The New Pictures

Mourning Becomes Electra (RKO Radio). The eye glides like a skiff across the black, lurching waters of a New England harbor. The sound track blares the black, lurching music of the chantey, Shenandoah. And on the screen the dreadful, faintly ludicrous enginery of Eugene O'Neill's tragedy of incest lurches, and begins.

The Mannons were the first family of a small New England seaport of 1865. Through the body of their Freudian existence, O'Neill has rammed the misfitting dramatic skeleton of the Greek trilogy, Oresteia.

An unfaithful wife murders her husband, just home from the war, whereupon her daughter, who has always loved father as immoderately as she has loathed mother, persuades brother to murder mother's lover. When mother hears of this event (from her son's cruel lips), she shoots herself. Her monstrously affectionate children then suffer a monstrous expiation. Demented by remorse and ingrown desire, the son shoots himself in order to join mother. Daughter determines to "live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die!"

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.

Nonetheless, O'Neill is one of the finest theatrical craftsmen of his day, and Electra has a gnashing vitality. The cinemadaption is, as Playwright O'Neill himself concedes, "magnificent." The rough edges of the incestuous theme have been ground smooth in the dialogue without losing a jot of theatrical shock. The Grecian mood, though it echoes rather tinnily through the New England characters, reverberates grandly on the super-loud sound track, in what O'Neill calls the "sumptuous simplicity" of the Mannon mansion, in the classic drape of the costumes, in the still, pure lighting of the picture.

The film also boasts some fine performances, notably Rosalind Russell as the cold-blooded daughter and Katina Paxinou as the hot-blooded mother.* Michael Redgrave, as the unweaned son, illumines a tortuous, hazily written role with great imagination. Raymond Massey, as the statue-warm father, acts with variety and sensitivity. Leo Genn may not be the romantic Adam that O'Neill had in mind, but he is still entirely plausible. There are several minor quibbles but only one broad complaint to be lodged with the moviemakers. The film is far too long (2 hrs. 59 min.).

All praise and blame for a daring effort belong to Dudley Nichols. O'Neill, an old friend, would not permit the film to be made unless Nichols produced, directed and wrote the script. All credit for risking $2,250,000 in the venture belongs to RKO, which may have some trouble getting its money back. As one critic put it: "Average moviegoers are going to talk back to this picture."

Producer Nichols disagrees: "I think they'll accept it. It'll be a road show with Theatre Guild backing. It might even become a cultural 'must.' If not--well, sometimes our greatest [financial] failures give the films their greatest vitality."

Cass Timberlane (MGM) should refine the judgment of readers who did not like the Sinclair Lewis novel, but thought that it would make a good movie script, anyhow. It doesn't.

After expertly filleting the slender satiric backbone out of the book, M-G-M evidently expected to be left with some meaty, salable sentiment. What remains is a fatty mass of banality about a soap-operatic small-town judge (Spencer Tracy) who marries a girl (Lana Turner) young enough to be his daughter, and has trouble keeping her interested.

Out of a disastrous awe for the author of several better books (Main Street, Babbitt), the film has accentuated the banality with loving care--as in an exchange between Tracy and Turner concerning wondrous Manhattan (She: "Gee! And to think they got all this from the Indians for only $24." He: "And a bottle of rum. Ha! Ha!")

Spencer Tracy understandably doesn't seem to believe in what he is doing. Lana Turner, according to the Hollywood grapevine, "emerges" as an actress in this picture. Some moviegoers may feel that she merely protrudes.

The Upturned Glass (Rank; Universal-International) symbolizes a frail human vessel, chipped with rough handling, which stands upturned and jagged in the midst of life. The vessel in this case is a gifted, high-strung surgeon (James Mason), separated from his wife and in love with a married woman (Rosamond John). In order to avoid damage to her husband and daughter, they break off their affair. She promptly jumps out of a window.

Or was she pushed? The distraught surgeon discovers that she was driven to suicide by a pickerel-hearted sister-in-law (Pamela Kellino). He then coldly lures sister-in-law into the dead woman's room and throws her out the same window. Next he packs the body into his car and hares off into the night and fog to dispose of it.

On the road he picks up another doctor, gets involved in an emergency case, stays to operate and (with loud scratching of pens on his heavenly balance sheet) saves a life for the one he has taken.

Confronted with the corpse he has neglected to hide, Dr. Mason protests: "It's justice." "It's paranoia," retorts his fellow doctor. Convinced that cracked vessels should be "thrown away" before they can do more harm, Dr. Mason jumps off a cliff.

All in all, the movie is a little too clever. The screen play, by Actress Kellino (Mrs. Mason offscreen) and John P. Monaghan, polishes a bright idea to the point of flashiness. The dialogue is excellent, the camera work imaginative, the cutting so rhythm-conscious that the film has a faintly singsong quality. The picture even shows good taste to a fault. In polite concern to grant the intelligence of moviegoers, Actor-Producer Mason has underplayed so drastically that his surgeon fails to exhibit enough intensity. As a result, the whole last reel of the film groans like a car trying to do 80 in low gear.

*Greta Garbo, 42, turned down the Paxinou role because she could not bring herself to play the mother of Rosalind Russell, 39.

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