In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese June 2016.
This month, the programmers at TCM are paying tribute to the theatre, with over sixty adaptations--dramas, comedies, thrillers and musicals. When I was younger and the consciousness of cinema and its history as an art form was developing, there was a strong reaction against the theatre, particularly pictures with theatrical origins. It was the spirit of the times, a matter of standing up for the cinema against the cultural prejudices of the moment (by the way, cultural prejudices against the cinema haven't gone away--they've just changed). Now we can look back more calmly. The development of storytelling in movies has been closely tied to the theatre from the start. Georges Méliès was a magician, a man of the stage, and his movies were an extension of his theatrical art. The movies built naturally from principles of theatrical blocking and staging as much as painting and photography, and many of the greatest filmmakers started in the theatre (Griffith, DeMille, Walsh, Eisenstein, Lubitsch, Cukor, Welles, Minnelli, Ray, Sirk). Some, like Ford and Hitchcock, were avid playgoers, and some, like Visconti, Kazan, Bergman and Mike Nichols, had long careers in both arts. And, of course, armies of writers, set designers and art directors, and actors came from the stage.
Really, it's been an ongoing exchange, and a mutual enrichment. There are so many remarkable pictures in this tribute. There's a night of Shakespeare adaptations at the end of the month, including two very different 1948 films from two great artists--Welles' Macbeth and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet--and the 1935 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, featuring almost every name actor under contract at Warner Bros. at the time and directed by the German theatrical genius Max Reinhardt. There's a whole night of comedies--from Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest) to Hecht and MacArthur (The Front Page) to Neil Simon (The Odd Couple)--including Cukor's 1940 version of Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story, originally written for its star Katherine Hepburn, which has echoes of A Midsummer Night's Dream (actually, you can feel the presence of Shakespeare in a lot of the best film comedies of the '30s and '40s). There's Kazan's film version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) based on his 1947 stage production, which revolutionized American theatre and gave us Marlon Brando. There's the overpowering 1940 adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town from the team of director Sam Wood and production designer William Cameron Menzies, with a beautiful score by Aaron Copland.
And there's a rich survey of musicals, including James Whale's beautiful version of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat (1936), Minnelli's debut film Cabin in the Sky (1943) from the Vernon Duke-John Latouche musical, with an all-black cast; Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's On the Town (1949), a milestone in movie musicals because of the New York location shooting in the opening sequence (sadly, most of the score, from Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein, was thrown out and replaced with more ordinary songs), Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins' lavish version of West Side Story (1961), another Bernstein score with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; and Cabaret (1972), from the John Kander-Fred Ebb musical, directed by another great artist with parallel careers on stage and screen, Bob Fosse. This is a wonderful pocket history of the ongoing love affair between two art forms.
