Oedipus in Flatbush

A View from the Bridge (Continental), like the drama by Arthur Miller from which it is adapted, is a grim and misguided attempt to make Pentelic marble of Brooklyn brick; to find in the moral slime of a slum episode the ink in which to write Greek tragedy as it was written in the golden age. Inevitably, the attempt fails; but the failure is impressive. The film, perhaps even more vividly than the play, demonstrates the Gnostic precept that when the seven deadly sins are counted, there is still one more. Its name is Ignorance, and it is as quick as any other to send a soul to hell.

The tragedy transpires in a cold-water flat, where a decent, hardworking, stupid stevedore (Raf Vallone), an immigrant from Italy, lives happily with his dumpy wife (Maureen Stapleton) and a nubile. 17-year-old niece (Carol Lawrence). While his niece was still a child, the stevedore loved her as a daughter. Now he desires her as a woman but he doesn't know it--partly because he is too stupid, partly because he is too weak to face the truth. If he faced it, he would have to give up his unnatural attachment to the girl, and this he cannot bear to do. Like Oedipus, he commits (in attitude if not in act) incest through ignorance, and the penalty for incest, as all myths agree, is dissolution of the personality--sometimes in madness, sometimes in death.

Madness in the stevedore's mind takes the form of jealousy, and jealousy begins when his wife's cousins, fleeing famine in Sicily, enter the U.S. illegally, go to work on the docks, come to live in the stevedore's cold-water flat. One of the cousins is a sober married man (Raymond Pellegrin), but the other is a charming gio--vanotto (Jean Sorel) who soon falls in love with the niece. Disturbed, the stevedore at first makes fun of the newcomer, but the niece falls in love with the boy anyway. Desperate, the stevedore resorts to slander: "He marry you he gotta da right be American citizen." Indignantly, the girl decides to marry the boy. At that the stevedore's obsession, like an elephant in musth, snaps the fraying tether of human feeling that restrains his frenzy. He betrays the boy and his brother to the immigration police. Too late the poor brute perceives that in betraying his friends he has betrayed himself, that in embracing the past he has forfeited the future, that in refusing to change he has agreed to die. He plunges a cargo hook into his own heart. "Why?" he gasps as he expires. "Why?"

Scene by scene the film is written--mostly by Playwright Miller; Scenarist Norman Rosten made few additions to the play--with clear intelligence and rude male force. In his direction, despite a tendency to get cute with the camera, Sidney Lumet often achieves a noble seriousness that makes the drama seem almost a rite--as is only appropriate: classic tragedy was the Dionysian counterpart of the Christian Mass. The actors without exception excel, but Actor Vallone beggars comparison. He is the gritty essence of stevedore. He looks like one of Michelangelo's Captives, half man. half rock.

For these reasons View is well worth looking at. Nevertheless, those who look will be fundamentally disappointed because Playwright Miller has fundamentally misused his materials. Greek tragedy, which Miller admittedly set out to imitate, is centrally concerned with the nature and task of the hero. As the Greeks conceived him, the hero was a personification of what is specifically human in mankind, and his task was to discriminate and defend what is human from what is not. to overcome the animal nature (personified by Sophocles as the Sphinx) that primordially dominates the human spirit. But in Miller's hero there is nothing specifically human; he is an animal who never for an instant dreams of overcoming his animal nature. Therefore, he is not a tragic hero but a pathetic creature. He is an ape. and Playwright Miller does not dignify the species by attiring him in figurative mask and buskin. After awhile, indeed, the ape begins to look sort of silly--like Oedipus in a gorilla suit.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.