THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Ferenc Molnar's prolific output (around 40 plays) was plundered (often in radically altered and/or watered-down form) by everyone: Rogers & Hammerstein got Carousel out of his Liliom, and Billy Wilder's fleetest farce, One, Two, Three updated (apparently unrecognizably) another play. Often forgotten is 1935's The Good Fairy, a triumph of clever dialogue and expert performances over William Wyler's typically ponderous, absurdly slow direction. In keeping with the good "production values" Wyler stolidly brought along for his whole career, things move way too slow. For no good reason, Preston Sturges' adaptation retains cumbersome faux-Hungarian street-name signs, presumably in the name of reminding audiences what cultivated terrain they've stumbled upon whenever an actor gets slowed down by a word. But Sturges keeps throwing away funny lines and faux-ponderous diction in every direction, and the movie's a blast despite all that. "Unhand me, varlet, lest I cleave thee to the brisket!" yells a drunk aristocrat. "I will scale yonder precipice alone!" And he's never heard from again.

HOBSON'S CHOICE (1954)



Harold Brighouse's 1916 comedy was a staple of Northern English comedy, which made everyone nervous when David Lean — "in every fibre a Southerner," notes Kevin Brownlow's biography — took it on. Fortunately, his cast — scenery-chewing Charles Laughton, John Mills (saving his career from impending disaster) and bitchy Brenda de Banzie — carry things nicely. Lean was never much good at comedy, but Hobson's Choice isn't much of a knee-slapper in the first place, so — unlike his awful, rhythmless Blithe Spirit, a mean-spirited, clunky travesty of Noel Coward's play (who responded "You've just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote") — it works. Lean's main contribution comes between dialogue, as in the clip above — continually grounding the mild, leisurely jokes in Manchester's real industrial sprawl. Co-writer Norman Spencer recalls Brighouse never really cared: "He was an old man who was a bit deaf and rather stunned by the whole thing. He said, 'I hope it'll be a nice film,' lost interest and went back up North again."

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? (1957)



It's nearly impossible to imagine Rock Hunter as a play — Frank Tashlin's movie is so aggressively cinematic, and its satirical points on celebrity's corrosive effects and so on kind of uninteresting. But it pops with Looney Tunes energy, mostly courtesy of Tony Randall: he's occasionally overrun with unexplained evil spirits that take over his body, lower his voice, and make him act as rudely as possible, an effect closer to the cartoons Tashlin started out in than any play. In the clip above (0:53 in), Randall interrupts the movie's action to address the audience directly while the screen loses its Cinemascope boundaries for all manner of TV-simulation; it's the cinematic equivalent of Todd Rundgren's sarcastic diatribe of in-house problems, "Sounds From The Studio," which showcased clipping, weird pitch-shifting and every other '70s analog problem in great detail. Here we get static, snow, and V-hold problems. It's the film's most exhilarating moment, and utterly irrelevant to theater.

THE HOMECOMING (1973)



"Didn't you hear what I said, dad?" sneers Ian Holm in the clip above. Pinter's clipped menace has translated to the screen better and more often than most, but The Homecoming is probably the best attempt to translate a play to screen with as little flash or changing as possible (including, at a mere 111 minutes, an intermission). Aside from one memorable handheld POV shot for the first act's climax — a nervous charge attempted by both character and camera — Peter Hall finds angles that sometimes find visual equivalents for what's being said, but mostly do the one thing that can't be accomplished in theater: have everything happen in a realistically crappy suburban house, without otherwise changing the tempo or performances one bit.

HAMLET ('96 Branagh/'00 Almereyda)





Five years apart, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda offered near-definitive, completely opposed takes on Hamlet. Branagh has the whole text uncut; to get through everything in a relatively speedy four hours, whole monologues are delivered in breathless rushes. Out of either necessity or bravado (or both), Branagh overplays wildly at times, rendering his every intonation explicitly theatrical; it's a big help for the novice viewer though:  arguably the most instantly comprehensible on-screen Hamlet, making everything clear. Updated to the 19th century, it seems, purely to enable lusher visual overkill, Hamlet is both intelligent Shakesperean interpretation and grand Hollywood entertainment. That Branagh stocks all the main parts with theatrically trained actors with basically no marquee value and all the minor parts with way out-of-their-depth Hollywood players (Billy Crystal! Jack Lemmon!) creates an inadvertant but fascinating form of tension and comic relief. Almereyda's version, on the other hand, goes fin de siecle, slashes the text remorselessly and spends a lot of time amusing itself with its updates (the ghost first appears in front of a vending machine on a security camera) and punnish ways to change things by implication without changing the words (Denmark is no longer a country but a corporation avoiding takeover). Within all the jokes, Ethan Hawke's slacker prince is convincingly callow, moody and self-absorbed, but Almereyda knows the text is strong enough to make even this young idiot's plight finally empathetically comprehensible.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributor: Vadim Rizov