The Star Wagon

That six people before me voted high-ratings for this long-unseen PBS broadcast from the '60s indicates that a few other people enjoyed it as I did. Anderson's play, from the '30s, featured Burgess Meridith and Lillian Gish in its original staging-- the story involves a disappointed inventor whose time-machine gives him a chance to revamp his life. Appealingly, the "early days" he and his buddy return to is a turn-of-century idyll (much of the broadcast was videotaped outside, near a lake). Orson Bean cuts a surprisingly romantic figure, and he has a lovely tenor solo of the traditional hymn "Jerusalem". But his stooge, a gnomish misfit with a compulsive belch, gets all the attention-- a very young Dustin Hoffman muttering and engagingly skulking in the shadows. Before THE GRADUATE appeared, this film anticipated the career to come. The film is once again available on videotape (priced expensively, for institutional use), and it will appear fitfully in retrospectives.