Watch Ah, Wilderness! For Free

How sad is this?

Fantastic!

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Blistering performances.

MGM's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's classic comedy about small time life benefits from a sturdy cast, especially Spring Byington and Lionel Barrymore. There is also Mickey Rooney who gives a delightful performance as a pre-adolescent son. But it is Wallace Beery, who plays the drifter uncle, that garners the most attention. Check out the dinner table scene where Berry's character stuffs the shellfish in his mouth. And don't miss the long drunk scene, which is brilliant. Despite the antics, it is a surprisingly restrained performance.Remade by MGM, as a musical called Summer Holiday, with Mickey Rooney in a more prominent role.

Eugene O'Neill's gentle nostalgic comedy got the full blown MGM treatment with Clarence Brown guiding a topflight cast in the standard interpretation of Ah Wilderness. My only complaint is that George M. Cohan who played the father of the Miller family did not repeat his role for the screen. Cohan could not/would not do the film and his loss was an opportunity for Lionel Barrymore who did the part with a sure hand.According to a book on the Barrymore dynasty, Lionel was upset with Louis B. Mayer for whom he was usually a loyal employee when Brown under Mayer's orders tilted the film and the billing toward Wallace Beery's showier part of Barrymore's alcoholic brother-in-law. Watch the two of them in scenes together as they try and top the other. It must have been one tense set. On stage Gene Lockhart did the part of Uncle Sid.The young protagonist about whom the action swirls is middle son Eric Linden. Barrymore does some creative interrupting at his son's valedictorian address filled with radical notions. Linden is rather clumsily courting Cecilia Parker and when she puts him off he goes out on one tremendous toot, taking his uncle Beery as a role model.If there was one thing Eugene O'Neill knew from this life it was alcohol and the effects thereof. Think about all the works he did where substance abuse is at the center. His greatest play, The Iceman Cometh is set entirely in a bar.Ah Wilderness is like the rest of O'Neill's works, no real plot to them, but deep character studies from a slice of life. Ah Wilderness being a comedy probably was easier to translate to the screen, even so the play which is set entirely in the Miller living room gets moved to the graduation and later to the tavern where Linden ties one on. On stage Elisha Cook, Jr. played the clumsy son.Mickey Rooney played young son Tommy in this version. Thirteen years later when he was the other side of too old for the part he played the Eric Linden role in a musical version Summer Holiday which proved that O'Neill should not be the basis for a musical even his only comedy.After 75 years, Ah Wilderness holds up very well and I think O'Neill probably approved of this version with the caveat that it had to conform to the Code. Helen Flint's part as a prostitute who gets Linden drunk and probably gives him a tumble was cleaned up by the Breen office. Given the code parameters, Ah Wilderness was as good as it could get.

Eugene O'Neill remains, some fifty two years after his death and some eighty seven since his first plays appeared on stage, America's greatest dramatist. This is not hard to understand - no one ever dissected our personal miseries as well by laying bare his own tragedies. It is understandable that he rarely touched on comedy (it does crop up in some forms in his plays - in HUGHIE look at the way the hotel night man has some twisted hero-worship of the gambler crime kingpin Arnold Rothstein). Twice (actually) O'Neill tried comedy. First a spoof, MARCO MILLIONS about Marco Polo. The other was AH, WILDERNESS!, which was his only successful Broadway play in the 1930s - 1955. It is a lovable look at middle class, small town American family life in 1905 (about the same time that that far more horrifying version of family life, A LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, occurs). And because we know what O'Neill was going through, seeing this version is not reassuring at all. The play will amuse, but in our cynical souls we know that it is what O'Neill really needed and never got.One thing the audience never got (unfortunately) was the star of the original production. In his penultimate Broadway performance, George M. Cohan played the father, Nat Miller. The critics of 1932 raved for Cohan's meaningful and wonderful performance, but we can only read of it - he was never in the running for the movie role. He was extremely difficult to work with under other directors, and would have been hard to control. It's too bad. The original choice for the role at MGM was Will Rogers, but Rogers wanted to make a round the world plane trip with Wiley Post, and went to their joint death in a crash at Point Barrow instead. Still Lionel Barrymore is good as substitute for either Cohan or Rogers.The cast on the whole is first rate, from Barrymore and Spring Byington as the parents (note the business about the problems Barrymore has eating certain types of fish) to Wallace Beery as the inebriate uncle and Aline MacMahon as the spinster aunt. The business of the three sons, Arthur (Frank Albertson), Dick (Eric Lindon), and Tommy (Mickey Rooney), and the daughter Mildred (Bonita Granville) all helps paint a picture that is close to Norman Rockwell (although the apparently alcoholism of the uncle is troubling). But it has some terrific moments, as towards the end when Nat warns Dick about fallen women/prostitutes as "sepulchres". But with a knowledgeable audience of O'Neill fans they can put in the dead older brother who wasted his talents on booze and women, and the baby brother who died prematurely. Suddenly the glitz and glare of the 1905 small town America on the 4th of July weekend turns into the shadow world of four dead souls pursuing an endless mutual fight in a New England summer house. It is a finely made movie of MGM near it's height, but the source for all the pleasant humor of the piece has a long dark shadow that is unsettling.

I found this mildly engrossing, if a tad dated and a bit of a period piece. Certainly it's always worth watching Lionel Barrymore. But the thing I found interesting - almost disturbing, really - is the change in attitude toward alcoholism since the time this play was written. Even though Wallace Beery's character is clearly struggling with alcoholism, the scenes in which he falls off the wagon are played for straight-out laughs. The dinner scene, in particular, in which everyone at the table finds his drunkenly boorish behavior amusing, is almost painful to watch in light of how we view this affliction today.