A stylish show with great performances of the best actors is not enough to varnish over the shortcomings of this mammoth mummy version of a great story. If you know the Aeschylus original, you just have to compare him with O'Neill and find O'Neill dwarfed to almost nothing.
The Aeschylus play dramatizes a true story of flesh and blood and towering passion, Agamemnon is the lord of the world and returns home after ten years of absence in war with even a prisoner for a mistress, and his wife and queen Clytamnestra axes him to death in his bath out of long built up fury. She murders the mistress too. Her children are Electra and Orestes, and there is a younger daughter as well. Orestes has a close childhood friend Pylades, who helps Orestes and Electra to avenge their father. Orestes kills both his mother and his mother's lover, and that's the story.
There is no Pylades in the O'Neill version and no younger sister. There is no chorus, which is vital in the Greek play for reflecting universal sentiment, and no poetry. Pylades is replaced by Kirk Douglas, who loves Electra but ultimately abandons her to her mourning.
The axing of Agamemnon is by O'Neill replaced by Mrs Mannon stealing poison into her husband's medicine, who suffers from heart failure.
Raymond Massey is impressing as usual as the general, Rosalind Russell gives her life's performance as Electra finally sealing herself up in mourning when both her mother and brother have shot themselves, she is actually innocent to any crime in the family while she accepts all the blame all the same, Michael Redgrave makes another of his many virtuoso performances of eccentricity and madness, Kirk Douglas is himself, Leo Genn is the murdered lover but don't get much to do or say before he is murdered, while perhaps the most impressing is Katina Paxinou as the mother, the only convincing character in this film, for her beauty and very expressive acting, more evident in her vibrations than in her talk.
It's an interesting film, of course, but it's like a stranded whale, hopelessly dead and morbid and void of the original Greek zest, which is preserved and delivered only by Katina Paxinou.
In brief, Aeschylus is to be preferred to this banal americanization of a great story reduced to petty humdrum provincialism. Not even the music constantly repeating itself manages to bring this show to any inspiring level. It's worth seeing though for the splendid dresses of the 1860s. The director did not make another film.
The Aeschylus play dramatizes a true story of flesh and blood and towering passion, Agamemnon is the lord of the world and returns home after ten years of absence in war with even a prisoner for a mistress, and his wife and queen Clytamnestra axes him to death in his bath out of long built up fury. She murders the mistress too. Her children are Electra and Orestes, and there is a younger daughter as well. Orestes has a close childhood friend Pylades, who helps Orestes and Electra to avenge their father. Orestes kills both his mother and his mother's lover, and that's the story.
There is no Pylades in the O'Neill version and no younger sister. There is no chorus, which is vital in the Greek play for reflecting universal sentiment, and no poetry. Pylades is replaced by Kirk Douglas, who loves Electra but ultimately abandons her to her mourning.
The axing of Agamemnon is by O'Neill replaced by Mrs Mannon stealing poison into her husband's medicine, who suffers from heart failure.
Raymond Massey is impressing as usual as the general, Rosalind Russell gives her life's performance as Electra finally sealing herself up in mourning when both her mother and brother have shot themselves, she is actually innocent to any crime in the family while she accepts all the blame all the same, Michael Redgrave makes another of his many virtuoso performances of eccentricity and madness, Kirk Douglas is himself, Leo Genn is the murdered lover but don't get much to do or say before he is murdered, while perhaps the most impressing is Katina Paxinou as the mother, the only convincing character in this film, for her beauty and very expressive acting, more evident in her vibrations than in her talk.
It's an interesting film, of course, but it's like a stranded whale, hopelessly dead and morbid and void of the original Greek zest, which is preserved and delivered only by Katina Paxinou.
In brief, Aeschylus is to be preferred to this banal americanization of a great story reduced to petty humdrum provincialism. Not even the music constantly repeating itself manages to bring this show to any inspiring level. It's worth seeing though for the splendid dresses of the 1860s. The director did not make another film.