The Maids (1974) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

This film was part of the 2nd season of "American Film Theater", Ely Landau's series of productions in which he created filmed versions of important plays and showed them in stage theatres for a single weekend, with advance tickets and reserved seating like a concert. He hoped to turn these works of serious literature into "events" for the uptown intellectuals. I'm not sure how he planned to make a profit, but he made a lot of these films before the idea finally imploded in the second year.

They filmed plays by Eugene O'Neill, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Brecht, Maxwell Anderson, John Osborne, Ionesco, and other such intellectual luminaries of mid-20th century stagecraft. There were even some intellectual musicals, like "Lost in the Stars" and "Jacques Brel". There were some highly distinguished productions. Olivier directed and starred in a Chekhov play which co-starred such rising young talents as Derek Jacobi and Alan Bates. Ionesco's Rhinoceros starred Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, who also co-starred in the famed Mel Brooks comedy "The Producers". Some of the directors in the AFT series included John Frankenheimer, Arthur Hiller, and Tony Richardson.

The renegade French playwright Jean Genet was a hero of the intellectual counter-culture in the period from WW2 to Vietnam. Genet, himself a thief and a male prostitute turned to literature, felt himself to be a champion of the downtrodden of the world: homosexuals, the third world, the criminal demimonde, the non-white world, the impoverished, the anti-corporate, the underdog. In fact, as late as 1968, Genet was involved in the anti-war protests at the Democratic convention. Most of his plays and novels were actually written in the forties. After Genet became a literary cause celebre for intellectuals like Sartre, his productivity dropped precipitously, and he wrote virtually nothing between 1960 and his death in 1986.

This particular play, "The Maids" was inspired by the true story of two French maids who murdered their employer in 1933. The women were said to be lesbian lovers as well as sisters. A more literal adaptation of this event was made into a film called Murderous Maids in 2000. Genet was not interested in the literal truth, but in the workings of the maids' minds. Genet, of course, identified with the maids. In his version, the women play roles constantly, assuming false deferential poses with the mistress, then taking turns playing the part of the mistress when she is absent. They plot to murder her. Although they do not succeed in that particular plot, they do provide false evidence against the lover of their mistress, and are waiting for the police to catch up with them after their failure to murder Madame.

I haven't actually spoiled the plot. The gist of the play's meaning, as well as the important plot developments, really unfold after the Madame leaves and the two maids are left to resume their bickering and role-playing. The AFT adaptation stars Glenda Jackson and Susannah York, two of the great actresses of that day.