Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

calvinnme ... he was just the lit match that set the kindling afire. This is the most messed up family ever. Christine Mannon has always hated her husband Ezra Mannon, a general in the Union army at the time of the Civil War. Outside of casualties the Mannons have nothing to fear from the war since they are safely in New England, far from the actual fighting. But they actually have their own civil war brewing. On top of Christine hating her husband since she married him, begging the question WHY did she marry him, Christine has a much younger lover, sea captain Adam Brant (Leo Genn). Apparently the daughter in the family, Lavinia (Rosalind Russell) fancied Brant at one time herself, so she could hate her mom because she is betraying her father, or she could just be jealous that a woman in late middle age beat her out of a beau.Brant began just toying with Christine because he wanted revenge for something the Mannons did to his mother years ago, although the toying turned to love. Plus it turns out Brant is a Mannon himself, but it is a part of himself that he despises. But Christine knows about the shunned relative angle and is still not dissuaded.Then dad and son return from war, and it turns out that there is something pretty weird about the father/daughter and the mother/son love dynamic going on here. It doesn't look paternal and it does not look platonic. Christine switches Adam's heart pills with poison and kills him so she can be free to be with Brant. However, Lavinia discovers her scheme and the poison pills. Rather than turn her mother over to the authorities for murder, she convinces her brother (Michael Redgrave as reluctant war hero and mama's boy Orin) to mete out their own brand of personal justice rather than send mom to the gallows. The problem is, Lavinia is more like her mother than she would ever admit, Orin is a very unstable partner in her scheme, and Christine does not think that Lavinia's idea of justice is all that it is cracked up to be.Add in Lavinia's rather naïve yet devoted suitor with high moral standards, played by a - believe it or not - sixth billed Kirk Douglas, and you have a recipe for disaster.If this sounds like a Greek tragedy, actually it is. But you know what, I was glued to to the screen taking it all in. I felt like a voyeur invading this family's most personal crazy secrets. It was just like when the brother and sister were on the boat looking down, like voyeurs, into the galley and seeing their mother in the arms of her adulterous lover. The movie grabs your attention and keeps it for 2 1/2 hours.Highly recommended especially for Michael Redgrave and Rosalind Russell who, though she was just shy of 40, did not look too old for the part. Michael Redgrave takes a wild ride of emotions and has you believing every one of them. Oh, and Kirk, run! Run far away from these people! No scrape that Burt Lancaster or the Duke ever got you into was as dangerous as these Mannons!

jarrodmcdonald-1 Rosalind Russell's Lavinia is engaged in a vicious war with her mother (Katina Paxinou) over the death of her heroic father (Raymond Massey) in this adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra from RKO studios. The drama intensifies when a brother, played by Michael Redgrave, returns from battle in the Civil War. He is soon drawn into simmering family entanglements. With his sister, he commits murder against their mother's lover to avenge the father's death. The film offers an eclectic array of acting styles, though Dudley Nichols' direction seems to skillfully weave all the elements together. Kirk Douglas gives a standout performance in a supporting role, but it's the ambitious interpretation of family justice and the explosive recriminations that characters continually experience which render it a riveting story, a riveting film– and an undeniable masterpiece.

JohnHowardReid The full British version of this movie is now available on an excellent Image DVD, but I must admit I was disappointed. I'm very glad I wasn't subjected to the original USA release version of 173 minutes, but in my opinion the British release of 159 minutes is still too long. I would have eliminated the whole of the final act, namely the whole of the Kirk Douglas episode which is not only an anti-climax and a poor recapitulation of events we have already witnessed, but actually a complete waste of time. I think the melodrama reaches the right climactic height and comes to a really satisfying conclusion before Kirk Douglas finally has his say. Mind you, it's not Kirk's dialogue that is so boring, but Rosalind Russell's. She is forced to recapitulate sentiments and speculations that she has already broached far more effectively in previous confrontations earlier in the play. And although director/screenwriter Dudley Nichols allows Russell tends to dominate the action, she is forced, alas, to play one of the least interesting characters. Only Henry Hull has an equally boring role, but he's in the movie for only a fraction of the time allotted to Miss Russell, and what's more, he shares just about all his scenes with other players. I was also not always happy with Katina Paxinou's interpretation. I thought she handled most of her scenes very astutely indeed, but at other times I felt she was giving a performance more suitable for a stage presentation. By contrast, Leo Genn opted for the opposite approach and tended to underplay his role. Mind you, he has an extremely difficult part but he approaches it the way he would on a stage. When his character is playing a deceptive role, he attacks it with vigor. When he wants to present Adam Brant free of deception, he underplays – as he would in a theatre. Unfortunately, this stratagem doesn't always work in movies – and for me, it didn't work here. But that's the way it struck me. You may think differently and feel that Genn handled both aspects of his characterization extremely well. Raymond Massey, of course, is perfect as always; but I wasn't over-happy with Michael Redgrave who seemed to pass up many of his opportunities in order to keep the spotlight on Rosalind Russell. As I intimated above, Rosalind Russell was already dominating the movie and she really needed someone to bring her down to size occasionally. Only Katina Paxinou had a good try at this, but I felt at times that director Dudley Nichols in collaboration with cameraman George Barnes and make-up artist Gordon Bau, was doing his best to sabotage Katina's efforts to upstage Roz.

mukava991 Despite odd casting choices, Eugene O'Neill's powerful epic about a New England family on a treadmill of intergenerational tragedy translates more or less successfully to the screen, with enough of its substance and poetry intact to keep one glued to the sometimes slow-paced proceedings. It gets off to a fuzzy start, with several minutes of talky exposition but once it settles on Rosalind Russell's chilly determined visage we have been captured. Although she is 15 years too old for the part, she embodies the stern and determined Lavinia Mannon, O'Neill's update of the classic Electra character of ancient Greek myth and drama, obsessed with avenging the murder of her father by her scheming mother, played by the Greek actress Katina Paxinou. Paxinou was actually only a few years older than Russell and isn't beautiful in the way that O'Neill's play indicates. She could be called handsome, perhaps, in the way that actresses like Judith Anderson or Agnes Moorehead were handsome. Then there is her accent as thick as Greek yogurt. This play sinks or sails on the power of the author's poetry and if you can't hear the poetry through the jumbled syllables, you are cut off from the play's life force. With Paxinou, only every other line lands, leaving the listener frustrated. Fortunately she is such a good actress that after a while we still understand her character emotionally and even empathize with her to a degree. Then there is Michael Redgrave as the brother of Russell, who looks nothing like either Russell or Paxinou, but who to be fair could be imagined as the offspring of Raymond Massey who plays the father. Again, in real life Massey was only a few years older than Redgrave and Russell. But again, he is such a good actor that once we get acquainted with him, the appearance ceases to matter. Kirk Douglas does very well in an early supporting role.The physical production has an artificial, in-studio look and feel which suits O'Neill's concept of the family mansion as a large mausoleum with its generations of inhabitants resembling masked figures struck from the same mold, to bring out the theme of morbid tragedy persisting through generations, re-enacted again and again by offspring who repeat the mistakes of their ancestors as if possessed by forces beyond their control.