Two Photoplays by Eugene O'Neill: The Hairy Ape and Desire Under the Elms, November 1926

In 1926 Eugene O'Neill wrote screen treatments of two of his most successful and celebrated plays, The Hairy Ape and Desire Under the Elms. Brought to public attention in 1928 through a summary offered by Richard Watts Jr. in the New York Herald Tribune, they were for a long time considered "lost" or "burned." They are presented here in full for the first time. These "photoplays" offer evidence of O'Neill's clearly growing sense of film form and its possibilities. This "cinematic" O'Neill would be one of immanence rather than transcendence, of surface folding, impersonal forces and singularities, rather than bodies sheltering metaphysical depths.