First Picture Show, The

If the Gordons were painters, they'd be splatter-artists, the kind who hurl paint at a canvas and pray that it makes pictorial sense. In The First Picture Show, they not only deal with a big time-span -- the years 1893-1995 in the USA -- but attack a slew of subjects and themes: the making of silent films, the role of women and Jews in that era, history, racism, old age, sibling rivalry, censorship and religious fundamentalism. All these elements (and more) are dramatized in rapid, breathtaking fashion, with the help of wall-to-wall piano music, quirky songs, props and flats on wheels, choreographed exits and entrances, Brechtian alienation (actors barking expository lines directly at the audience), countless light changes, doubling and tripling of roles, jumping back and forth in time. The idea, of course, was to create a play that would move, look and feel like its very subject: a silent movie (except that this one has dialogue as well as title cards).

The story focuses on Anne First (the energetic Ellen Greene), who goes from star-struck Ohio teenager to Hollywood movie star to film director to old lady in a retirement home. The latter Anne is played, at age 99, by Estelle Parsons, doing a salty-tongued but badly cliched "Golden Girls" routine (in another switch, her grand- niece, Jane Furstman, is played by Greene as a burnt-out TV commercial director who has tracked her down to make a documentary on her life).

Anne First's brother Louie (Steven Skybell) and wicked-witch sister-in-law (Norma Fire) also figure prominently, as do Ken Marks as pioneer producer Carl Laemmle, Harry Walters Jr. as an Oscar Micheaux-like black filmmaker and Valda Setterfield as a fire-and-brimstone preacher. Much of what these characters have to offer went by in a swirling, superficial blur (bad French, German and Chinese accents don't help, either), but there were many sharp, funny and moving scenes as well. One line of dialogue will doubtlessly be anthologized. Anne the elder delivers it while describing the way early Hollywood changed: "the little studios where big things happened became big studios where little things happened.