poetcomic1

This is as delicate and affectionate a play as 'Ah, Wilderness', the 'comic valentine' O'Neill wrote to the year 1906. This is above all a heart-breaking farewell, to O'Neill's older brother who died an alcoholic.

If you know Long Day's Journey Into Night, this play takes place some years later for the Tyrone/ O'Neil family. The mother two years after the events in Long Day's Journey went into a convent in New York and kicked her drug addiction for good and recovered her lost faith 'she had in her convent days'. Then she and. Jamie were together and he stopped drinking. Jamie began drinking again and died soon after.

Jason Robards is blessed/cursed with the highly developed character of Jamie here too but in this production he shades and softens the self hate and despair with a subtle, wistful longing for forgiveness and for faith. He brilliantly makes us see the Broadway drunken cynicism beginning to crumble and a wounded, child-like self glimpsed underneath.

NO ONE ever did what Colleen Dewhurst does in this production. She is a FORCE OF NATURE. Cherry Jones a great actress did an elegantly nuanced Josie but it just didn't match Colleen.

Josie is one of the most audacious creations in modern theater: mythological almost, The Virgin Mother, the rough and bawdy virgin and her whole role in the play comes down to her being able to embody 'the breast on which the wounded son can find forgiveness and peace'. Dewhurst moves so instinctively and with an animal grace - all the contrived method actors and carefully thought out bits of business look silly as I watched her in this.

I can't help thinking that Jason Robards really did find peace for the character of Jamie he had lived with so many hundreds of soul-scorching performances and for the misery of his own drinking in real life. It almost seems that Robards is giving Jaimie peace on her breast.

'Hoppy' was not a writer or gag man but an early master of the one line pitch, he had an incredible nose for money making ideas. He stopped Zanuck once in the hallway and poking him in the shoulder and said,. TYRONE POWER.....call it A YANK IN THE R. A. F. Zanuck was immediately smitten with the idea and though not a masterpiece it was so damned TIMELY that it made a LOT of money.

The Hoppy we have to thank for this movie is Bob Hopkins. Bernie Hyman the producer was in conference when Bob Hopkins poked his hed in the door pointed at Hyman and said "Jeanette Macdonald is a dance hall girl, Clark Gable her boss and Spencer Tracy is a priest.... they all get caught in the effing San Francisco earthquake. Call it San Francisco and you're IN." Hoppy was not a writer, not a gagmen but what we would call today a genius of 'high concept, the one sentence pitch. This movie is his vision.