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By PAUL BRENNER
Nobody can beat Jason Robards Jr. as the doomed snake oil salesman of the soul,
Hickey, in Eugene O'Neill's classic play "The Iceman Cometh," but Lee Marvin
gives it the old college try in John Frankenheimer's 1973 American Film Theatre
version of the play, now available on DVD through Kino Video's American Film
Theatre Collection. The setting is Harry Hope's skid row bar in 1912, where a
collection of drunken lowlifes and losers drink themselves into stupefaction,
cherishing their failed pipe dreams to avoid the end-of-the-line reality. As
cynical anarchist Larry (Robert Ryan) declares, "To hell with the truth. The
history of the world proves that the truth has no bearing on anything. It's lie
and the pipe dream that gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us --
drunk or sober."
The denizens of the dive await the arrival of Hickey for Harry
Hope's (Fredric March) annual birthday celebration, counting on Hickey's usual
quota of wild stories and free drinks. But Hickey arrives like a phantom to
shake their souls free of their delusions. Frankenheimer glories in the artifice
of the stage with no cinematic concerns to open up the production. The
camerawork is confined to seated compositions with the howling bones of the
characters' faces creeping from the shadows like ghosts in limbo. All the
condemned have their moments -- particularly Marvin, March, Bradford Dillman,
and Jeff Bridges. But the revelatory performance belongs to Ryan, who infuses a
stridently written character with haunted eyes and a tattered soul.
This two-disc set is the complete play, logging in at 239 minutes. Disc One
features a host of special features -- the theatrical trailer, an essay by
Michael Feingold, the American Film Theatre "CineBill," a stills gallery, an
interview with co-producer Edie Landau, a '70s promotional short with AFT
founder Ely Landau, a collection of trailers of other AFT productions, and a
collection of articles and essays. |
