Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cinema, the audience is aimed at the action. The two arts are antagonistic, and it is almost as hard to turn a good play into a good film as it is to make soup out of soap. The feat is attempted in three current attractions based on well-known stage works. Surprisingly, two of the three are films of blasting impact...
...tirade against white wickedness, Dutchman makes no more sense than any other noisy blurb for black reaction. But as a dramatic shocker, it hits even harder on the screen than it did on the stage. The camera picks the onlooker up, sits him down hard only two seats away from that subway succubus, and then forces him to sit there with his palms sweating while the danger builds and builds and builds like the brain-stabbing squeal of steel wheels in a turning tunnel...
...Sade, as written by Playwright Peter Weiss and performed by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook, was the decade's most cinematic drama. In a churning rowdydow of rant, cant, poetry, politics, music, magic, rite and ribaldry, the play moved across the stage like half a dozen movies mingling incompatibly on a giant screen. When Director Brook finally came to film the play, he simply let his cameras zig and zag and make lazy eights above the steamy business; then he assembled his takes into a movie that is altogether faithful...
...chief aim," Sade observes, "has been to take to bits Great Propositions and their opposites." On the emotional plane, however, there is no doubt about who wins. The inmates set up a mad clamor for Marat's cause. Drooling, twitching, cross-eyed, filthy, they stagger about the stage like broken bugs. "We want our revolution," they croak in cracked chorus...
...this stage, the war calls less for bloodletting than for form filling. There are no battles but plenty of bumf-British army term for paperwork. Powell's people move through "the backwoods of this bureaucratic jungle," and it is a novelistic miracle that he keeps their old characters vivid and alive while they are being bored to death. If not bored, embarrassed. "Embarrassed" rather than "afraid" is the word one character finds for his feeling when his bathroom is bombed...