Macabre curio
O’Neil’s play (1931), decked up as a "trilogy" with three separate acts entitled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted, has been very literally filmed, with (mercifully) some cutting, little externalization (arrivals and departures, Lavinia’s discovery of her mother’s liaison with Brant), some beautifully designed sets and refined photography. The play, alas, and the performances and the treatment, are all quite terrible. In 1931, no doubt, the injection of elements of Greek mythology into modern drama was still both fashionable and relatively novel; even so, it is difficult to see why at the time such crude and pretentious claptrap should have been taken so seriously. Doom, guilt, blood, murder, incest, hate, vengeance, fate, death, evil-all the dark abstractions occur again and again, used and over-used with such ludicrous emphasis that the words "Cold Comfort Farm" come to one’s lips within fifteen minutes. Everyone has a fixation: daughter on father, son on mother, father on daughter, mother on son; and finally, when mother and father are both dead, brother on sister. Granted that Dudley Nichols believed in the play, one is still surprised at his invertebrate handling; the direction of players is stiff, the use of camera utterly lacking in drama, and the editing devoid of any dynamic quality. The play is just "transferred" on to celluloid.
A stellar cast fumbles with helpless and sometimes touching ineptitude. Rosalind Russell, as Electra-Lavinia, tries long and hard, but is simply unequal to acting on this scale and reminds one nostalgically at times of her superb Mrs. Fowler-Prowler in The Women. Katina Paxinou is unexpectedly dull and artificial as Clytemnestra-Christine: Raymond Massey’s Agamemnon-Ezra is stagey and unconvinced: Leo Genn’s Brant has the accents and demeanour of a regular pre-war diner at the Berkeley Hotel. Redgrave’s Orestes-Orin is the best of a bad lot, an exterior performance not without mannerisms, but at least with the kind of suited to this material. As innocent fiancŽe and fiancŽ, Nancy Coleman and Kirk Douglas have little to do except exclaim, with sympathetic bewilderment, at the innumerable irregularities of the Mannon household.
Richard Hageman’s music accompanies much of the action with a choral rendering of "O Shenandoah," thus adding the final touch to this macabre curio.

G.L.
"Monthly Film Bulletin", Vol. 19, No. 221, June 1952