Word: lumet
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Journey was produced on Broadway in 1956, three years after the playwright's death. Translated to the screen by Director Sidney Lumet, who has added nothing to O'Neill's playscript and taken very little away, Journey provides a raw red slice of family life, liberally garnished with rotgut, morphine, vitriol and sour grapes, that takes more than three hours (allowing intermission) to digest. But it feeds the inner...
...faithfully did Producer Landau and Director Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men) adhere to the original that only eleven pages of the text were cut to get the film down to three hours. The play, a long slice of O'Neill self-fictionalized autobiography, deals with the bedeviled Tyrone family-the mother a pitiful dope addict, the father a stingy sot, the younger son a tuberculosis victim, and the elder son a cynical lush...
...Ordeal. French critics took Journey to task for its faithfulness to the stage version, complaining that the film was a "slavishly unimaginative transposition of theater to screen." To foreigners, the torrential flow of talk, which O'Neill uses to bludgeon home his message, seemed merely an ordeal. Lumet replied: "I believe there is room for literature on the screen." But the format seemed to have inspired Journey's stars. Last week's Cannes Festival jury awarded a collective top-acting prize to Journey's four stars-though they had to share their honors with A Taste...
Journey had been bid for by most major studios (with offers as high as $500,000 for the script alone), but Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, widow of the playwright, guarded her husband's works diligently. She was so impressed by the Landau-Lumet production of The Iceman Cometh on television's Play of the Week series that she entrusted to Landau the TV-movie rights to a sizable O'Neill portfolio: all of the plays that have reverted to her control. Landau hopes soon to film more O'Neill, with top casts and directors...
...View from the Bridge. Playwright Arthur Miller's attempt to find Greek tragedy in cold-water Flatbush makes about as much sense as building a brownstone Parthenon, but Director Sidney Lumet has filmed the play with pace and intelligence, and Actor Raf Vallone, as the stevedore hero, has the brute force of a cargo hook...