Mourning Becomes Electra, Dudley Nichols, 1947

The O Neill original transposed Euripides Agamemnon, Clytemnestra legend to postCivil War New England. Rosalind Russell plays the daughter of a returning war hero (Raymond Massey), who comes home to find his wife (Katina Paxinou) in the arms of a younger man. The wife murders the husband, leaving it to her grown children, Russell and Michael Redgrave, to exact vengeance. This morbid plotline climaxes with Russell s descent into destructive selfrighteousness and her brother s retreat into insanity.