COUNSELLOR AT LAW (1933)

If you're curious to see what an A-list straight Broadway play looked like circa the 1930s, preserved faithfully but with enough cinematic flair that it's not quite as if they'd just propped a camera in front of the stage (which is what a lot of filmed stage plays from that era look like now), you could scarcely do better than William Wellman's film of Elmer Rice's top-class, socially conscious potboiler, from a script adapted by Rice himself. The cherry on top is John Barrymore, starring as the heroically high-strung lawyer, in a role that he never played on the stage, for the very good reason that it might have seemed the height of insanity to hire him to play a guy who'd fought his way up from a ghetto-born background; in the movie, this has the virtue of letting him show how thoroughly he could power a star vehicle from the starting gun to the finish line even when he seemed miscast, not that you were likely to be troubled by that while you were watching him.

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA (1953)



Peter Brook's movie of John Gay's satirical ballad opera (first peformed in 1728) is a high-spirited anomaly: a production of what ought to be a dead form that is powered by the director's delight at exploring the possibilities offered to him by a new medium. Laurence Olivier was cast as the dashing brigand Macheath and, after it had been confirmed that the sound of his voice, when raised in song, would not panic the horses or stop viewers' hearts, was permitted to do his own singing. Among its other distinctions, the movie would be Olivier's only musical, and the only evidence ever recorded on film that Peter Brook was once in a good mood.

HENRY V (1944)



When Kenneth Branagh's 1989 version opened, one New York critic referred to director-star Laurence Olivier's earlier version as "quaint." As if, as Elizabeth I once told the King of Spain. The play -- celebrating the English monarch's ability to rally his countrymen and fill them with the spirit needed to whup enemies who have them outnumbered and outarmored (or so it seems, until the shiny bastards discover that, once knocked down, they can't get up out of the mud) -- was a jingoistic work of propaganda, and Olivier's movie, unlike Branagh's "antiwar" edition, is a jingoistic propaganda movie, designed to give comfort and warmth to British audiences looking forward to seeing Hitler's head disconnected from his body. The wonder of the play is that it raises jingo propaganda to the level of art, and the wonder of the movie is that, from its candy-colored photography, Book of Days production design, and the star's triumphant, roaring performance, it does full justice to the text. It's a sophisticated, literate entertainment that makes you feel about twelve years old, in a good way.

KING LEAR (1971)



This final film by the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev (who died two years later, and whose 1964 Hamlet is nothing to sneeze at either) was released the same year as the film version of Peter Brook's freeze-dried Lear, which tried to make the material seem modern and relevant by flattening out its emotional peaks, and that approach could scarcely seem like more of a folly than when laid alongside this picture. It builds to an awesome concluding section of transcendent apocalyptic imagery; the battles and burning buildings and senseless carnage do full, horrifically beautiful justice to Shakespeare's conception of a world turned upside down.  Kurosawa aimed to touch the hem of its garment with the most flamboyant imagery in his own take on Lear (the 1985 Ran)...and he came this close.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962)



One of the great things about filmed theater is that it may provide the opportunity to see a classic work performed by a dream cast that would be unlikely to gather for a theatrical run, and this may be the ultimate fulfillment of that possibility made good on: Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell making magic out of Eugene O'Neill's long, grinding, mesmerizing masterpiece of an American family play. Sidney Lumet, who made his name directing plays for TV (including the famous 1960 production of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh starring Robards as Hickey), made this five years into his still-ongoing movie career, and he hasn't topped it yet.

SECRET HONOR (1984)



Working with a text that amounts to a monologue performed by one man -- Richard Nixon, played by Philip Baker Hall -- in one room, the director, Robert Altman, uses the handsomely designed set (which features banks of computer monitors) and Hall's sweating, cursing whirlwind of a performance to create such a stream of fireworks that the movie seems amazingly alive visually. As political mind trips go, it covers more ground with more smarts and to greater effect than any of Oliver Stone's presidential portraits, at half the length and God knows what fraction of the cost.

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

Contributor: Phil Nugent