Play of the Week: "Waiting for Godot"

PLAY OF THE WEEK: “WAITING FOR GODOT” (WNTA-TV, 4/3/1961)

Directed by Alan Schneider.

Premiering in 1959, the ambitious television experiment Play of the Week presented an eclectic mix of plays that "no one else would touch,” including Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece, Waiting for Godot (1961), starring blacklisted stage and screen actor Zero Mostel. In reference to the direction of Godot by Beckett collaborator and confident Alan Schneider, Mostel reportedly quipped that he "wished to be re-blacklisted."

Screenplay: Samuel Beckett.  Cast: Burgess Meredith, Zero Mostel, Kurt Kasznar. 

DigiBeta, B/W, 102 min.

Preceded by...

SAMUEL BECKETT'S FILM (1965)

Preserved through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation

Samuel Beckett’s lone work for projected cinema is in essence a chase film—one that locates the existential crisis of modernity in the very fabric of the movies themselves. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting of an aged Buster Keaton and the exquisite cinematography of Boris Kaufman. Film is a now-legendary cinematic conundrum that asks as many questions as it answers.

Director: Samuel Beckett.  Screenplay: Samuel Beckett.  Cast: Buster Keaton, Nell Harrison, James Karen.

35mm, b/w, 20 min.