Based (we guess pretty closely) on Michael Frayn's play, (the second act in the original is from the backstage perspective, for example), adapted by Marty Kaplan, this is a very clever piece and yet somehow it doesn't quite work on film, perhaps - as Q conjectured with her normal good sense - that there's simply too much of the play itself, a farce which (deliberately) isn't very good or funny.
Michael Caine is wonderful as the director (a director who leaves the show mid-way through, though) who we see reacting to the whole of the first act (here you can't help think about Bogdanovich the actor-writer-director directing the actor playing a director; at times you forget you're watching a film of the play). Then in the second it's a mini-silent film featuring some incredibly well-staged scenes, the best involving the journey of a whisky bottle.
The version we saw on DVD was in 4x3 (which seems odd) and features some beautiful staging of the characters, e.g. the scene where they're searching for Elliott, yet he's standing behind them.
Cast features: Carol Burnett, Denholm Elliott (great), Julie Hagerty, Marilu Henner (good), Mark Linn-Baker, Christopher Reeve, John Ritter (who seems like he's doing an impression of someone), Nicollette Sheridan and (as a stagehand) Zoe Cassavetes.
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