Three Sisters

Olivier's painfully stagebound record of the 1967 National Theatre production of Chekhov's play, in which he himself took a comparative back seat as Chebutikin. Two fantasy sequences are added as a sop to cinema (one of them a redundant visualisation of Irina's wish-fulfilment dream of Moscow as a paradise of glittering ballrooms and theatres). Moments of passion survive from Joan Plowright's Masha; otherwise it's a catalogue of pregnant pauses from which all Chekhovian intent has long since ebbed away.