The original Sleuth from 1972 was stagey.
Some things that make a movie stagey to me include limited camera angles, little intercutting, long scenes, few locations, few characters. A stagey movie is one that looks like you’re watching a play.
Likewise its follow-up, Manderlay.
Based on the criteria for stagey mentioned so far, 12 Angry Men should qualify: All but 3 minutes set in one room, 12 characters, lots of dialogue, based on a teleplay and kept true to the original script.
But the way Sidney Lumet shot the film was brilliant; he definitely took full advantage of his medium:
So I’m not sure I would say it’s stagey, or that a stage production could match what the film version achieved. Does anyone disagree?
1776 definitely fits the (play)bill here…but like near everything else mentioned thus far, it was originally a stage play (a Broadway musical debuting in 1969 (which ran for 1,217 performances), to be exact). Between the historic theme and my digging a couple of the actors and their BRILLIANT casting (William Daniels as John Adams and Howard Da Silva as Benjamin Franklin), I wish I liked it a lot more than I did and do…
August: Osage County was very stagey. And also based on a play, so…
Arsenic and Old Lace was the first one I thought of; it was originally a play.
I have to admit, that’s an interesting camera idea, and one which I did not note on first viewing. In my head, I do think of this as a stagey movie, but maybe if I re-watched, focusing on the camera work, I might think of it differently.
The recent film version of Anna Karenina was intended to be a location movie, but was forced into being a stagey production by budgetary constraints:
Come Back To the Five and Dime, Jimmie Dean Jimmie Dean
Yeah, much of the movie, and pretty much all of the songs, are kinda meh. But, the last twenty or thirty minutes, the actual vote on, and signing of, the Declaration, are brilliant. What you take away is that the Declaration, and independence in general, were by no means a given, as it appears in hindsight. In fact, it took all kinds of wheeler-dealing to get everyone on board. Fascinating. (Note that the dealmaking shown in the movie is highly fictionalized, but the actual negotiations were at least as complex.)
I was going to mention this one. The movie was not “stagey” and failed as a result. To work, it HAS to be seen the way a live audience would see it.
When you see it in the theater, in the first act you see a play being rehearsed- a silly farce set in an English country house. In the second act, the set is turned around and the live audience sees the BACK of the English country house set… you see what is going on literally “behind the scenes.” You see the issues among the cast, the romances, the feuds, and meanwhile, you hear the appropriate lines being spoken to the “audience” now hypothetically at the back of the stage looking at the front of the set. Side-splittingly funny. In the third act, the set is turned around the right way again, and the live audience sees the front of it, as it is meant to be seen, but now all kinds of things have happened and it is absolutely hilarious. I’ve seen it a couple of times and I’ve never laughed so much at a live production.
I’ve always thought this would be a difficult play for actors to learn because they say the same lines in the farce-play-with-a-play in all three acts, but with different business inserted in acts two and three. No matter–it’s one of the funniest plays in the world.
All of this was lost in the movie. The movie should have been filmed as though filming a stage play. The play only works if it is seen in a “stagey” way.
Chorus Line (the movie) would have worked better if filmed in a stagey way, too.
If you’re going to cite a stagy movie based on a Mamet play, the best (?) example is Oleanna.
Two people, one very small set, all talk.
Great username/post combo.
Two I’ll bet no one remembers: Mary, Mary with Debbie Reynolds and Michael Rennie, and ***Hedda ***with Glenda Jackson and Patrick Stewart.
I was watching the former on TCM some time ago, and was thinking the whole time “Real people do *not *talk like that!” :smack:
“Mame” is quite stagy; for example, several scenes end with the actors freezing and the lighting changing to spotlight one or two characters, while everything else is unlit. It works for that movie.
Twelve Angry Men certainly qualifies, you don’t even need to change the set at all.
I concur with the Dial M for Murder nomination as well as Rear Window. Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? also seems to fit.
My Dinner with Andre would qualify, no?
And I thought it was brilliantly done. There’s a great scene where a character leaves the theater through a back stage door and emerges into the vast Russian steppe in winter - simply breathtaking.
Auntie Mame (the 1958 film) is terribly “stagey.” Everything about it screams that it was written to be a stage play.
Yeah, that’s the one I meant.
A Few Good Men - adapted from a stage play, and it shows. A very small number of locations, lots of dialog, and all the drama/conflict comes as dialog set-pieces.