The American Film Theatre — note the fancy spelling of “theatre,” peasants — was a subscription service that Ely Landau, producer of high-toned entertainments, managed to keep afloat for a couple of seasons in the early 1970s. Big-time plays by big-time playwrights, stars, and directors — all working for cheap, out of love for the theat-R-E — were presented at regular movie houses a couple nights a month. This was, I recall, an era of financial doldrums for Hollywood — back in Bridgeport I could see double bills of near-first-run movies for a dollar or two, and in all but the toniest bijoux first-run films were discounted on certain weeknights — so Landau may have sniffed a financial as well as an artistic opportunity.
As a theatre- and theater-mad teenager I was hot to see these shows, but I didn’t have the price of a subscription — they were $30 a season, and there were no one-offs — and have pined for them ever since; so when I recently found out my Kanopy subscription got me access to pretty much all the AFI films, I went on a binge.
I assumed the cut-rate productions, which have so far as I can see approximately no following among the film-crit community, wouldn’t set the world on fire visually, and indeed they mostly look like 70s movies-of-the-week, albeit the high-class kind like That Certain Summer or Brian’s Song: competent but stodgy, befitting the offer of great plays rather than cinematic takeoffs thereof. (All that fish-eye fucking around may be all well and good for Harold Pinter, Mr. Joseph Losey, but this is Mr. Brecht’s party, not yours!) If there have a place in the film continuum, they belong with stage-show translations like Richard Pryor Live at the Sunset Strip, Swimming to Cambodia, Give 'Em Hell, Harry! or Stop Making Sense — renderings, not creations, done either more or less well but finally only as interesting as the artifact rendered.
But at times the AFI films give us more, sometimes a lot more. The creators were, after all, pros at the top of their game, and the grand nature of the project more or less mandated that they serve the project rather than their own film-career needs. They weren’t just making movies, or even just doing plays — they were taking six-figure pay cuts to do theatre all the way to the r and the e, and their playing suggests what that meant to people at a certain stage in history.
There are coups de théâtre in the films, for example, that you can tell the directors want to land the way they would onstage. Practically the only really interesting thing about Tom O’Horgan’s strenuously zany version of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (scripted by the author of Lenny!) is its preservation of Zero Mostel’s famous transformation into the title creature. For years people spoke of Mostel’s Broadway performance of this part as a revered, unrecorded theatrical miracle, like something by Arkadina or Sarah Bernhardt. Whatever else O’Horgan botched (how do you mess up with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel so soon after The Producers?), he got that on film. “Big” performances can be thrilling onstage and look like hammy garbage on the big screen. But Mostel had been working his gift for the grotesque for years, and by Rhinoceros had turned it into something like a special effect. Think of his roleplaying with Estelle Winwood at the beginning of The Producers; you’re as impressed with the inventiveness of his face-pulling as with the plight of the character. The escalation of his Ionesco character’s rage into animal behavior — roars and screeches, lumbering gait, sudden stalking and violent lunges — is a great technical achievement, the very definition of bravura; even if you don’t get it you have to applaud, at least in the spirit of Partridge applauding the barnstorming ham in Fielding’s Tom Jones: “Anybody may see he is an actor.”
You can see a more sustained kind of theatre-acting in Maxmillian Schell’s Goldman in The Man in the Glass Booth. The play by the actor Robert Shaw (whose intellectual bona fides were confirmed to me by his statement to Richard Schickel at Time about the film Jaws, in which Shaw had appeared and which had just come out, that the book on which the film was based was “a novel written by a committee, a piece of shit”) is kind of a crazy Sixties fever dream. A seemingly mad Jewish developer, given to hallucinatory, ambigiuous speeches about the Third Reich (in whose camps he had been interned during World War II), is kidnapped by Israelis who insist he’s really a Nazi camp kommandant named Dorff and taken to Tel Aviv to stand trial for war crimes; Goldman admits he’s Dorff, but negotiates to represent himself at trial wearing a Nazi uniform. The court places him in a booth, a la Eichmann, as a precaution, and Goldman’s testimony behind the glass is extremely provocative and anti-Semitic — until it is revealed that he is not Dorff at all, but the mad Jewish seer we had seen him to be at first, who had intended to sacrifice himself for reasons that are ultimately mysterious: he seems at times to want chide his fellow Jews for their sheeplike submission to the Nazis; at other times he suggests they would have done the same as Hitler if they’d had the chance.
Wild, right? Try to imagine such a thing even being countenanced in the age of AIPAC and Ilhan Omar — especially written by an English gentile! I love it, of course, and resent the trimming and softening done by director Arthur Hiller (the Hollywood plodder behind Love Story) and screenwriter Edward Anhalt (an old practiced hand at theater-to-film translations); in the play, for example, Goldman’s identity is revealed at trial by another Holocaust survivor, and his final speeches are paint-peeling crazy: “I rode on Russian horses, on great black Russian horses. Every lamppost in Danzig a gallows...” The film elides this, has Goldman exposed by medical records, and then has him go catatonic (as announced by a doctor conveniently present). Shaw had his name taken off the thing and I frankly don’t believe Hiller’s story about him coming around later. The original Broadway production, starring Donald Pleasance and directed by Harold Pinter, must have been nuts.
But there’s enough jam in the movie version to make it interesting; indeed, by the standards of our own boring time it’s fascinating. Goldman starts out attractively sardonic and eccentric, but we quickly realize he’s disturbed — and he goes on being disturbed, raving about Hitler, sex, and Y.A. Tittle, through nearly an hour of pre-Israeli shenanigans. To give you some idea, he gives a lavish party in his own honor, wanders during his own speech out onto the terrace, takes off his shoes, and gouges a stigma into his foot with the stand of his dead wife’s urn. We do, these days, have peculiar lead characters, but if they are not some Hollywood fuckboi playing The Joker they tend toward quirkiness (usually accompanied by ukuleles) rather than active psychosis. Schell, with a feral grin and mad eyes magnified by thick glasses, keeps us repelled but also from turning away; his intelligence is obvious, but his madness isn’t — we sense early on that even when he’s raving he’s aware of his effect, and when other people treat him seriously he’s impressed by their perceptiveness. And until Hiller and Anhalt fink out, his ravings in the booth are amazing and thoroughly contemporary — in fact he suggests a modern alt-right character granted a poetic sensibility and a thirst for actual transgression — not the titillating bullshit of Milo Yiannopoulos or Richard Spencer, but something he’s not only willing but also eager to die for.
More on this tomorrow.
I've got a couple of these on DVD they are impressive. The Iceman Cometh is one of my favorite plays and Marvin is adequate in it but the supporting actors I think are incredible. At any rate that's my opinion. It gave me a chance to see great O"Neal which I probably wouldn't have had otherwise.
Theatr(e) is the original and correct spelling.