Word: stagebound
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...mysteries of the movie business is Hollywood's predilection for filming hopelessly stagebound Broadway hits. Some plays transfer easily to the screen, but those built around theatrical gimmicks invariably drop dead. Same Time, Next Year, like last year's Equus, never stood a chance as a movie: it is a one-joke, one-set, two-character sitcom that should be allowed to retire in peace to the nation's dinner theaters...
Neil Simon writes funny commercial Broadway plays that, as movies, remain stubbornly stagebound. Most of Lovers takes place inside the same apartment set, instilling a sense of in creasing confinement that stifles screen comedy. There are some good fleeting gags, but here too there is a sense of constriction. Simon writes jokes and sur faces, not characters, so the actors really have nowhere to go in developing their roles...
Originally a play that had a good run in both London and Manhattan, Joe Egg was written by Peter Nichols, himself the father of a spastic child. Boisterous and harrowing, it is a macabre tour de force. But Nichols' adaptation for the screen is stubbornly stagebound, and the young Hungarian director Peter Medak does nothing to liberate it. The film seems forced and artificial, and the bilious lighting makes it look as if it had been staged inside a plastic showcase...
...finished the poem, his right hand arched upwards into the smoky spotlight air in a mighty gesture of evangelism. Yet the cosmopoet was always stagebound, always in his political poems, judging the audience's response. A nervous sense of commercialism shackled his ascent. The sublime, that mostly mystical state of imaginative transport, eluded him and certainly his audience. And certainly one can not expect to find his highest excellence of art in the nuts and bolts of topical evanescence in the bump and bulk of rush-hour urgency...
...high points, Streetcar is observant, moving and exciting. Unhappily, despite Director Kazan's efforts to get movement inside the cramped settings, the movie too often seems stagebound and slow. It also has stretches of talk that go better in the theater than on the screen...