In a more recent movie adaptation Lee Marvin stars as Mr Hickey. Click for its trailer here
The whisky-ridden derelicts who drag their broken carcasses through Harry Hope's bar came out of O'Neill's youth when he, too, was drinking too much and dreaming of becoming a writer. They are men whose only lives are illusions - "pie dreams", O'Neill calls their memories which they foolishly translate into hopes for the future that will never exist. When the play opens they are happily living together in a spirit of human rancour, broken, tired and drunken but buoyed up by romantic illusions about themselves.
What shatters their stupour is the arrival of an old comrade who has reformed. He has found peace at last, he says. He does not need whiskey any more, he says, because he has purged himself of illusions and knows the full truth of himself. Instead of making them happy, however, his reform movement destroys their decaying contentment.
Without illusions, they find themselves standing alone and terrified. They cannot face the hollowness of themselves without the opium of illusions. But they are released in the last act by the awful discovery that their teacher has freed himself from illusions by committing a crime that will sit him in the electric chair. He is free from illusions because he has resigned from life and is already dead in spirit. Whereupon, the derelicts drink up again and happily relapse into the stupour of the bottle.
After having previously watched "Long Day's Journey into Night", I got deeper into Eugene O'Neill's work with "The Iceman Cometh" with its "tomorrow movement", in which each member sentimentally reminisces about their glory days and pledges to return to them tomorrow.
In all of my past sojours I met, without realising it, several of O'Neill's characters, because every boarding house had at least one, and every construction camp had scores of broken people who always reminisced about their glory days and always pledged to return to them tomorrow.
As for Eugene O'Neill himself, he died at the age of sixty-five in a hotel room in Boston. His last articulate words, uttered with clenched fists, were: "Born in a hotel room - and Goddamn it - died in a hotel room."
