Word: aeschylus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When the public and the critics decided back in 1931 that they liked "Mourning Becomes Electra," they were welcoming the most ambitions, and perhaps even the most dramatically effective effort ever seen in the American theater. The play, a modern version of Aeschylus' resounding and grisly trilogy, "The Oresteia," lasted five hours, during which there were four violent deaths, a number of suggestions of incest, and scarcely a letup in the terrible tension. Now comes the movie. No concessions have been made to the public's sentimentality, and the compression of the film to two and a half hours makes...
...Puritan mind. The murder and desire for revenge that divides the austere Mannon family into two camps is also the conflict between Puritanical repression and the open sensuality of the foreigner. Except for details of place and time, O'Neill has not had to change Aeschylus' story at all: the Trojan War has become the Civil War, and Agemmemnon is now the victorious General Ezra Mannon...
...plays Ezra Mannon's voluptuous, murderous wife with such a convincing mixture of malice and weakness that one forgets completely that the character is itself unrealistic and even ludicrous. Her murder of Ezra is revenged by her two children, the weak Orin, and the strong Lavina (the Electra of Aeschylus). After killing their mother's lover and making her commit suicide, they are obsessed by their own guilt, and Orin, who is played superbly by Michael Redgrave, commits suicide himself, while Lavinia, played by Rosalind Russell with what is probably the best acting of her career, retires to the Mannon...
...History, gets her diary up to date, whom will she write down as the Man of the 20th Century? Barring the unlikely appearance, before 2000, of an extraordinarily effective saint or major prophet, the Man of the Century will be a German intellectual, devoted to children, caviar and Aeschylus...
Mourning Becomes Electra (produced on Broadway in 1931) was never a great play-let alone a great Greek play. But it is a play that hankers after greatness (and Greekness) like a schoolgirl with a crush on a bust of Aeschylus. By attempting to dramatize the Oedipus complex on a framework of Greek drama, O'Neill produced a travesty of Freudian thought and something like a parody of Greek tragedy...