Hollywood in the past had a cyclical relationship with what was called legitimate stage theatre. The stage plays themselves, actors, and writers all came to Hollywood as the fodder for film. Drawing upon that legacy is Chandler Wilds’s modern-day film adaption of the Eugene O’Neill classic The Hairy Ape titled The Dancing Monkey.
Set in the present day in small-town industrial America, you have Wayne (Paige Smith), who works at multi-generational Cooley Box company on the assembly line and takes a sick day only to find on his return that his vote will be deciding one for or against a Shop Union. No pressure here as he has encounters with co-workers all trying to encourage him to vote one way or the other. Wayne even visits a representative of a small Communist party group seeking answers.
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“…Wayne has a vision of a body lying somewhere in his path that turns out to be his dead son.”
You have Management in the form of Jennifer Cooly (Nicole Foster) and her financial person called Lisa Sheets (Natasha Coppola-Shalom), who try to subtly and not so subtly influence him with facts about the shop he cannot disclose to his fellow workmates. Throughout all these movements and building on the conclusion of his vote for or against, Wayne has a vision of a body lying somewhere in his path that turns out to be his dead son. All a great recipe or a story, you get action, adventure, conflict along the way, and an epiphany moment.
The drawback, as I see it, is that this adaption ignores the existential drama of the source material. The material came for the age of those great inspiring works by people like Clifford Odets and others. These works mesmerized crowds into action, often being condemned in the press for preaching all things like the dehumanization of the worker and their Rights. These rights were thought of as being Communist in origin to undermine the free spirit of what was thought of as Capitalism in the later thirties.
"…a caricature of Communism's catchwords."
