New Movies: All in the Family

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Adapted to the screen by Charles Dyer from his play, Staircase is a static, placid film in which the camerawork is subdued. Its strength is in its two key players. Each being determined, perhaps, to do his best acting before a peer, Burton and Harrison give firmly disciplined, finely delineated performances of undeviating honesty. Burton has rarely immersed himself in a part to the extent that one could forget he was Richard Burton, but he does it this time. Harrison has often seemed to be acting before a mirror rather than a camera. In Staircase he is acting before the broken mirror of a man's life, and he evolves a poignancy that is wonderfully real. At crucial moments in the film, he is given to saying "God help us all, and Oscar Wilde." Wilde would not have liked Staircase. It is not elegant. It is not witty. It lacks his opulent depravity. But in its modest and unassuming way it shows that Wilde's martyrdom has finally affected the conscience of humanity.