Why Do I Like the Chicago Bears This Week?
I.
Always.
Like.
THE.
Chicago.
Bears.
Time to Get Things Sorted
The Rams are 29th in passing yards allowed per game through three weeks. They have only four sacks, while allowing seven passing touchdowns. Opposing quarterbacks are tossing to a rate of 127.3, ranking them next to last in the league. Line ’em up, spread ’em out, chuck it.
(They are also a bad rush defense, but does that matter?)
There is a grace period in the NFL, when teams are allowed to look messy and disjointed. Bill Simmons and Cousin Sal, hosts of my favorite NFL podcast, joked that while we the NFL fans were ready for this season, the NFL season was not ready for us. But that grace period usually ends after the first four weeks. The Bears have looked solid and prepared on defense, incoherent and unprepared on offense.
They don’t have to light the Rams up for 40 Sunday, but the non-rookies need to start producing.
Lumet III: Theatrical Roots/Theatrical Cinema
Let’s start linking these units together. We discussed Lumet’s ideological foundations with The Group Theater, and his development of early television aesthetics. So, it’s unsurprising that Lumet’s cinematic career, at least at the early stages, is peppered with stage adaptations.
Stage Struck (1958), his second film, is based on the play Morning Glory. But it’s a light comedy and produces light fare. Lumet quickly understands the in order to bring the stage to the screen, and achieve his sensibility, he has to bring the stage’s heavyweights to the screen. And while he’ll make some script alterations here and there, he’s loyal to the power of the text. (This will be discussed later in the term as one of the reasons Lumet is not a favorite of the auteur theory folks.)
Who are these heavyweights? Tennessee Williams. Arthur Miller. Eugene O’Neill. The three most important American dramatists of the first half of the 20th century. In 1960, Lumet adapted Williams’ Orpheus Descending as The Fugitive Kind, starring Marlon Brando. The film is a strange one, but worth seeing as an example of the dramatic hurdles one faces when bringing the stage to the screen. Lumet’s adaptation of Miller’s A View From the Bridge is far more straightforward, but a rather bland cinematic effort.
It is with Long Day’s Journey into Night that Lumet finds his theatrically adaptive form. It is a beautiful film and an exquisite piece of cinematic craftsmanship. From Film at Lincoln Center:
The definitive Eugene O’Neill on film, Lumet’s flawless adaptation of the author’s autobiographical, Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece stars Ralph Richardson as the embittered stage actor James Tyrone, husband to a recovering (or relapsing?) morphine addict (Oscar-nominee Katharine Helpburn) and father to an alcoholic fellow actor (Jason Robards Jr., recreating his role from the original Broadway production) and a tubercular merchant seaman (Dean Stockwell). Shot entirely in sequence at New York’s Chelsea Studios following a lengthy rehearsal period with the cast, Long Day’s Journey swept the acting prizes of the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, winning a collective Best Actor trophy for Richardson, Robards, and Stockwell, and Best Actress for Hepburn.
“After such an experience, I don’t see how one can niggle over whether it’s ‘cinema’ or merely ‘filmed theatre.’ Whatever it is, it’s great…Katharine Hepburn has surpassed herself—the most beautiful comedienne of the thirties and forties has become our greatest tragedienne; seeing her transitions in Journey, the way she can look eighteen or eighty at will, experiencing the magic in the art of acting, once can understand why the appellation ‘the divine’ has sometimes been awarded to certain actresses.”
—Pauline Kael
Lumet always felt he didn’t get enough credit for the cinema of this adaptation. I think anyone revisiting it now understands his displeasure was well-founded.
Here is my favorite speech from the piece. Watch the subtlety of Lumet’s camera, and the effectiveness of the lighting design, in allowing Dean Stockwell, as Edmund, to tell this story.
