The play's the thing, Part 2

The American Film Theatre, 40 years on

As I was saying yesterday, Ely Landau’s American Film Theatre was a subscription service in the early 1970s, for which top actors and directors did low-budget, limited-auteurism versions of great plays. There were some hiccups in the logistics — when the New York Times covered it, they got a bunch of angry letters complaining about poor service and delayed refunds — and in the quality and reception of the movie-plays, which classy critics generally found un-cinematic and pop critics found stodgy. Looking back from 2003, the critic Richard Schickel said, rather sniffily, that AFT “created a certain frisson outside of New York, where opportunities to see current avant-garde works — which the A.F.T. favored — were limited.” He was referring specifically to the film of Genet’s The Maids, which even 15 years ago was hardly avant-garde, but as a onetime starstruck kid with his nose pressed to AFT’s window I can see his point: AFT was canning culture for export — to the rubes, one could say if one were rude. So it wasn’t really a first-class product, but more like first-class material making a third-class passage, like Duse touring the provinces.

And, as I also mentioned, they didn’t want to gussy up these quality theatre products too much — they were selling classic plays, not cinematic exercises, so even the better directors kept it simple. (Actually they gravitated toward directors like Delbert Mann and Arthur Hiller who tended to do just that anyway.)

So when there are shortfalls in the films, they’re not due to over-ambition, but (it seems to me) a lack of energy devoted to solving the theatrical problem, like a road company that’s sick of pumping out classics and gone artistically catatonic. Lost In The Stars, for example, is kind of a sluggish property anyway, and Mann’s plodding approach to the film version does it no favors (though it’s fun to see the young black actors lively-up Maxwell Anderson’s deadly dialogue).

I like Joseph Losey’s version of Brecht’s Galileo better than most critics, partly because I actually think Topol is terrific in the lead: Conveying intellectualism is not one of his gifts (as a global star who tends to play broad to suit his multilingual audiences, he has more in common with Cantinflas than Charles Laughton, whose production this one seems to be based on), but his hammy style suits Brecht’s vision of the scientist as an engineer and conniver whose curiosity leads him to genius. (Also, Barberini, the cardinal who becomes Pope Urban VIII, is played by Michael Lonsdale, and the hint of Hugo Drax beautifully suits the character.) But Losey — who had actually worked with Brecht — seems defeated by the limitations of the gig, and to fall back on second-unit tricks and run-of-the-mill Verfremdungseffekt. Sometimes genius can thrive in adversity, but even Orson Welles himself might have faltered were he contractually obligated to Just Do The Play.

The most successful AFT shows are ones where the property happens to play well under the strictures of the form and the directors know it. Albee’s A Delicate Balance is real hothouse drama, set among the highest of high-class professionals residing in what feels like Greenwich, Connecticut, and director Tony Richardson doesn’t appear to have thought even for a minute of “opening up” the play with exteriors or traveling shots. (Richardson’s 1969 Hamlet, filmed entirely in London’s Roundhouse Theater, was good training for this.) It’s just the claustrophobic spectacle of an upper-class family having to take on more than their expected share of angst in the form of two old friends who’ve been driven out of their home and unto their protection by a nameless “terror” — friends whom they eventually have to (with politeness so extreme it’s psychotic) throw out of the house. It’s pretty much all three-camera tricks, but perfectly keyed, and the acting is of just the sort to succeed on AFT terms: Theatrical in that it’s slightly unnatural and interior, not chat or discourse but soul-baring, thoughts and feelings flung into the air, the mid-20th-century equivalent of Shakespeare’s iambs.

Something similar makes The Homecoming work, too, though the poetry is more modern, abrasive and contrapuntal: The camera bears down (who knew Peter Hall was such a dab hand at shot-reverse-shot?) as the actors do the Pinter vector where the tension in the plain meaning of words is warped like bent wood sculpture by the subtext, where an offer to take a glass of water, for example, becomes a death struggle: “And now perhaps I’ll relieve you of your glass.” “I haven’t quite finished.” “You’ve consumed quite enough in my opinion.” “No, I haven’t.” “Quite sufficient in my own opinion.” “Not in mine, Leonard.” “Don’t call me that please." You could do it with hand puppets and people would be riveted. As it was, watching Ian Holm and Vivien Merchant — even on a flat screen rather than on stage — gave me shivers, and not the kind of shivers you get from horror movies, but the kind that stir the mud at the bottom of one’s soul. That’s a lot to get from a night at the flickers.