Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

The 1973 Broadway revival of "A Moon for the Misbegotten," one of the plays about Irish-Americans in Connecticut in the late-19th and early-20th centuries by Nobel Prize winner Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) electrified audiences. The original Broadway production in 1958 with Cyril Cusack, Franchot Tone, and Wendy Hiller had flopped. Frequent O'Neill director José Quintero had a dream cast of Jason Robards Jr., Colleen Dewhurst, and Ed Flanders. Quintero, Dewhurst, and Flanders all won Tonys. The three of them and Robards were nominated for Emmies for the 1975 ABC "Broadway Classics" filming of the play. Only Flanders won (the first of three Emmies for him, the other two for playing Dr. Westphal on "St. Elsewhere").

O'Neill reportedly felt that his portrayal of his alcoholic older brother Jamie (ca. 1923) as Jamie Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey into the Night" (ca. 1912) was too brutal and wanted to soften it in "Moon," which is set after the death of the parents, while Jamie is waiting for the estate to clear probate. The Jamie of "Moon," played by Robards who played the younger alcoholic in the 1962 Sidney Lumet film of "Long Day's Journey") remains an alcoholic weakling who hates himself for being a drunkard and drinks because he hates himself. I don't see the Jamie of "Moon" as all that much more sympathetic, especially since Robards was more bombastic in "Moon" than he had been in "Journey."

Although Robards received top billing, the play is much more about Josie Hogan, the sort of Amazon played by the formidable Colleen Dewhurst (1924-1991), who was primarily a stage actress but reached a larger audience in the last years of her life playing the mother of Murphy Brown (for which she won two of the four Emmies she was awarded between 1986 and 1991). Josie calls herself a big cow and looms over her father (Flanders playing Phil) but is very gentle with Jamie, though she has elaborate, stylized joking relationships with both men — and a lot of truth is fobbed off as jokes by all three.

Phil is concerned or at least pretends to be concerned that when Jamie receives his inheritance (in a matter of days), he will sell the farm on which Phil and his daughter (the sons all having fled, the last one in the first scene) are tenants. He would like the get his hands on the inheritance through Josie. Jamie is very obviously drinking himself to death.

Phil tells Josie that Jamie is going to sell their farm to a Yankee would-be squire (a rich Standard Oil executive) so that she will ensnare him. In the course of the long second act in which Josie starts to get Jamie to pass out and to bed her, so that in the morning Phil can "surprise" them in bed together, she learns that Jamie had no intention of selling them out. She also realizes that it is too late to save Jamie, that his soul has already died. Dewhurst's line reading and face and body reveal increasing insight into what her father and Jamie are up to (down to might be more accurate!).

Especially in their final scene, Flanders does a great job of showing that there is a heart beneath his gruff exterior, and that he knows when he is playing the role in ritualized verbal combat with Josie. The Tony and Emmy he received look to me to be fully deserved. Some times award-givers get things right!

No attempt was made to get beyond the single set of the play or to "cinematize" it. I think that Robards is too hot for the cool medium of television. Occasionally, if less often, Dewhurst was too. Early on Flanders seems "stagy," though his final scene in which the bombast is turned on and off and Dewhurst's Josie is subdued by her sad realization that Jamie is lost works very well on the small screen.

Closeups are used sparingly, but there is enough cutting to avoid seeming visually static — in a one-set play in which there is little action or even movement. In much of the second act, Jamie is lying in Josie's lap.

The production runs five minutes over the two hour mark. Although I think this is too long, I am mindful that "The Iceman Cometh, "Mourning Becomes Electra," and Long Day's Journey Into Night" (the full version; Lumet made cuts in the screen adaptation) are twice as long. In writing about the play, I suggested that, as usual for O'Neill, there is too much of good things: the lyricism, the compassion, and the stylized combative "joking" relationships.

The play and telecast are emotionally exhausting for the audience as well as for the performers. It is more so in the theater, but I am very glad that the definitive performances of Dewhurst, Flanders, and Robards in Quintero's production was preserved.

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O'Neill was a very famous and honored dramatist during his lifetime, winning five Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His plays tend to be daunting in length and emotion wringers. What has endured and sustained his reputation are the plays about Irish immigrants and their children uneasily settled in New England that he wrote at Tao House (near Danville, on the eastern slope of the coastal mountains east of the San Francisco Bay) after his withdrawal from the New York theatrical world: "A Moon for the Misbegotten," "A Touch of the Poet," "Long Day's Journey Into Night," along with booze-soaked "The Iceman Cometh," which, unlike the others was performed on Broadway during O'Neill's lifetime (in 1946).

©  2008, Stephen O. Murray

This is a contribution to CaptainD's good movie writeoff.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD