YMMV / The Iceman Cometh

• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The 1960 televised production has Jason Robards as Hickey. While a well-known stage actor at the time, Robards was mostly unknown to film or TV audiences.
  • A very young and then unknown Robert Redford played Don in the 1960 TV production.
  • Tom Pedi and Sorrell Booke appeared in both the 1960 TV production and the 1973 American Film Theater production as Rocky and Hugo, respectively. Pedi would become a familiar sight to television audiences as the repairman in early Maytag appliance commercials, while Booke became a familiar face to many a decade later as Boss Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard.
• The Woobie: While most of the characters ruined their own lives through drinking, it's hard not to have some pity for them. Some examples:
  • Regardless of what you think of Hugo's radical politics, one can't but sympathize with a man who spent years locked in solitary confinement in an eastern European prison for his political beliefs, eventually losing most of his eyesight and his sanity.
  • It's similarly understandable why Don despised his mother - who put her radical politics and her sexual promiscuity ahead of being a good parent to her son. He describes his home life as like living in a whorehouse, only worse because she didn't have to do it for money. Years of resentment cause him to turn her in to the authorities for her terrorist activities. He later commits suicide because of his sense of guilt for betraying her.
  • Jimmy Tomorrow's final monologue about how he lost his job and his wife due to his drunkenness is very sad, even though he brought much of it on himself. Rocky mentions that a policeman brought Jimmy back after finding him crying at the edge of a dock contemplating suicide by drowning.
  • Willie is still a young man (in his late 30s), and his alcoholism is the most severe of the whole lot, most of whom are in their 50s or 60s. He came from wealth and was educated in Harvard Law School, and he basically took up drinking and being a bum to spite his corrupt stockbroker father (who wound up in prison for wire fraud).
  • Larry can't even escape into his happy, drunken delusions anymore after Hickey's visit.
  • Hickey is more of a Jerkass Woobie, bordering on Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds when it's revealed that he murdered his wife. His Jerkass side shows itself when he torments his friends by forcing them to face intolerable realities about their own lives. He kids himself that he's doing it for their own good, when in reality he's doing it because misery loves company. On the other hand, years of alcoholism and guilt over his lack of self-control have slowly lead a man who was once a joy to be around into insanity and murder.