Who: The New York City Master Chorale, Megan Abbott, Scott Adsit, Mike Albo, Jami Attenberg, Sandra Bauleo, Tara Isabella Burton, Alexander Chee, Vinson Cunningham, Maria Dahvana Headley, Marcy Dermansky, Jo Firestone, Angela Flournoy, Alice Gregory, Jill Hennessy, Suki Kim, Maris Kreizman, Victor LaValle, Min Jin Lee, Lisa Lucas, Noreen Malone, Leon Neyfakh, Max Read, Rosie Schaap, Elissa Schappell, Rob Spillman, J. Courtney Sullivan, Sarah Weinman, and more What:“What the Dickens?” Where: Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby St., 212-334-3324 When: Saturday, December 15, free with advance RSVP, 12 noon – 4:30 pm Why: On December 15, Housing Works will present its ninth annual marathon reading of Charles Dickens’s 1843 holiday classic, a ghost story about a poor family and a wealthy miser. “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that,” the novel begins. “The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” The event kicks off at 12 noon with Christmas carols sung by the New York City Master Chorale, followed by dozens of performers reading passages from the book. Seasonal treats will be available for purchase, and everything in the store will be ten percent off. Admission is free and you can come and go as you please, but advance RSVP is recommended.
Gary Shteyngart will present his latest book at the JCC on December 12 (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)
Who:Gary Shteyngart What:Arts + Ideas — Conversations Where: Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th St., 646-505-4444 When: Wednesday, December 12, $20, 8:00 Why: Leningrad-born author Gary Shteyngart will be at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on December 12 for the latest “Person Place Thing” event, being held in conjunction with the publication of his most recent book, Lake Success (Random House, September 2018, $28). Shteyngart, whose previous novels include Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan, will discuss the book and sign copies; there will also be live klezmer music by Brooklyn-based new traditionalists Tsibele. “Barry Cohen, a man with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management, staggered into the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He was visibly drunk and bleeding. There was a clean slice above his left brow where the nanny’s fingernail had gouged him and, from his wife, a teardrop scratch below his eye. It was 3:20 a.m.” So begins Lake Success, the first chapter of which is titled “Destination America.”
Bryan Cranston takes on iconic role of madman Howard Beale in stage version of Network (photo by Jan Versweyveld, 2018)
Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 17, $49 – $399 networkbroadway.com
When it was released in 1976, Sidney Lumet’s Network instantly shocked audiences as it unmasked the approaching intersection of the corporatization of entertainment and news in the media, featuring a brilliant, prescient script by Bronx native Paddy Chayefsky that skewered the television industry and Americans’ obsession with “the tube.” It revealed a world dominated by ratings-hungry white men in suits, with two exceptional white female characters boldly asserting their own personal and professional power and independence at the height of the women’s liberation movement. Four decades later, the story is as relevant and shocking as ever in Ivo van Hove’s riveting yet dizzying stage production, which opened last night at the Belasco.
The film was nominated for ten Oscars, winning acting awards for the late Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, and Beatrice Straight and Best Original Screenplay for Chayefsky, who wrote such other gems as Marty, The Hospital, The Americanization of Emily, and Altered States before passing away in 1981 at the age of fifty-eight. Despite Bryan Cranston’s mesmerizing lead performance and all of van Hove’s live-streaming technical wizardry — which can be breathtaking and exhilarating as well as overwhelming, distracting, anachronistic, and confusing — it’s Chayefsky’s words that steal the show, adapted here by Lee Hall like they are gospel, which in many ways they are. In the published version of the play, which debuted at London’s National Theatre in November 2017, Hall describes his adaptation as “keyhole surgery,” writing, “Hopefully my interventions are invisible to the untrained eye.” The only significant changes involve the treatment of terrorists by the media, which Hall and van Hove tone down here, and the addition of a coda following the climactic finale. (Hall was given access to Chayefsky’s archives, so he has noted that any and all changes were based on or inspired by the author’s notes, letters, drafts, etc.)
Howard Beale (Bryan Cranston) is downtrodden as Max Schumacher (Tony Goldwyn) looks distraught in Ivo van Hove’s high-tech Broadway version of Network (photo by Jan Versweyveld, 2018)
Olivier, Emmy, and Tony winner Cranston (Breaking Bad, All the Way) takes on the iconic role of Howard Beale, portrayed so memorably by Finch in the film. Cranston immerses himself in the role with a careful abandon; he pays tribute to Finch while making the part his own, much as Hall and van Hove treat the movie. After twenty-five years with Union Broadcasting Systems, Beale is being put out to pasture because of low ratings. But he surprises everyone when he announces during a broadcast that he is going to commit suicide live on television the next week. His best friend and longtime colleague, news division president Max Schumacher (Tony Goldwyn), puts him back on the air quickly so he can apologize and restore his dignity, but Beale instead calls “bullshit” on the state of the world, sending everyone into a tizzy — except ruthlessly ambitious programming head Diana Christensen (Tatiana Maslany), who jumps on the unique opportunity and soon convinces executive producer Harry Hunter (Julian Elijah Martinez), network executive Nelson Chaney (Frank Wood), and network head Frank Hackett (Joshua Boone) to give Beale his own show, making him a kind of angry prophet of the airwaves, speaking for and to the common person. The contemporary of industry legends Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, and Edward R. Murrow becomes a ranting and raving populist hero, although Schumacher believes Beale is being turned into a fool, but there’s little he can to do stop the momentum, which eventually falls apart all by itself.
The use of live video, something van Hove has done in such previous productions as The Damned at Park Avenue Armory and A View from the Bridge and The Crucible.) Depending on where you are sitting, the cameras, operated by technicians Gina Daniels, Nicholas Guest, Jeena Yi, and Joe Paulik, may also occasionally block your view. The footage is projected onto a large screen at the back, often turning Beale into a giant, his image repeating into the distance. Period news reports about Patty Hearst and old commercials — with Roy Scheider in a Folgers ad and Cranston himself pitching Preparation H — fly by on a wall of screens on one side, but don’t get too caught up in them or you’ll miss the magnificent dialogue. The set, by van Hove’s partner, Jan Versweyveld, includes a bar and nightclub-like tables and couches at stage left (where audience members who pay $299 to $399 enjoy dinner and drinks curated by former White House pastry chef Bill Yosses while watching the show and even interacting with the characters) and the glassed-in control room at stage right, where various executives, some of the tech crew, and the announcer (Henry Stram) can always be seen, as if everyone is both under surveillance and doing the surveilling.
Diana Christensen (Tatiana Maslany) and Harry Hunter (Julian Elijah Martinez) can’t believe what they’re seeing in Network (photo by Jan Versweyveld, 2018)
When Beale implores his television audience to open their windows and scream, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” van Hove shows numerous people doing only the latter; instead of photographing men and women yelling out their windows, a procession of YouTube-like selfie videos follow, seeming out of time and place. The live video even extends outdoors when Max and Diana go for a stroll, but the scene takes you out of the play as passersby gawk at Goldwyn (Scandal, Ghost) and Emmy winner Maslany (Orphan Black, Mary Page Marlowe), who never quite catch the fire and passion of William Holden and Dunaway in the film, a critical relationship that literally puts the news and entertainment divisions in bed together. Goldwyn is otherwise solidly effective as Beale’s determined protector, and the pivotal showdown between Max and his wife, Louise (Alyssa Bresnahan), hits the right notes; however, Bresnahan looks so much like Dunaway that you can’t help but wonder if she should have played Diana. (Coincidentally, Dunaway just announced she will be returning to Broadway next year, portraying Katharine Hepburn in Tea at Five.) In a fine casting touch, Barzin Akhavan plays both Jack Snowden, the young anchor in line to replace Beale, and the warm-up guy for Beale’s circuslike show, a newsman transformed into carnival barker.
News division president Max Schumacher (Tony Goldwyn) and programming head Diana Christensen (Tatiana Maslany) bring their work home with them in Network) (photo by Jan Versweyveld, 2018)
But it’s Chayefsky’s sparkling language that reigns supreme all these years later; Beale’s pronouncements ring as true now as they did in 1976. Take this speech, for example: “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do and there’s no end to it. We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat and we sit and watch our teevees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy. So we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we live in gets smaller and all we ask is, please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my teevee and my hair dryer and my steel belted radials, and I won’t say anything, just leave us alone. Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad.” When he mentions Russia, the audience laughs, but Hall isn’t making a cheap joke about current events; the reference is in the film.
In another Beale rant, it’s as if Chayefsky saw the coming of smartphones, the internet, and social media: “Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get on your television. There is a whole and entire generation right now who never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is gospel. This tube is the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, and prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddam force in the whole godless world! And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people.”
When Jensen makes his remarkably foresighted proclamation to Beale about power, international commerce, and “the primal forces of nature,” devilishly delivered by Wyman (Catch Me If You Can, A Tale of Two Cities), van Hove puts Jensen above everyone else on a heavenly platform, as if he’s a godlike figure who is the only one who understands what is really happening in the world — in 1976 as well as in 2018. Be sure to get to the Belasco early, as the actors are already traversing the stage, preparing for the evening news, as the audience enters the theater, and stay in your seats after the curtain call, as there’s a bonus that brings the visionary satire right up to the present moment, although that point has already frighteningly shone through over and over again.
Masha (Sonya Gershevich) and Dmitry (Vladimir Mishukov) develop an unusual relationship in Elephants Can Play Football
ELEPHANTS CAN PLAY FOOTBALL (слоны могут играть в футбол) (Mikhail Segal, 2018)
SVA Theatre, Beatrice
333 West Twenty-Third St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday, December 12, 8:00pm – Elephants Can Play Football – Drama. Directed by Mikhail Segal
Festival runs December 8-14 cherryorchardfestival.org
Held in conjunction with the multidisciplinary Cherry Orchard Festival, Russian Film Week takes place December 8-14 at the SVA Theatre, consisting of fourteen new works as well as a fifteenth anniversary screening of Alexey Uchitel’s award-winning The Stroll, presented by the director in person. On December 12 at 8:00, Mikhail Segal’s (Franz+Polina, Film about Alekseev) fourth feature, Elephants Can Play Football, will be shown, an offbeat and unpredictable black comedy that follows the trials and tribulations of lonely and successful fortysomething businessman Dmitry (Vladimir Mishukov), who has a thing for much younger women, although not necessarily in ways one might expect. Over the course of the film, Dmitry, aka Dima, develops unique relationships with Masha (Sonya Gershevich), the seventeen-year-old daughter of his college friend (Segal, who also composed the score) and his wife (Alla Nesterova); the younger Sveta (Varya Pakhomova), whose parents (Yuriy Bykov and Nadezhada Gorelova) travel a lot; and twenty-year-old Lika (Sasha Bystrzhitskaya), whose roommate, Vera (Elena Korotkova), is battling severe depression, which actually leads to several outrageously funny scenes. Dmitry either lies about the relationships or hides them from his best friend, Sergey (Sergey Mamotov), and his wife (Irina Pakhomova) as he fastidiously insinuates himself into the young women’s lives.
Lika (Sasha Bystrzhitskaya) and Dmitry (Vladimir Mishukov) frolic through a field in Elephants Can Play Football
Elephants Can Play Football has creepy, uncomfortable moments, and not all of it makes sense, but Mishukov is compelling as the strange Dmitriy, and Eduard Moshkovich’s camera adores Gershevich and Bystrzhitskaya. The film is very much about time — actually, a fear of death — and being an active participant in a life outside oneself. Dmitry is obsessed with youth; when he talks to his parents on the computer, their heads are cut off, as if he doesn’t want to see their elderly faces. Meanwhile, he regularly says that he’ll just look out the window, as if what’s happening out there is better than what is going on inside him. At one point he rails against a man who is three minutes late to a meeting, but to Dmitry, three minutes could be a lifetime, particularly after an incident that nearly kills him. Elephants Can Play Football is often head-scratchingly confusing, and the sexual dynamics can be disturbing, but then a twist onscreen will bring you right back into its narrative grip. Among the other works being shown during Russian Film Week are Avdotya Smirnova’s The Story of One Appointment, Karen Shakhnazarov’s Anna Karenina: Vronsky’s Story, Sarik Andreasyan’s Unforgiven, and Konstantin Khabensky’s Sobibor, with many screenings followed by Q&As with members of the cast and/or crew.
28 West 27th St. between Broadway & Sixth Ave.
Saturday, December 8, free, 3:00 – 6:00 sit, 6:00 – 9:00 after-party theidproject.org/sitathon
For a dozen years, the nonprofit Interdependence Project has been dedicated to meditation, arts, and activism, building a “community committed to personal development and collective engagement, [seeking] to create a wiser world, one mind at a time.” On December 8, the organization will host its annual Sit-a-thon fundraiser and year-end party, taking place at 28 West 27th St. You can either join a three-hour meditation beginning at 3:00 or sponsor someone who will be participating; the sit will be followed by a three-hour after-party. There is also a silent auction that has already begun online; items available include a guided tour and cocktail party at the Rubin, membership to Asia Society, two tickets and a backstage tour of the Broadway musical Beautiful, spin classes, private conflict resolution sessions, an astrology reading, group admissions to the Museum of the Moving Image and the Noguchi Museum, and a yoga set. We well remember the IDP’s November 2009 Sit Down, Rise Up event, a twenty-four-hour sit in the front windows of ABC Home & Carpet, in which one of us, a former IDP board member, took part. The 2018 Sit-a-thon might not be quite as complex a production, but every action makes a difference, both personally and in the world at large, something we all have a stake in.
Tony Shalhoub, Bebe Neuwirth, Tony Yazbeck, and Carmen de Lavallade, will read dance pieces in next “Selected Shorts” presentation at Symphony Space
Who: Carmen de Lavallade, Bebe Neuwirth, Tony Shalhoub, Tony Yazbeck, Patricia Kalember What: Stories about American dance and performance of newly commissioned work Where:Symphony Space, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, 2537 Broadway at 95th St., 212-864-5400 When: Saturday, December 12, $21-$87, 7:30 Why: In conjunction with the publication of Dance in America: A Reader’s Anthology, Symphony Space is dedicating its next edition of “Selected Shorts” to writings about dance. The book, edited by Mindy Aloff, consists of works by Agnes de Mille, Lincoln Kirstein, John Updike, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Edmund Wilson, W. H. Auden, Isadora Duncan, Charles Dickens, George Balanchine, and Josephine Baker, among many others. The pieces will be read by Kennedy Center honoree and lifetime achievement Obie winner Carmen de Lavallade, two-time Tony and Emmy winner Bebe Neuwirth, Tony and Emmy winner Tony Shalhoub, and Tony nominee Tony Yazbeck. The evening will be hosted by Patricia Kalember and will feature the premiere of a newly commissioned dance inspired by Ben Loory’s 2015 short story “The Cape,” choreographed by Gabrielle Lamb of Pigeonwing Dance.
Orson Welles makes one of the greatest entrances in film history in The Third Man
THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed, 1949)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, December 7, 9:00, and Sunday, December 9, 8:30
Series runs December 7-13
212-255-2243 quadcinema.com
In order to finance his career as a director (and pay off tax debts), Orson Welles acted in other people’s films and made television commercials, from the sublime to the ridiculous; between 1958 and 1961 alone, he appeared in or narrated nearly a dozen and a half movies. In conjunction with the celebrated release of the long-unfinished project The Other Side of the Wind, about attempts to complete a Hollywood auteur’s final film after his death, the Quad is presenting “Actor for Hire: The Other Side of Orson Welles,” running December 7-13 and consisting of thirteen movies the Boy Genius acted in but did not write or direct. The very best of them is The Third Man, screening December 7 and 9. (Among the rarer, less-well-known entries are Henry Hathaway’s The Black Rose, Matt Cimber’s Butterfly, Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place, and Bert I. Gordon’s Necromancy.) Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller is quite simply the most entertaining film you’re ever likely to see. Set in a divided post-WWII Vienna amid a thriving black market, The Third Man is heavy in atmosphere, untrustworthy characters, and sly humor, with a marvelous zither score by Anton Karas. Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an American writer of Western paperbacks who has come to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime (Welles), but he seems to have shown up a little late.
While trying to find out what happened to Harry, Martins falls for Harry’s lover, Anna (Alida Valli); is told to get out of town by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and Sergeant Paine (Bernard “M” Lee); meets a stream of Harry’s more interesting, mysterious friends, including Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer); and is talked into giving a lecture to a literary club by old Mr. Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). Every scene is a finely honed work of art, filled with long shadows, echoing footsteps, dripping water, and unforgettable dialogue about cuckoo clocks and other strangeness. The shot in which Lime is first revealed, standing in a doorway, a cat brushing by his feet, his tongue firmly in cheek as he lets go a miraculous, knowing smile, is one of the greatest single moments in the history of cinema.
Orson Welles stars as Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (Fred Zinnemann, 1966)
Quad Cinema
Saturday, December 8, 1:00, and Tuesday, December 11, 5:00 quadcinema.com
Orson Welles plays the real-life Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann’s majestic adaptation of Robert Bolt’s 1962 Tony-winning stage drama, A Man for All Seasons. Paul Scofield won a Tony for the Broadway production as well as an Oscar as Sir Thomas More in the classic film, which earned a total of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Bolt. Unable to produce a male heir with his wife, Catherine, King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) is seeking a divorce in order to marry Anne Boleyn (Vanessa Redgrave), but that would mean going against church doctrine, something the honest and principled Sir Thomas refuses to do. Sir Thomas finds himself at odds not only with the cardinal and the king but also with Thomas Cromwell (Leo McKern) and the ruthlessly ambitious Richard Rich (John Hurt). His friend the Duke of Norfolk (Nigel Davenport) tries to get him to sign a document allowing the king to divorce and remarry, changing the power of the church, begging him, “Oh, confound all this. I’m not a scholar. I don’t know whether the marriage was lawful or not. But damn it, Thomas, look at these names! Why can’t you do as I did and come with us, for fellowship!” Sir Thomas famously replies, “And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?”
It’s a spectacular moment in a film filled with spectacular moments as More’s wife, Alice (Wendy Hiller), daughter, Margaret (Susannah York), and potential son-in-law, William Roper the Younger (Corin Redgrave), want him to reconsider his choices and the king himself states his case, but Sir Thomas isn’t budging; he’s one of the most principled, brilliant characters ever put on celluloid, in one of the best historical dramas ever made. And in a key scene, Welles has this wonderful exchange with Scofield: “That thing out there, at least she’s fertile,” a dour Cardinal Wolsey says, referring to Anne. “But she’s not his wife,” Sir Thomas responds. “No, Catherine’s his wife, and she’s barren as a brick. Are you going to pray for a miracle?” the cardinal asks, to which More concludes, “There are precedents.”
Will Varner (Orson Welles) runs just about everything and everybody in The Long, Hot Summer
THE LONG, HOT SUMMER (Martin Ritt, 1958) & COMPULSION (Richard Fleischer, 1959)
TLHS: Saturday, December 8, 5:40, and Thursday, December 13, 5:00
C: Sunday, December 9, 6:30, and Wednesday, December 12, 5:00 quadcinema.com
In Martin Ritt’s The Long, Hot Summer and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion, the big, blustery Orson Welles, his sweat practically dripping off the screen, takes center stage though primarily a supporting character. Welles claimed that he hated making The Long, Hot Summer, a fiery Tennessee Williams–like melodrama based on several works by William Faulkner, although clearly inspired by Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Welles plays Will Varner, a wealthy plantation magnate who essentially owns a small southern town. He is grooming his son, Jody (Anthony Franciosa), to take over his empire, but when ambitious drifter and rumored barn burner Ben Quick (Paul Newman, who played Brick in Cat the same year) shows up looking for work, Will decides to set him against Jody, with the winner capturing the spoils, which in the case of Quick might also include Will’s young but already spinsterish daughter, Clara (Joanne Woodward, who married Newman during production). Shot in blazing CinemaScope, the film, which also stars Angela Lansbury as Will’s girlfriend, Lee Remick as Jody’s shopping-loving wife, and Richard Anderson as Clara’s momma’s boy beau, boils over with sexual energy that lives up to the original trailer’s declaration that “nothing — but nothing! — will be withheld!” The Long, Hot Summer earned no Oscar nominations and was not a box-office hit, but Newman became an international superstar by being named Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, while the film was in competition for the Palme d’Or.
Jonathan Wilk (Orson Welles) meets with clients Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) and Artie Strauss (Bradford Dillman) in Compulsion
The next year, Welles and costars Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman shared the Best Actor award at Cannes for Compulsion, a searing exploration of crime and punishment in the guise of a teen exploitation flick. (Dig that crazy opening credit sequence!) Based on the novel and play by Meyer Levin that fictionalized the Leopold and Loeb case, Compulsion explores the nature of good and evil as it follows wealthy Chicago law school students Artie Strauss (Dillman) and Judd Steiner (Stockwell) on their mad rampage of murder and rape, determined to commit the perfect crime and get away with it because of their superior intellect. But when fellow student Sid Brooks (Martin Milner) finds a pair of glasses that might be the key to discovering who killed little Paulie Kessler, it’s going to take a lot more than understanding Friedrich Nietzsche to keep Artie and Judd from the hangman’s noose. Fleischer, who had a diverse career that ranged from Violent Saturday, The Vikings, Fantastic Voyage, and Doctor Dolittle to The Boston Strangler, Red Sonja, and Amityville 3-D, adds Hitchcockian flourishes to Compulsion, evoking the homoeroticism of Strangers on a Train and Rope (which was also a fictionalized retelling of the Leopold and Loeb story) while having most of the violence occur offscreen. (Fleischer’s cinematic use of the pair of glasses is also a direct reference to the glasses in Strangers on a Train, while Judd’s study of ornithology, highlighted by the stuffed birds in his bedroom, foresees Norman Bates’s taxidermy obsession in Psycho, made a year later.)
Like The Long, Hot Summer,Compulsion boasts a strong — and familiar — supporting cast, including E. G. Marshall (The Bold Ones) as clever DA Harold Horn, Gavin MacLeod (The Love Boat) as one of his assistants, Diane Varsi (Peyton Place) as Sid’s girlfriend, Edward Binns (12 Angry Men) as a crack reporter, and Anderson (Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man) as Judd’s older brother. But it is Welles’s presence that takes over the film in its later stages; playing larger-than-life defense attorney Jonathan Wilk, a character based on Clarence Darrow, he enters the film in a grand manner, as Fleischer opens up a space for him to come through a door and dwarf everyone else. Wilk’s eloquent closing argument about capital punishment is one that should be studied by lawyers, actors, directors, and death penalty proponents — even if Welles required the use of a teleprompter to get him through the powerful speech in a single take. Like The Long, Hot Summer,Compulsion received no Oscar nominations and was a box-office failure. When seen back-to-back, the two films work extremely well together, with smoldering story lines, expert cinematography (by Joseph LaShelle in the former, William C. Mellor in the latter), intense acting, and, yes, Orson Welles.
Held in conjunction with the multidisciplinary Cherry Orchard Festival, Russian Film Week takes place December 8-14 at the SVA Theatre, consisting of fourteen new works as well as a fifteenth anniversary screening of Alexey Uchitel’s award-winning The Stroll, presented by the director in person. On December 12 at 8:00, Mikhail Segal’s (Franz+Polina, Film about Alekseev) fourth feature, Elephants Can Play Football, will be shown, an offbeat and unpredictable black comedy that follows the trials and tribulations of lonely and successful fortysomething businessman Dmitry (Vladimir Mishukov), who has a thing for much younger women, although not necessarily in ways one might expect. Over the course of the film, Dmitry, aka Dima, develops unique relationships with Masha (Sonya Gershevich), the seventeen-year-old daughter of his college friend (Segal, who also composed the score) and his wife (Alla Nesterova); the younger Sveta (Varya Pakhomova), whose parents (Yuriy Bykov and Nadezhada Gorelova) travel a lot; and twenty-year-old Lika (Sasha Bystrzhitskaya), whose roommate, Vera (Elena Korotkova), is battling severe depression, which actually leads to several outrageously funny scenes. Dmitry either lies about the relationships or hides them from his best friend, Sergey (Sergey Mamotov), and his wife (Irina Pakhomova) as he fastidiously insinuates himself into the young women’s lives.
In order to finance his career as a director (and pay off tax debts), Orson Welles acted in other people’s films and made television commercials, from the sublime to the ridiculous; between 1958 and 1961 alone, he appeared in or narrated nearly a dozen and a half movies. In conjunction with the celebrated release of the long-unfinished project 
In Martin Ritt’s The Long, Hot Summer and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion, the big, blustery Orson Welles, his sweat practically dripping off the screen, takes center stage though primarily a supporting character. Welles claimed that he hated making The Long, Hot Summer, a fiery Tennessee Williams–like melodrama based on several works by William Faulkner, although clearly inspired by Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Welles plays Will Varner, a wealthy plantation magnate who essentially owns a small southern town. He is grooming his son, Jody (Anthony Franciosa), to take over his empire, but when ambitious drifter and rumored barn burner Ben Quick (Paul Newman, who played Brick in Cat the same year) shows up looking for work, Will decides to set him against Jody, with the winner capturing the spoils, which in the case of Quick might also include Will’s young but already spinsterish daughter, Clara (Joanne Woodward, who married Newman during production). Shot in blazing CinemaScope, the film, which also stars Angela Lansbury as Will’s girlfriend, Lee Remick as Jody’s shopping-loving wife, and Richard Anderson as Clara’s momma’s boy beau, boils over with sexual energy that lives up to the original trailer’s declaration that “nothing — but nothing! — will be withheld!” The Long, Hot Summer earned no Oscar nominations and was not a box-office hit, but Newman became an international superstar by being named Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, while the film was in competition for the Palme d’Or. 