london bridge is falling down
by Douglas Messerli
Norman
Rosten (based on the play by Arthur Miller), Sidney Lumet (director) A View from the Bridge / 1962
Obviously, it is
not London Bridge in this American film based on the play by Arthur Miller,
that is falling down, nor even Brooklyn Bridge near the shipping yards where
the Carbone family lives and works. The bridge is a symbolic one, common to
Miller’s dry literary conceits, suggesting that Eddie Carbone (Raf Vallone),
the bridge to his sister’s past through his caring for her daughter, Catherine
(Carol Lawrence), and to his wife’s Sicilian roots through his invitation into
their home of the immigrant relatives, Rodolfo (Jean Sorel) and Marco (Raymond
Pellegrini), Indeed, Carbone begins the drama as a human link at least, if not
a bridge, between the dock workers, administrative brutes, and the workers’
lawyer, Alfieri (a role excellently acted by Morris Carnovsky). And we quickly
perceive Eddie as a solid edifice who supports and loves his family,
alternately teasing and attempting to please his adoring but increasingly
troubled wife, Beatrice (Maureen Stapleton, in a strangely muted performance
that more closely resembles the acting style of Jean Stapleton in All in the
Family than Maureen’s usually endearing outsiders).
The trouble is that this human bridge is gradually falling apart, his emotional rivets slowly being loosed by deep psychological yearnings of which the simple Italian workman is unaware. His role as protector to Catherine has, over the years—due to both his wife’s and the girl’s empathetic maternalness and loving placation to his sometimes violent temperament—has grown into unspoken love for the niece, his “Madonna,” that is quietly smoldering into lust.
The arrival of his wife’s relatives, the
ox-like, married Marco and the handsome blonde Southern-Italian Rodolfo, who
quickly falls in love with the beautiful girl who is close to his own age,
changes everything, and shifts the family dynamics so completely that Eddie is
suddenly forced to perceive not just the impossibility of his unconsciously
burning fantasies but that he is no longer a man in his prime. As nearly all of
our major American dramatists, from O’Neill, Williams, Miller to Albee have
made evident: sexual desire and aging are nearly always an incendiary mix.
Director Sidney Lumet has done nearly
everything he could to take Miller’s self-consciously claustrophobic, hot-house
drama into the real world, spilling out crucial events into early 60’s derelict
New York streets that reminds one a bit of Elia Kazan and Martin Scorsese. The
scene in which Eddie literally trails after the couple, Rodolfo and Catherine,
following them into a automat, insistently watching them as they enter a movie
and, later, a dance club, adds texture and deeper dimensions to Miller’s stagey
work, as we begin to wonder which one of the two is he really stalking, and
imagine his emotional responses to the apparently innocent acts he witnesses.
And the final street battle between Marco
and Eddie and Eddie’s suicide, with a curved metal lifting-hook, could not have
been better dramatized. But the problem with Miller’s drama is that his
simple-minded and brutish lead, Eddie, needs to be told, time and again
apparently, what his problem is—without
him ever catching on—which puts nearly every character in the work in the
position of verbally accosting him with the “facts,” as if each were required
to take turns at playing a hack psychologist. Accordingly, although the
audience catches on quite quickly to the heart of the matter, the drama
requires that the “hidden reality” be restated over and over in sometimes yawn-inspired
declarations.
But it is all too much to imagine that
this brute of a man could possibly be so conflicted; and, besides, by this time
we no longer care. He’ll never ever be able to figure it out and resolve any
such psychologically complex concepts. The only thing he can imagine to ease
his passions is to turn into a “rat,” turning in his wife’s illegal immigrant
family members to the authorities. And even then, he cannot comprehend that in
that act he himself has forever dirtied his name, not Marco or his neighbors,
whom he blames.
Still we can’t quite help ourselves
wishing that in this south-borough version of West Side Story, Tony and Maria (Carol Lawrence’s most memorable
role) might escape as Rodolfo and Catherine to Manhattan, along with Beatrice
and Marco, to start a new life: the singing duo might have easily discovered
brain, heart, courage enough to carry on in Lumet’s The Wiz! Besides Rodolfo always wanted to see Broadway! Maybe he
was just a little bit gay after all.
Los Angeles, May
14, 2015
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (May 2015).
*I
suddenly remembered a related event wherein an acquaintance I’d made as a
Freshman in 1965 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee told me that he was
reading Miller’s play, and was struck by the major character’s homosexuality.
For years after, reading reviews and commentaries about the play, I found
absolutely no mention about Eddie Carbone’s possible homosexuality. In
hindsight, I can comprehend why. Perhaps the young friend was simply being a
particularly astute reader— or perhaps he was trying to bring up another
discussion, of which, in that year, I was yet quite innocent.
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