Ah, Wilderness!

Ah, Wilderness! (Clarence Brown, 1935) The 1933 Eugene O'Neill play adapted by the wife-husband team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who also wrote The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Diary of Anne Frank (play and adaptations). Just the collective writer credits is reason enough to watch the film, which (I've read in some film circles, incorrectly as it turns out) inspired the "Andy Hardy" series at M-G-M. 

 

"Inspired" as in as loose an interpretation of the term as possible. They're both about families and have Lionel Barrymore and Mickey Rooney in the credits. But, the "Hardy" series never dealt with alcoholism, sloth, and the revolutionary pangs of rebellion and first love that can raise the roof of any American domicile, until it is planed down to respectability (or some form of it). It may be the lightest of O'Neill's plays and so not threatening to the "American values" of M-G-M head Louis B. Mayer. But, the O'Neill name would have appealed to M-G-M production head Irving Thalberg (who had cut back activities after a 1932 heart attack) and his replacement David O. Selznick.

It's not all Currier and Ives at the Miller household in 1906 New England, where father Nat (Barrymore) is a newspaper publisher, sagely juggling the traumas, large and small, happening under his roof, with wife Essie (Spring Byington), children (in order of birth) Arthur (Frank Albertson), Richard (Eric Linden), Mildred (Bonita Granville), and youngest Tommy (Mickey Rooney) and Nat's brother Sid (Wallace Beery) and Essie's sister Lily (Aline MacMahon). Sid is living in his brother's house because he can't hold a job, largely due to his constant drinking. Lily is there out of charity for a spinster, which Sid would love to change, if not for her constant rejection due to his drinking and questionable past.

Then, there's Richard, about to graduate from High School and suffering the pangs of first love, two things that can puff out a guy's chest and mess with his head—as the saying goes "you can tell a Senior, but you can't tell him MUCH."*

With his mind swimming with Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, Marx and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, and mooning over the girl next door (Cecilia Parker), he thinks himself a man of the world, bound for Yale, and is itching to prove himself, when, frankly, he's still living under his father's roof and hasn't even kissed a girl (or "the" girl, as she's afraid of kissing). The influences and urges set him up to become a failure like his Uncle Sid—although Sid, for all his talk and self-conceit (and self-deception) does have his uses—so, the faltering steps the kid takes to manhood have to be monitored and negotiated.

That includes not citing Marxist tracts in his graduation speech, learning how to drive the family's Stanley Steamer, his passionate love letters to his girl, Muriel, which are intercepted by her father and found to contain passages from Swinburne, leading to the parent storming the Miller residence and threatening to cancel advertising in father's newspaper. Muriel is forced to write a farewell letter to which man-of-world Richard can only blurt "Geewhillickers!" and bust out in tears.

 

To say nothing of his getting roaring drunk and getting rolled by a floozy.

Growing up is tough. And one is reminded of that other dramaturge John Wayne who when assured that that the immaturity of an opponent is a temporary thing and "will learn" usually replied "...if he lives." Nobody learns anything getting killed in the process.

But, O'Neill—and Goodrich and Hackett—makes sure the kid survives long enough to go to Yale. It's a sweet movie, sometimes painful, but everything promises, if not happiness, continuity, and maybe an upward trajectory from the fates of so many in O'Neill's plays, whose foibles and self-delusions are given a light dusting of sugar in Ah, Wilderness!

 

* “You can tell a freshman by his silly, eager look / You can tell a sophomore ’cause he carries one less book / You can tell a junior by his fancy airs and such / You can tell a senior, but you can’t tell him much.”