Noises Off...

What you’re left with is a lot of bustle and jabber, and occasional sparks from the cast. Caine has some fine comic moments of high exasperation, there’s great wit in the way Burnett arches her eyebrows and, as a besotted trouper, Denholm Elliott’s puttery calm is like a balm amid the delirium. It’s a delirium that finally seems more appropriate to the sitcom than to the stage. Read full review

There are a number of hefty laughs scattered throughout "Noises Off," Peter Bogdanovich's screen version of Michael Frayn's English stage farce. Yet there are nowhere near as many as the source material deserves and Mr. Bogdanovich's cast might otherwise have earned. Read full review

The performers all seem to be relishing this sendup, but we're always aware that it is a vehicle better suited to the stage. In trying to open it up some for the screen, Bogdanovich and scriptwriter Marty Kaplan have presented the original play as a series of flashbacks that come upon Caine as he sweats out the play's Broadway opening. All this does is slow the opening and delay the close. Read full review

Another theatrical metaphor fails to transfer to the screen. This adaptation of Michael Frayn's stage hit undoubtedly has its moments, but will still disappoint those who laughed themselves silly at the original. Read full review

Onstage, Noises Off was a riot. On film, it's in the salvage business, snatching a few vagrant laughs from a reworking that otherwise sinks like a failed souffle, reminding us yet again that farce onstage and farce on film are two fundamentally different constructs. [20 March 1992, p.30]

Very little sense of the performers' humanity emerges from behind their stage roles, perhaps because Bogdanovich has directed the supposedly spontaneous dialogue to sound just as forced and theatrical as the scripted lines. [20 March 1992, p.2]

It's not that Bogdanovich's movie doesn't have its laughs. It does. Frayn has a comic genius that is expansive -- he can pile one-liners, character humor and physical schtick on top of one another quickly and deftly. And the cast Bogdanovich has assembled, led by Michael Caine as the embattled director, is up to the demands. But a film version of a play about making a play? That's a step removed. It's a blanket that muffles the crispness of the play. A bridge too far. The mediation of the screen between us and the play about a play is unnecessary at best and a real bother at worst. [23 March 1992, p.C08]

The jokes start wearing thin, and most of the noisy characters become rather tedious well before the rag-bag of thesps finally pitch up on Broadway. Read full review

The charm of the film is that's it's so clever a play, but that cleverness wears thin quickly. Read full review