The Iceman Cometh

The Iceman Cometh is one great film to go out on for not one, but two of the best players ever. This turned out to be the last performances for both Fredric March and Robert Ryan. In the case of Ryan he knew he was terminal and his performance has real poignancy.

Of course you can't beat the material that was given to them and the rest of the cast. It's been argued that The Iceman Cometh is the greatest work from the pen of America's greatest playwright Eugene O'Neill and I'm not going to argue the point.

Some would give the honor of O'Neill's greatest play to Long Day's Journey Into Night. That particular play was Eugene O'Neill's remembrance of his childhood and family. The Iceman Cometh is also about a family of sorts, the community that's been established around Harry Hope's waterfront bar and SRO flophouse. It's owner Harry Hope played by Fredric March, is a former Tammany politician who's not set foot outside his establishment because he's in mourning over his late wife Bessie.

The whole usual crowd of boarder/drinkers is awaiting the arrival of one of the regulars who apparently likes to go slumming there. It's Hickey, a gladhanding traveling salesman Lee Marvin who spends like a Diamond Jim Brady and is generally the life of the party. But it's a new and somber Hickey that comes to bar that day.

A stranger arrives that day also, Jeff Bridges a young anarchist is on the run he says from the Pacific Coast where his mother among others has been picked up. He's looking for an older leader of the movement Larry Slade who is played by Robert Ryan. Ryan is a beaten and tired man and of all the people in the bar he's the one with the most realistic assessment. It's the last stop for this crowd before the Grim Reaper.

But the somber Marvin, still full of salesman's guile gets them all to reassess themselves and their 'pipe dreams' even for a little while. He also reveals a terrible secret about himself and Jeff Bridges has even bigger cross to bear and Bridges can't bear it.

I was blown away by the performances of everyone in the cast. Marvin came in for some criticism at the time, attempting to serious a part and one that Jason Robards, Jr. was given acclaim for as his career role. But there was nothing wrong in Lee Marvin's performance that I could find. Young Jeff Bridges more than held his own with the veteran cast. My favorite among the supporting parts is Bradford Dillman who plays a lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law and for whatever reason, broke down and is now here.

One member of the cast in this production was in the original Broadway cast when The Iceman Cometh premiered on Broadway in 1946. That was Tom Pedi who played the bartender Rocky Pioggi who also doubled as a pimp for some prostitutes who hang out there. Next to Ryan, the women who we don't learn anything about really, seem to have the most realistic ideas about the patrons there. Pedi's performance in a part he grew to own is pretty special also.

Bridges is the outsider, he had a cause, a revolutionary cause and O'Neill in his youth hung around with that crowd as we learned in Warren Beatty's Reds. We also learned that while O'Neill liked the people he was less than optimistic about the beliefs they had. If Bridges is a failed John Reed, O'Neill in Ryan's character of Larry Slade is looking back over the years when he drank in such places as Harry Hope's. The rest of the cast is no doubt modeled after people he knew back in the day.

In his own way, O'Neill loved these people a whole lot more than he did his own family. And it's to them and for them he wrote The Iceman Cometh. And it's for us to see a small part of New York in 1912, some folks who might have passed unnoticed by time, but for the fact that a literary genius passed among them.

It was a wise decision on the part of producer Ely Landau- one of the only wise ones, as seems to be the history of the flawed ambition of the American Theater Company's movie adaptation productions- to hire John Frankenheimer as director. He was known at the time in the movie industry for churning out high-charged action and adventure pictures (i.e. The Train, Grand Prix), and the occasional dark classic (The Manchurian Candidate), but he started as a television director, and with a play that ran like The Iceman Cometh there would be needed someone who could track the stinging, meaning-of-life-and-death dialog of O'Neill's play with the camera and not make it feel too 'stagey'. This might be difficult to surmise that he made it fully cinematic in the sense of using more than one set or exteriors, as he didn't. Everything is confined to that set of Harry's bar. But within this precise, necessary limitation, Frankenheimer delivered one of his best projects.

Then again, how could he not with the source material? It's about some of the richest theater ever produced, least in the 20th century, and is considered by many to be O'Neill's epic masterpiece. It's a tale of a community, a quasi-family of bums and stragglers who're stuck more or less in a dive down in a seedy section of New York city in the early part of the century, awaiting the return of Hickey (Lee Marvin), a big force of a man who works in advertising. This time things are a little different, however, and a new revelation leads the men (and a couple of the women) to wonder if he's flipped his lid. Around this premise of a dark secret or a certain feeling of "death" that Hickey has brought with him, O'Neill creates an ensemble that's unforgettable in its mix of light and dark, principled and sleazy, afraid and just downright kooky. There's a whole mix; there's Larry the ex-anarchist who's slowly dying inside (Robert Ryan); there's the depressed-cum-demanding kid (Jeff Bridges); Harry (March); the bartender/pimp; a black gambler; the "Limey"; the "Tarts"; and a crazy, rambling European screaming about socialism from time to time.

And despite what some may have said comparing it to the 1960's made-for-TV version directed by Lumet (which I would love to see but is at the moment unavailable), I'd be hard-pressed to see a cast better than this. Just a reminder: Lee Marvin can act, amazingly, and here he puts his chops to such a test that he rolls on to his climactic, half hour quasi-confession like it's the performance of his life. Ditto for Ryan and March, and for them it was more-so (Ryan knew he was dying, adding a poignancy to what was probably his best, most subtle work, and March is captivating as the stubborn old drunk owner). And Bridges, in a role which he said made him want to continue seriously being an actor, is hard to take one's eyes away from, even as his character wavers from being sympathetic to unlikeable in a single scene. And the bulk of the supporting cast are all wonderfully played and transposed, injecting life into a play that requires it to keep it going full throttle.

It's not an easy thing to endure; it's four hours long, and for the first hour here and there one has to go through some minor early morning drunkenness from the characters, which isn't the least effective portion of the play as well as the film. From there on out, if one is tuned into O'Neill's precisely harrowing story of the bums and drunkards and outcasts and all very flawed human beings, it will work wonders even in its sparsest moments. The ending, I might add, is about as perfectly bittersweet as I've seen this side of Woody Allen's Manhattan. Frankenheimer's work is a nearly forgotten gem.

I have to confess right off the bat that I love O'Neill and this play is certainly one of the grandest of them all, but I am also one of those that would have preferred to see Jason Robards in the Hickey role. I did see Robards play it on kine scope and thought he was about as right as it gets.

Having said that, Lee Marvin does admirably in this huge role. My expectation were low but I was not disappointed. I even thought he brought a level of menace to the part that might have been missing with another actor.

It is a grim play. Nothing cute about this bunch of burn outs and hardcore drunks. Not easy to view and experience and very long! (I watched it in 3, count them, 3 sittings! Special praise goes to Robert Ryan, in one of his best roles ever and a very young and vibrant Jeff Bridges who comes through against a long array of seasoned performers.

I do not think I have ever heard the word "pipedream" more. It occurs again and again and with purpose and sadness.

Although this work has a half a ton of drunks and losers, it is not for the partying JERSEY SHORE crowd. This is highbrow epic stuff.

Bravo!!

It seems that there have been a few actors psychologically and kinesthetically "born" to interpret the works of a certain great playwright (or director) as Toshiro Mifune/Akira Kurosawa for the cinema. It would seem that March and Jason Robards had this relationship with Eugene O'Neill. I've been told that March's performance in "Long Day's Journey into Night" in NYC in the 1950's was for the ages; this "ICEMAN" is another example. I had always thought that in his high gloss Hollywood films March appeared a bit flat and dull (excepting of course "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"). In this film we can see a great actor regalvanized in one of the greatest supporting performances ever committed to film. Beneath the sheer coating of mordant humor which March provides with such finesse, we witness the total, volcanic deterioration and spiritual anguish of a human being. Probably the two greatest career finishes in cinema history were March and Robert Ryan in this movie.

"The Iceman Cometh" was part of American Film Theatre, an experiment by producer Ely Landau. The idea was for top-flight casts and creative talent to film classic plays. Then selected theaters would show one film a month, but only on two days (consecutive Tuesdays, if memory serves) before returning to their regular programs until the following month, when the next AFT release would be put up for two more days.

The program was nothing if not high-tone and ambitious. Productions included Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" with Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield and Lee Remick; "Lost in the Stars," the Maxwell Anderson-Kurt Weill musical based on "Cry, the Beloved Country"; Eugene Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder; and Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" directed by Laurence Olivier. Unfortunately, the project as a whole was an unmitigated disaster. For one thing, most of the films were uninspired, some were mediocre, and a few were downright awful. But most of all, the whole idea flew in the face of motion picture economics: how could any movie (or live play, for that matter) possibly break even when it ran for only TWO DAYS?

All things considered, it's a tribute to Landau's skill as a promoter that the AFT managed to limp through two "seasons," 1973-74 and 1974-75, before collapsing in a tangled heap of debts, lawsuits, and countersuits. But collapse it did, and the legal can-of-worms that it left, with the AFT's liabilities mixed with the rights of authors and their estates, is probably what keeps the films out of theatrical circulation and unavailable on video.

In the case of most AFT productions, truth be told, that's no great loss. But "The Iceman Cometh" is head-and-shoulders above all the rest put together (I suspect Landau knew it, too: that's no doubt why he put his best foot forward by making it the premiere production). It is, in fact, a great movie -- a great play with a once-in-a-lifetime cast (it was Fredric March's last movie, and Robert Ryan died even before it came out) under the hand of a fine director (John Frankenheimer) who cut his teeth on live drama during the Golden Age of Television.

Nobody connected with this film ever did better work -- not Ryan, who was brilliant and deserved a posthumous Oscar nomination for it; not March, one of Hollywood's greatest; none of the supporting cast; not even Jeff Bridges, who was only 23 and just at the beginning of his career (he once said that this was the film that made him realize he was serious about being an actor).

A special case is Lee Marvin in the pivotal role of Hickey; he was much disparaged by critics at the time, but the tone was one of

how-dare-this-B-movie-thug-lay-his-unclean-hands-on-a-role-that-belongs-now- and-forever-to-Jason-Robards. Meaning no disrespect, but Robards was hardly infallible; Lee Marvin never did anything as bad as Robards's Brutus in "Julius Caesar" (1970). An impartial viewing of Marvin in "The Iceman Cometh" shows he was entirely up to the role, even in the demanding, shattering 25-minute monologue where Hickey's self-loathing hypocrisy slips out against his will.

I was lucky enough to see this film twice in a theater -- once on its premiere in November '73, and again in the spring of '75, when Landau tried (in vain) to recoup his losses by giving a general release to selected AFT films. I've never forgotten it, and there are moments as fresh in my mind as if I saw them yesterday: Robert Ryan's anguish when he snarls, "You think you'll get me to admit that to myself?" and Marvin replies, "But you just did admit it, didn't you?"; Jeff Bridges's tormented profile as he sits at the table with Ryan trying to sort out his life; Fredric March as the doddering saloon-keeper venturing outside for the first time in years; Lee Marvin's ironic little dance as he calls himself "a happy-go-lucky slob like me." All, and so much more, unforgettable.

I am dismayed to read in another comment here that there seems to be a three-hour version of this film out there somewhere. This would be outrageous enough if the original version were readily available, but since the original is not, it's intolerable. Any cutting of this film (which already judiciously edits O'Neill's original text) can only be a mutilation. Accept no substitutes, and DO NOT watch this film, regardless of its length, if it is shown on TV with commercial breaks. See it ONLY in its 239-minute version, uninterrupted except for the two intermissions O'Neill intended (this was, by the way, the first movie with two intermissions) -- the cumulative power of the play demands it, and a movie this great deserves nothing less.