From Stage to Screen: Murder, Madness & Mom

The difference between a man watching a play and a man watching a movie is the difference between a target and a gun. In theater, the action is aimed at the audience; in cinema, the audience is aimed at the action. The two arts are antagonistic, and it is almost as hard to turn a good play into a good film as it is to make soup out of soap. The feat is attempted in three current attractions based on well-known stage works. Surprisingly, two of the three are films of blasting impact.

Dutchman is a racial shocker that slams through the spectator like a volt jolt from the third rail. Adapted for $60,000 from LeRoi Jones's one-act play, the film describes in 55 minutes the brutal brief encounter between a black man and a white woman who meet in a subway car somewhere under Manhattan. The man (Al Freeman Jr.) looks like a young intellectual; the woman (Shirley Knight) acts like a maniac in a miniskirt. Smiling and snarling, she flops down beside him and slides her thigh against his thigh. When he stammers, she strokes his lips and invites him to "do the thing" right there and then, and never mind the other passengers. When he refuses, she leaps to her feet and screams: "You middle-class black bastard, you liver-lipped white man, Uncle Tom Big Lip!" In a black rage, he slugs her and then vomits all over the subway car his lifelong bellyful of hatred against the white man and all his works. When he subsides, the dame stabs him dead.

As a tirade against white wickedness, Dutchman makes no more sense than any other noisy blurb for black reaction. But as a dramatic shocker, it hits even harder on the screen than it did on the stage. The camera picks the onlooker up, sits him down hard only two seats away from that subway succubus, and then forces him to sit there with his palms sweating while the danger builds and builds and builds like the brain-stabbing squeal of steel wheels in a turning tunnel.

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, as written by Playwright Peter Weiss and performed by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook, was the decade's most cinematic drama. In a churning rowdydow of rant, cant, poetry, politics, music, magic, rite and ribaldry, the play moved across the stage like half a dozen movies mingling incompatibly on a giant screen. When Director Brook finally came to film the play, he simply let his cameras zig and zag and make lazy eights above the steamy business; then he assembled his takes into a movie that is altogether faithful to the play and no less frazzle-dazzling to experience.

Time: 1808. Place: a bathhouse in the asylum where Sade spent the last 13 years of his life--and actually did write plays for the inmates to perform. Playwright Weiss supposes that Sade once wrote a drama in the form of a debate between himself and the great demagogue of the French Revolution. Marat (Ian Richardson) stands for social progress; he believes that the only way to improve people is to improve the society they live in, that violent revolution is the best way to begin. Sade (Patrick Magee) stands on the contrary for moral autarchy; he believes that the only way to change the world is to change the people who live in it, that revolutions revolve in a vicious circle and get humanity nowhere.

The debate bristles with modern implications, but in intellectual terms it is platitudinous and inconclusive. "The play's chief aim," Sade observes, "has been to take to bits Great Propositions and their opposites." On the emotional plane, however, there is no doubt about who wins. The inmates set up a mad clamor for Marat's cause. Drooling, twitching, cross-eyed, filthy, they stagger about the stage like broken bugs. "We want our revolution," they croak in cracked chorus, "NOW!"

In the end, they get what they want. Marat, stabbed by a spastic Charlotte Corday (Glenda Jackson), lies weltering in his tub of blood. The director of the asylum and his guests politely applaud the conclusion of the piece; but the inmates, identifying with their roles, run suddenly amuck. Fighting, biting, ripping, raping, they swarm over the guards and the guests, they leap upon the camera and drag the spectator down into the delirium of a revolution that is suddenly no longer there and then but here, now, always.

The message of Marat / Sade seems to be that bourgeois society is a madhouse, and anybody who lives in it must be out of his mind. In the talented hands of Weiss and Brook, there is dramatic power in an idea whose time has passed.

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad, a film version of the Arthur Kopit play produced off Broadway in 1962, is supposed to be a comedy about momogamy in American life. The heroine, an overdecorated middle-aged man-eater (Rosalind Russell), arrives at a Caribbean resort with her nixed of kin: a husband (Jonathan Winters), dead for a decade, who hangs taxidermically immortalized on a coat hook in her clothes closet, and a son (Robert Morse), arguably alive, who at 25 still sucks his thumb and sleeps in a set of Dr. Denton drop-seat pajamas. Forbidden by Mamma to leave the suite or even answer the telephone, the son is delightfully alarmed to discover that his hotel womb has a view. Specifically, the view includes the resident baby-sitter (Barbara Harris). But when he tries to get Mother out of the way by arranging a date for the old nymph with a local satyr (Hugh Griffith), she coolly arranges a harpy ending.

Kopit's play turned horror into humor by reducing characters to costumes --easy to laugh at a son being swallowed if the mother is just a feather-boa constrictor. Richard Quine's film turns yocks into rocks by trying to discover immortal souls under the plastic spangles--hard to laugh at a farce that opens with a prologue in heaven. Quine & Co. kept their cinematic corpse on ice for more than a year while they tried to decide what to do with it. They should have stuffed it.

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