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By PAUL BRENNER
At one point towards the end of "Rhinoceros," Gene Wilder looks at himself in
the mirror and says to himself, "A couple of horns will give my sagging face a
new little lift." By then, a couple of horns for any purpose would give a lift
to the film.
This 1974 American Film Theatre version of Eugene Ionesco's classic
Theater of the Absurd comedy about a gaggle of New Yorkers who find them being
turned into rhinos has been Americanized by theater director Tom O'Horgan
("Hair," "Lenny") and screenwriter Julian Barry (founder of The Living Theater).
But it barely matters, except in a cheap sort of way, in O'Horgan's disastrously
drab production, with the actors caterwauling for their lives. In this lame
re-teaming of Wilder and Zero Mostel, the lone survivor of the cataclysm is
Mostel, recreating his Broadway role from 1961 -- the performance that made him
a star. Mostel's role is basically a supporting one and he only has two scenes
with Wilder (that is if you ignore an abominable dream sequence where the Mostel character reappears). But Mostel dominates
the key scene in the film in which Mostel, before Wilder's eyes, transforms
himself into a rhinoceros. This is the kind of in your face and in your lap
performance that has to be seen to be believed -- his role in "The Producers" as
subtle as Noel Coward by comparison. Wilder, on the other hand, slogs through
the film doomed but with his dignity intact but not much else. The rest of the
proceedings is a sorry spectacle.
This Kino Video DVD in its American Film Theatre series also contains a recent
interview with Tom O'Horgan, the theatrical trailer, an essay on Ionesco by
Michael Feingold, the AFT Cinebill, a stills gallery, a print interview with
Zero Mostel, an interview with AFT co-creator Edie Landau, a promotional short
for AFT, a trailers gallery, and a collection of essays on AFT. |
