The Sea Gull is a 1968 British

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

-American-Greek

Cinema of Greece

Greece has a long and rich cinematic history. Greek films dominate the domestic market, for example Safe Sex had more box office receipts than Titanic. Characteristics of Greek cinema include a dynamic plot, strong character development and erotic themes...

 drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 directed by Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet was an American director, producer and screenwriter with over 50 films to his credit. He was nominated for the Academy Award as Best Director for 12 Angry Men , Dog Day Afternoon , Network and The Verdict...

. The screenplay

Screenplay

A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...

 by Moura Budberg

Moura Budberg

Moura Zakrevskaya, variously Countess Benckendorff and Baroness Budberg was the daughter of Ignaty Platonovitch Zakrevsky , a Russian nobleman. She first married Count Johann von Benckendorff, a high-ranking Czarist diplomat, in 1911...

 is adapted from Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...

's classic 1896 play The Seagull

The Seagull

The Seagull is the first of what are generally considered to be the four major plays by the Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. The Seagull was written in 1895 and first produced in 1896...

.

The Warner Brothers/Seven Arts

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...

 release was filmed at the Europa Studios in Sundbyberg

Sundbyberg Municipality

Sundbyberg Municipality is a municipality in Stockholm County in east central Sweden, just north of the capital Stockholm. Sundbyberg is wholly within the Stockholm urban area and has a 100% urban population....

, Stockholms län

Stockholm County

Stockholm County is a county or län on the Baltic sea coast of Sweden. It borders Uppsala County and Södermanland County. It also borders Mälaren and the Baltic Sea. The city of Stockholm is the capital of Sweden. Stockholm County is divided by the historic provinces of Uppland and Södermanland...

, just outside of central Stockholm

Stockholm

Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...

.

Plot synopsis

Set in a rural Russian house, the plot focuses on the romantic and artistic conflicts among an eclectic group of characters. Fading leading lady Irina Arkadina has come to visit her brother Sorin, a retired civil servant in ailing health, with her lover, the successful hack writer

Hack writer

Hack writer is a colloquial and usually pejorative term used to refer to a writer who is paid to write low-quality, rushed articles or books "to order", often with a short deadline. In a fiction-writing context, the term is used to describe writers who are paid to churn out sensational,...

 Trigorin. Her son, brooding experimental playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

 Konstantin Treplev, adores the ingenue

Ingenue (stock character)

See also Disingenuous, which is not quite the antonym that it may seem!The ingénue is a stock character in literature, film, and a role type in the theatre; generally a girl or a young woman who is endearingly innocent and wholesome. Ingenue may also refer to a new young actress or one typecast in...

 Nina, who in turn is mesmerized by Trigorin. Their interactions slowly lead to the moral and spiritual disintegration of each of them and ultimately lead to tragedy.

Principal cast

• Vanessa Redgrave
  Vanessa Redgrave
  Vanessa Redgrave, CBE is an English actress of stage, screen and television, as well as a political activist.She rose to prominence in 1961 playing Rosalind in As You Like It with the Royal Shakespeare Company and has since made more than 35 appearances on London's West End and Broadway, winning...
  
   ..... Nina
• Simone Signoret
  Simone Signoret
  Simone Signoret was a French cinema actress often hailed as one of France's greatest movie stars. She became the first French person to win an Academy Award, for her role in Room at the Top...
  
   ..... Irina Arkadina
• David Warner
  David Warner (actor)
  David Warner is an English actor who is known for playing both romantic leads and sinister or villainous characters, both in film and animation...
  
   ..... Konstantin Treplev
• James Mason
  James Mason
  James Neville Mason was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes .- Early life :Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the...
  
   ..... Trigorin
• Harry Andrews
  Harry Andrews
  Harry Fleetwood Andrews, CBE was an English film actor known for his frequent portrayals of tough military officers. His performance as Sergeant Major Wilson in The Hill alongside Sean Connery earned Andrews the 1965 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for the...
  
   ..... Sorin
• Denholm Elliott
  Denholm Elliott
  Denholm Mitchell Elliott, CBE was an English film, television and theatre actor with over 120 film and television credits...
  
   ..... Dorn
• Eileen Herlie
  Eileen Herlie
  Eileen Herlie was a Scottish-American actress.-Life and career:Eileen Herlie was born Eileen Isobel Herlihy to a Catholic father and a Protestant mother in Glasgow, Scotland, and was one of five children. Herlie was trained as a theatre actress. Among her West End London theatre successes were The...
  
   ..... Polina
• Alfred Lynch
  Alfred Lynch
  Alfred Cornelius Lynch was a British actor on stage, film and television.Lynch was born in Whitechapel, London, the son of a plumber. After attending a Roman Catholic school, he worked in a draughtsman's office before entering national service...
  
   ..... Medvedenko
• Ronald Radd
  Ronald Radd
  Ronald Radd was a British television actor.Radd starred in some 60 different TV shows between 1955 and 1976 including The Avengers, Danger Man, and Z-Cars...
  
   ..... Shamraev
• Kathleen Widdoes
  Kathleen Widdoes
  -Life and career:Widdoes was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the daughter of Bernice and Eugene Widdoes. Widdoes moved to New York City to pursue stage work and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris under a Fulbright scholarship. From 1964 to 1972 she was married to well known actor Richard Jordan, with...
  
   ..... Masha

Principal production credits

• Cinematography
  Cinematography
  Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...
  
   ..... Gerry Fisher
  Gerry Fisher
  Gerry Fisher, B.S.C. is an English cinematographer. In 1976 Fisher was nominated for the Best Cinematography Award by the British Society of Cinematographers, for Aces High, and in 1977 was nominated for a BAFTA Award for the same film...
  
  
• Production Design
  Production designer
  In film and television, a production designer is the person responsible for the overall look of a filmed event such as films, TV programs, music videos or adverts. Production designers have one of the key creative roles in the creation of motion pictures and television. Working directly with the...
  
   ..... Tony Walton
  Tony Walton
  Tony Walton is an English set and costume designer.Walton was born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, United Kingdom. He began his career in 1957 with the stage design for Noel Coward's Broadway production of Conversation Piece. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s he designed for the New...
  
  
• Set Decoration
  Set decorator
  A set decorator is in charge of the set dressing on a film set, which includes the furnishings, wallpaper, lighting fixtures, and many of the other objects that will be seen in the film. Props and set dressing often overlap, but are provided by different departments...
  
   ..... Rune Hjelm, Rolf Larsson
• Costume Design
  Costume design
  Costume design is the fabrication of apparel for the overall appearance of a character or performer. This usually involves researching, designing and building the actual items from conception. Costumes may be for a theater or cinema performance but may not be limited to such...
  
   ..... Tony Walton

Critical reception

In his review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby

Vincent Canby

Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...

 described the film as "so uneven in style, mood and performance that there are times when you could swear that the movie had shot itself — though not quite fatally . . . Lumet's way with this adaptation by Moura Budberg is implacably straightforward. It plows ahead, scene by scene, act by act, in which there always is first an establishing long shot and then cuts to individual actors as they act and react. This kind of Secret Storm

The Secret Storm

The Secret Storm is a soap opera which ran on CBS from February 1, 1954 to February 8, 1974. The series was created by Roy Winsor, who also created the long-running soap operas Search for Tomorrow and Love of Life...

technique inevitably flattens out the nuances and the pauses that give depth to the tangled personal relationships. It also makes too literal the boredom and quiet despair that should hang over the Chekovian characters like an unseen mist. Most of the performances are excellent, but all of the actors seem to be on their own . . . Miss Signoret is simply miscast, if only because of her Frenchness. Her speech rhythms are so jarring that it's often impossible to understand her . . . As a result of the variety of styles, the movie turns into a series of individual confrontations that seem as isolated as specialty acts. Without the single dominating influence that should have been provided by Lumet, the play is fragmented beyond repair."

Time

Time (magazine)

Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

observed, "The paralyzing problem with this film version of Chekhov's first major play is that it is far too dramatic . . . Any traces of wit have been pretty well destroyed by Lumet's lumbering technique. The actors perform as if they were all on the verge of a nervous breakdown . . . Lumet moves his camera incessantly to give the illusion of action, but uses fadeouts to duplicate the curtain falling at the end of an act . . . Most disturbing of all, [he] and cinematographer Gerry Fisher have shot the whole film in softly gauzed pastel colors, thereby reducing Chekhov's intricate dramatic tapestry to the sleazy cheapness of a picture postcard."

Variety

Variety (magazine)

Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

called it "a sensitive, well-made and abstractly interesting period pic."

According to the Time Out London Film Guide, it is "basically an actors' film . . . sometimes dull and almost always unsatisfactory, despite excellent performances."

External links

• The Sea Gull at the Internet Movie Database