“PIPE DREAMS”

By Raymond Benson

Back in 1973, producer Ely Landau and his wife Edie launched a daring and unprecedented cinema series that played in the U.S. for two “seasons,” with a total of fourteen titles (but only thirteen were shown), all renowned works—classic and modern—originally produced on the stage. It was called the American Film Theatre. (A review of a DVD box set of the entire series appeared on Cinema Retro previously. Click here to read.)

The concept tried something different. The directive was to take a great stage play, not change a word, and in most cases, use the actual play script as the screenplay. The next step was to hire an accomplished film director to interpret the text for the film medium but stay faithful to the play. Sometimes the director was the same person who helmed the original stage production. A further step was to persuade the original casts from the Broadway or London productions of those plays to star in the film; or, when that wasn’t possible, to cast big-name Hollywood or British actors. Thus, the result was indeed a filmed play—but you as an audience member wouldn’t be watching it from the middle of the orchestra or from the side or from the first balcony; instead you were up close and personal in a realistically-presented world (on studio sets and/or real interior or exterior locations)—just like in “regular” movies. You had the best seat in the house, so to speak, but there’s no proscenium arch. It’s a movie. But it’s a play.

Kino Lorber has slowly been re-releasing the movies from the American Film Theatre in individual packages, upgraded to high definition Blu-ray. One recent title is the picture that opened the series, and it’s one of the best. The Iceman Cometh, from the play by Eugene O’Neill, is directed by the formidable John Frankenheimer (the script was adapted by Thomas Quinn Curtiss), and is a remarkably faithful rendition of this lengthy powerhouse of a stage drama. While the filmmakers indeed made some cuts to the text, the picture still runs just a minute or two less than four hours, and that’s not including two built-in intermissions! (Have you ever seen a film in a theater with two intermissions? It’s not unusual for the theatre, though!)

This is drama with a capital “D.” You get to spend the four hours with a bunch of hopeless alcoholics in a dark, decrepit Irish bar in the big city and listen to their tales of woe and “pipe dreams”—the theme running through the piece that highlights the hopes and wasted lives of men and women on the fringe. The play originally premiered in the mid-1940s, about a decade after AA became a thing. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun? Stop! It’s true that the tale is terribly depressing, but Iceman is such a masterwork in writing and acting that you come out enlightened and, yes, changed.

An amazing cast dominates the production. Lee Marvin stars in the showy role of Hickey, a traveling salesman who has gone on the wagon and is usually the life of the party when he comes into town—but now he’s preaching abstinence to the motley crew who doesn’t want to hear it. Fredric March, in his last screen appearance, plays Harry Hope, the owner of the bar, but he’s just as damaged and forlorn as the rest of his clientele. Robert Ryan (who co-starred with Marvin in the classics Bad Day at Black Rock and The Professionals), also in his last film role, steals the movie in an amazing performance as Larry Slade, a bitter anarchist and journalist who is really the protagonist of the story and through whose eyes we navigate this precarious jungle of fog and booze. A very young Jeff Bridges, only a couple of years after his big splash in The Last Picture Show, plays Don Parritt, the son of Larry’s girlfriend—a woman who has been arrested for her political activities.

Those are the main four genius thespians on display here, but a supporting cast consists of the likes of Bradford Dillman, Moses Gunn, Sorrell Brooke, Clifton James, Tom Pedi, and Martyn Green, plus the three streetwalking ladies who congregate and cavort with the men, played by Evans Evans, Hildy Brooks, and Nancy Juno Dawson.