Sean Burns
There’s something endlessly frustrating about being a theater fan and reading about all the famous productions of plays that you’ll never be able to see. Movie buffs can always find a way to watch the classics, but legendary turns upon the stage exist only in oral histories and written accounts. I get that the whole point of live theater is that it’s ephemeral – every evening only happens the same way once – but what if there was a way to try and preserve these great plays and performances, in the process making them available to wider audiences who might not have geographical (or financial) access to Broadway?
Such was the dream of the American Film Theater, which ran for two seasons from 1973 to 1975. It was the brainchild of impresario Eli Landau and his wife Edith, who together had previously produced the popular Play of the Week series when Eli owned New York’s Channel 13. The idea here was bringing top-flight Broadway productions to movie theaters across the country, presenting the plays uncut and with the kind of marquee talent that audiences would never be able to see in a touring production. Sponsored in part by American Express, the Landaus used a subscription model to fund their films, then rented out movie theaters in which to show them, generally on quiet Mondays and Tuesdays when exhibitors would be amenable to such an experiment. Alas, the system proved unsustainable. For starters, a lot of modern studios can’t even manage to produce eight films a year, as the Landaus intended, and none of the majors were pleased about competing for screens, even on slow days. But for a little while there, they managed to bring Broadway to small towns.
The first season kicked off with the most ambitious of the American Film Theater’s offerings, a four-hour production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh headlined by The Dirty Dozen co-stars Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan, directed by John Frankenheimer. It’s a fascinating hybrid of stage and screen. The oft-stated intent of the Landau’s project was not to adapt or re-interpret these plays for a different medium, but rather to preserve them. Frankenheimer was an old hand at this kind of thing, having started out shooting stage plays for live television. The film doesn’t adhere to proscenium blocking and it’s not staged in front of an audience, but despite some striking, classically Frankenheimer compositions, it’s always very much a recording of a theatrical performance. At no point does it feel like you’re watching an actual quote-unquote movie, but you’re watching The Iceman Cometh starring Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan, and that’s sure as hell something.
Especially Ryan. The actor would be dead of cancer three months after filming finished, and his gaunt, haunted visage hangs over the play like a dark cloud of regret. I can still remember catching some of The Iceman Cometh while channel surfing as a kid, probably wondering why Lee Marvin wasn’t killing anybody, and finding myself mesmerized by this wreck of a man with eyes so sad they seemed to sink deep into the recesses of my television screen. His Larry Slade is the playwright’s obvious authorial stand-in, a melancholy drunkard whose tragic condition is that he sees through every illusion, cursed to boozy dissolution by his own self-awareness. (Though born in New York, O’Neill was so tragically Irish he could sometimes border on self-parody. But Ryan sells it.)
Set in 1912, the play takes place in the ironically named Harry Hope’s saloon and rooming house, where a gaggle of bums and rummies wait for Lee Marvin’s Hickey – a traveling salesman and life of the party who arrives every year on Harry’s birthday to bring them all on a bender for the ages. But this year Hickey shows up sober and spouting a whole new philosophy, systematically disabusing each barfly of his precious rationalizations and phony plans for tomorrow we all know damn well will never come to pass. “Pipe dreams” he calls them, and if you take a drink for every time a character uses that term you’ll be about as far along as the pickled denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon. But it turns out Hickey’s got a few secrets and illusions of his own, the point of the play being that life is unbearable without them.
Fredric March was suffering from prostate cancer and came out of retirement to play Harry, adding to the death knell air of the proceedings. Jason Robards had made the role of Hickey famous on Broadway, and previously starred in a Play of the Week production directed by Sidney Lumet. Marvin was unexpected, controversial casting but I find him captivating, broad and beefy with a delivery that makes Hickey’s chipper, self-improvement mottos vaguely terrifying. (He reminds me of those discomfiting early scenes in Unforgiven when Clint Eastwood’s trying to pass himself off as a regular dad. We all know what’s under the surface.) The one bum turn in the main cast comes surprisingly enough from Jeff Bridges, who had just been so terrific in John Huston’s Fat City but here overplays his guilty secret like he’s trying to make sure people in the back of the rafters will guess it long before his character’s inevitable confession.
Bridges gets tripped up trying to stake out a spot between stage acting and the close, revealing confines of the camera. The Iceman Cometh is an arduous play, not just to perform, but to watch. A three-hour edit was culled for a regular theatrical release following the National Film Theater screenings, but that’s still an awful long time to spend in a dingy room with a bunch of bellowing drunks. Yet Ryan never needs to raise his voice. He has his own gravitational force, pulling your attention even when sitting in the background of other actors’ arias. His still, soulful performance feels like a last will and testament, the preservation of which proves the value of the Landaus’ project, even if an American Film Theater proved to be a pipe dream.
“The Iceman Cometh” is streaming on Tubi and Kino Film Collection.
