USA,
1958, 98 min
Shown in 1957
CREDITS
- dir
-
John Goetz, Franchot Tone
- prod
-
Marion Parsonnet, Franchot Tone
- scr
-
Anton Chekhov, Stark Young
- mus
-
Werner Janssen
- cast
-
Franchot Tone, Dolores Dorn-Heft, George Voscovec, Peggy McCay, Clarence Derwent, Gerald Hiken, Mary Perry, Shirley Gale
- prod co
-
The Uncle Vanya Company
- source
-
Continental Distributing
- gga award
-
Best Actress: Dolores Dorn-Heft
-
COMMENTS
Screened Thursday, December 13. Dolores Dorn-Heft attended the Festival and won the first Golden Gate Award for Best Actress. Franchot Tone was also the master of ceremonies for the 1957 SFIFF Opening Night at the Metro Theatre.
OTHER
Uncle Vanya, the American film of the 1957 Film Festival, is based upon an off-Broadway production of the play of Chekhov, with the same superlative cast that made the play such a success in New York. Franchot Tone, who with John Goetz, directed the picture, stars as the outsider who enters a Russian household, teeming with frustrations and disappointment. The cast is so talented, and the Chekhov play so trimmed of unnecessary verbiage, that it is constantly exciting. Because the camera is used without its customary flexibility, however, Uncle Vanya is primarily an enormously well photographed stage play rather than a motion picture. But it is a valuable contribution: a skillful preservation of an admirable stage presentation. It could not have been a very expensive film to make, and certainly if additional similar pictures of classic plays could be produced, what a contribution to university libraries might be offered!
—Paine Knickerbocker, San Francisco Chronicle
FACTOID #99
Philadelphia-born, British-raised director Richard Lester, who shot the trippy Petulia in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, directed our Opening Night film and attended the Festival two years in a row, accompanying 1966’s A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum and 1967’s How I Won the War.
