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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

A precious souvenir

March 20, 2020 by Terry Teachout

With America’s theaters shuttered, I plan to devote some of my upcoming Wall Street Journal drama columns to screen versions of important stage plays of the past. I’m starting off with John Cromwell’s 1940 adaptation of Robert Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Here’s an excerpt.

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Time was when Broadway’s hits were routinely converted by Hollywood into big-budget films. As often as not, though, the shows were recast and “adapted” within an inch or two of their lives, at times to unintentionally comic effect. (There’s a reason why TCM hardly ever shows Irving Rapper’s 1950 film version of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” to which a ludicrously happy ending was tacked on by the studio.) On occasion, though, the screen versions bore far more than a passing resemblance to the plays on which they were based, especially when some of the stars and supporting players from the original stage casts reprised their roles for the camera. Even when their performances seem overprojected and awkwardly “stagy,” the films in which they appear still give us precious glimpses, however flawed, of the evanescent phenomenon that is great stage acting…

One such film is “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” John Cromwell’s 1940 screen version of the Pulitzer-winning 1938 play in which Robert E. Sherwood, writing at a not-dissimilar moment of high national anxiety, put on the stage a doubt-ridden Abraham Lincoln with whom war-fearing theatergoers could identify—played by Raymond Massey, whose performance was so powerful that he would be identified with Lincoln for the rest of his life….

Sherwood adapted his own play for the screen, opening it up with outdoor scenes and shrewdly trimming the earnest speechifying that makes the original stage version read at times more like a pageant than a drama. As a result, his brilliant condensation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates into a single 10-minute scene stands out in high relief. It is in this scene, perfectly staged by Cromwell, that you get the clearest sense of what Massey’s stage performance must have been like, and why it inspired Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times to call it “an exalted performance…he plays [the part] with an artless honesty that is completely overwhelming at the end.”…

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Read the whole thing here.

From Abe Lincoln in Illinois, the Lincoln-Douglas debate scene:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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