The Viewing List

A dozen stage-savvy flicks among the “new arrivals” on Netflix’s Watch Instantly list:
1. Orson Welles & Me. It’s a self-conscious period piece self-consciously presenting a teen idol, Zac Efron, in his first “mature” role (though he’s still playing a teenager). Yet it strenuously avoids dumbing down its story. Names like John Gassner and Brooks Atkinson are casually dropped without elaboration, just as they would have been in that culture at that time. As solid a Welles tribute as Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock.
2. Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet. I saw this the year it came out, though I was just eight years old and it was rated R. My father couldn’t imagine that Zefferelli could have put anything in it that would truly deserve not to be seen anyone under the age of 17. Just some tits (hers) and ass (his) during the “Lark! Nightingale!” exchange.
3. Good. I read an interview with Viggo Mortensen where he said he’d been sent this script and started reading it without realizing that it was based on the C.P. Taylor play. What, some whole other project about a literature professor in league with the Nazis?
4. Star! The Noel Coward renaissance is just beginning. Let’s not let this overblown Hollywood bio-musical of Coward’s sometime muse Gertrude Lawrence ruin it. Actually, unless you happened to invest money in it (it’s one of the most notorious flops of all time, and helped kill off the Hollywood musical), this is quite a satisfying film. Coward himself approved Daniel Massey as the best actor to portray a young him, and the musical numbers (drawn not just from Coward but from Weill and Music Hall) are so lavish that they make you understand why these songs were popular and not just “important.”
5. The Italian Job (1969) was the final fim acting job for the real Noel Coward, oozing comfort opposite the tense Michael Caine in a heist thriller.
6. Dracula (1979). This was the film that emerged from the hit Broadway version of Bram Stoker’s play. But while the projects shared the same star (Frank Langella), the whole point of the stage show had been Edward Gorey’s set and costume designs and Dennis Rosa’s sensitive yet slightly campy direction. John Badham’s version seems like it wants to be a Transylvania take on Jaws.
7. Macbeth, the 2006 GeoffreyWright emo version, where the witches are comely groupies. Speaks more to its time than Polanski’s 1971 version did, if you ask me.
8. See What I’m Saying. “The Deaf Entertainers Documentary.”
9. Salome’s Last Dance. Ken Russell’s play-within-a-lay-within-a-martyrdom is the extreme version of the common practice of never doing Salome straight—it’s always a meta-commentary on gay culture, modern immorality, or Wilde himself.
10. Sunday. There’s an actor in it named “Jimmy Broadway,” but this Jonathan Nossiter-directed drama is strictly Off Broadway method-led. Based on a novel by James Lasdun (who also co-wrote the screenplay), one of its main characters is a literally starving actress (Lisa Harrow).
11. Mr. Laughs. A documentary about the well-respected yet relatively little-known stand-up comic Sal Richards.
12. Banjo on My Knee. 1936 musical with Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Buddy Ebsen and any Western’s good luck charm, Walter Brennan. Written by Groucho Marx’s pal Nunnally Johnson.