The best movies based on plays are those with just the right changes to the source material
When sound came to the movies in the late 1920s, suddenly every play and musical ever written became available for adaptation. The studios saw the opportunity and grabbed it. But what they didn’t know — what it took them a while to realize — is that adaptations are like transplants. You can’t just take one thing from one place and slap into something else.
Early attempts to adapt musicals, for example, were static, and plays were often stagy and featured people talking in weird accents that were not quite English and not quite American. But eventually, filmmakers remembered what they’d learned in the days of silent film, that the camera needed to move and that films needed to communicate, not just with words, but also with camera movement, close-ups and combinations of images.
Ever since, the theater has been a steady source for movies. Yes, more movies come from novels — like films, novels change locations at will and always have a defined perspective. Yet it’s almost inevitable that any play that makes a strong impression will find its way to celluloid, whether it’s a lightweight musical (“Mamma Mia”) or a heavyweight drama (“Fences”).
And there are no rules for this. Stage adaptations that seem like stage adaptations, that never “open up” into other locations, are fine; and ones that expand and seem as if they never could have been plays are fine, too. Films that are faithful to their original source can be great or dreadful, and so can films that play fast and loose
with the original material. It all depends on the vision of the people making the film.
No matter what the approach, one thing is essential: The play must be reimagined as a film. That sounds almost ridiculously obvious, but in practice it means reimagining every moment and making the translation from one medium to another. Take, for example, “War Horse,” which premiered on London’s National Theatre in 2007 and became a Steven Spielberg film in 2011.
In the stage version, the horse was a large puppet, operated by visible puppeteers, and the horse was almost always onstage, often just off to the side. Thus, it was always easy to remember that “War Horse” was the horse’s story, and the cruelties depicted were easier to take, as well, because the use of puppets provided some distance.
On screen, this wasn’t possible. You can’t use fake horses in a movie, and unless the horse was literally in the scene, he couldn’t be off in the background, there to remind us of his existence. Spielberg and his screenwriters instead had to find their way into the story’s emotional current through filmic means, and they did. They invested in the emotional elements of individual moments and dramatically depicted war scenes only alluded to in the play.
The nagging thing about adapting great material is this: If the play is already great, it may be in its ideal form. That is, it may be meant to be a play, not a movie. That means, in a sense, that the play has to change and become something else in order to be just as great in another medium. For the film version of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet added a character, played by Alec Baldwin, and an entirely new scene, which provided the movie’s most remembered line: “Coffee is for closers.”
Another thing that might have to change is casting. In 1963, it was regarded as a scandal that Julie Andrews, who played Eliza Doolittle on Broadway, was passed over for George Cukor’s film version, in favor of Audrey Hepburn, who couldn’t really sing and ultimately had to be dubbed. But today, more than a half-century later, does anyone doubt the sheer magic Hepburn brings to that film? It was the right decision.
There have been some wrong decisions, too, over the years. Lots of them. What follows are some of the best and worst of films derived from plays:
Best
(1) Private Lives (1931): This Noël Coward play was only a year old when the screen version from MGM was released. Directed by Sidney Franklin, it represents the best of film and stage technique. Producer Irving Thalberg actually filmed the play when it was on Broadway, so Franklin and his cast could refer to it when they were in doubt. Yet some of the best comedy comes from Franklin’s use of close-ups. The result is a somewhat under-appreciated classic, and a landmark in stage to screen adaptation. (2) Design for Living (1933): If “Private Lives” showed the value of faithfulness to an adapted work, Paramount’s 1933 adaptation of another Noël Coward play showed the opposite. Screenwriter Ben Hecht essentially tossed the original play out the window, keeping only the premise of a menage a trois. That, combined with the direction of Ernst Lubitsch, resulted in a film even more sophisticated and witty than Coward’s original work.
(3) The Voice of the Turtle (1947): Ronald Reagan, Eleanor Parker and Eve Arden are magnificent in this almost-forgotten adaptation of John Van Druten’s play, about a chance meeting between an Army officer and a budding actress, both of whom are recovering from deep spiritual wounds.
(4) A Streetcar Named Desire (1951): Elia Kazan directed this faithful adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ stage hit, importing most of the original Broadway cast, with Vivien Leigh taking on the role of Blanche DuBois, who was originally played on stage by Jessica Tandy. An excellent movie in its own right, it’s also a filmed record of Marlon Brando in the role that transfixed the theater public and transformed American acting.
(5) Richard III (1955): Here’s the thing about Laurence Olivier. He looked like a leading man, but he had the soul of a char-
acter actor. In this adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, which he also directed, he is in hog heaven, with his fake nose and hump, straddling the line between comedy and tragedy and milking this villainous role for everything it’s worth. (6) My Fair Lady (1964): Rex Harrison’s claim on history is his performance here as Henry Higgins, which preserves his Broadway performance in the same role. Audrey Hepburn is achingly lovely, and the movie is a feast for the eyes, the summit of a particular kind of full-color wide-screen opulence that would soon go out of fashion. (7) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1966): Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton achieved their screen zenith, together and separately, in this Mike Nichols adaptation of the Edward Albee play. The film is just a succession of brilliant scenes and can be watched over and over again with pleasure — and horror. (8) The Boys in the Band (1970): Acclaimed as a breakthrough and then discarded as an outdated relic, this William Friedkin film, an adaptation of the play by Mart Crowley, must be regarded as a slice of gay cinema history. Made when the gay rights movement was in its infancy, it’s a movie about how difficult it is to maintain a healthy self-conception in the midst of a culture that is demeaning you. Five of the actors who appear in the film died of AIDS, either in the late ’80s or early ’90s. (9) Amadeus (1984): Milos Forman’s adaptation of the Peter Shaffer play, about the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri in old Vienna, is one of the great examples of a director’s coming in with his own distinct vision and reshaping the play into a completely different kind of work. This time, the results couldn’t have been better. It’s a sensuous delight of beautiful settings and glorious music, with vivid performances. (10) Fences (2016): Denzel Washington took a role made indelible by James Earl Jones and transformed it into his own psychological lexicon. Then he built a film around that, taking care to fill every single role in this August Wilson adaptation with the best actor available. And everyone had a chance to excel, especially Viola Davis, whose performance will be studied for the next 50 years.
Worst
(1) Proof (2005): This adaptation of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, about a brilliant young mathematician who thinks she might be going mad, sabotaged itself through the casting of Gwyneth Paltrow, a pleasant actress, but one incapable of depicting mental torment. Lacking a doorway into madness, she just played the role as sullen — and took the movie down with her. (2) Nine (2009): Rob Marshall adapted this outdated relic from the 1980s, a musical based on Fellini’s “8½,” and cast Daniel Day-Lewis as an Italian director. Lewis’ idea of acting Italian was to walk hunched over and to smoke constantly. He looked like a creep, and when he sang, he didn’t sound Italian. He sounded like Bela Lugosi. (3) Rabbit Hole (2010): Two things got in the way of this adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. First, the literalizing quality of cinema took what seemed emblematic (a husband and wife cope with the death of their son) and turned it specific, to the detriment of the material. And second, Nicole Kidman seemed miscast in a role originally played on stage by Cynthia Nixon.
(4) Les Miserables (2012): Anne Hathaway annihilates the best song in the show (“I Dreamed a Dream”) by sobbing through it, and Hugh Jackman has tonal problems, in Tom Hooper’s long, long, very long adaptation of the hit musical. Here’s a case where a less faithful rendering might have aided the translation from stage to screen.
(5) August Osage County (2013): A disaster. Director John Wells took Tracy Letts’ dark and very funny black comedy and transformed it into a maudlin drama. He did this not by an act of will, but by passively allowing Meryl Streep to transform the character of the mother, a comic monster, into a vessel for audience pity. It’s a shame that years from now people will blame Letts for Streep’s demolition job.