Eugene O’Neill, the playwright, was known for his psychologically dark and depressing tragedies that dwelt on alcoholism, drug addiction and family dysfunction. But he did write one comedy which was sort of an attempt at autobiography (sort of).
And that was “Ah, Wilderness!” Eventually this play was translated into a motion picture starring Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery and even a very young Mickey Rooney.
It’s the story of a family; the Millers, living in a small New England town in 1906. Barrymore is the family patriarch Nat and his wife Essie is played by the always amusing Spring Byington. Their youngest son Tommy is played by Micky Rooney. Beery plays Nat’s drunken and lazy brother Sid who works as a “reporter” on Nat’s town newspaper. The rest of the children are played by relative unknowns but in general, the acting and direction is quite good.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
The event of the movie is the graduation from high school of the next to oldest son Richard. He’s the class valedictorian and an “intellectual” whose reading of modernist fiction, poetry and political thought gets him into trouble with his parents and his girlfriend’s father. Swinburne, G.B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx provide Richard with plenty of quotes to rankle his elders. But when Muriel McComber’s father Dave finds a Swinburne poem among his daughter’s effects he orders her to break off her romance with Richard and pulls his advertisement from Nat’s newspaper.
To get back at the world Richard goes out with one of his older brother’s friends to a saloon and gets drunk and fraternizes with a chorus girl who sits on his lap and soaks him for drinks and some money. After he gets thrown out by the bartender for being underaged he show up home drunk and depressed much to his family’s chagrin. The end of the movie revolves around Nat explaining the facts of life with respect to women and living a decent life to his son. Of course, Richard and Muriel re-unite and even her father comes around to approving of their romance.
In between Richard’s problems we’re witness to the drunken escapades of Nat’s brother Sid (played by Wallace Beery) and his on-again, off-again courtship of Lily Davis who must be Mrs. Miller’s cousin. Beery performs a very over-the-top rendition of his drunken oaf character and Lily seems to take solace from chastising Sid for his drinking and career failures.
Alright, so why do I like this movie? Many of the exterior shots of the small town were filmed in Grafton, MA. And remarkably the town still looks surprisingly the same after almost a hundred years. I know the area very well from an earlier phase of my life in New England and find these views of the town incredibly nostalgic. So that’s one thing the movie has going for it (admittedly a highly specific point with a very small audience of appreciation). The other virtue the movie possesses is the charm of a small town from the very dawn of the twentieth century. There’s a simplicity to the activities that still has an attraction to some of us looking back from the awful alienated place we find ourselves in today. There’s a five-minute scene of the children shooting off fire works on Fourth of July morning that brings me back over sixty years to my childhood. And the awfulness of the high school graduation talent-show-scene makes me laugh for its similarity to some of the shows I have attended. There’s just a thick slice of good-natured old Americana that cheers my heart. So, who is this movie for? Probably just me, unless what you read here piques your curiosity.