The Iceman Cometh (1973)

 The Iceman Cometh (1973) Written by Eugene O’Neill

                                            Directed by John Frankenheimer


This is a slightly shortened film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s enormous, in length and depth, play. It is not for casual viewing. It is a long haul of a heavy load.

The character of Larry Slade acts as a sort of Our Town like stage manager telling us of the scene at the outset. It’s a dive bar in downtown NYC in the early part of the 20th century, the last gasp saloon. A bar and rooming house upstairs owned and run by Harry Hope. The role of Harry Hope is played by Fredric March, the actor 75 years old and here in his final role.
Larry Slade is Robert Ryan, only 63, but also a more or less final performance with awareness of his imminent death from cancer in that same year.
Perhaps that is what helps drive March and Ryan to deliver the most powerful and perfect performances in the movie.

This little look at the movie and play is not going to be able to give much of an insight to the complex psychological mechanism of this play/movie.
It might be best for the reader to seek it out and watch for themselves. It is perhaps best viewed alone, most certainly not a date movie. Maybe best for men or old/soul men, or whatever gender, because it is all about men with no real woman characters other than a couple of hopeless “tarts” who pass through the bar angling for their own hopes which are dependent entirely on these drunken men.

What we have here is a contemplation of life, hope, and death. The “pipe dreams” of hope are delivered to these men through their alcoholism. The drunkenness ignites their hopeful dreams of escaping their current situation and into a future life based mostly on what they were before their fall into this place. The play is entirely set in the bar where they get drunk and dream of escaping to be free, and live again with self, and community, respect.

They wait for Hickey, played by Lee Marvin. Hickey is an on the road salesman, who shows up periodically and flush with enough dough to be the life of the party. He buys them drinks where their usual routine is short on the money to fuel their drunken transcendence day to day.

Only this time Hickey has changed. He is here to confront and murder their hopes and dreams as something in himself has also died between visits.
There is a rather big reveal at the end of this 4 hour epic. This writing will avoid spoiling that for those interested in seeing the movie or play.

That said, the character of Larry Slade comes on hopeless from the very outset. He is an old man, the old anarchist. He has given his life to the movement for social change, economic justice, but has seen this fail. He has seen comrades in the movement disappoint. He has seen them turn on one another. His lofty, idealistic, dreams have been crushed. Yes, there could be a better world, but for something in the people themselves not ready or equipped to make it happen. Perhaps they know the way but cannot make it to the promised land themselves, just too corrupted by the competitive set-up of civilization to return to the garden of tribal hunter-gatherer communist union. He has come to Harry Hope’s to die.
(A pause here to explain the label “anarchist” attached to Larry Slade and its historical perspective. This type of anarchist is not a single bit nihilistic. It's not about destroying everything and burning up the world. The play refers to early 20th century notions of anarcho-syndicalism, as a type of highly idealistic social and economic structure relating to affinity group autonomy that then associates loosely with other affinity groups perhaps based around worker own industrialism. Libertarian communism.)

Larry as a younger man out on the coast has watched the betrayal and failure among these movement people. That betrayal comes and finds him in the bar in the form of the character of Don Parritt, Jeff Bridges, who may even be his own horriblly tragic son.

So at the outset Larry Slade is quite hopeless and welcoming his own death. Yet through the course of the play, through the confrontations with Hickey, the man who loved to put on a party but now the killer of hopes, a pitchman of hopeless and death, a murderer, be sees once again the value of hope and how HOPE IS LIFE and on a sense all the bar inhabitants and perhaps us all, have. His is appalled but murderous Hickey and is his enemy at the end, as we should be too.

The play in the end is an advocacy of hope and dreams as what we have to carry us all through life.