On Screen

...If the fellow-passengers in the play are insulted, here they are manhandled...

...The cameraman, David Watkin, has captured, under Brook's guidance, a double world: Characters in the foreground emerge in cruelly detailed focus, while those in the background mill about in a state of hazy deliquescence, semiabstract mirages that might be people or just the delusions of madness...

...gives a nicely tempered performance as Clay, making much of what humor can be extracted from the part and sensibly restraining the violence, Shirley Knight's Lula is another matter...

...Who, first of all, is the presumably Flying Dutchman of the title...

...Instead of this lengthy episode, Brook now gives us a surrealist phantasmagoria of blurry images, polychrome bats emerging from and dissolving into opalescent mists...

...At the very least, they would move to another car...

...The handheld camera, in harmony or discord, whirls around with or against the swirls of the spectacle...

...Still, it does give us a little more the sense of an agon...

...To be sure, this is a dubious gain, for it reveals more clearly the unfresh-ness and exiguity of the ideas and their verbalization...

...Lula is the white society tempting and luring the Negro to his destruction...

...But, to our astonishment, the work thus emerges more playlike...

...Besides cutting down on the running time, this must have struck Brook as being "purely filmic...

...On the other hand, the fine music and English lyrics by Richard Peaslee and Adrian Mitchell can, oddly enough, be less well heard on screen...

...The first of the two main departures from the stage presentation is a curtain of iron bars that separates the lunatics on stage from the sane spectators who have come to gape at them...

...Furthermore, characters from this episode (originally filmed, then cut out) are seen trailing about in what remains like so many red, or varicolored, herrings...

...The careful, insane sexual provocation, with the lethal knife awaiting the victim who cannot but respond, is not the way the white society treats the Negro, no matter how unjust that treatment has been until recently and, to a large extent, still is...

...No go...

...It is a split world, frightening yet not without its terrible beauty...

...Lula is the white American woman preying on Negroes...

...Here Marat sees figures from his past in a hallucination that serves, among other things, to introduce Marat's life story...

...Brook has also added some superviolence that would have been unsafe on stage...

...The German reads Gesichte, visions, not Gesichter, faces...

...they are dressed according to today's fashions and behave with interesting unruliness...

...Compared with the play, the film version has, as might be expected, both advantages and disadvantages, though they do not always come where we expect them...

...in that case, why bother with it at all...

...But it turns out to be the most effective transfer yet of a stage production to the screen...

...But she is not looking for the unselfish love that would redeem her...

...Such a one is LeRoi Jones' Dutchman...

...Such behavior on a subway, certain actual cases notwithstanding, is unthinkable: The passengers, as long as they were threatened by nothing more powerful than a crazy blonde, would not put up with any of it...

...Whereas the madmen of Marat/Sade convince with their controlled patterns, Miss Knight's Lula, who is supposed to be sane enough to ride the subways, is not only a hideous heap of histrionic self-indulgences, she even lacks that smidgen of credibility with which the author has provided her...

...If, in the play, the dead youth slumps across Lula's knees, in the film, he sprawls over her on the subway floor in a kind of necrophilic rape...

...For the duologue-duel of Sade and Marat becomes unexpectedly clearer than it was on the stage, where it tended to get submerged in the perpetual peripheral upheavals...

...It is a work that tries to be both naturalistic and symbolistic, but fails in both modes, individually and in concert...

...But it not only subtracts something from an already deficient script, it also weakens the film's validity as a record of the stage production...

...But that, of course, is supposed to be the symbolism...

...Aside from this, the film is thoroughly lovely to watch...

...One kind of play, though, that need not be put on screen is the kind that was already rotten on stage...

...Anthony Harvey, the British director, has gone the play's exaggerations one better, wherever possible or impossible...

...But how could Clay, her young Negro victim, be the Dutchman...

...Let's try another symbolic level, then...

...they are profoundly unsettling and haunting...

...However neurotic American women may be—with black or white men— they are not psychotic murderesses, and, in any case, they are by now indulging fairly freely in interracial intercourse—at any rate on the social level and in the urban milieu here depicted...

...These theatergoers are included by Brook in the film...

...All in all...

...It also drives home the superficiality of Patrick Magee's Sade, the splendidly contained doggedness of Ian Richardson's Marat, and the marvelous ambiguity of Glenda Jackson's Corday...

...Now, the oppressor's wrong is wrong indeed, but it is a brutal, blanket subjugation...

...No go again...

...Besides, with her continuous apple eating and sharing, she is more of a travesty of Eve...

...and though, as Sartre has shown, it may have its sexual implications, it is both more and less sinister than what happens in Dutchman...

...I say transfer as distinct from adaptation, because, except for two features, we have here a faithful filmic record of a memorable stage event: the clever but mediocre play by Peter Weiss that provided Peter Brook with a pretext for a rousing piece of theatrical prestidigitation...

...If in Jones' stage directions Lula eats an apple daintily, here it becomes a piece of orgiastic oral sex...

...Still, that filmed theater audience is present often enough to begin to be distracting, yet not quite enough to make a significant contribution by its presence...

...Artists as different as Odilon Redon and Nicolas de Stael would have been thrilled and tickled by this spectacle, no less fascinating to the layman's eye...

...To substitute titillating perversion for simple brutality is not to shed light on either the social or sexual relations between the races...

...Again, where we might have supposed the madmen less awesome when seen close enough for the make-up to show, they turn out to be actually more alarming, partly because they are such superb actors, partly because, with Brook's help, they have developed such meticulous scenarios of tics, spasms, and eccentricities...

...The girl, Lula, who travels restlessly up and down the subway lines...

...It is the display of a stupidity that, like all extremes, merges with its diehard opposite...

...Let's try still another level...

...And it is no use arguing that the play isn't worth much, anyhow...

...The selective eye of the camera forces us to concentrate on this or that panel of the polyp-tych...

...Against the whites and greys of the asylum's bathhouse and the inmates' garb, the splashes of color from costumes, warders' uniforms and props function in a similarly dual way as do focus and non-focus: color solos performed dazz-lingly to an accompaniment of amorphous drabness...

...And the idea that this rampant psychopath can go on killing indefinitely (the concept, along with several others in the play, is stolen from Ionesco) is absurd in this nonabsurdist context...

...An advertisement for Dutch Masters cigars is no help at all, but neither is anything else...

...So we are not surprised to find the film unable to convey the crazy simultaneity of the stage madhouse, the sense of a thirty-three-ring circus summarizing the entire world in caricature...

...And that brings us to the paradox of the author...

...Miss Knight, always a walking compendium of the worst Actors Studio inanities, is here allowed, not to act insane, but to be insane —something that, by Diderot's well-known paradox of the actor, does not work...

...I just wish now that they would also bring back another, unduly neglected, Brook film version of a play, The Beggars' Opera, which seems to have failed only for the insufficient reason of not being The Threepenny Opera...

...That LeRoi Jones should be steadily published, produced, awarded grants and applauded would, in view of his unceasing let's-massacre-the-whites tantrums and rabble rousing, be grotesque...

...Some of these effects are good, though Brook cannot resist occasional excesses, such as a close-up of the erotomaniac Duperret's semen-stained trousers...

...It eliminates episode 26 of the play, which the translators mistranslate as "The Faces of Marat...

...The second major alteration is both more beautiful and more worrisome...

...These twitches and grimaces are, however, more than just horrible...

...Equally preposterous is the notion that these passengers, many of them Negroes, having patiently tolerated vicious molestation by the girl, would side with her to a man in the murder of the young Negro, even becoming her accomplices...

...Well, what of the symbolism...

...Though Al Freeman Jr...

...There seems to be no such thing as an untalented bit player in the Royal Shakespeare Company...

...In view of his almost total lack of talent, it is, like the rest of white liberal masochism, disgusting...

...The idea has its merits, in that it adds another dimension to a film limited by its recording function, and the bars, too, come in for good use from time to time...

...there is something in this film version both for those who have seen the play and those who haven't, which cannot be said of many such undertakings...

...He, certainly, is not looking for redemption through this white woman's love...

...Such lapses are not infrequent in this prize-winning English version...