Film
Variety (AKA Vaudeville)
Screening on Film
Samuel Beckett wrote the script for this one-character drama without dialogue featuring Buster Keaton. Alan Schneider, the film’s director, staged all of Beckett’s plays in the United States. He also directed four of Edward Albee’s plays, winning the coveted “Tony” award for his work on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Boris Kaufman (who won an Oscar for On the Waterfront) was the director of photography.
A husband and wife acrobatic team achieve great fame with a young new partner, Aerinelli. After the wife is seduced by the young trapeze artist, the husband is driven to commit murder. An exceptional expressionistic outing which brought the distorted angles and warped camera effects to a standard social drama. Variety stands as an awesome example of the genre; it was both commercially and critically successful and brought the young Dupont to Hollywood, where, unfortunately, he ended up making mostly forgettable B-movies.