An Eloquent Memorial

By JAY COCKS

THE ICEMAN COMETH

Directed by JOHN FRANKENHEIMER

This is the first in a series of eight presentations of the American Film Theater (TIME, Oct. 1), an intricately organized system of production and distribution designed to give stage drama new permanence on movie screens. Current plans are to schedule each of the films for a brief run on different dates in different parts of the country. After that, the American Film Theater insists, they will be taken out of circulation, never to be released again.

Success has a way of changing plans like that, and The Iceman Cometh is a success indeed. It is not merely a worthy production of a great play; it also possesses moments--most notably in the performance of Robert Ryan--of its own greatness. Altogether, it is a film of such extraordinary beauty and power that the A.F.T. would be doing both itself and the public a disservice if it quickly retired the film to a vault.

Like Arthur Penn and George Roy Hill, John Frankenheimer began his career as a television director. Though he has made some good movies since (such as The Manchurian Candidate), his staging of Iceman has the intensity and immediacy that characterized the best early TV drama. He also catches, rather better than Sidney Lumet did in his 1960 TV production for Play of the Week, the play's roiling richness, the tidal flow from realistic melodrama into tragedy.

For such a long and daunting project, Iceman was made quickly: three weeks of rehearsal, eight weeks of shooting. Occasionally the rush shows, in a composition that is a little too static or in a microphone shadow against a wall. Overall, though, Frankenheimer's production is careful and vigorous. Harry Hope's bar looks dingy but never hokey. The photography keeps the backgrounds in as sharp perspective as possible, letting each viewer select his own point of focus. In that respect, this Iceman resembles the style of Orson Welles' banquet scene in Citizen Kane, in which each face was vivid at a long table. The technique creates a pervasive sense of being enclosed that, paradoxically, never makes the eye feel cramped.

The storm center of the play is Hickey, the drummer, the shill for salvation through recognition of selfdelusion. He annihilates the pipedreams in which the patrons of Harry Hope's back room curl up like quaking children in the middle of a nightmare. Everyone in Harry Hope's place needs booze to nourish his dream, but it is the dream itself, not alcohol, that keeps them alive. Hickey, underneath his salesman's brass and chatter, needs rage, contempt and anguish to galvanize the entire play.

Lee Marvin's Hickey has the hype and the patter but only a portion of the necessary bravura. He seems to be wrestling with the vivid memory of Jason Robards in the same role, a performance of such passion that it became definitive. It may be unfair for an actor to carry such a burden, but Marvin does not carry it well. His Hickey is tentative, almost halting.

This does not so much throw the production out of balance as readjust the emphasis. Hickey does not stand apart, he becomes just another victim. The weight of the play falls on Robert Ryan, whose portrayal of Larry Slade is magnificent. Slade, the rummy poet anarchist, the man who likes to pretend he watches life with cynical dispassion from the grandstand, who claims to invite and welcome death, is a role full of traps. It is hard to separate Slade's sodden grandiloquence ("Go, for the love of Christ, you mad tortured bastard, for your own sake!") from Eugene O'Neill's own penchant for overstuffing his dialogue. Ryan does it by animating and underscoring every line, each inflection with a vast, crumbling dignity, a lacerating honesty.

The rest of the movie is meticulously cast: Fredric March is a splendid Harry Hope, Jeff Bridges a fine, driven Parritt. Bradford Dillman, Moses Gunn, Evans Evans, Tom Pedi and John McLiam are all excellent. Yet the movie belongs most securely to Robert Ryan, and it is an eloquent memorial to his talent. Ryan, who died of cancer in July, was ailing while he was making Iceman. In the circumstances, it would be easy to sentimentalize his performance. But such a gesture would diminish its greatness. With the kind of power and intensity that is seldom risked, much less realized, it has its own pride and stature.

Jay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.