'Mourning Becomes Electra' at the Astor

When the public and the critics decided back in 1931 that they liked "Mourning Becomes Electra," they were welcoming the most ambitions, and perhaps even the most dramatically effective effort ever seen in the American theater. The play, a modern version of Aeschylus' resounding and grisly trilogy, "The Oresteia," lasted five hours, during which there were four violent deaths, a number of suggestions of incest, and scarcely a letup in the terrible tension. Now comes the movie. No concessions have been made to the public's sentimentality, and the compression of the film to two and a half hours makes the experience if anything more painfully intense.

"Mourning Becomes Electra" can hardly claim to be entertainment. It can be compared neither to the Hitchcock thriller that also mixes psychology and murder, nor to the "good" European film, also dramatic--but on purely human, and therefore familiar, terms. "Electra" is all O'Neill--deeply emotional, sonorous, and occasionally pretentious. Much of the picture consists of agitated, often repetitive talk, and even the general excellence of the acting cannot always keep the audience fascinated by the tortured characters who seem to keep themselves busy day and night expiating the guilt of their ancestors.

O'Neill employed the classical plot as a framework in which he could examine dramatically the suppressed guilt he saw in the Puritan mind. The murder and desire for revenge that divides the austere Mannon family into two camps is also the conflict between Puritanical repression and the open sensuality of the foreigner. Except for details of place and time, O'Neill has not had to change Aeschylus' story at all: the Trojan War has become the Civil War, and Agemmemnon is now the victorious General Ezra Mannon.

Exceptional acting in the main roles overcomes the picture's constant danger of falling into absurdity. Katina Paxinou plays Ezra Mannon's voluptuous, murderous wife with such a convincing mixture of malice and weakness that one forgets completely that the character is itself unrealistic and even ludicrous. Her murder of Ezra is revenged by her two children, the weak Orin, and the strong Lavina (the Electra of Aeschylus). After killing their mother's lover and making her commit suicide, they are obsessed by their own guilt, and Orin, who is played superbly by Michael Redgrave, commits suicide himself, while Lavinia, played by Rosalind Russell with what is probably the best acting of her career, retires to the Mannon mansion to spend the rest of her life suffering for her ancestors' misdoings. The conflict of the picture is seen complete in Lavinia's mind, for she, first a Puritanical Mannon, becomes more and more like her mother, although she finally rejects her last chance of marriage.

The major faults of "Mourning Becomes Electra" are its length and its unrelieved intensity. One either takes O'Neill on his own terms or doesn't, but anyone with a glimmer of affection for America's Great Dramatist should enjoy this, his supreme theatrical achievement. It has certainly been provided with the best in direction, photography, and period atmosphere.