Mourning Becomes Electra Mourning Becomes Electra Image 1947 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 173, 159, 105, 121 min. / Street Date December 21, 2004 / 19.99 Starring Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, Raymond Massey, Katina Paxinou, Leo Genn, Kirk Douglas, Nancy Coleman, Henry Hull Cinematography George Barnes Production Designer William Flannery Art Direction Albert S. D'Agostino Film Editor Roland Gross, Chandler House Original Music Richard Hageman From the play by Eugene O'Neill Written, Produced and Directed by Dudley Nichols
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson Mourning Becomes Electra is as about as close as Eugene O'Neill ever got to the commercial mainstream. The playwright's lengthy and sober works have always been the pet projects of creative theatrical and film directors, with little attention paid to their commercial possibilities. This 1947 film version of O'Neill's harsh drama of parent-child relationships plays like two grim Greek tragedies rolled into one. The curse on the rich New England Mannon family lies in their bloodline and not outside influences; and the fate that befalls them seems to grow from within like a cancer. Screenwriter Dudley Nichols took Mourning Becomes Electra as a personal quest, somehow finding the money for distribution through RKO, with all of that studio's technical expertise behind the camera. He also assembled a knockout cast that combined great talent from the stage and films. It's a fairly unique show - two hours and forty minutes of stylized drama. Synopsis: The Civil War is over and General Ezra Mannon (Raymond Massey) comes home, bringing with him the son, Orin (Michael Redgrave), that he forced to join in the fighting. Back in the Mannon mansion trouble is brewing. Wife Christine (Katina Paxinou) has been seeing an adventurous sea captain, Adam Brant (Leo Genn). Unfortunately, Ezra's adoring daughter Lavinia (Rosalind Russell) has found out about this and is determined to split the family apart, as she's in love with Brant as well. The intrigues reach back into the portraits on the Mannon wall, for it turns out that Brant is the illegitimate son of Ezra's brother; Christine plans to use the sea captain for a revenge of her own. Mourning Becomes Electra doesn't unspool like a typical Hollywood film of 1947. The titles play out over an image of stormy seas, while the film's theme song Shenandoah is sung by a choir. The contrast between the exterior appearance of the Mannon family and the festering trouble within is immediately apparent. O'Neill's stage play is highly theatrical and the movie makes no attempt to disguise it. The acting is stylized toward broader mannerisms and there are few subtleties - the actors' reactions are left right out in the open. Since every one of the characters has their own private obsession, there are few onlookers to provide a neutral point of view. Peter and Hazel Niles (Kirk Douglas and Nancy Coleman) are present while a lot of the twisted family trouble take place, but neither represents an author's point of view. This is indeed the kind of play where people arrive, make speeches, sit, stand, and exit; nobody eats a meal or reads a book, as they're all caught up in the tension of the moment. The focus of the story is on treachery and the semi-incestuous relationships that perpetuate what amounts to a family curse. Rosalind Russell's Lavinia is inflamed by hatred for her unfaithful mother, and dotes on her imperfect father as if he were unquestionably pure. Her scheming sets most of the misery in motion. Michael Redgrave's Orin, the war-wounded "weak" brother, idolizes his mother and takes her side on everything, while naturally resenting his domineering, overpowering father. This obviously unhealthy Electra - Oedipus situation is a classical contrivance with a psychological base. Instead of developing their own personalities, the children absorb the family conflicts of the previous generation, with Lavinia 'transforming' into her stern and dictatorial father, and Orin becoming the accusing, resentful and suicidal mother. O'Neill presents the Mannon family as a war of personalities, always with the females scheming for revenge and urging others to murder. Costumes are coded light and dark to symbolize malevolence; at one point Orin sits in a tall chair and seems to become one of his own ancestors, the gallery of unhappy dead that rule the house from their portraits on the walls. Poor Adam Brant would simply like to see the good name of his wronged mother restored; his crime is to encourage the affections of both a mother and daughter, probably wishing to demonstrate his influence over the womenfolk of the family that robbed him of his birthright. That would be a "normal" family scandal, but Christine and Lavinia's hatreds are so strong, they sublimate Adam's resentment into a larger scheme of murder. The Mannon women become bloodthirsty demons while the men question their own virility or condemn themselves as weaklings unfit for living. Adam realizes he must give up sailing, for the sea shows no mercy on cowards. Mourning Becomes Electra becomes an annihilating melodrama as deadly as a film noir; the mother-daughter pair of femme fatales set loose a chain reaction of killings and remorseful suicides that leave most of the cast dead. The fire of revenge consumes the avenger as well; after plotting so murderously, Lavinia clumsily drives away her fiancee Peter with a lie about her earlier sexual transgressions. The story takes place in an America split and wounded by civil war but makes no political points specific to history except to suggest that the males destroy themselves in giant conflicts while the women undermine the social structure from within. Forbidden passion is the root of the evil, as the play makes a heavy contrast between the innocent sexuality of the Polynesians Adam has known, and the destructive repression of the New Englanders. Lavinia thinks that by untruthfully confessing to Peter that the family deaths were the result of her having an affair with a South Seas islander, she'll hide the real cause for all the horror. The supposedly compassionate Peter surprises her by being equally unforgiving of the lesser charge, and Lavinia prepares to live out her life behind closed shutters, alone and unloved. Some reviewers have said that Rosalind Russell was miscast. She's actually quite good, presuming that O'Neill and Nichols didn't want Lavinia to be likeable. The real honors go to Katrina Paxinou (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and Michael Redgrave. Paxinou sells Christine's attractiveness entirely through her acting, convincing us that she could be the love object of an experienced sea captain, and she's genuinely chilling when her eyes grow steely cold while plotting murder. This is Michael Redgrave's first American film and he gives unusual shadings to the standard weakling brother role. He doesn't overstate Orin's resentment of his father and his off-balance personality is cued by nicely timed flashes of wildness that cross his face. Redgrave's Orin is a less hysterical cousin to his mad ventriloquist in the classic (Dead of Night) of a couple of years before. Raymond Massey gives Ezra the proper granite look, and makes a touching spectacle of the old man's belated effort to find peace with his wife and family. Leo Genn (the great Starbuck of John Huston's Moby Dick) is suitably dashing and haunted as the scorned relation to the cursed House of Mannon. In one of his earliest films, Kirk Douglas plays Peter as sweet and not-too-bright, while Nancy Coleman's Hazel intuits the Mannon sickness more strongly. As befitting an O'Neill tragedy, neither of these benevolent outsiders is strong enough to have a positive effect on the story. The least engaging element in the play is the caretaker played by Henry Hull, a one-man Greek chorus existing only to provide rushed family exposition in a lengthy opening, and then to stand off to one side to calmly witness new chapters unfold in the haunted Mannon story. He's not an official 'guide,' like the narrator in , and he has no other real function except to fill in for the notable lack of servants in the Mannon house. Image's DVD of Mourning Becomes Electra is a good presentation of a movie that could have been lost years ago. An artistic experiment that probably saw only a limited release, it was subjected to a long history of shorter versions. One release cut over a third out of it. According to the IMDB, this surviving version is 14 minutes short of the original length. The full cast accounting lists quite a few characters that don't appear on screen, such as a chemist and a one-legged soldier. So there's presumably a scene where Christine gets the poison to kill Ezra, and perhaps another episode with Orin in the company of other wounded soldiers. Lavinia's early trip to New York to find her mother in the arms of Adam Brant is rushed and interrupted with clumsy flashbacks that couldn't be a part of O'Neill's play, and the rather highly-billed Sara Allgood is seen in only one shot, climbing a set of stairs. The picture quality is better than good but is not given a full polish, with a bit of dirt showing up now and then. The audio is clear; RKO's high technical standards shine through. There are also no extras. The package text calls this an uncensored version, indicating that it's longer than what's normally shown but not claiming to be the full-length original, which I think was screened at an exhaustive RKO retrospective held at the LA County Art Museum in 1977. What's really needed is something like the excellent essay in the Joan of Arc disc that detailed that film's confusing history of releases and edited versions. Mourning Becomes Electra probably has a similar story in need of telling. Image has some resourceful digital artists: the compelling cover art is a clever melding of three images seen in stills on the package back. For all we know, those stills may have been all anyone could locate for the title. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Mourning Becomes Electra rates: Movie: Very Good Video: Very Good Sound: Excellent Supplements: none Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: January 16, 2004 [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © DVDTalk.com All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use