“Forty Deuce,” directed and adapted by Paul Morrissey from the play by Alan Bowne
the Gay Film Festival
The transposition of a play to the cinema or television can be a tricky one trading in the static long view of the theater for the cuts and framing alterations of film and video. In the case of film the conversion all too often results in a distanced picturing of expository speech and gesture, while video performs a relentless process of miniaturization, setting tiny actors adrift in the text of a play in the same way that it turns almost all practitioners of dance into minuscule Thumbelinas. There are exceptions, of course, two of the more recent being Robert Altman’s cinematic adaption of