Front Row Seats
•DVD/⋆DEBUT
•BLU-RAY/⋆DEBUT
▸STREAMING
▸EXCLUSIVE TO VOD
•⋆ American Film Theatre Series 14 films, various directors, 1973-75; Kino Lorber
THE DREARY TERM “FILMED PLAYS” EVOKES UNDERCOOKED hybrids that lack both the spontaneity of live performance and the buoyancy of untethered mise en scènes. But from 1973-75, producer Ely Landau undertook to divest stagecraft-on-film of its negative image, conceiving the American Film Theatre as a vehicle for bringing dramatic and musical plays to the masses without altering source texts, but with dynamic photography and top talent on both sides of the camera to impart the sense of immediacy so often lost in translation.
Like subscribers to a theater company, AFT patrons would buy a season pass, allowing them to attend one of only four screenings of each monthly offering (scheduled on days cinemas deemed “slow”— Mondays and Tuesdays). The first season consisted of eight modestly budgeted programs: seven original works and one, which screened in the UK five years prior), while the second and last season saw only five releases. Half a million people signed on for Landau’s experiment, and were rewarded with such imaginative pairings as Edward Albee’s Pulitzer-winner A directed by Oscar-winner Tony Richardson, Joseph Losey’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s semi-musical-bio-with-alienation-effects (a show whose 1947 English-language debut was also directed by a pre-blacklist Losey), and actor Robert Shaw’s potent war-crimes reckoning a change of pace for Neil Simon alum Arthur Hiller. (Despite the qualifying-run-averse nature of AFT distribution, star Maximillian Schell pulled a surprise Oscar nod for the latter, the series finale.) Avant-gardists and fans alike could revel in the reteaming of Gene Wilder and a brilliantly bonkers Zero Mostel in Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist allegory .
