Both productions are film adaptations of Eugene O’Neill’s 1931 play, the first a theatrical release done in black and white, the second a made for TV production done in color. The 1978 version has helpful notes provided by classical scholar and popular author, Erich Segal.
O’Neill based his play on Aeschylus’ trilogy, the Oresteia, which deals with the murder of King Agamemnon on his return home from victory at Troy, and the revenge for that murder exacted by his son Orestes, with some assistance by his daughter Electra. The trilogy ends with a nearly mad Orestes finally acquitted on the charge of murder by a jury on the Areopagus in Athens. O’Neill, who, according to Segal, went through life convinced that he should never have been born, or died soon afterwards, finds the character of Electra, who plays a minimal role in Aeschylus’ play, fascinating and chooses to view the family tragedy through her eyes. In doing so, he makes quite a few changes: for example, the story is recast as taking place in New England (Massachusetts or Connecticut) following the Civil War, with town judge and victorious general, Ezra Mannon (=Agamemnon), returning home. O’Neill has chosen New England for three reasons, it seems: the Civil War is the closest American approximation he can find for the internecine struggles of the Trojan War; the Greek revival style of architecture was popular in the mid-19th c., and the Mannon house looks a lot like a Greek temple; the sea plays a crucial role in most of O’Neill’s plays, and New England provides the right setting for sea-faring folk.
O’Neill does more than update and Americanize the locale. He incorporates Freudian psychology in the play, in which mother and daughter both yearn for the same lover, Adam Brant (first cousin to Lavinia); in which the daughter has a fixation for her father and hates her mother for her disdain of him; in which the mother and son have a fondness for each other that seems greater than normal. And he incorporates his own haunted past and sense of guilt. Like Lavinia and Orin, he tries to escape his past, but cannot – O’Neill tried to commit suicide several times, joined the Merchant Marine to get away from home, left the Catholic Church, but he never could escape his ghosts. They were always with him. That sense of a haunted and doomed existence pervades the play.
More than anything, what O’Neill captures from the Greek original is a sense of tragic heaviness to be experienced in a particular place. In Aeschylus’ play, Agamemnon doesn’t simply die because his wife has taken a lover; he and his ancestors have blood on their hands, family members whose death they have caused. That curse is not erased when Clytemnestra kills her husband, as she hopes, for her son Orestes returns to exact vengeance against his mother and her lover. Even then, when all who might rise up to kill him in turn are dead, Orestes is pursued by the Furies, the ghosts of blood guilt, who drive him mad. Orestes, though, escapes this doom eventually, when he is tried and found not guilty in a civic trial at Athens. Trial-by-jury replaces the sense of blood guilt and blood feud that had been dominant to that point. The cycle is broken, and there is an heroic end for Orestes. Electra, Orestes’ sister, presumably escapes his troubles, for Aeschylus makes nothing of them.
O’Neill transfers that sense of a haunted house, but he removes the favorable conclusion. For the members of the Mannon household cannot escape the house or their doom, try as they might. Orin and Christine on separate occasions refer to the mansion as a “tomb,” and it serves as a tomb three times (Ezra is poisoned in the house, Christine shoots herself with Ezra’s gun, as does Orin, and the house serves as the setting of a wake in each case). One of the townspeople gossiping notes that Abe Mannon (Ezra’s dad) built the house, after driving his son David away, for they both loved the same Creole servant. She notes that Abe built the house as a “temple for his hate.” This is a place of judgment, not mercy. Christine judges her husband and passes sentence; Lavinia judges her mother and lover, and passes sentence; Orin becomes a double for his father, and takes to studying the law, for he feels that Lavinia must not know happiness, but must be judged and punished.
The characters are aware of the house’s baneful power, but are unable to escape it. Christine plans to leave with Adam Brant and sail away to the “blessed isles” in the South Pacific; Orin, on coming home, makes the same suggestion of his mother; even Ezra, before he dies, suggests that he and Christine go away to the islands. Lavinia and Orin do escape to the island for a year, and the removal from this judgment seat does wonders for Lavinia, who ceases to wear black, and becomes gayer and more beautiful. She, it seems, may escape the curse, marry Peter Niles and leave the Mannon house, but her complicity in the murder of Adam Brant, and the suicide of her mother, link her to Orin, who cannot get over all the killing he’s done (he eventually comes to see all the killing as a means of getting back at his father, and ultimately at himself) and who refuses to let Lavinia escape – he will expose their crimes if she leaves with Peter.
Even after Orin kills himself, Lavinia cannot escape for she cannot forget Adam Brant (she accidentally calls Peter Adam) and Peter cannot forget the possibility that she had been sexually active with a native on the islands. She admits such an affair: “I wanted to learn love from him – love that wasn’t a sin.” The realization that love could be viewed as a blessing, or something other than a sin, offers the possibility of freedom and escape for Lavinia, but the morality of 19th c. New England, with its Puritan sensibilities will not allow such a love. Consequently, Peter can never accept her (she is now “dirty”), and so she is resigned to a life-long sentence alone in her house.
As the play ends, she tells Seth, who has acted as chorus throughout the play, to shut up the house and nail all the shutters closed. She plans to stay at the house, all alone with the ghosts.
The title suggests that “mourning” suits Lavinia (Electra), but this is not so. It is how people view her, so that when she changes after the trip to the South Seas, Peter is shocked at her appearance. But it is a trap. What she longs for, what all the characters long for, is an escape from the suffocating atmosphere of that house, and she almost escapes. In a way, the play might better be titled Electra Becomes Mourning, for that is what happens. She turns into mourning, rather like Niobe, who can never escape her grief.
Of the productions, I prefer the 1947 film – the performances are better (except for Leo Genn as Brant), and the B & W cinematography is tremendous. At one point, Orin tells Lavinia that he prefers “artificial light”… “a lamp burning out in a room of waiting shadows.” That sentiment is wonderfully caught in the lighting and B & W cinematography. The house and world are waiting shadows, the dead just waiting for our time to run out so they can have us. The set designer has great portraits of all the Mannon men on the walls of the parlor and Ezra’s study. These are lit in just such a way that the painted figures become ominous ghosts hovering above the house’s inhabitants. You get the sense that the house will never let you go. Except for the ponderous score (Maurice Jarre’s simple orchestration, with flutes and guitars in the 1978 version may better approximate the sound of music in a Greek play), the 1947 production is superior to the 1978 version.