This is the inaugural column of a new series. While we’re all obliged to shelter in place, for who knows how long, and virtual encounters online are the only safe ones, I’ve decided to put into words an idea I’ve long cherished: to curate a series of screenings of great films from the past that may have, for various reasons, extra resonance for those of us who love the theater or are involved—when times permit—in the making of live performance.
Some of these films will be found on any cinema buff’s top 100 list; others will not. The list of favorites I’ve accumulated over the years has only intermittent links to the titles that regularly show up on the syllabi of film history courses. These essays will focus on films notable for their writing and acting; the cinematic aspects of their direction will be less important here than the director’s handling of actors and of script.
Also, I’m writing these essays to address a need. In the great age of art house and revival house moviegoing, say from 1945 to about 1990, such places were meccas, in New York and other big cities, for young artists and artistically minded students in every field. The prints those theaters screened may have been scratchy and the sound equipment erratic, but the people who ran these places had an abiding love for film in all its forms, including film that owed something to theater. The “auteurist” notion that the director’s style was a film’s primary criterion of value had only begun to evolve, mostly in the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, in this period, and had only gradually made its way into American film criticism by the 1980s. The auteurists, at their best, contributed a deep understanding of cinema aesthetics to our discussions of film, and they didn’t exactly sneer at films that were derived from a stage play or featured actors noted for their stage performances, but such matters were secondary to them. It’s taken another full generation for us to fight free of auteurism’s limitations, and to perceive film as a form in which the elements are balanced, with the words and the performers’ presence supporting one aspect of the joy of film while the director’s cinematic art upholds another. Stay with me as I go on with this series, and you’ll meet many artists who were steeped in theater, who came from theater to film and brought their stage sense with them, or who traveled freely, as many do now, between stage and film.
In the era I’m speaking of, the art house itself served as such a meeting place. Film people knew what was going on in the theater; theater people knew what was worth checking out in film. An instance I often cite comes from my years as a Columbia undergraduate in the 1960s: Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had just opened on Broadway, creating a sensation; everyone in town was talking about it. The New Yorker movie theater, a pleasantly seedy revival house on Broadway and 88th Street, had scheduled a series of old Bette Davis films. And on their single-sheet, mimeographed schedule for the series (those were indeed simpler times), their listing for Beyond the Forest included the sentence, “This and not Chicago is the film mentioned in the opening scene of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.” And, indeed, Beyond the Forest is the film in which Bette Davis walks into a cabin, looks around, and says, “What a dump.”
These theaters—besides the New Yorker, I remember with affection the Thalia, the Metro, the Regency, and, in later years, Theater 80 St. Marks, in between its two eras as a legit playhouse—served as meeting places and sources for discussion in themselves. (For a few years, the New Yorker also ran a cinema-dedicated bookstore in a room upstairs of the theater.) You might find yourself debating the value of a film with a total stranger, or being steered to one that your teachers, colleagues, or classmates, told you was a must-see.
And there was also film criticism, of a kind not so much practiced today: Not the rather flat and mechanical daily-paper reviews that reduce every film to a bare plot summary and a rating of one to four stars, not their more upholstered but equally simplistic predecessors who are summed up for me in the name “Bosley Crowther,” and not the cineaste-auteurist kind, full of theory, technical jargon, and directorial-pantheon rankings. The film critics I mean wrote most often for weekly or monthly magazines, and addressed themselves to an intelligent general readership—not to the suburban couple out to be overwhelmed by a noisy blockbuster, and not to the earnest, bespectacled obsessive who dreamed of growing up to become the next Raoul Walsh or Jean Renoir. Critics such as Dwight Macdonald, James Agee, Pauline Kael, and my mentor and dear friend Stanley Kauffmann—they spoke their minds in plain English, in lucidly crafted sentences, and spoke them bluntly, taking no prisoners. Yes, they all had their blind spots and shortcomings—you learned by reading them which of their opinions to take with a grain of salt—but the measure of their quality was the love they instilled in their readers for all the possibilities the art of film could offer, as certified by the off-the-beaten-track films they could send their readers to.
If I hadn’t read Agee’s collected criticism, I doubt that I would ever have gone to see something called The Curse of the Cat People, and only Kael’s encomium sent me, on a chilly Halloween night in New Haven, to the Yale Film Society for a screening of what was still called, in the American distributor’s cut-up prints, The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. Film students know it today as Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage), and if you want to be really upset and disturbed, you can find it in the Criterion Collection. The Yale undergrads who thought it would just be a scary-fun night out hadn’t read Kael, and didn’t know what they were in for till their dates started screaming and running out of the room.
I’ve written occasionally about film over the years, but I don’t pretend to be a film critic, and though I know more than a bit about film history, I lay no claims to being a film scholar or historian. My position is that of a cultivated theater person who loves film on two grounds—first for the effect it has on me as film, and second for the joy I get when it reunites me with the theater of the past. These two elements are not separate from each other: at the greatest moments in many movies, they fuse. The theater lives again in cinema and the cinema, with help from the theater’s effect, brings something alive in you. All movies take place in the past; even if you’re working on a film and watching the dailies, what you’re seeing was shot earlier that day. Its time has gone but there it is, preserved and alive. In that sense, watching rushes with an actor who may be sitting next to you in the screening room is no different from seeing a film with Bert Williams or William Gillette, great stage stars who died long before you were born, or a film with great stars whom, in later years, you were lucky enough to see on the stage, as I saw Buster Keaton, Agnes Moorehead, Max von Sydow, and Lillian Gish. Nothing proves Einstein’s theory that time is relative better than film.
So off we go to movieland! I’m going to talk about some famous films, and some very obscure ones. I’m going to traverse the genres and the periods—but don’t expect me to talk about any film made much past 1990. That’s the area in which those of you who are younger than I (and that’s almost everybody) grew up. You’re probably already well steeped in its films, and if not you’ll know easily enough without my help which ones you want to see. Whereas I’m going to talk to you about films that it might never occur to you to watch without a little prodding. You may occasionally find me echoing other knowledgeable folk, and I won’t pretend that my knowledge equals theirs, but I will try to bring a little vantage point of my own to the conversation.
And if you’re still wondering why you should bother about all this, let me tell one last anecdote: About 35 years ago, when I was teaching classic drama to playwriting students at NYU, I saw that Theatre 80 had scheduled a very rarely programmed film which I’d always wanted to see, the Danish director Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (Vredens dag). As I hate going to movies alone, I asked my teaching assistant, a bright guy, if he’d care to come along. He said he was committed to having dinner that night with his girlfriend, a hardworking apprentice curator at a major museum. “Tell her to come too,” I said, wildly guessing that this film I’d never seen might appeal to both of them. So he phoned her and asked, then, holding the phone, turned to me. “She wants to know,” he said, “if this film is going to change her life.” “Tell her yes,” I said. So she agreed, and the three of us went and saw Dreyer’s extraordinary film. And about a month later, he told me that she had said to him, that morning, “You know, I think that film has changed my life.” I was glad my wild guess had paid off—all the more because I also had been profoundly moved by Dreyer’s film. And this too, by the way, was a film I had wanted to see because of a critic: When Day of Wrath was released in the U.S., in 1948, Archer Winsten of the New York Post had been so struck by it that, after it had received mixed reviews and closed quickly, he led his colleagues in a campaign to have it brought back. New York was being flooded with European films at the time, but Winsten’s nudging, and the enthusiasm of colleagues who’d skipped it the first time around, started Day of Wrath on its road to the high status it holds today. I can’t guarantee that every film I discuss will carry such greatness, or will change your life. But if they can widen the world for you a little, especially while we’re all locked down in our separate cells, I’ll be happy.
