AH WILDERNESS (1935)

Smartly trimmed & ‘opened up’ by husband/wife writing team Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett, directed & shot (partly on location in Mass.) with honeyed beauty & affection by Clarence Brown & Clyde De Vinna, Eugene O’Neill’s rose-tinted pastorale on his small town coming-of-age summer before college in 1906 is one of those gentle, prestige stage works you don’t expect to offer more than modest chuckles of recognition. Surprise!, the play and sentiments hold up beautifully; real laughs in one hilarious set piece after another. (High School Commencement Exercises; a disastrous family dinner; a reluctant Birds & the Bees talk; et al.) Then infinitely touching at the end as patient Dad & rebellious son dig deep enough to uncover a bond of love they’d almost forgotten. O’Neill rarely works so well on screen. (Try John Ford’s THE LONG VOYAGE HOME/’40 for O’Neill’s favorite film adaptation.) Wallace Beery shambles a bit as bilious Uncle Sid, but gets his laughs and knows how to use his bulk to keep a bit of serious threat to the drinking. While father-of-the-family Lionel Barrymore (in a role spotted for Will Rogers before his death) keeps his grumpy mannerisms entirely in check, pitch-perfect throughout. So too the rest of the cast, particularly Aline MacMahon as Uncle Sid’s long-suffering intended. An O’Neill favorite from DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS and BEYOND THE HORIZON on stage, she seems to intuit the heartbreak & tragedy beneath the glad-wrappings that would surface twenty years on as LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT.*

LINK: Orson Welles and the Mercury Players did a tab version for radio in 1939 with Welles playing teenage son Richard, much as he had when they did Booth Tarkinton’s PENROD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79dx1RQHwFI

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The play acquires all sorts of undertones (and overtones) after seeing LONG DAYS JOURNEY. They’ve even been performed in alternating rep, but always with the parallel roles messed up. Only Dad and O’Neill alter ego Richard Miller stay the same. JOURNEY’s addicted mother lives inside Aunt Lily (here MacMahon) and O’Neill’s older brother isn’t the older brother seen here (a small role), but Uncle Sid.

DOUBLE-BILL: Twice musicalized: M-G-M flopped with SUMMER HOLIDAY/’48, brilliantly directed on a technical level by Rouben Mamoulian, but to little effect with an unmemorable score, and a miscast Mickey Rooney, bumped up from the kid brother he’s just right for here to the lead. Then a near miss on B’way as TAKE ME ALONG, with Robert Morse, Walter Pidgeon & Jackie Gleason’s Uncle Sid. A born O’Neill player, what a Hickey Gleason would have made in THE ICEMAN COMETH. For a tiny taste of what might have been, see Gleason in an odd little film called PAPA’S DELICATE CONDITION/’63 with him singing ‘Call Me Irresponsible.’