Look Homeward, Angel (adapted from Thomas Wolfe's novel by Ketti Frings). Few novels of any size or importance can be transferred to the stage without forfeiting an amplitude that is half their strength, a personal accent that is half their essence. Look Homeward, Angel is one of the few, and the reason is clear enough: the novel's amplitude is often the sheerest excess, its personal accent the most rioting rhetoric. For all Wolfe's great gifts, his novel was too often diminished by a craving for size, impoverished by an orgy of word-spending, made shallow by a show of philosophy. What the book had pre-eminently to bequeath to the theater was some magnificent characters, and Playwright Frings has settled for that one bequest. She has taken the people and let the purple go.
Her exceedingly effective play is not Wolfe's novel miraculously purged of all its faults and yet preserving all its fullness. It could not be, and in a certain sense the play is not Look Homeward, Angel at all. It is neater, smaller, simpler —a workable family play, set against a background of the family boarding house and squeezed into a few weeks' time. In one respect, something has been lost: the characters are no longer so fully and revealingly lived with, hence so expressive or large. In another respect, something has been blurred: there is a lessened thematic sense, and even in a tighter framework, where everything should prove integral, some things are merely episodic or picturesque.
But on its own self-governing terms, the play is vivid and often impressive. And unlike the book, it is not rampantly autobiographical, not literally self-centered. The Eugene Gant who is Thomas Wolfe, imprisoned though he may feel, impassioned though he may grow, is less the protagonist, more just part of a memorable tribe. There is the well-meaning, property-loving, family-exploiting, sympathy-maneuvering mother. There is the lusty ruin of a father, with a heroic gift for drink and denunciation, and a sense of values for all his violences. There is Eugene's snappish, put-upon sister; there is his protective brother Ben, who, as in the novel, is more notable dying than when alive. The Gants' tumultuous strifes and set-tos constantly startle and sometimes even rout the genteel, almost ghostly boarders.
What gives Look Homeward, Angel a vitality laced with truth is how much the Gants seem an actual family, at once riveted and riven—far more than Eugene's romance with a boarder (Frances Hyland) seems an authentic love affair. The long-borne inner tensions snap when at last Eugene turns on his mother—hair-raisingly in Anthony Perkins' performance—for the way she has used and fettered her children.
Under George Roy Hill's able direction, Perkins plays a smoldering, resentful, romantic teen-age Eugene with a quiet sensibility that gives his last vibrant scenes (the very last is one too many) their stunning force. Jo Van Fleet is extraordinarily good as the mother; as the father, Hugh Griffith acts with a vigor and virtuosity that match the role. The play, at its best, conveys how, for almost every true writer, youth is a bursting of bonds and a simultaneous bondage to dreams; and how, for most men, the impact of their own flesh and blood can become at times a thing of blood and tears.