“There was a mercy in the world which you might not at first recognize. If you just kept on not getting what you wanted, you would stop wanting it in any painful way. It would be all right. You would learn to like what you had.”
In honor of the release of its new DVD edition of The Last Days of Disco, the folks at the Criterion Collection invited Whit Stillman to submit a top-ten list of his favorite Criterion releases. He chose Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus, Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come, Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, Hitchcock’s Notorious, and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal…
What would I choose from the Criterion catalogue? I like nearly all of the films on Whit’s list, but only one, The Lady Eve, would make my personal top ten….
Thanks, Terry—missing here was my preface to the Criterion list: these were the first 10 films I came to in their catalog that I admired, not even getting to most of their catalog, not a 10 best list.
“At Wilber’s age, it was possible to believe that argument served some purpose, persuaded people, obliged those in error to turn to the truth. But soon enough you would have to wonder if an argument ever did anything beyond giving pleasure to those who already agreed with its contentions.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I report from Maine on the Ogunquit Playhouse’s revival of Cabaret, which is based on the Sam Mendes-Rob Marshall Broadway production, after which I pay tribute to Harold Prince, who died on Wednesday. Here’s an excerpt.
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“Cabaret,” for all its deceptive air of festivity, is in fact savagely serious, a tough-minded snapshot of Weimar Germany on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, and Mr. Mendes’ sleazed-up staging, which put the emphasis on the show’s pitch-black side, was—to put it very, very mildly—not the sort of thing you’d expect a resort-town theater to present.
So it is fine news that this “Cabaret,” directed by BT McNicholl and choreographed by Andrea Leigh in the distinctive manner of the Mendes-Marshall staging, has neither been censored nor watered down. Ogunquit has even taken the trouble to reproduce the original sets, designed by Robert Brill, and rent the down-and-dirty costumes created by William Ivey Long in 1998. If you saw “Cabaret” at the Roundabout, you’ll know what you’re getting—and you’ll know not to take the kids, either…
I was writing review when word came of the death of Harold Prince. Our paths never crossed during his lifetime, and I wish I had gone out of my way to tell him how much I admired him. Alas, he had long since ceased to be a major force in American theater by the time I became the Journal’s drama critic—his last hit, “Show Boat,” opened in 1994, nine years before I filed my first review—and neither of the two shows of his that I covered in this space, “LoveMusik” and “Prince of Broadway,” merited a rave. By then he had lost his uncanny feel for the moment, one of the things that had helped to make him so significant an artist.
Yet a giant he still was, one in whose long shadow we all work today….
