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3. A Vicious Cycle at Sea
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3 A Vicious Cycle at Sea Fog, fog, fog, all bloody time. You can’t see vhere you vas going, no. Only dat ole davil, sea—she knows! —Eugene O’Neill, “Anna Christie” Eugene O’Neill didn’t like the theater very much, but he liked the cinema even less. Ironically, among all the screen adaptations of his work, he truly loved John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home. First of all, the movie derived from four humble one-acts written very early in the playwright’s career, not from such later splashy successes as Strange Interlude, The Great God Brown, or Mourning Becomes Electra . Second, although O’Neill always insisted that theatrical productions follow his texts faithfully, Ford’s film hardly paid slavish attention to the source material . Surprisingly, perhaps, in this case O’Neill responded very enthusiastically to the liberal treatment given his little plays. After reading the script in advance of the film’s release in 1940, O’Neill congratulated screenwriter Dudley Nichols in a letter which included the following statement: “I believe a picture of a play should concentrate on doing those things which the stage cannot do. Then a balance can be struck in which the picture medium brings fresh drama to the play to take the place of the stuff which belongs to the stage and cannot be done as well in pictures” (Selected Letters 503). The fact that O’Neill clearly loved the film yet felt entirely unthreatened by its success suggests that he believed the two enterprises were entirely separate. A synergistic relationship between theater and film, O’Neill says, works to strengthen the understanding and independence of both forms. Comparing The Long Voyage Home to the source plays from which the movie is taken builds a case for the unique properties and capabilities of drama. It is commonplace to assume that film adaptations “open up” a drama with a more expansive treatment of space and time. Surprisingly, Ford’s film defies that expectation and, in the process, shows what O’Neill’s little plays do. And thus the source plays of the fine Ford film, all written when O’Neill was a relatively unknown talent, reveal the early signs of later techniques perfected in a mature masterpiece such as The Iceman Cometh and strive to transcend theatrical limitations. 36 / Chapter 3 In his letter to Nichols, O’Neill did not elaborate further about those things on film “which the stage cannot do,” or which aspects of theater “cannot be done as well in pictures.” Several years later he maintained that the “talkless parts” were the high points of the film for him. That he liked it at all is truly remarkable . Although America’s only Nobel Prize–winning playwright liked the idea of theater and film very much, the practice of the commercial Broadway “Show Shop” and popular Hollywood claptrap appalled him. As early as 1924, he announced, “I don’t go to the theatre because I can always do a better production in my mind than the one on stage. I have a better time and I am not bothered by the audience” (qtd. in Cargill, Fagin, and Fisher 112). While he regularly failed to attend the opening nights of his own plays, he did work on productions during their rehearsal periods. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the film adaptations of any of his plays and regarded Hollywood as merely a source of income. Even this detached demeanor, however, did not come without regrets. O’Neill tried to barter the sale of Mourning Becomes Electra for $150,000, the price for which he was apparently willing to suffer the consequences of having to endure the film. In his letter to Theresa Helbrun in 1944, O’Neill appealed to her memory of the play’s stage triumph at the Theatre Guild: “Do we want to let Hollywood debase (as it must, being at heart, even with the best intentions, merely a commercial mob amusement racket) the Mourning Becomes Electra in our memories, the achievement that had great significance, whereas the picture will have none?” (Selected Letters 558).1 About the filming of The Hairy Ape, O’Neill expressed further regrets about relinquishing the rights to one of his very favorite plays and fondest memories in the theater: “I didn’t really want to sell because I knew no one in Hollywood had the guts to film my play, do it as symbolic expressionism as it should be...