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By PAUL BRENNER
One of the many reasons that the lofty experiment known as the American Film
Theatre lasted only two seasons in the mid-70s was its smugness and its scent of
snobbery about cinema as an art form. The idea of bringing famous plays to the
unwashed masses -- albeit unwashed middle class masses -- with thoroughly
uninspired, non-cinematic techniques was (most of the time) deadly. The little
seen film version of Jean Genet's "The Maids" -- now available on Kino Video --
is an archetypical case. Get some well-known (and respected) lead actors
(preferably British) and shoot the whole damn thing straight on without having
the actors adjust for the more intimate film form their emotive theatrical pitch
and back row howling. And then zip -- you have a film.
In "The Maids," Glenda Jackson and Susannah York play two sisters who serve as
maids for a flighty and condescending socialite (Vivien Merchant). In Genet's
incendiary play, the maids engage in ritualistic role-playing as they plot to
poison the dowager with a cup of tea laced with sleeping pills. Performed
onstage, the heightened language of Genet is powerful and disturbing. On film,
at least as in the film directed by Christopher Miles, Genet's language becomes
overbearing and pretentious. It also doesn't help when Miles tries to "open up"
the play with grainy street scenes dropped in over the exalted dialogue. Instead
of expanding the play to new artistic heights, all Miles succeeds in doing is to
make the play resemble a segment of Philo Kvetch from "The Soupy Sales Show."
The typical American Film Theatre special features include the theatrical
trailer, an essay by Michael Feingold, a trailer for Jean-Pierre Denis's
"Murderous Maids," a stills gallery, the AFT Cinebill, an interview with AFT
executive Edie Landau, a 1974 promotional short, a collection of AFT trailers,
and articles concerning AFT. |
