Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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zedz
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#26 Post by zedz » Wed Jun 22, 2016 8:39 pm

I just did a rough trawl through my decades lists to identify eligible films, and I seem to have come up with only sixteen titles, which surprised me - though there are probably more that I don't yet realise qualify.

Some ones that haven't been mentioned yet:
Pandora's Box (Pabst, 1929) - Obvious, but I initially overlooked it.

City Girl (Murnau, 1930) - Based on something called The Mud Turtle, apparently.

Peter Ibbetson (Hathaway, 1935) - originally derived from a novel, but there was an extremely successful theatrical adaptation that features in the chain of causation (this is, of course, also true of the Lugosi Dracula, if you're so inclined), At any rate, this is one the strangest Hollywood films of the 30s, and you should check it out.

Day of Wrath (Dreyer, 1943) and Gertrud (Dreyer, 1964)

The following Fassbinder films / scripts were originally staged as plays: Katzelmacher, The American Soldier, The Coffeehouse, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Bremen Freedom. And Pioneers in Ingolstadt, Jail Bait, Nora Helmer and Women in New York were based on plays by others.

I'm not voting for it, but don't forget that The Seventh Seal was originally the Bergman play Wood Painting.

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Ashirg
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#27 Post by Ashirg » Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:22 pm

Since it's not easy to figure out what titles are based on a play, I think this list from Wiki should help (removing the musicals).

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domino harvey
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#28 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:28 pm

How is everyone's prospective list not a hundred titles long after looking at that? And that is still extremely incomplete, like not even close!

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Ashirg
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#29 Post by Ashirg » Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:47 pm

There is also this list, but like the other one, it's mostly Hollywood centered. But the second list adds Bad Girl (1931) among others which I did not realized was based on a play.

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knives
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#30 Post by knives » Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:58 pm

Almost all early sound films were based on plays just because it was the easiest way to adapt. Even as late as the '40s Lean's Dickens adaptions were based on earlier theater adaptations. You could easily do a full list honestly.

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knives
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#31 Post by knives » Wed Jun 22, 2016 11:22 pm

Also Dom should be happy that Susan Slept Here is eligible.

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zedz
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#32 Post by zedz » Wed Jun 22, 2016 11:47 pm

domino harvey wrote:How is everyone's prospective list not a hundred titles long after looking at that? And that is still extremely incomplete, like not even close!
Well, it would be very easy to rank a hundred films I liked that were based on plays, but I'd be straying a long way from the top of my personal heap to do so - which I imagine would make the compiling and ranking exercise quite a drag. I was actually surprised by how few of the six hundred or so films I'd voted for in the last round of the decades lists were based on plays. Even among classical Hollywood fare from the twenties, thirties and forties I could only find half a dozen play-sourced properties that I'd ranked highly enough to make the top fifty for any of those decades (out of sixty-plus American films). But I was only aware of the stage-basis of two of those without checking (His Girl Friday and The Cat and the Canary), though I'd have laid odds that Stage Door was as well.

I'm starting to think that "theatre adaptation" is kind of an irrelevant category for me. For most of the films I'm considering voting for, it's a characteristic I was either unaware of or which has no bearing on my response to the film. For me, it's a bit like ranking films in which there are extras wearing green shirts or in the which the score includes oboes. The provisional list I've come up with looks just as random as one sorted by those categories would. I'd never have perceived any particular affinity between those films if I hadn't done an imdb search to verify their stage origins, and the elements I'd consider in ranking them would have nothing to do with what the list is supposed to be about.

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knives
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#33 Post by knives » Thu Jun 23, 2016 12:32 am

That's actually why I'm discounting entirely any films where I don't engage with them as a piece of theater (I'm not saying this should be a rule just what works for me). Yeah, I could vote for Whale's Frankenstein or Susan Slept Here, but I love those entirely on cinematic grounds and thus it would make my list feel to me arbitrary especially in terms of the concept of adaptation. So the question for me is more how does this film connect theater to film. That's why I'll be voting for Suddenly, Last Summer, but not Baby Doll. They are both some of the greatest films ever, but Mank is making it a piece of theater contorted to cinematic technique while Kazan is a much more pure act of cinema (or at least a far less theatrical one).

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#34 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:18 am

Robert Lepage. 'Le Polygraphe' is based on his own play (not seen either) as is 'Far side of the Moon' which I saw on stage and in the cinema. The film is a very different animal to the bravura one man theatre show with it's circus humour and illusion but holds up well even if its origins are unfamiliar.
Possible Worlds is based on a play by mathematician John Mighton starring Tilda Swinton.
Also Nø is an adaptation of a collectively devised theatre piece 'The Seven Streams of the River Ota' and is open about the influences of Michel Brault and Alain Resnais (the October Crisis and Hiroshima mon Amour).

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#35 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:30 am

A strange hybrid and also one of the greatest of Trevor Nunn's epics , the RSC's Nicholas Nickelby, was re-housed and shot as a 2 camera shoot after the end of its run with a live audience at London's Old Vic. I had the chance to catch the version in Edinburgh a couple of years back and thought it a marvel of staging and the use of mutiple role playing. If anyone has 9 hours to spare the original is available on a 3 disc DVD set

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domino harvey
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#36 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jun 23, 2016 10:05 am

zedz wrote:
domino harvey wrote:How is everyone's prospective list not a hundred titles long after looking at that? And that is still extremely incomplete, like not even close!
Well, it would be very easy to rank a hundred films I liked that were based on plays, but I'd be straying a long way from the top of my personal heap to do so - which I imagine would make the compiling and ranking exercise quite a drag. I was actually surprised by how few of the six hundred or so films I'd voted for in the last round of the decades lists were based on plays.
This is just such a weird wall you're building for this exercise. Isn't it possible that a film could function better as a filmed adaptation of a play than it does overall in competition with other films from the decade it was released? Time-based distinctions of grouping films is just as "arbitrary" as you're labeling this list. It's like saying there's only a few good noirs because there weren't thirty of them in your Top 50 for the 1940s.

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#37 Post by zedz » Thu Jun 23, 2016 3:44 pm

knives wrote:That's actually why I'm discounting entirely any films where I don't engage with them as a piece of theater (I'm not saying this should be a rule just what works for me). Yeah, I could vote for Whale's Frankenstein or Susan Slept Here, but I love those entirely on cinematic grounds and thus it would make my list feel to me arbitrary especially in terms of the concept of adaptation. So the question for me is more how does this film connect theater to film. That's why I'll be voting for Suddenly, Last Summer, but not Baby Doll. They are both some of the greatest films ever, but Mank is making it a piece of theater contorted to cinematic technique while Kazan is a much more pure act of cinema (or at least a far less theatrical one).
I think that's a sensible approach. It's what I originally imagined my list would look like (lots of tightly written intimate actor showcases).

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zedz
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#38 Post by zedz » Thu Jun 23, 2016 3:53 pm

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:Robert Lepage. 'Le Polygraphe' is based on his own play (not seen either) as is 'Far side of the Moon' which I saw on stage and in the cinema. The film is a very different animal to the bravura one man theatre show with it's circus humour and illusion but holds up well even if its origins are unfamiliar.
I quite enjoyed Lepage's films until I saw one of his incredible stage productions (Far Side of the Moon, and I've subsequently seen The Dragons' Trilogy), then all I could see were how they failed to live up to them. Far Side of the Moon was ten times more 'cinematic' on stage than it was on screen. The final effect of the production is pure transcendence in the theatre, but it's so easy to do on film that it just looks kind of gauche in the movie.

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zedz
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#39 Post by zedz » Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:12 pm

domino harvey wrote:
zedz wrote:
domino harvey wrote:How is everyone's prospective list not a hundred titles long after looking at that? And that is still extremely incomplete, like not even close!
Well, it would be very easy to rank a hundred films I liked that were based on plays, but I'd be straying a long way from the top of my personal heap to do so - which I imagine would make the compiling and ranking exercise quite a drag. I was actually surprised by how few of the six hundred or so films I'd voted for in the last round of the decades lists were based on plays.
This is just such a weird wall you're building for this exercise. Isn't it possible that a film could function better as a filmed adaptation of a play than it does overall in competition with other films from the decade it was released? Time-based distinctions of grouping films is just as "arbitrary" as you're labeling this list. It's like saying there's only a few good noirs because there weren't thirty of them in your Top 50 for the 1940s.
I'm not denying that there are lots of great films derived from plays, it's just that it's increasingly seeming like such an arbitrary quality that it's hard to care about ranking films based on it, especially since, from a brief analysis of my past voting, it doesn't seem to be a characteristic that has much in common with what I particularly value in film.

Time-based considerations of films (and music) is something I, and most other people I assume, do all the time. It's one of the most natural and common divisions, and it's all over this forum, the internet and in the way art is packaged and processed (Best Films of 2014, Your Favourite Records - 1980-1984, Hits of the 50s, English Literature of the 16th Century). That's a much less arbitrary way of thinking about cinema for me, and there are plenty of technological, industrial and social commonalities between films made in the same historical era. 'Adapted from the stage', if no trace of the stage remains in the film, is for me a meaningless distinction, no different than 'adapted from a novel', 'based on a true story' or 'based on an original idea by Betty Hutton'.

I think knives' solution - to focus on films where the stage origin actually has some substantial bearing on the shape of the filmic production - is a good and workable one, even if it's hugely subjective. So for me, that means Pasolini's Medea would be too far removed from the theatre to qualify, whereas Jansco's Elektreia, with its frontal orientation, limited sets, lack of cuts and elaborate choreography, seems to me very much like theatre reconceived for a vastly larger outdoor stage.

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#40 Post by Shrew » Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:18 pm

The trouble with this huge list of classic studio films is that while I love a lot of them, I've never considered them as theatrical adaptations. I'm just not familiar enough with the sources to judge them based on how they made specific choices to move the material from stage to screen. Obviously it's unreasonable to expect people to read a bunch of old, unavailable, and likely mediocre plays, but at the same time, would you feel comfortable listing Vertigo among the greatest literary adaptations?

Anyway, if I submit a list I'll probably restrict it to plays I'm familiar with or ones that clearly show their heritage, rather than ones strip mined from forgotten potboilers.
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#41 Post by Mr Sheldrake » Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:19 pm

I'll confine myself to plays I've seen or read as there are just too many otherwise to consider in a short span of time. I've become much more of a playgoer than moviegoer in recent years and there will still be plenty of potential candidates for a list of 20 (or 25). I'll be seeing Long Days Journey Into Night and The Crucible this weekend in NYC, and The Rose Tattoo in Williamstown Mass next month so I'll be able to add those to be considered. And I always watch movie versions soon after seeing the plays, the decisions made in adaptation are fascinating.

I saw a production of He Who Gets Slapped last winter finding it a dreary piece with an unbelievable ending. Sjostrom said in interviews that he had complete freedom in re-writing and I thought he vastly improved it. He added an opening sequence dramatizing the back story and he completely changed the ending. Visually, his superimposing the images of HE getting laughed at during his scientific conference, with the circus audience in an uproar laughing at his clown's slapping routine was inspired. Chaney was indeed superb in the role of HE.

Despite my feeling that the stuff about the baby is an awkward melodramatic device, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a staggering emotional experience on stage. The movie version is by contrast very slow and Nichols/Lehman grind it to a halt as they open it up, in the front yard scene, and especially in the drunken ride to the roadhouse. Burton was great and the others very good in compensation.

Picnic is a play that improves with opening up, the feel of small town America that suffuses Inge's work is beautifully evoked. Much of that is due to Howe's cinematography including the justly famous Chinese lantern night time scenes in the park. And Inge's yearning to escape the confining space of the world he grew up in is not lost in transition.

There is no play called Baby Doll that serves for the movie adaptation. Instead material from two one act plays were used, mostly 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (a rare production this summer in NYC). Silva is much more harsh in the one act, he only wants to claim his pound of flesh in revenge, and he does. Kazan and Williams worked on the script even while on location. Williams abruptly left in terror of the threatening stares he was getting from the locals, leaving it to Kazan to finish the job. Years later he would write a full length version for the stage that highlighted the sex, full of nudity, reportedly a disaster and never produced again. I saw a production last year that Emily Mann adapted for the stage from the movie script with Dermot Mulroney as Silva that was superb. The movie benefits from the great performances that Kazan elicited, especially Carroll Baker, but I feel his Walker Evans type photography of the locals used as documentary background jars with Williams' florid theatricality.

My favorite Williams both on stage and in the movies is Orpheus Descending/The Fugitive Kind. This is Williams untethered from Kazan, and Brando untethered from the iconography of Stanley. It's so much fun to watch him inhabit the part, the most potent object of desire that Williams ever conjured up for himself. Streetcar is the greater play, I saw a powerful version with Gillian Anderson last month, and likely the greater movie, but its pain and mythic overtones can be tiring.

Nichols did much better in his adaptation of Closer. Law, Owen and Portman were perfect casting. Mawber's play is an estimable work of contemporary angst, but here the opening up, kept to a minimum, worked. The play ends on a tragic note that Nichols eliminated, oddly, as I thought it added a needed gravitas.

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#42 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jun 23, 2016 7:44 pm

Other can't believe I forgot to include on my shortlist even though their heritage was obvious titles: Preminger's Saint Joan and the Moon is Blue, the Miracle Worker, Tall Story, and Pagnol's Fanny Trilogy, which I will allow to be voted on as one movie

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#43 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jun 23, 2016 11:09 pm

For my viewings for this project, I will also be labeling the films I see that are also eligible for the next mini-list, films predominately taking place over the span of approximately 24 hours or less, by designating “(24)” at the end of their writeups. As you can see, the three films I’ve started off with all qualify!

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Jack Hofsiss 1984) Filmed for Showtime via the American Playhouse, this is a far superior adaptation of the Williams play than Richard Brooks’ more well-known 1958 version, especially since that movie makes no sense with the homosexuality elided out. The jury’s still out on whether Jessica Lange’s performance is too loosey goosey as Maggie, though she’s one of Williams’ least-interesting female characters in general and the part practically begs to be overwrought. But Tommy Lee Jones and Rip Torn are spot-on as Brick and Big Daddy respectively. Torn is especially great (though too young for the role), as who else could best sell a line like “Fuck the goddamn preacherman”? And as you can see, this version is filled with profanity in addition to the taboo subject matter other adaptations forgo. It’s really just a filmed version of the play, with the same sets you’d get in the stage version (Brick and Maggie’s room and their balcony and a bit of the hallway), but the star here is the words and the performances, as is the case for most great filmed plays. Recommended. (24)

Charley’s Aunt (Archie Mayo 1941) The most famous transvestism farce in stage history has been adapted numerous times and this one is the most prominent due to Jack Benny’s central casting as the middle aged college student who must pretend to be the matronly titular figure for reasons so convoluted they aren’t even worth remembering. The comedy here is broad broad broooooaaaaddd but there’s undeniably some big laughs to be had at many of the stupid sight gags and schticky plot mechninations. Even considering the hoary material this isn’t nearly as good as it could be with tighter direction and a better supporting cast for Benny to play off (though I thought Laird Craig was spot-on if underused as a potential romantic partner who for once in these kind of films doesn’t fall head-over-heels for the homely guy in drag). I have no interest in seeing this play ever again in any form (including this one), but I was glad to have at least seen it once in some manner. (24)

Sunday in New York (Peter Tewksbury 1963) Screwball Comedies didn’t die, they just became Sex Comedies in the late fifties and early sixties. Sex Comedies of course are the last clearly identifiable Hollywood genre to form and play out before the studio system’s demise and the mix of old fashioned morality with newfound sexual liberation (such as it is) rarely disappoints in producing fascinatingly disjointed and contradictory entertainments. Sunday in New York is on the whole conventionally moralistic, as in Shakespeare’s comedies, everyone ends up married and domestic. Yet, before they get there, the film manages to be legitimately shocking in its candor. Now, it’s pretty clear that most of the source material has been scrubbed down to the bare minimum of what allowable on American screens at this time, but even as a seasoned vet of movies like this I was genuinely impressed with what the filmmakers were allowed to get away with here.

Jane Fonda plays in many ways the flipside of her Tall Story character, a young woman who flees her relationship because her boyfriend wants to sleep with her without marrying her. Virginal Fonda drops in unannounced on her brother Cliff Robertson in the Big Apple and grills him on whether its normal for guys to always want sex so much. She tells him her boyfriend is, and I quote here, “Tired of going to the gymnasium and playing handball three times a week.” Protective of her virtue, Robertson gives her a lie about his own moral prowess, fidgeting around his apartment all the while as of course his girlfriend was about to drop in for some quick morning sex!

Through a series of absurd screwball plot contrivances, Fonda leaves the apartment and keeps running into Rod Taylor, and the two eventually end up back at her brother’s place. The scene is set for the film's centerpiece sequence in which, clutch the pearls everyone, Fonda decides to throw herself at Taylor, a perfect stranger she'd only just met hours prior, and… the film doesn’t cut away once the lovemaking begins. She even teasingly says in the middle of making out that this is the part where the screen always fades to black in the movies, a knowing wink to the audiences watching as the seduction and sex continues, but also an acknowledgement that Fonda herself doesn’t really know what comes next.

The film does of course have to cut away at some point, as things may be evolving for the era but we’re still at least a couple years away from being able to show Fonda having sex on-screen! Once we’re back, we see the situation has been complicated: Fonda and Taylor are pacing around the room naked (in robes, but still). Turns out Fonda interrupted him before he could consummate their speedy courtship, off screen, and informed him of her virginity, to which he of course cannot impugn with sex! She tries to convince him to take her virginity (biggest leap of faith in history of cinema is required here: Jane Fonda circa-1963 having to broker with any cognizant human being to sleep with her?), arguing against his phony morality (one that mirrors her brother’s), “Who do you think you're talking to, a sixteen year old girl you’re selling into white slavery?” As you can see, the film is refreshing and brazenly racy.

Things get farcical, as they often do in these movies, with the inopportune introduction of the fiancee and the brother and so on. The film settles into a more conventional but still frequently funny idiot plot where characters have to pretend to be each other and it’s all very silly and quite a distraction from the best thing here, which are the intriguing and provocative interactions between Taylor and Fonda. Still, even with a bagful of sex farce crutches, the film is a lot of fun.

Director Peter Tewksbury CV’s basically this, some Elvis movies, a Disney flick, another sex comedy, and over a hundred episodes of Father Knows Best (all unseen by me, but not promising on the whole), but I have no idea how that can be when this film adaptation of Norman Krasna’s Broadway smash is so cleverly visualized and laid out with such intelligence and comic deftness that I was sure it was the work of a master and I just didn’t recognize the name. I especially liked the visual gag in the second bus scene, which instead of giving us a traditional shot-reverse shots plays out without cuts the delayed and looping reaction of an extra to events that transpired in the prior scene without comment in the conscious framing of the left third of the screen as Fonda and Taylor prattle on:

Image

The film is smartly and elegantly made, so much so that I came to dread the heavier farce bits in the second half, even though they made me a laugh a lot (especially Robertson’s deadpan response to being inducted into the stupidity of the plot), because I wanted to see the craft put to better use on the salacious sexual politics the film handles far better and not the sillier and more familiar situational comedy of the genre. Still, even with caveats, this is a provocative and entertaining film with lots of laughs and comes Highly Recommended. (24)

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#44 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jun 25, 2016 2:08 pm

I've just realised that one of Richard Linklater's films is eligible for this - Tape, based on a play by Stephen Belber. It makes sense that it would be, since all the action is claustrophobically set inside a single motel room. I remember watching it a few years back and having to persevere through the slightly bumpy early section involving Ethan Hawke alone and goofing around in the room and also adjust to the quite harsh digital video look of the piece. But once Robert Sean Leonard turns up, and especially Uma Thurman in the final third, the friendly banter concealing darker threats takes over with the power dynamics between the threesome shifting around in a really gripping way.

Perhaps more than Boyhood and the Before trilogy, this is the Linklater film that I'd love to see someone like Criterion (or Arrow, given the wonderful job they did with Waking Life) tackle.
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#45 Post by swo17 » Sat Jun 25, 2016 2:17 pm

Also SubUrbia

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#46 Post by PillowRock » Sat Jun 25, 2016 4:51 pm

Does the play have to have been produced for a movie based on it to be eligible? Or are movies based on never-produced plays (like Casablanca) eligible?

I also just wanted to remind people that many of Sacha Guitry's movies were based on his own plays.

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#47 Post by swo17 » Sat Jun 25, 2016 5:40 pm

It's already been established that Casablanca and any other film in a similar situation are all eligible.

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domino harvey
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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#48 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jul 01, 2016 8:34 am

Barefoot in the Park (Gene Saks 1967) Neil Simon is just the worst. Smug, unfunny, and fiercely overwritten prattling from our two leads Robert Redford and Jane Fonda as newlyweds who move into a closet in NYC and proceed to subject the viewer to a good solid hour of jokes about it being a walk-up. I’ve lived on the top floor of a walk-up. It did indeed suck. It did not, however, inspire me to write approximately a million unfunny jokes about how much it sucks to put into a play. But we can’t all be Neil Simon. The bigger problem here is Fonda’s character, who is so unappealing in her neediness and infantile approach to conflict that there is never any desire to see the squabbling couple reconcile once they inevitably hit a roadblock in their honeymoon period. I didn’t like Redford’s arrogant and stiff young lawyer much better, but by the end of it I was so sick of these two that I only hoped they did get back together so that no one else would have to be subjected to either of them. Truly they deserve each other.

Smoking / No Smoking (Alain Resnais 1993) An unusual two-hander in which Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma play all of the on-scren (stage) speaking roles, amounting to nine different characters, none ever occupying the stage with more than one other character. It’s easy to imagine the quick changes this must have required on the stage, with helpful wigs and color-coding of the characters transferring the helpful visual cues for the stage to the screen. But in the closer proximity that film gives us, these tools take on the form of comic strip affectations (the maid is always wearing neon green, the slutty wife is always in bright red, &c), matching the colorful animated intros each of these two films receive.

Running nearly five hours, the combined effect of the two films is simple but exhausting: various characters in a small British town interact in the “present,” then we get a flashforward to an event either five days, weeks, or months in the future and set at a new locale, and then finally we get a five year flashforward set in the courtyard of a church. Once one narrative strand plays out, the film doubles back and says, “Or maybe this happened” and rewinds back to turning points and changes the outcome. A character who turned down a date now instead accepts, &c. The basic narrative parts here is fairly innocuous, much of it broad farce (and Azema’s penchant for hammy overacting is equal parts beneficial and detrimental for much of this material), but the film’s conceptual structure rapidly becomes an annoying affectation once we realize that the film isn’t playing with questions of fate or chance but rather positing an utterly idiotic and pointless “What if” question. Unlike in Sliding Doors, where a minor event (catching a certain subway train in time) has massive repercussions for the protagonist, these films don’t ask how things could be different if small scale circumstance changed but rather how the story would be different if the characters had completely different internal motivations. This is to say, how the story would play out if the characters were not the characters they are. “Hey, did you ever think how different a situation would turn out if the person you were talking to began to act like someone else?” is not a dramatic question I find interesting in the slightest, and brother, we get five fucking hours of this.

Sitting through these two movies quickly became an endurance test and I was reminded of the (even worse) the Falls which also mercilessly beat the poor audience over the head with its unfunny one-joke premise for inhumanly long periods of time, the length becoming part of the gimmick. A film this long can not sustain itself without some kind of emotional investment in the characters— there’s a reason Godard’s political films are so short, after all— and hitting the reset button every fifteen minutes makes any attempts futile. And the larger points the material may be aiming for are nulled by the zero-impact any of the altered decisions have on the proceedings given that they’re all just a playwright's pawns in an unamusing series of emotional farces. A tiring failure.

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#49 Post by Sloper » Wed Jul 06, 2016 3:54 pm

Frank Borzage’s After Tomorrow is one of my favourite ‘theatrical’ films. Made on a relatively small budget and largely bound to a couple of sets, it is nonetheless beautifully shot by James Wong Howe: in fact it’s exactly the kind of thing this mini-list is celebrating, a film that feels, throughout its running time, as though it’s based on a play (which it is) but also takes advantage of everything the medium of film has to offer. The acting is wonderful (Charles Farrell in particular is a revelation after his wooden performance in Liliom, another Borzage masterpiece based on a play), and the play itself is a very funny, moving, mature story about being poor, in love, and in thrall to two sets of royally fucked-up relatives. The two mothers here are flesh-crawlingly authentic studies in parental awfulness. The title song, which seems to have sunk into obscurity despite being mercilessly plugged in the film, is delightful and catchy, and the scene where the young lovers sing it together at the piano is very sweet, and very sad. That’s the film in a nutshell really – it’s as naïve and idealistic as its two protagonists, and as knowing and cynical as the characters who are hemming them in. The combination is miraculously effective. If you’re lucky enough to own the Murnau/Borzage/Fox set, and this one is still languishing on your kevyip, it’s well worth 80 minutes of your time.

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Re: Theatre Adaptations Genre Mini-List Discussion + Suggest

#50 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Wed Jul 06, 2016 5:05 pm

Altman's Fool for Love and Come back to the 5 and dime hasn't been mentioned yet I think. Similarly the early Preminger Margin for Error with Otto relishing his role as a Nazi Consul.

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