Tweet "Stagey" Movies . . .

In the "What Were They Thinking?" thread, the subject of theatrical--i.e. "stagey"--movies came up, with the following cited:

Li'l Abner
Pirates of Penzance
The Music Man (some elements)
Sally
Whoopee!
The Cocoanuts
Anna Christie
The Front Page (1931)

Madam Satan, also mentioned in that thread, is largely stagey in its structure (just think of the Zeppelin as the ballroom in Die Fledermaus, only up in the air)--as I watched it, I found myself saying, "OK, that's Act I curtain . . . Act II curtain . . . ", and so on.

Animal Crackers quickly comes to mind as well.

Some are intentionally stagey; with others, it's just that they didn't take a cinematic approach.

Others to add to the list . . . (I'm sure there are many)?

The Petrified Forest
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock experimenting with "real time")
The Producers (musical version)
American Buffalo
The Prisoner of Second Avenue

Borzage's Liliom: i could see in the stripped down sets and Rose Hobart's odd performance what the stage production production must have been aiming at and that Borzage was going for that effect, but the stripped-down sets on screen just look cheap. Of course, the stage production didn't have to contend with Charles Farrell.

greta

Phil Silvers' Top Banana was shot on a NY stage without an audience and never aspired to be anything other than a filmed record of the show.

Journey's End is very stagey, but it's deliberately so and it's very effective.

The enjoyable Rio Rita never quite escapes from its on-stage heritage. Show Boat largely does, however.

THE MIKADO (1939)
HENRY V (1944)
DAS CABINET DES DR CALIGARI (1919)
VON MORGENS BIS MITTERNACHT (1922)

Suddenly, Bergman comes to mind. Bergman can be stagey (though, to me, always enjoyably): The Rite is especially so. Winter Light has an "on-stage play" feel to me much of the time.

SIDE STREET
FIVE STAR FINAL

...both of which I love BTW.

HENRY V (1944)

Indeed and very probably due to wartime constraints, in part.

My father watched the action sequences being filmed, at Powerscourt, in Ireland.
Every farmers horse within 20 miles was given a days work in the charges, it was a welcome bonanza.

Give me stagey: with the exceptions of Music Man & Abner, the above titles read like a list of my favorite pictures.

Not to forget Lars von Trier's "masterpiece" DOGVILLE (2003). This for me must be the equivalent of what Dreyer's JOAN is to many people on this forum. It makes my toenails curl. But not in a good way.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1952), in which Anthony Asquith does almost nothing to disguise the stage origins of Oscar Wilde's play. In fact, he even shows a curtain going up in the beginning and a curtain coming down at the end!

Lots of 'em from the early talkie years, starting with those all-star revues, such as The Show of Shows (1929), which usually depicted the performers on a stage with curtains and a visible proscenium arch. Then there were many filmed plays, of course: Coquette (1929), The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929), etc. etc. Some of the earliest examples can be pretty deadly, but by the time filmmakers turned their attention to Street Scene (1931), The Guardsman (1931), and The Animal Kingdom (1932), general technique had improved, and the films are more enjoyable. In a different thread I mentioned the adaptation of Preston Sturges' Broadway hit Strictly Dishonorable (1931), which is very close to the stage version; the film version of his less successful comedy-drama Child of Manhattan (1933) moves away somewhat from the source material, and "opens it up" to an extent, but it's still essentially a filmed play.

The weirdest example I can think of is from a much later era: The Bad Seed (1956), with Patty McCormack. That's also a filmed play, but nonetheless it's kind of a jolt at the end, when the actors come out to take their bows. And Patty, the little homicidal monster, delivers a nice curtsey!

JUNO & THE PAYCOCK comes to mind.

The '29 MADAME X.

Just about every George Arliss film. Mr. A liked stagey films and stated in his memoirs that when the writers were finished with the script, he would revise scenes to make the narrative more stagey. Eventually some stories could only be told on the run - CARDINAL RICHELIEU is a good example - so he would go with the flow.

COUNSELLOR AT LAW is confined almost entirely to an office but Wyler keeps things moving so that the viewer hardly notices.

Some film adaptations try hard but can't shake their stage origins. I'm thinking of THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, and WATCH ON THE RHINE.

A THOUSAND CLOWNS did some editing sleight-of-hand to open up a one set play. THE ODD COUPLE opened up a few scenes outside the apartment. And how about 1776?? 70% true to its essential setting where everyone argued for independence.

OUTWARD BOUND

Often the story is best served by not leaving the stage roots,if you do, the film can seem disjointed.

I think there was one major studio musical that would have worked better if they'd abandoned the stage and that is Brigadoon. If they had filmed it on location, like Oklahoma, it might have been great, instead of being just good.

The reasons are the nature of the story, it's a fantastic dream-like fantasy, and fantasy (like Lord of the Rings) is often well served by grounding it in reality.

Of course it would have been a big budget picture, and I can come up with all kind of reasons not to do it that way, but I think they missed something special.

One reason the P&P film She Knows Where She's Going works so well is that it mines this fantasy element already present in the Highlands. Imagine doing THAT film in the studio!

One would expect Design for Living to be stagey (if one didn't know that it was completely re-written); but it isn't. And I would like to state at this point that immorality may be fun; but it doesn't replace 100% virtue and three square meals a day.

Three largely stagey silents:

The Saphead

Seven Chances

The Show Off

Going back to the silent days: Tillie's Punctured Romance was based on a stage play, and Marie Dressler repeated her stage performance (and a lot of her lines, apparently), but the film doesn't feel especially stagey until the very last moment. It ends with that scene on the pier, after everyone has been pulled out of the water; Chaplin faints, and is dragged away. Then, Marie and Mabel Normand reconcile, and they hug -- and a curtain closes in front of them!

I'll never forget how surprised I was, the first time I saw it. Where did that curtain come from? They're on a pier, and they appear to be outdoors, so the sudden use of a stage convention was really startling.

It was many years before I would see a more fully restored version, one which includes the shot of Dressler, Normand, and Chaplin stepping out in front of the curtain to take their bows.

The Desert Song (1929)
This Man is Mine (1934)
Broadway (1929)

I don't think all "stagey" films are necessarily bad for the screen, but I do sense their play roots maybe a little more than I would want when it's supposed to be a film taking advantage of film tech.

some examples of stagey movies for me are:

Coquette
Taming of the Shrew both Pickford early talkie transition films
Grand Hotel
a lot of George Cukor films like Little Women,A Star is Born, My Fair Lady, Dinner At Eight, The Philadelphia Story(which is why I was always refreshed when Kate went on location for her later films The African Queen and Summertime)
The Children's Hour, Sabrina, Green Mansions, and Wait Until Dark were later films that appeared stagey but again some of these are adapted from plays so it makes sense.
Naturally a lot of musicals will appear stagey as they were originally well musicals made for the stage. When watching The King and I I have to sometimes remind myself that this is a film and not person who filmed a broadway performance from the back. West Side Story, Auntie Mame are other ones from the 50s. Funny Face...

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is stagey but cinematic at the same time which fascinates me. Same with Long Days Journey Into Night.

Films like 42nd Street, GoldDiggers of INSERT YEAR HERE, Stage Door, and All About Eve dealt with story-lines around "the stage".

A lot of films that remakes of Shakespeare with notable exceptions when directors like Kurosawa,Baz, and Mr. Wilcox try out their own visions.

The 1990s interpretation of The Crucible was pretty stagey and stays pretty true to the play.

There are a lot of them out there I haven't mentioned but like I said before, these films can easily be in my top favorites despite their stagey presence.

Nobody has yet mentioned Blessed Event. A friend mentioned that he thought Del Ruth might have kept some stage blocking from the Broadway show.

[silentfilm]

There's many Neil Simon films, like The Odd Couple (1968) that are pretty much just on one big set. At least they opened the film up a little in the beginning, where Felix (Jack Lemmon) tries to commit suicide.