The Wall Street Journal - 20.03.2020

A12| Friday, March 20, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

he spoke such lines as “I’m a plain,

common sucker with a shirttail so

short I cain’t sit on it.” It was only

after he saw Massey in the film

version of “Ethan Frome” that

Sherwood started writing the play,

and you can hear Massey’s distinc-

tive voice in every line he speaks.

A passionate supporter of Presi-

dent Roosevelt, Sherwood was hor-

rified by the rise of Adolf Hitler,

and “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” which

is based on Carl Sandburg’s “Abra-

ham Lincoln: The Prairie Years,” is

both the story of Lincoln’s pre-pres-

idential life and a plea for America

to abandon its isolationism and (in

Sherwood’s words) “participate vig-

orously in the concern of the

world.” Accordingly, Sherwood’s

Lincoln is a darkly introspective

man who senses his destiny but

fears the dreams of Mary, his politi-

cally ambitious wife: “I don’t want

to be ridden and driven, onward

and upward through life, with her

whip lashing me and her spurs dig-

ging into me!” Yet in the end he

gives in, following the improbable

path that would lead him to the

White House—and Ford’s Theatre.

Sherwood adapted his own play

for the screen, opening it up with

outdoor scenes and shrewdly trim-

LIFE&ARTS

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN KUCZALA; CRITERION COLLECTION; EVERETT COLLECTION

Paul Muni in ‘The Story of Louis Pasteur,’ above left; a scene from ‘The X From Outer Space,’ above right

ming the earnest speechifying that

makes the original stage version

read at times more like a pageant

than a drama. As a result, his bril-

liant 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 At-

kinson of the New York Times to

call it “an exalted performance...he

plays [the part] with an artless

honesty that is completely over-

whelming at the end.”

Nowadays Sherwood’s plays are

rarely staged, and “Abe Lincoln in

Illinois” has had only one major

professional revival, by Lincoln Cen-

ter Theater in 1993 (Sam Waterston

played Lincoln). The huge cast—the

original 1938 production fielded 49

actors—ensures that it will hence-

forth be seen rarely if at all. For

this reason, the film version of “Abe

Lincoln in Illinois,” which can be

viewed on Amazon Prime and You-

Tube, is all the more valuable. At an

hour of supreme national peril, it

reminds us of what great theater

does better than any other art form:

It can inspire us to try to become,

as Lincoln so triumphantly became,

the very best that we can be.

Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama

critic, is the author of “Satchmo at

the Waldorf.” Write to him at

[email protected].

Editors’ Note:Theater coverage

will continue during coronavirus-re-

lated shutdowns with reviews of

streaming productions and essays

on filmed theatrical productions

and adaptations.

EVERETT COLLECTION

Raymond Massey (center) in ‘Abe Lincoln in Illinois’

THEATER REVIEW| TERRY TEACHOUT

Perfectly Cast for

Perilous Times

N

o new openings be-

cause theaters are

shutting down for

the duration—

what’s a movie

lover to do? Unlike

other questions posed by the pan-

demic, this one has an easy an-

swer. Stream or download, sit back

and enjoy. It won’t be the same as

the big-screen experience, but if

truth be told “I’ll wait for it to

come to Netflix” (or the streaming

service of your choice) has been an

increasingly familiar refrain in re-

cent years, and a good flat-panel

display in the den (or the home

screening room of your choice) can

deliver dazzling images.

Beginning this week I’ll be sug-

gesting feature films and docu-

mentaries that may be of special

interest, with instructions on

where to find them in the vast cy-

bermall of streaming sites. (For a

start, think about giving yourself a

subscription to the Criterion Chan-

nel, a rich resource for American

and international classics.)

At the moment fans all over the

web are sharing lists of their fa-

vorite outbreak flicks. Most in-

clude such genuinely terrifying

films as, yes, you guessed it, “Out-

break” (a disease similar to Ebola)

and “Contagion” (a disease eerily

similar to the novel coronavirus).

My own picks are less topical.

That’s not to minimize the gravity

of the situation, but only to note

that movies have many ways of

mixing relevance with flights of

fancy, extravagant action, histori-

cal resonance or the welcome dis-

traction of silly fun.

When I reviewed“12 Monkeys”

in 1996—can it really have been

that long ago?—I called it “‘Die

Hard’ with a virus.” Terry Gilliam’s

dystopian phantasmagoria, stream-

ing on Showtime, stars Bruce Wil-

lis as James Cole, a time traveler

who tries to change the course of

a pandemic that has banished

mankind from the surface of the

earth to its steaming bowels.

James first appears in our midst in

a state of seemingly terminal dis-

combobulation; he insists he’s

been sent from the future to find a

pure form of the virus that has

ravaged his world. For his troubles

he is diagnosed as suffering from a

Cassandra complex (in Greek my-

thology Cassandra had the gift of

prophecy but no one believed her),

pumped with Thorazine and locked

up in a psych ward, where he

meets a seriously deranged ani-

mal-rights activist (Brad Pitt) and

a beautiful, open-minded psychia-

trist (Madeleine Stowe) who’s not

so sure James is certifiable.

Some movies come and go in a

matter of weeks or months, while

others find a permanent place in

our collective consciousness. “

Monkeys” became a cultural

keeper mainly, but not only, by vir-

tue of its graphic distinction: Jef-

frey Beecroft designed the spectac-

ular production, and Roger Pratt

did the superb cinematography.

Mr. Willis is at once commanding

and affecting. Mr. Pitt is terrific

playing a relatively minor charac-

ter. He’s far more memorable here

than in the muddled “World War

Z,” where he starred as a former

United Nations operative who

tracks down a lethal pathogen to

neutralize a global plague of com-

puter-generated zombies.

Many lists of outbreak movies

have included“The Andromeda

Strain,”Robert Wise’s 1971 screen

version of the Michael Crichton

novel (it streams on Amazon

Prime Video). I’m not a fan. Much

of the action is plodding, despite

the provocative premise—a lethal

organism from outer space comes

to Earth via a satellite probe—and

the script suffers from the same

problem that afflicted the book, a

cluttered climax lacking in dra-

matic clarity. (A Universal execu-

tive who worked on the production

once told me that Lew Wasserman,

the Hollywood titan running the

studio at the time, summoned

Crichton to a meeting to talk about

improving the ending for the film

version, but they never got around

to the subject at hand. Wasserman,

eager to impress the celebrated

author, had instructed his secre-

tary to put through all of his calls.)

The premise of“The X From

Outer Space,”available on the

Criterion Channel, is similar—sci-

entists return from Mars with

spores that precipitate a global ca-

lamity. But no one can accuse this

1967 camp classic from Japan of

being plodding. It is, in a word, lu-

dicrous. In additional words it is

cheesy, tacky, shrewdly goofy, dul-

cetly daffy, gleefully silly and ab-

surdly entertaining. Does nonsense

like this really have a place in the

urgency of the moment? Watch

those spores grow into a 200-foot-

tall rubber-suit space chicken and

you may be glad that it does.

Physical action has a time-hon-

ored place in mainstream movies.

“Mission: Impossible 2”(rent or

buy it on iTunes or Amazon) com-

bines kinetic sequences of uncom-

mon exuberance—the director was

the Hong Kong action wizard John

Woo—with a world-wide hunt for a

genetically modified virus dubbed

Chimera. The virus is, of course,

bad, but an antivirus isn’t all that

good because it’s what the bad guys

want to use when they hold the

world hostage for billions of dollars.

The co-stars are Tom Cruise, in his

usual M.I. role as Ethan Hunt, and

Thandie Newton as Nyah Hall, a

classy professional thief. The film

isn’t great, far from it, but lays

strong claim on your attention

while cars crash, dirt bikes roar,

kickboxers kick, fireballs blossom

and pathogens spread.

Hunkered down in our apart-

ments and homes we may be, but

we needn’t be trapped in the pres-

ent.“The Story of Louis Pasteur”

(streaming on Amazon) was made

in 1936. Yet it still serves as a

model, albeit an agreeably old-

fashioned one, of how much accu-

rate information a film can convey

in a conventional dramatic form.

Paul Muni plays the 19th-century

French biologist with taut inten-

sity. Pasteur created the first vac-

cines for anthrax and rabies, but

one scene toward the end carries a

special message for our time. Pas-

teur’s daughter is about to give

birth and the great man demands

that her obstetrician sterilize his

instruments and, an equally radical

thought, wash his hands. The physi-

cian scoffs—“See here, I’ve brought

hundreds of babies into the

world”—but Pasteur perseveres.

“Wash them to the elbows,” he in-

sists, then: “Don’t be afraid. Use the

brush! The brush! The brush!”

Our film critic

recommends some

movie magic in the time

of shuttered cinemas

TIME WAS WHENBroadway’s hits

were routinely converted by Holly-

wood into big-budget films. As of-

ten 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 Wil-

liams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” to

which a ludicrously happy ending

was tacked on by the studio.) On

occasion, though, the screen ver-

sions 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 perfor-

mances seem overprojected and

awkwardly “stagy,” the films in

which they appear still give us pre-

cious glimpses, however flawed, of

the evanescent phenomenon that is

great stage acting—and once in a

while everything clicks, with results

that can be miraculous.

One such film is “Abe Lincoln in

Illinois,” John Cromwell’s 1940

screen version of the Pulitzer-win-

ning 1938 play in which Robert E.

Sherwood, writing at a not-dissimi-

lar moment of high national anxi-

ety, put on the stage a doubt-ridden

Abraham Lincoln with whom war-

fearing theatergoers could iden-

tify—played by Raymond Massey,

whose performance was so power-

ful that he would be identified with

Lincoln for the rest of his life.

Born in Canada in 1896, Massey

is probably best known today for

having played the psychopathic

killer who looked like Boris Karloff

in Frank Capra’s 1944 screen ver-

sion of “Arsenic and Old Lace,”

though TV viewers of a certain age

will also remember him for having

played Dr. Gillespie opposite Rich-

ard Chamberlain in “Dr. Kildare.” In

1938, he was a respected support-

ing actor who divided his time be-

tween Broadway and Hollywood. As

for Sherwood, he was one of Broad-

way’s top playwrights, a member of

the Algonquin Round Table who

was equally at home knocking out

hit plays like “The Petrified Forest”

and “Idiot’s Delight” and successful

screenplays (his screen credits in-

clude “Rebecca” and “The Best

Years of Our Lives”). Choosing a

second-tier Canadian actor to play

Lincoln might have seemed mis-

guided, but Massey, who was both

6-foot-3 (he wore lifts to play Lin-

coln) and bore a striking facial re-

semblance to the 16th president,

had a natural gravity well suited to

the part. Moreover, the backwoods

accent he assumed made him

sound completely convincing when

FILM REVIEW| JOE MORGENSTERN

The New View From the Couch