Eight Lesser-Known Film Adaptations of Drama Prize Winners

The third work to receive the Drama Prize, "Miss Lulu Bett" was adapted by William C. de Mille (a specialist in Broadway adaptations and the elder brother of famed mogul Cecil B. DeMille) for the 1921 holiday season. Actress Lois Bett (who went on to portray Daisy Buchanan in the first film adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" and enjoyed one of the few silent careers to endure into the classic Hollywood era) starred as the eponymous character, a household "slavey" who falls in love with the local schoolmaster after entering a bigamous marriage under false pretenses. De Mille went on to direct "Icebound" (1924), a lost adaptation of 1923 Drama Prize recipient Owen Davis's winning work. In 2001, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

One of the playwright's most enduring works, "Anna Christie" was a memorable showcase for Greta Garbo's first sound performance in 1930 ("Garbo Talks!"; "Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby!"). With a screenplay by Frances Marion (fresh off her first Academy Award for "The Big House"), the film directed by Clarence Brown ("A Free Soul," "Anna Karenina") included contributions from classic Hollywood luminaries such as director of photography William H. Daniels (Garbo's preferred cinematographer and an Academy Award winner for "The Naked City"), 11-time Academy Award-winning production designer Cedric Gibbons ("Pride and Prejudice," "Gaslight") and costume designer Adrian ("The Women," "The Wizard of Oz"). Although studio executives feared that Garbo's accent and precarious command of English would deter audiences from embracing the film, the actress was forced to reshoot several scenes as her diction improved.

A mordant (and pre-Code) explication of the legacy of familial neglect, alcoholism, rape and prostitution, "Anna Christie" resonated with the Depression-era audiences. Although contemporary reviewers were flummoxed by Garbo's "flat, rather toneless" voice, the actress, Brown and Daniels received Academy Award nominations for their work.

One of only six films produced during the classic Hollywood era to feature an all-African American cast, Marc Connelly's "The Green Pastures" situates familiar Biblical vignettes in the context of the era's flagrant bigotry and infantilizing racial stereotypes. Rex Ingram (the first African-American Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University) starred as the paternalistic "De Lawd."

According to TCM's Kerryn Sherrod, "Imagine, if you can, a 'Southern-style Heaven' where black English vernacular is spoken, fish fries and free cigars are plentiful, and the Hall Johnson Choir sings spirituals in the background all day." "[B]y downplaying, and outright distorting, African-American folk religion, and by side-stepping any confrontation with race problems," argued G. S. Morris of Bright Lights Film Journal, "Connelly fails to provide any real arena for racial reconciliation, instead affirming stereotypes and making it safe for white agnostics to find solace in a forgiving Uncle Tom."

Largely repudiated by civil rights activists, the 1936 film, co-directed by Connelly and Hollywood workman William Keighley ("The Adventures of Robin Hood," "The Man Who Came to Dinner"), was a financial success, grossing nearly $3.8 million by 1939 and selling 6,000 tickets per hour at Radio City Music Hall during its commercial zenith. The last surviving charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, Connelly co-wrote the screenplay for Victor Fleming's adaptation of "Captains Courageous" (1937) and enjoyed a second career as a television actor before dying at the age of 90 in 1980.

A seminal Depression political satire that prefigured such disparate works as Gore Vidal's "The Best Man," Warren Beatty's "Bulworth" and Armando Iannucci's "Veep," "Of Thee I Sing" was nearly adapted twice as a vehicle for the Marx Brothers in 1932 and 1938. While the anarchic comedy (including a nominating convention wrestling match and marriage proposal, a Supreme Court ruling on corn muffins, and the revelation that the president's estranged fiancee is "the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate son of an illegitimate nephew of Napoleon") was belatedly adapted as a CBS television special in 1972, its frivolous spirit suffused the magnum opus that emerged after the team elected to shelve "Of Thee...": "Duck Soup" (1933).

Produced by Kaufman's onetime Algonquin Round Table confederate Herman Mankiewicz — who shepherded a generation of New York-bred Hollywood screenwriters before earning an Academy Award for his nebulous contributions to Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" (1941) — "Duck Soup" swapped out the progressive rudiments of Kaufman and Ryskin's plot (U.S. president who ran on "love" platform forsakes beauty pageant winner for shrewd administrator) for Freedonian political intrigue and cynical power grabs worthy of the banking tensions (chronicled by 2018 History finalist Kim Philips-Fein in "Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal") that underscored the beginnings of FDR's social welfare programs. Yet the sheer physicality (culminating in a food fight/singalong not entirely unlike the concluding singalong of "Of Thee...") and eclectic score make "Duck Soup" the spiritual adaptation of this riotous Pulitzer classic.

Immediately preceded by three winning plays that were prominently adapted for the cinema (George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's screwball comedy "You Can't Take It with You," Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" and Robert Sherwood's "Abe Lincoln in Illinois"), William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life" anticipated the existential dishabille of such post-Beat writers as Hubert Selby Jr. and Charles Bukowski. Set at Nick's of San Francisco, an exemplar of seedy midcentury urbanity, the wealthy layabout Joe holds court in a milieu populated by literate longshoremen, disaffected cops, struggling artists and an early adherent of Eastern philosophy.

Although complicated by the era's Production Code standards (emblematized by the sanitization of a murder and the imposition of a romantic ending), the play initially was adapted as a project under the aegis of the Cagney family in 1948. James Cagney starred as Joe, while sister Jeanne portrayed morally ambiguous prostitute Kitty Duval; as with many of their projects, younger brother and business manager William served as the film's producer. Interestingly, cinematographer James Wong Howe (who previously collaborated with the Cagneys on "Yankee Doodle Dandy") was the husband of novelist Sanora Babb, whom Saroyan had pursued romantically over the course of a nine-year correspondence that ended in 1941. The film failed to resonate with preview audiences, leading Cagney to request a new denouement from Saroyan; however, the writer's fee could not be accommodated by what remained from the coffers of the spendthrift $2 million production. Despite these troubles, the "ennui" (Bosley Crowther)-laden film still managed to recoup $1.5 million at the box office.

A decade later, Jackie Gleason (as Joe), Jack Klugman and Betsy Palmer starred in a critically-acclaimed 90-minute adaptation aired on CBS's "Playhouse 90." The supporting cast included future "Bewitched" star Dick York, noted character actor Bert Freed and — defying type — socialites Dina Merrill and Gloria Vanderbilt. Long unavailable to the general public, it may be viewed at the Paley Center for Media in New York City.

Those aware of the decades-long relationship between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, complicated by such factors as the Catholic actor's refusal to divorce his estranged wife and Hepburn's alleged bisexuality, may be surprised to see the duo portraying an estranged couple in Frank Capra's 1948 adaptation of Crouse and Lindsay's Broadway smash, which received the 1946 Drama Prize.

Believed to have been inspired by the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie (a pro-business Democrat who ran as a liberal Republican against Franklin Roosevelt and carried on a lengthy, public extramarital affair with book critic Irita Van Doren, the wife of 1939 Biography winner Carl Van Doren), the plot concerns the dark horse Republican candidacy of aircraft manufacturer Grant Matthews, who is equally anathematized by big business and big labor. As his campaign progresses, Matthews is forced to grapple with the outsized power of special interests; his precarious relationship with his wife, Mary; and the patronage of his lover, newspaper tycoon Kay Thorndyke (portrayed by an aged-up Angela Lansbury following her Academy Award-nominated turns in "Gaslight" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray"). Unlike Wilkie, who remained a moderating force in American politics throughout World War II and even discussed forming a postwar third party with Roosevelt, a humbled Matthews reconciles with his wife and withdraws from the campaign.

Despite the success of its Broadway run, the imprimatur of the film's stars and its improbably catalytic role in convincing Harry Truman to seek his own term, "State of the Union" did not meet box office expectations, in part because the "happy-accidental" pairing of Hepburn and Tracy (facilitated by the last-minute withdrawal of Claudette Colbert following conflicts with Capra) led audiences to assume that the picture would be a screwball comedy in the vein of "Woman of the Year" (1941) or "Without Love" (1945). (Nevertheless, it was the 14th highest-grossing film of the year, outpacing such classics as "Key Largo," "Foreign Affair," and "The Naked City.") Indeed, gadfly film scholar Raymond Carney has gone so far as to characterize "State" as a "hard-boiled film noir." Seldom screened for decades after Capra acquired the rights to the film, "State" has been widely available since 2006.

Although director Sidney Lumet had embraced location shooting by this juncture in his long career (portions of 1962's "A View from the Bridge" were shot in the then-dilapidated waterfront district of Red Hook, Brooklyn, while the Catskill hamlet of Milton, N.Y. doubled for rural Louisiana in "The Fugitive Kind"), his adaptation of four-time Pulitzer winner Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical magnum opus returned him to the claustrophobic mise-en-scène of "12 Angry Men." Written shortly before the playwright succumbed to idiopathic cerebellar ataxia, a progressive brain disease that ultimately forced him to stop writing, in 1941-1942, "Long Day's Journey into Night" was embargoed at O'Neill's request for 25 years after his 1953 death. O'Neill's widow, actress Carlotta Monterey, refused to honor his request on the strength of its artistic merit, eventually publishing the work through Yale University Press in an arrangement that benefited scholarships at the Yale School of Drama. Despite its length and funereal air, the play — an exegesis on the familial struggles wrought by illness, physiological (alcoholism, opioid addiction, tuberculosis) and mental (sexual compulsivity, narcissism) — proved to be cathartic for the outwardly stoic generation that all too often wrapped the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II in martinis and Miltown, leading to a successful 1956-1957 Broadway run with Jason Robards and O'Neill's fourth Pulitzer.

Shot on a low budget of $435,000 at Chelsea Studios in Manhattan, the 1962 adaptation found the director working with an array of notable talent, including producer Ely Landau, who secured the film rights from Monterey after mounting an acclaimed television adaptation of "The Iceman Cometh"; cinematographer and old Lumet hand Boris Kaufman; Ralph Richardson; Robards, who reprised his stage role of womanizing alcoholic Jamie; and veteran character actor Dean Stockwell as the O'Neill-esque, tuberculosis- and wanderlust-afflicted Edmund. Katharine Hepburn portrayed the family's morphine-addicted matriarch, Mary Cavan Tyrone, in a bellicose and critically divisive Academy Award-nominated performance largely underpinned by her climactic slap of Stockwell.

Producer Joseph E. Levine hoped that "Long Day's" would galvanize the fledgling American art cinema following the unexpected commercial success of De Sica's "Two Women" and Fellini's "8 1/2." But the film failed to recoup its budget, leading the impresario to quip, "You cannot stay in business by making O'Neill pictures. I will never get my money out of [it]."

Nevertheless, "Long Day's" has endured as a daimonic force of the popular unconscious in American culture — the unsaid penumbra of family reunions — spawning four Broadway revivals and several screen adaptations, including a 1973 ITV television production with Laurence Olivier.

Initially premiered in Houston in 1964, Paul Zindel's "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds" enjoyed a rapturous Off-Broadway reception at the Mercer Arts Center in 1970, ultimately running for more than two years. Set in Staten Island, the play chronicles the volatile dynamics between a drug-dependent, abusive single mother (Beatrice) and her feuding daughters: introverted, scientific-inclined Tillie (who grows the titular, radioactive marigolds for her school's science fair) and Ruth, who is favored by her mother and frequently projects her psychiatric issues onto Tillie.

Zindel's work was arguably ahead of its time, capturing an unabashedly blue-collar, "dirty realist" zeitgeist that would inform the work of two-time Pulitzer finalist Raymond Carver (who first enjoyed national exposure with the publication of "Neighbors" in Esquire in 1971), underground poetry stalwart Charles Bukowski (who left his day job as a postal sorter to write his first novel in 1970) and Bob Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces." It was, perhaps, with an eye toward the unexpected commercial success of the latter film (which earned over $18 million on a $1.6 million budget) that saw "Marigolds" bypass a Broadway production for the silver screen.

Directed by Paul Newman and adapted by late-bloomer screenwriter Alvin Sargent (who earned his first Academy Award nomination for "Paper Moon" the following year), the resulting 1972 film was a family affair — Newman's wife, Joanne Woodward, starred as Beatrice, while daughter Nell Potts portrayed the voluble Matilda. (Bridgeport, Conn. stood in for Staten Island due to its proximity to the Newmans' longtime family home in Westport.)

Although Woodward and her daughter earned acclaim for their performances, Newman's direction divided critics, with future Pulitzer winner Roger Ebert castigating his perceived lack of visual style. Long unavailable on VHS or DVD, the film was reissued on Blu-ray in 2018. Despite its lukewarm reception, "Marigolds" was the virtual blueprint for one of the most epochal films of the 1970s: John Cassavetes's "A Woman Under the Influence," in which the desperation of Zindel's work is recast in a masculinized setting driven by Peter Falk's performance as a beleaguered construction worker.

While Zindel continued to work in the theater and as a screenwriter through 1989, he found his most enduring calling as a writer of young adult fiction, exemplified by the "Pigman" series and "Confessions of a Teenage Baboon." The American Library Association recognized his "significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature" with the Margaret A. Edwards Award a year before his death in 2002. "Paul Zindel knows and understands the reality young adults deal with day-to-day," the citation read. "He has the ability to depict young adults in an honest and realistic way. The characters he developed nearly 40 years ago still speak to today's teens."