Noises Off... (Peter Bogdanovich, 1992)

I've not seen Noises Off, Michael Frayn's celebrated 1982 farce, on stage so I must reserve judgement on how well it works there (although I suspect it'd come off like the terrible comedy Lora Meredith starts her stage career with in Sirk's Imitation of Life). But it definitely does not work on film. Peter Bogdanovich ventilates the play admirably, the impressive cast surpasses the dexterous requirements of the material, and the entire project has a mild Cubist/modernist/Celine and Julie feel to it as the principals run through three performances of the same play, once mainly from backstage. It really is a brilliant piece of comedic writing. 

But the timing required to pull off the physical comedy loses the thrill of its dexterity in film where myriad takes can perfect it. In a theatre, the audience can be impressed together and have their laughter build off one another. In a movie theatre or at home, you're stuck with film's reality quotient and soon, moribund questions of realism arise such as why would theatre professionals allow unprofessional behavior like drunkenness and personal gripes to ruin a performance, not to mention three performances? Oh well - at least it's an admirable failure rather than an enraging one like Bogdanovich's smug, indulgent catastrophe At Long Last Love (1975).

Grade: C+