Desire Under the Elms (1958) Reviews

I think something got lost in the translation of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms. Other films based on his work used the text as scripture and featured running times that hovered somewhere between two-and-a-half and three hours. Desire runs, roughly, an hour-forty. So pacing is obviously a problem.

The first act plods along slowly, detailing the barely contained rage and boiling resentments of Eben (Anthony Perkins) towards his dad, Ephraim (Burl Ives). They quarrel over who owns the rights towards the farm lands they live on, and there’s conflict between him and his two brothers who run out into the wider world the moment they see the opportunity. It all seems like the beginnings of a sobering, powerful drama in which familial strife comes to a head and tragedy occurs.

This doesn’t happen. Once Anna (Sophia Loren) is added to the mix as Ephraim’s younger immigrant bride, the story warps into tawdry romance novel pulp and ends in something close to bad soap opera writing run amok. The mid-section frenziedly builds tension, that I assume is supposed to be erotic, between Anna and Eben, yet Perkins and Loren generate no chemistry between the two of them. So the romance between them is rushed and limp, and we stumble head-first into a finale that dizzily tries to tie up all the loose ends and come up with some kind of satisfactory conclusion to this mess. It almost succeeds, but Hollywood moralizing ruins the day.

So let’s examine these major problems for a minute aside from pacing. Here is a case of star power actually hurting and sinking a film instead of helping it. Sophia Loren’s character is supposed to be beautiful, but uneducated and greedy. But Loren comes across as too well-spoken, possessing a high-class accent that she picked up somehow and too sophisticated for this role. This was a common problem in her Hollywood films, they rarely seemed to know how to use her like Vittorio de Sica masterfully did.

Perkins is neurotic, and his performance is much better when it focuses in on the relationship between his character and Ives’. The romance is a wash from the start and the film’s insistence on transferring attention away from this central conflict hurts it profoundly. And Burl Ives manages to turn the two of them into nothing but white noise with his commanding presence. He takes the cliché role of “monstrous father figure” and transforms it into a more humane and complicated character reading through his great talents as an actor.

And that ending…. From what I’ve gathered in a brief bit of research, the original play ends with Anna killing her love child, Eben abandoning her after learning that she’s killed their son in some warped effort to win his love, and she gets carried off to jail. The film has all of that, except Eben returns to her, professing his undying love and getting carted away to jail with her. This goes against his character, the interior logic of the film and feels like tacked on moralizing from the period.

Of course that disaster is just one of many which harm the film. But it does have its bright spots, like gorgeous cinematography that crafts a mythological feeling in the images and overall tone. There’s also a nice score to compliment the look of the film and Ives’ committed work. While it is pretty terrible in the long run, it’s still watchable in a way that shows like Melrose Place were, you shake your head and feel guilty and stupid for watching something so clearly terrible as it twists and turns in increasingly ridiculous and strange ways before coming to a conclusion so outlandish it almost seems like the only logical one that could be found.