DEATHTRAP (1982)

One set, five characters, a couple of twists and a few good, juicy murders: that’s the formula for success in Ira Levin’s puzzle box of a murder mystery about a struggling veteran playwright desperate for a hit. Add a nervous spouse with a weak heart, a gay lover, a weird psychic, a cagey agent and a wall full of handcuffs, pistols and crossbows and you’ve got one of the few stage plays with the power to make audiences scream and jump like a creature double-feature. The movie version wisely sticks to the basics, letting the cat-and-mouse triple-double-cross plotting speak for itself while sticking mostly to the confined but never claustrophobic Long Island home of the plotting protagonist (Michael Caine at his very Michael Caine-iest, having a helluva time). And though certain naysayers here at the Screengrab may say nay, I also give kudos to Christopher Reeve’s performance in the film, which tweaks his goody-two-shoes Superman image while letting him exercise the underutilized mischievous side of his (admittedly limited) range. Meanwhile, Dyan Cannon gives good scream as the wife, and if all that doesn’t win you over, the movie has at least one immortal line, delivered by a snarky critic (Joel Siegel) after Caine’s playwright Sidney Bruhl premieres a hackneyed whodunit nowhere near as clever as Deathtrap: “I'll tell you who done it.  Sidney Bruhl done it.  And he done it in public."

THE RULING CLASS (1972)



Adapted for the screen by Peter Barnes from his own deeply subversive play, The Ruling Class was sort of a last gasp for the British “Angry Young Man” movement. But its demise was also its salvation: the play – and the subsequent and very successful film – kept in place the elements of class warfare, generational conflict and family drama and turned them on their heads. It replaced rage with whimsy, a tone of rebellion with a sense of absurdity, and an overall tone of Pythonesque lunacy that proved the movement wasn’t entirely devoid of humor. The story of an upper-class family of British aristocrats forced by fortune into restoring as its head a deranged son who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ (played with delightfully silky craziness by Peter O’Toole, in one of his greatest roles), The Ruling Class is, even today, as vicious as it is hilarious. It expands on the play by adding a few memorable characters and trading up in the players (most especially Nigel Green as McKyle, “the Electric Christ”, and the unforgettable Alastair Sim as the bewildered Bishop Bertie Lampton) as well as taking the sets out-of-doors, but what made the stage version so great was its devastatingly funny and fiendish dialogue. Barnes and director Peter Medak are wise enough not to change a bit of that.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007)



Tim Burton’s first full-blown attempt at a musical is so successful, it’s a wonder that he never tried it before. Without sacrificing the elements that have made him famous – the gloomy atmospherics, the high gothic sensibilities, the manic pace, the deft blend of dark humor and absurd violence – his big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s notorious musical gives him the perfect format. Why? Because musicals are infinitely forgiving of the qualities that, in many of Burton’s other films, can rightly be considered weaknesses: his overblown dialogue, his clumsy grasp of the dynamics of storytelling, his slight characterization, and his love of style over emotional substance. Everything really comes together for him here, and the result is one of the most enjoyable musicals in decades. Dismissals of the lead actors (Johnny Depp as the vengeance-addled Victorian hairstylist and Burton’s wife, Helena Bonham Carter, as the vendor of unhygienic meat pies) as unable to sing at the level expected from a big-screen musical somewhat miss the point: Sweeney Todd is a fiendishly difficult production, its songs and structure much more akin to an opera than a musical comedy, and it contains precious few toe-tappers, so putting the words in the mouths of those not well-suited to the old school of musicals doesn’t sink it one bit.

INHERIT THE WIND (1960)



Almost fifty years down the road, there are a lot of problems with the Stanley Kramer adaptation of the then-controversial play (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, no relation) about the Scopes Monkey Trial. It’s excessively stagey; Kramer doesn’t bother to open up the set very much, and too many scenes are given no chance to work in the very different medium of film. The casting is problematic; Spencer Tracy and Frederic March are terrific in the lead roles (as stand-ins for Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively), and there are some good supporting jobs, especially by Elliott Reed as the county prosecutor, but Dick York and Donna Anderson as the romantic leads are flat as pancakes, and Gene Kelly playing a thinly-veiled H.L. Mencken is one of the biggest botch-jobs in casting history. It’s unfair, imbalanced, and historically inaccurate. And in a certain sense, it’s simply not as relevant as it once was; Inherit the Wind isn’t about what it’s about, but rather a Cold War narrative about the long-faded dangers of McCarthyism. But there are still some gorgeous speeches in this moldy oldie, and since America is, astonishingly, still debating the rightness of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools some eighty-odd years after the Scopes Trial, it maintains a relevance its authors couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966)



While many directors attempt to open up adaptations of stage plays for the big screen by taking the action up and out, Mike Nichols helps make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a masterpiece by doing the opposite. Although he does take us outside once or twice, what makes the film so visually arresting is his camera’s perfect pace with the legendary dialogue: instead of going out, it circles endlessly in and around, like a shark. It darts in and out of scenes, whirls around like the heads of the characters after a stinging rejoinder, and creeps in for powerful closeups that reveal faces as ugly as the words they’re speaking. Who exactly gets credit for the screenplay has been the subject of endless disputes, arguments and lawsuits, but really, it’s as simple as going to the source; almost all of the hypnotic dialogue that takes place between timid, repressed college professor Richard Burton and his domineering, disapproving wife Elizabeth Taylor is present in Edward Albee’s original stage play. Not for nothing is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a sort of literary shorthand for viciously feuding married couples: as Burton and Taylor go for each other’s throats, the camera matches them slash for slash, portraying a couple so sick of each other – but so used to each other – that the object of their hatred fills their eyes and becomes all that they can see.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce