wound he received in the war. The beloved son of his mother, Lavinia has to convince her brother that Christine in responsible for the death of their father. Confronting Orin with proof of their mother's infidelity, Lavinia does not spur her brother to kill his mother, but rather to kill Brant. Getting way with the murder he tells Christine what he has done which drives her to suicide, leaving Orin crazed with remorse. The final part, "The Haunted," is where O'Neill diverge the most from Aeschylus. Instead of Orestes haunted by the Furies for slaying Clytemnestra and avenging Agamemnon, Orin's torment is entirely psychological. Meanwhile, Lavinia is being courted by Peter Niles (Kirk Douglas), who represents the possibility of a happy life freed from the Mannon curse. But instead of ending with a new notion of justice, "Mourning Becomes Electra" concludes with the symbolic end of the Mannon family.

The maritime background of O'Neill is present in these dramas, but more important is the Puritanism of his native New England. The curse on this family is entirely sexual in nature, from what happened with the servant girl before the current Mannon mansion was built to the sins of this generation. Even though Agamemnon brought home Cassandra from Troy as his concubine, Clytemnestra killed him because of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. But for O'Neill it is all about the sex, including having Brant talking Lavinia for a moonlight walk before settling on her mother as his conquest. The problem is that this is the sort of sex that is behind closed doors, the results of not only the inherent Puritanism of the characters but also the strictures of early 20th-century American theater and the Hayes office. The result is talking about it without really talking about it, and with a cold passion that is rather disconcerting.

Ironically, the stiff formality of the acting performances are more in keeping with ancient Greek drama than with modern American theater, which only serves to distance the drama from the audience. For me there is another intervening layer because I know that when RKO bought the rights to "Mourning Becomes Electra" Katharine Hepburn tried to put together a production in which she would play Lavinia and Greta Garbo would come out of retirement to play Christine. Once your eyes bug out at the thought of that casting it is hard to watch Russell and Paxinou without being disappointed at what might have been. The result is an odd and decidedly not "little" film that fails to do O'Neill justice.

One of the many excellent plays by O'Neil is destroyed by poor casting. Massey is the best one in the cast. Paxinou is an embarassment; half her dialogue is not understandable due to her heavy accent (and the DVD is NOT closed captioned). Her constant use of her eyes like a silent movie star is laughable at times, ruining the drama of the scene. Redgrave can't quite get the ebb and flow of the American English for which O'Neil is so well known. He is too over the top near the end. And Russell just holds up her head and looks down her nose as her way of registering Lavinia's imagined superiority to the other characters. Her voice has an irritating, pinched sound at all the dramatic moments; she nevers builds to an emotion - she just starts screaming. She's just plain awful! Poor Kirk Douglas is lost among all these scenery chewers. IMAGE has made a rotten transfer to DVD. There are white specks throughout, and the extreme contrast between the blacks and whites, renders some scenes unwatchable. The soundtrack has a constant hiss, and has not been properly balanced digitally. All in all, a waste of money. Stick with the EXCELLENT Broadway Archieve production which is vastly superior on all counts (and which is a production of the COMPLETE play). This one is strictly of historical interest to O'Neil fans.

All of a sudden, after World War II, Rosalind Russell seemed poised to become Hollywood's greatest star. The studios were bowing down to her, and she started flexing her muscles and chewing up the kind of parts that hitherto she had been excluded even from dreaming about. Previously there had been a sort of appreciation for her clipped comic roles, most notably in Cukor's THE WOMEN, and she was deemed a serviceable leading lady in glossy MGM romantic dramas and thrillers, nothing too special. I wonder what happened to signal to Hollywood that she was actually an actress of some range? Were people tired of Bette Davis and thought, let's give Rosalind Russell the parts we used to give to Davis automatically, the droit du seigneur distaff side?

Anyhow her casting in MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA was an inspiration that could have been good, but somehow, the movie got away from the makers. It wasn't just putting Russell into it--though some believe that casting JANE RUSSELL as Lavinia might have made more sense--it was that every last part was filled with some cockamamie choice. The casting director must have been on drugs. And yet, that is part of what makes this 1947 movie such a gem.

By the way, Lucille Ball is said to have lobbied heavily to land the role of Lavinia, in a production which would have co-starred Jane Darwell as Christine. But who did they get for Christine?

Katina Paxinou--the revered Greek actress who had made a sensation playing a Spanish peasant in FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. Audiences just barely made out what she was saying in BELL TOLLS. Here she plays Rosalind Russell's mother, a New England aristocrat. As many have noted, she seems to be encountering the English language for the very first time, and, as she has the most important role for the first half of the movie, it only gets better after she shuts up and lets Russell, as Lavinia, take over the ranting and raving. Michael Redgrave! He's great but where did they get him from? Had he made any US pictures before, or did they just say, he was super playing the nutty ventriloquist in DEAD OF NIGHT, let's bring him over to RKO to play Orrin--the "Orestes" character in O'Neill's secong hand Oresteia. And on and on it goes, right down to Kirk Douglas and Raymond Massey and the insufferable Leo Genn as the man both mother and daughter desire. I'm sorry, but that fire hydrant over there has more sex appeal than Leo Genn in this movie.

They say that somewhere, there is even more footage waiting to be joined up to extend this long, long picture into a fourth hour. I'm looking forward to a "special edition" of this DVD, perhaps with the later, Joan Hackett version from PBS as an extra. That one is good too, with Peter Weller from ROBOCOP playing the Kirk Douglas part, hey, why not?

Eugene O'Neill was, arguably, America's greatest playwright and, although plays like THE ICEMAN COMMETH and LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT are probably better known to today's audiences, his mammoth 6-hour long MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA is considered to be one of his finest works.

In 1947, veteran screenwriter Dudley Nichols (BRINGING UP BABY, STAGECOACH) adapted O'Neill's 3-part MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA to the screen, cutting its running time to less than three hours. It was a big budget production with an all-star cast from RKO Pictures. Nichols also directed, and that was his mistake.

Nichols should have stuck to writing and left film directing to some of his other collaborators, like John Ford or Howard Hawks. Unfortunately, the final movie of the O'Neill work, despite fine performances by Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, Raymond Massey and Kirk Douglas, is very static; no more than a filmed stage play. His exposition scenes are excruciating.

Once the exposition has ended however, much of the drama's power does come through. Set in post Civil War America, the play, an adaptation of the Greek tragedy ORESTEIA, tells of an unfaithful wife (Katina Paxinou) who murders her wealthy husband (Massey), only to have her children (Russell, Redgrave) take revenge upon her, then suffer the horrible consequences of their own act.

Though Russell and Redgrave both were Oscar-nominated, MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA was a critical and box-office failure. It was soon withdrawn from release. One might say that it was the HEAVEN'S GATE of its day.

Virtually unseen for decades and never before released onto home video, MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA is available on DVD (in a restored version) from Image Entertainment.

Like the Michael Cimino epic western, the movie's reputation is much worse than the film itself. Concentrate on the drama, rather than the fact that the picture is very uncinematic, and the film should be an interesting and involving experience.

© Michael B. Druxman

Dudley Nichols's widely panned adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's ambitious three-part tragedy starts off on shaky footing, frontloaded with stagy exposition, but I think it settles nicely into a sort of grim, gothic melodrama centered around a fatally dysfunctional nineteenth-century New England family. Performances, especially Katina Paxinou as the treacherous Mannon matriarch, are exceptional. The English actor Michael Redgrave (The Browing Version, 1951), while a curious choice for oedipally deranged but well-meaning son Orin, is very good (his monologue on the futility of war is riveting); Rosalind Russell, on the other hand, as daughter Lavinia is tough to pin down-- is she too old for the part or spot-on as the spinster-apparent? I'm still undecided. Image's transfer is not quite pristine, but nothing to get your hackles up about. Three-plus stars. (For five-star O'Neill, treat yourself to John Frankenheimer's 'The Ice Man Cometh' available from Kino.)

Although some people have criticized some of the casting choices, to me this is a minor consideration given your choices on DVD--this or the Broadway Theater version. To me, this version is more faithful and more satisfying than the longer--and thus presumably more complete--PBS production, which would be a false assumption. I was suitably impressed with this version of the drama to want more; I thought that the public television version would be the "definitive" version. Unfortunately, I was stunned by the truncated ending that left everything that had gone before incomprehensible and moot; apparently the viewer was supposed to make his or her conclusion of how the tale would end. Is it supposed to be a "happy" ending, or is there something we are supposed to glean from Orin's wild-eyed stare? Trust me: this version is far closer to the spirit of O'Neill's play and its final tragic denouement.

The movie is probably the worst so called classic movie I have ever seen. Borderline incest and people committing suicide, this plot was aimless and pointless. I am not sure how something like this made it to the screen especially in 1947!? This thing seemed to last forever.