Downsized (NBC)

In the second major piece of NBC news today,  America's version of Ricky Gervais's mockumentary The Office is ending after a final, ninth season.

This is where the expression "to put something out of its misery" comes from, right?

The Office has been limping along for seasons now ... even before the departure of the show's star, Steve Carell. (One could argue that the show lost its way once the tension of Jim and Pam's "Will they or won't they" relationship was resolved, which is probably why the British version ended after Tim and Dawn shared their first kiss.)

The last season made it clear that The Office didn't have that long to live: the ratings had dropped to those of its first, limping season, and many of Dunder Mifflin's staples already one foot out the door: writers/EPs/actors Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak  announced they were on their way out to work on The Mindy Kaling Project; head writer Daniel Chun made a deal with ABC; former show runner Paul Lieberstein (who played beleaguered HR rep Toby Flenderson) was leaving with Rainn Wilson to work on a spin-off about Dwight; series stars John Krasinski, Ed Helms and Jenna Fischer hadn't renewed their contracts, and newcomer James Spader ended his contract early.

But at least The Office might go out with a bang. According to show runner Greg Daniels:

This year feels like the last chance to really go out together and make an artistic ending for the show that pays off a lot of the stuff that matters most to fans,” Daniels said. “This will be the last season of The Office. And we’re planning a very big exciting last season. We’re going to have a lot of faces coming back … There are a lot of things that I’ve personally been wanting to do since season two … All questions will be answered this year. We’re going to see who’s behind the documentary … Now that we know we have an end date we can blow things up and take some chances and it will be very freeing, creatively."

That being said, Mr. Daniels himself only announced his return as The Office's show runner in July, after spending four years splitting his time as an executive producer of the cubicle comedy and it's time-slot follow-up, Parks and Recreation.

There's only one problem with this carefully marketed plan: Race, Mr. Mamet's sure-to-be-great new play, isn't great at all. It's not even very good.

The curtain comes up at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Race opened Sunday night, on a stylized Santo Loquasto set of a looming book-filled law-firm library, plopped like a diorama—this is an educational lesson, after all—in the center of an otherwise bare all-black and starkly lit stage. Four actors—two middle-aged white men, one middle-aged black man and a younger black woman—are in that conference room, awkwardly already in mid-conversation. (Mr. Mamet directs his play, yielding pacing and placement often as stilted and abrupt as his famous dialogue.)

The well-known and powerful billionaire Charles Strickland (misplayed by Richard Thomas, who never seems either powerfully angry or powerfully dismissive) is in the lawyers' office, attempting to hire them. He has been accused of raping a young black woman in a hotel room, which he denies. Jack Lawson (an excellent James Spader, who it could be argued has been training his whole career for this role) is the cynical and brilliant litigator he wants to represent him, and Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) is Lawson's black law partner, which makes this firm a good choice for Strickland, considering the accusation. Susan (Kerry Washington) is a young black associate at the firm, the novice to whom Lawson can pontificate—and to whom Mr. Mamet can make his arguments. It is she who, as the wobbly third leg of the firm, will be the center of Mr. Mamet's usual swirl of possible treachery and double-crossing.

The first act has Lawson and Brown discussing whether they want to take Strickland's case, and, with Susan, whether they think he's innocent or guilty. (Don't lawyers specifically not do that?) This provides Mr. Mamet the opportunity to put in his characters' mouths—especially Lawson's—his theories about guilt and innocence, truth and perception, back and white. All black people hate all white people, all white people are guilty; everyone feels all sorts of guilt and shame, truth is flexible and a smart lawyer's skill is to manipulate all that.

It's all rendered with Mr. Mamet's expected verbal pyrotechnics, but the inherent pleasure of virtuosity aside, the fireworks fall flat. The play is reveling in its subversive political incorrectness, but political incorrectness hasn't seemed flamboyantly subversive at any point in this new century.

In the second act (the roughly 90-minute play includes what the Playbill notes is a 12-minute intermission), things make less sense. When it turns out Strickland's accuser is a prostitute, Lawson announces he won't reveal that fact to the jury. (Huh?) When it appears that associate Susan has sold out the defense's strategy to prosecutors, Lawson's partner, Brown, reminds us that he never liked her, pulling her college thesis from his desk drawer (conveniently handy!) and announcing its title, "Structural Survivals of Racism in Supposedly Bias-free Transactions" (conveniently suspicious!).

When word comes that the hotel maid has amended her testimony to police, undermining Lawson's planned defense, we're to understand that it's a false statement, proof that the prosecution is onto his strategy. But when word comes that the responding police officer has found a lost page of his report, also undermining the defense, this revelation is presented as an honestly lost-and-found document (confusing!).

Race is an intriguing play, and far better than Mr. Mamet's last Broadway effort, the mediocre sitcom November. (It's also much better than "Keep Your Pantheon," the main piece of The Two Unrelated Plays By David Mamet, which played at the Atlantic earlier this season.) Ultimately, this is not thought-provoking Mamet so much as a parody of it.

IN THE LAST CARGO CULT, MIKE DAISEY'S most recent monologue, which opened Monday night at the Public, Mr. Daisey talks about traveling to the small, primitive South Pacific island of Tanna to visit a culture almost entirely different from our own, one of communal living, with no private property and—more important—no money. He's going there to witness John Frum Day, an annual religious celebration of the island's John Frum's cargo cult, a religion based on Tanna's brief exposure to American servicemen during World War II. On John Frum Day, the people of Tanna celebrate by recounting U.S. history—or at least their version of it—in song, dance and theater.

Mr. Daisey is a funny, insightful, magnetic storyteller, and his travelogue—tales of flying to Tanna on a ramshackle plane, eating local delicacies, sleeping with a baby pig—are hilarious. They're also not really the point. Mr. Daisey is concerned with money, how Tanna survives without it and how much we rely on it. He's angry about the financial crisis; he's angry at the bankers who created it; and he's particularly angry to realize that the financial system has us all interconnected, that he can't revel in the bankers' misfortune because what's bad for them is bad for him, too.

He weaves several stories together—of the Tanna trip; of arriving at college and first being exposed to rich people; of all the "awesome stuff" in the world he wants and which require cash—to make us think about the role of money.

And you do think about it, for the time you're in the theater. Thinking about money is like thinking about air; you don't need to, because it's everywhere. More likely, what you will thinkk about Cargo Cult after you walk out of the theater is what a pleasure your last two hours have been.

TO SEE SO HELP ME GOD!, A LONG-LOST and very funny 1929 backstage comedy being presented by the Mint Theater Company at the Lucille Lortel, is to wonder why this one was forgotten while so many boring old backstage comedies—The Royal Family, currently at the Manhattan Theatre Club, for example—were remembered.

So Help Me God! is a witty and goofily screwball old-fashioned three-acter written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who a few years earlier had written the play Chicago. (The Kander and Ebb musical arrived a half-century later.) It was set for an October 1929 opening, but the Great Depression interfered. This production, with a script adapted by Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank, who also directed, is essentially its premiere.

It's an All About Eve story, but one in which Eve is outflanked by Margo. Kristen Johnston is fantastic as Lily Darnley, the domineering diva, a 6-foot-tall force of nature in dramatic deco gowns (the costumes, I should disclose, are by my friend Clint Ramos) who casually molds people and situations and the plot of the play-within-a-play to fit her needs. My Girl star Anna Chlumsky is less strong in the Eve part, flat and insufficiently steely as she plots her rise. But the rest of the cast ably supports, especially Catherine Curtain as Belle, the blowsy broad in the company, and Jeremy Lawrence as the put-upon stage manager.

The characters are deadly serious in their backstage machinations, but, for us, it's a fun (if slight) night at the theater.

MELISSA JAMES GIBSON'S THIS, WHICH OPENED at Playwrights Horizons last week, is poorly named but impressively written, a smart, funny and affecting play about four old friends (and one sexy new addition to the group) who wrestle with changing lives as they grow up and, as people do, grow both together and apart.

Jane (Julianne Nicholson), Marrell (Eisa Davis) and Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald) were classmates at an unnamed but elite school; they've remained tight for 15 years. Tom (Darren Pettie) was a staffer at the college; he's married to Marrell and together they have a newborn son who won't sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time. Jane has a daughter, too, and a husband who died a year earlier; Alan is gay and single and wittily self-lacerating. Finally, there's a Jean-Pierre (Louis Cancelmi), a handsome French doctor-without-borders ("I always think that makes it sound like he has a messy personal life," Alan snarks), who becomes enmeshed with the group as Marrell tries to fix him up with Jane.

Marrell and Tom are drifting apart, their distance exacerbated by the stress of young parenthood. Jane is exhausted by the world's sympathy and pity, and by the idea she had an ideal marriage until her husband got sick. Alan is lonely and bored and desperate to do something useful in the world. Jane and Tom fall into a brief affair. Tom doesn't want Marrell to know because he can't deal with the repercussions; Jane doesn't want Marrell to know because she can't stand to hurt her. There are kinds of unhappiness, Marrell tells Jane at one point, "personal, marital, professional, existential or interdisciplinary." Her own, she continues, is interdisciplinary. All of their unhappiness is interdisciplinary.

The unhappiness is also honest, and real, recognizable to us all if not in specifics then at least in spirit, intelligently rendered in sharp and wise dialogue. Together with another Playwrights production, Circle Mirror Transformation—which after being twice extended in the fall returns to Playwrights' upstairs space, the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, next week—it's one of the best new dramas of the season.

THE NEW A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, which opened at the BAM Harvey Theater last week, is every bit as good as you've heard. What more is there to say? It's the classic and powerful Tennessee Williams play; Cate Blanchett gives a mesmerizing performance as the delusional faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois, and Joel Edgerton is hunky and duly animal (if, sometimes, a bit too Brando-sounding) as Stanley. The Liv Ullman-directed production, originally staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, is only here through Dec. If you can still find a ticket, go.

editorial@observer.com

Jackie and Roy have been taking their vitamins. Onstage and in wedlock, they've been together for over 50 years, and when they step onto the tiny stage of the FireBird Café, where they are making one of their rare club appearances through Sept. 23, you can see from the way those years have treated them, we should all be so lucky. The great Mabel Mercer once said, "They're so fresh and original they'll survive us all." And they have.

I can see how some youngsters out there might confuse this Jackie and Roy with a couple of dead baseball players for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But to music veterans, they need no introduction. When they met back in l948, in a Chicago jazz joint called Jump Town, Jackie Cain was a radiant, leggy blonde from Milwaukee, barely out of Pulaski High School and bobby socks, who wanted to swing. Roy Kral was a young piano player from Cicero, Ill., who let her sit in for a couple of tunes with the band. At first he objected. Then she dusted off her pipes and let it rip. He liked what he heard. They've been together ever since, blending their voices with every musical congregation from the Charlie Ventura orchestra to the New York Philharmonic in a unique brand of harmonic bebop called "vocalese," singing instrumental pieces written by legends like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown.

They coped with rock 'n' roll in the 1960's by going electric, translating songs by John Sebastian, Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles into jazz terms and revolutionizing pop music for more sophisticated ears. They championed Brazilian bossa nova years before everyone else, when Antonio Carlos Jobim first played his sambas in their living room. They have always championed the longevity of great songwriters, recording collections by Sondheim, the Gershwins, Alec Wilder, Cy Coleman, Alan Jay Lerner and Rodgers and Hart. And they still bridge all gaps with disarming skill, impeccable intonation and a thrilling demand for excellence, breaking rules right and left while enthralled audiences cheer for more.

The constancy of their art and the quality and joy of their music is very much on view at the FireBird these nights. Opening with some tasty Gershwin, they rollick through "Sweet and Low Down" like dolphins after a lunch break at Sea World. Then Jackie investigates the more obscure gem "Changing My Tune," a George Gershwin ballad to which brother Ira added lyrics for a Betty Grable film in 1947. This is followed by a swinging rendition of "I Got Rhythm" that demonstrates their ability to stamp even the most familiar standards with a flavorful imprint that is very much their own. Intensely selective about their repertoire, the Krals can always be counted on to unveil something fresh, different and never before heard.

So it is with a collection of tunes with music by Roy and words by Fran Landesman, the distinguished lyricist whose "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" has become a classic. First, there is the piercing ballad "Lost," a ruminative lament for careless years and wasted values that will break your heart, followed by "Through the Windows of Cars," an offbeat memory piece about life on the road from the perspective of someone on the move. A real killer song in the set I heard was a third Kral-Landesman piece, "Absent Friends," a haunting musical toast with which anyone over 30 who has lost a few lovers and pals can easily identify. "Moon Over Miami," the beautiful title song from a 1941 Betty Grable musical, was never sung in the film, an injustice Jackie rectifies with a solo vocal that shimmers like mylar.

This act concentrates more on accessible show tunes and standards than on the innovative vocalese arrangements that are Jackie and Roy trademarks, but "Zanzibar" is pure out-of-this-world jazz, a fracturous affair blending Dave Frishberg's witty lyrics and contrapuntal harmonic patterns with piano chords right out of Ravel's Pavanne , then topped off by hot Brazilian rhythms and Roy whistling in tempo over the bells and percussion. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Jackie and Roy could make a clubfoot dance.

Superbly assisted by dynamic bassist Dean Johnson and virtuoso drummer Richard DeRosa, they epitomize polish, hip musical sophistication and what people used to call class. Exuding the kind of elegant self-assurance that comes with years of craft, they are the Lunt and Fontaine of jazz. They don't waste your time with any of the pretentious, naïve or second-rate noodling that plagues most cabaret acts these days. You will never hear a rock 'n' roll "My Funny Valentine," or anything sappy by Andrew Lloyd Webber. They've already forgotten more about songs and how to sing them than today's shriekers will ever learn. Yet their artistry remains effortless and their youthful appeal timeless, even in their autumnal years. I don't want to imagine a world without the music of Jackie and Roy, but the law of diminishing returns suggests their future appearances just might be numbered. This is a blessed opportunity to see and hear how truly special they still are. Seize it.

Skip Nurse for Arms of Strangers

After an abhorrent summer, it's time to say goodbye to rotten movies and hello to a brighter fall in which hope springs eternal. I'm off to the Toronto Film Festival, where 329 films will unspool in nine days; if my eyesight endures and my tailbone survives, expect a full report next week. Meanwhile, I leave you with a few thoughts on the changing marquees at home. The overrated Nurse Betty is movie misogynist Neil LaBute's satirical swipe at America's obsession with soap operas, and while it's nice to see him working for the first time from somebody else's lighter and less bitter script ideas, there are too many of them for one movie to deal with coherently. What this film lacks is one clear vision, no matter how churlish.

The script, about a Kansas coffee-shop waitress and daytime-soap addict (creamy Renée Zellweger) who escapes from her loveless marriage to a cretinous car salesman (another colorful characterization by LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart) and flees to Hollywood with a stash of drug money in the trunk of her Buick and a pair of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hit men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) on her tail, reeks of cleverness without purpose. The source material is so top-heavy that Nurse Betty jumps all over the place, stealing ideas from Voltaire, Pirandello, Quentin Tarantino, The Truman Show and The Wizard of Oz . Despite a tantalizing star turn by the sunny leading lady, the borrowed elements never quite jell into anything satisfyingly original. A preposterous affair from start to finish.

In The Watcher , another serial killer is terrorizing Chicago during the Christmas holidays. The twist is that, in addition to stalking victims, he's also stalking the traumatized FBI agent who is stalking him. You know the killer's identity from the opening scene (he's a baby-faced maniac played by Keanu Reeves, of all people), so the problem is how to build suspense in a different way. A new kind of tension develops between the killer, who has left a trail of mutilated women all the way from L.A., and the burned-out cop (James Spader), who has tried for years to catch him and suffered a nervous breakdown from his continual failures. Now the killer makes the cop's psychological torture a motivating factor in his slaughter-fest. This is one sick dude, and Mr. Reeves plays him with sadistic relish. In a part so small you wonder why she bothered, Marisa Tomei plays the detective's shrink, so naturally she becomes the next target. It's hair-raising and violent enough to sustain interest up to a point, but when the wacko tries to bond, bargaining for Ms. Tomei's life in exchange for Mr. Spader's friendship ("You're like a brother to me," he whines, before lighting the kerosene under Ms. Tomei's shackled feet), the movie turns silly, provoking the audience into a howling fit.

The Watcher 's first-time director is Joe Charbanic, who has never done anything more serious than music videos for Ice T, Ice Cube and Coolio, and expects us to know the difference. But the atmospheric, cutting-edge camerawork by the great Michael Chapman, whose innovative cinematography on Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was unforgettable, upstages the actors in every scene. Regarding the actors, Ms. Tomei is so wasted she could have phoned in her role from an all-night Denny's. Deadpan James Spader, who often sounds like Jack Webb in Dragnet , is as monotonous as a grocery- store bar code. Some people will wonder why Keanu Reeves signed on at all, but think about it: Big, dumb action flicks like The Watcher are easy, they pay more money than art-house indie-prods, nobody notices if you can't act and you get a big trailer with rehearsal space for your rock band.

Sensitively written and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and soberly narrated by Judi Dench, Into the Arms of Strangers is a powerful and wrenching documentary about the heroic Kinderstransport -a rescue mission in which the people of Great Britain opened their doors and hearts to save 10,000 German children from the Nazis in the days before World War II. We know what Hitler did to the Jews, but it's a harrowing revelation to learn what he did to their children.

Barred from schools, parks and playgrounds, their homes and synagogues burned, the children were instilled with lessons of terror and obedience, and lived under a never-ending threat of death. Escape meant exit permits, entrance visas, foreign sponsors, a country willing to take them in and money. To our everlasting shame, America did nothing to help them. England was the only country to relax its immigration rules enough to offer safe shelter for children under the age of 17. Each child was allowed one small suitcase, and when you see the extraordinary footage showing those frightened, adorable, confused innocents packing their pajamas and teddy bears and heading for the train stations, you'll need a box of Kleenex.

You see it all, not through the retrospective eyes of historians, but through the eyes of the children themselves, most of whom never saw their families again. The grownups who recall the horrors as well as the happier moments in exile that changed their lives forever are the heroes of the film, but it's also a tribute to the courage and kindness of the British people. The film is beautiful and noble, and the stills, interviews and film clips are gloriously assembled. I feel pity for people who define "survivor" as the title of a brainless and gimmicky television show. See Into the Arms of Strangers , experience the bravery and resourcefulness with which the 10,000 children of the Kindertransport confronted and coped with a catastrophe of this magnitude, and you'll discover the real meaning of the word.

Critical Care is set in a fictional four-star intensive-care unit for terminal patients with big pockets where technological advances have freed the doctors, who are all in it for the big payday, from having any extended personal contact with their patients. Many of the most pungent lines about the new cynicism in medicine are delivered by a completely comical figure (Albert Brooks, portraying the drunken head of the hospital) who exists in the film only to show how bad the bottom-line mentality of medical practitioners has become.

Although Critical Care does indulge to a certain extent in fantasy and caricature in its treatment of life and death in an exclusive state-of-the-art intensive care unit in an unnamed large city, it emerges as a magically entertaining blend of heart, soul, mind, wit, farce and, finally, an idyllic idealism. What holds it together is a marvelously resourceful performance by James Spader as Dr. Werner Ernst, an overworked, ambitious surgical intern whose awakening sex drive nearly proves his undoing in the heartlessly corrupt medical establishment with the most advanced technology and the most regressive morality. Mr. Spader takes us through Dr. Ernst's moral awakening without becoming preachy or treacly about it, to the point that I hate to think what the movie would have been without him.

Most of the action takes place amid the antiseptic whiteness and modish turquoise of a literally deathly quiet in a circular temple of life-support systems attached to various stages of human vegetation. As the mobile camera roams around the ghastly neatness of its surroundings, the entire spectacle is bathed with a satirically mordant elegance that is pleasing to the eye even as it chills the heart.

In this gruesome context, even the mildest turn of phrase seems funnier than it would normally. When Dr. Ernst suggests that there is a cabbage in his refrigerator at home with a better chance of gaining consciousness than a certain comatose millionaire with a fabulous insurance policy for catastrophic illness, one chuckles in spite of oneself. Of course, it helps if one is agitated by our national medical crisis, as one should be. Otherwise, one may question some of the plot contrivances involving a pair of selfishly motivated sisters-played by Kyra Sedgwick and Margo Martindale-trying desperately to gain control of their comatose father's estate, which is worth millions. As James Spader's character finds himself taking control over the old man's fate, Ms. Sedgwick's Felicia Potter, the shameless sexpot of the two, is not above seducing the susceptible doctor for her purposes. Meanwhile, Ms. Martindale's Connie practices a brand of hypocritical, Bible-thumping, right-to-life rhetoric in a facade which promotes her own selfish ends. The wildly shifting moods of the film from pure cynicism to pure idealism may disturb viewers who prefer a consistent tone in their entertainment.

Here again, Mr. Spader is indispensable in bridging the wide gaps between such extreme characterizations as Helen Mirren's Stella, a nurse with an intense compassion for the desperately death-seeking patient in Bed 2, played by Jeffrey Wright; the drunken Dr. Butz, burlesqued with cartoonish brio by Mr. Brooks; the ruthlessly pragmatic Dr. Hofstader, played by Philip Bosco with a seeming delight in how remote from his patients modern technology has enabled him to become; and, in two problematic representations of good and evil, each with a perplexingly vague mandate for end-of-life issues, Anne Bancroft as a ghostly nun, and Wallace Shawn as a puckish Satan's helper who is, as is to be expected, considerably more fun than the nun.

Amid all these positive and negative allegorical figures, Mr. Spader's Dr. Ernst alone supplies the audience with a protagonist, a raisonneur and a sufficiently flawed character at the outset who gradually becomes redeemable by the final fadeout. Ever since Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, Mr. Spader has played a wide range of both sympathetic and unsympathetic characters with a strange blend of passivity and unobtrusive attentiveness. He will probably never be a bankable star, and thank God-at least for us, if not for him. Instead, he has evolved into one of the best listeners and reactors in the business, one whose face can so eloquently express the processes of thinking. The emotions he projects are thus eminently earned, and when he confirms for an uninsured accident patient that he is indeed a doctor, Mr. Spader's slow smile becomes a hymn to the medical profession.

As for Mr. Lumet, he has long endured the slings and arrows of romance- and fantasy-seekers who are impatient with his persistent devotion to gritty realism. As one of his perhaps unjust detractors, it gives me special pleasure to rank Critical Care among his most felicitous and graceful achievements.

In Beaumarchais, Another Cast of Scoundrels

Édouard Molinaro's Beaumarchais the Scoundrel, from a screenplay by Mr. Molinaro and Jean-Claude Brisville, inspired by an unpublished work by Sacha Guitry, is held together in all its pomp and pageantry by the remarkably gifted Fabrice Luchini in the title role, much as Critical Care is held together by the remarkably gifted James Spader. Am I, reputedly the archfiend of directorial auteurism, suggesting that actors are the true auteurs of the cinema? Well, sometimes. Not that Mr. Molinaro's contributions to the project should be slighted or minimized. Even the casting of Mr. Luchini was regarded by the director as essential to the conception and execution of the role of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), the author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, titles more familiar in America through the operas of Rossini and Mozart, respectively.

Beaumarchais was a fascinating figure in both the literary and political turmoil of his time. Voltaire, no less, is quoted in the film as declaring that Beaumarchais would never achieve the greatness of Molière because he (Beaumarchais) squandered his talents on the life at the expense of the art. But then Molière would never have provided such mesmerizing movie material as a character, and his century, the 17th, was, of course, less tumultuous than the 18th, during which Beaumarchais was often beleaguered and imprisoned. Guitry, a filmmaker himself, and one of the most prolific French playwrights of the 20th century, obviously found a kindred spirit in Beaumarchais.

What Mr. Luchini has captured so admirably in the character is a personality awash in ambiguities and contradictions: bent on mischief, yet often beset by spasms of idealism; a champion of the people against the corrupt aristocracy, and yet also a shameless social climber, eager for the beribboned privileges of the nobility for himself. Mr. Luchini has often played such complex parts for such ironically inclined directors as Eric Rohmer and Christian Vincent.

Mr. Luchini is coupled with one of France's most exciting young actresses, Sandrine Kiberlain, and a large part of France's acting nobility-Michel Serrault, Michel Piccoli, Jean Yanne, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jacques Weber, Alain Chabat, among many others who summon up ghosts of the Nouvelle Vague and the Truffaut-hated "tradition of quality" that preceded it. Mr. Molinaro is closer to the "tradition of quality" than to the Nouvelle Vague more in spirit than in age. La Cage aux Folles (1978) is his signature film for American art-house audiences, but that is more in the mold of commercial entertainment than is usual in his mostly noirish career. The problem with Beaumarchais the Scoundrel is that it sprawls more than it surges. Mr. Molinaro and his collaborators have simply taken up more themes than they can explore in depth. Beaumarchais in London trying to help the cause of the American Revolution is even more at sea than Thomas Jefferson was in the desiccated Paris of Merchant-Ivory in Jefferson in Paris (1995). Still and all, Mr. Luchini and Ms. Kiberlain are well worth the price of admission all by themselves.

Correction

Before the mail starts pouring in, I must confess that I committed a strange and perhaps unconsciously sexist gaffe in last week's column when I reminisced, "That reminded me of the 'problem' raised by a nervous talk-show host about blond May Britt's interracial marriage to Sammy Davis Jr. Wasn't she too short for him?" What I knew and meant to convey, and the only way the "question" makes ironical common sense, was "Wasn't he too short for her ? Somewhere along the way, my male chauvinist fingers reversed the comparative heights of the towering Britt and the diminutive Davis on my typewriter. I suppose it all goes back to the genes I inherited from the cavemen.