A Touch of the Poet (1974) (TV)

User Rating:

6.4/10   

Director:

Kirk Browning

Writer:

Eugene O'Neill (play)

Release Date:

24 April 1974 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot Keywords:

Filmed Play | Based On Play

Cast

John Heffernan	...	Paddy O'Dowd
Nancy Marchand	...	Nora Melody
Roberta Maxwell	...	Sara Melody
Donald Moffat	...	Jamie Cregan
Carrie Nye	...	Deborah Hartford
Robert Phalen	...	Mickey Malloy
Fritz Weaver	...	Cornelius Melody

Runtime:

150 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Company:

Hollywood Television Theatre

Trivia:

Kim Stanley was nominated for the 1959 Tony Award (New York City) for Actress in a Drama for "A Touch of the Poet".

Movie Connections:

Version of Fast ein Poet (1968) (TV)

Falls Just Short of The Dark Irish Truth

Eugene O'Neill expressed a desire to tell the full story of America, in a ten play cycle that would show the full circle from innocence to corruption in the Yankee experience. A TOUCH OF THE POET is the only play he completed in this cycle. Ironically, the Yankee family who was supposed to be central to the story is off stage most of the time.

What O'Neill failed to grasp is that the Irish experience itself followed a similar pattern from poverty and innocence to wealth and corruption. In this play the Irish are always the victims, never the victimizers. The Melody family are sanitized, sentimentalized Irish stereotypes. The real truth of the Irish experience -- the corroding forces of racism and hate -- are entirely ignored.

And yet -- for one brief moment, O'Neill almost seems to get the idea. At the very end of the play, after brawling Cornelius Melody and his henchman Jamie Cregan have attacked the wealthy Yankee mansion, (accomplishing nothing and making fools of themselves in the process) Cregan sits in the kitchen and boasts of his violent deeds to the adoring Irish women of the family. Cregan brags about how the Irish "almost" succeeded in forcing their way into the mansion, but that they were stopped in their tracks by "a big n----r." Then he brags about how Major Con Melody, who fails completely to confront the rich Yankee inside the house, succeeds in brutally beating "the n----r." O'Neill bewails the fact that Major Melody loses his identity as an Aristocrat, and has to accept his place as an American working man. What he does not notice, or acknowledge, is that in real life Con Melody and his gang would have continued to take out their rage and frustration on blacks long after their own poverty was at an end. At the end of the play, Melody announces to the drunken lads in the saloon that he is now one of them -- an Andrew Jackson Democrat. What he does not say is that Jackson is pro-slavery, anti-black, and a symbol of racial hate. In real life Melody and his boys would have celebrated their "victory" by going back out and finishing the job on "the big n----r," not only beating him up but murdering him, raping his wife, and burning down his house. This is what they did in New York in 1863, in Chicago in 1919, in East St. Louis in 1917, and so on and so on.

The real truth about what the Irish became in America is not fully revealed in this play, or anywhere else in American literature. Powerful forces in the Irish community and the Catholic church are preventing the truth from being spoken. Only the ghosts of the Union dead may whisper in the night, telling tales of evil long forgotten.