The idea of A History of the American Film must have seemed enchanting to its young author, Christopher Durang. It takes a few basic characters right through the typical genre movies—and others—from Intolerance to Earthquake. There is Loretta, the sweet girl from the orphanage, whom every kind of evil befalls without making her shed her innocence. She is part Loretta Young, part Sade's Justine, and wholly in love with Jimmy, who goes from Jimmy Cagney to Bogart, from Jimmy Dean to Brando, always slapping Loretta around, ditching her, or making her equally unhappy by not ditching her. There is also Bette, who is Bette Davis and other tough and mean females, whose chief purpose is not so much to take Jimmy away as to make Loretta suffer more in the process. She is also Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Sade's Juliette among others.

Then there is Hank, the strong and silent yokel, who is Fonda, Stewart, and Cooper until he goes bonkers and becomes Tony Perkins in Psycho. And there is Eve (Arden), the perennial good-natured, wisecracking loser. Lastly, there are several Contract Players, doing various typical Hollywood parts. All of them, when not playing parodic movie scenes, become spectators at a typical Bijou, which is the main set of the show…. The symbiosis is complete: Audience and movie stars not only live off each other, they actually melt into each other. And on and on go the same basic idiotic relationships, through Westerns and war movies, thrillers and Busby Berkeley musicals….

Durang's play is closet camp that needs to be much shorter, less elaborately bedizened, and fitted snugly into some intimate university theater…. [But] drawn out and overproduced in sundry ways, it sadly betrays itself as the campy, campus cabaret it is: bright and funny in places, but largely self-indulgent, repetitious, and sophomoric.

True, there are droll passages, like the takeoff on Now, Voyager's notorious double-barreled cigarette-lighting scene, or a number of lusty sick jokes like this bit between a returning World War II veteran and the woman he left behind: "Michael, I've been promiscuous."—"I have no hands."—"Well, how promiscuous were you?"—"How much of your hands are you missing?" Durang also has a good ear for nomenclature: A spaceman arrives from the planet Zabar; a film is called Seven Brides for Twelve Angry Men. But at any moment things may collapse into "Don't sit under the atom bomb with anyone else but me," or "Jimmy, our vines have such tender grapes," where the references are either too obvious and crude, or too farfetched. After a while, the formulaic aspects become all too blatant; for example, simple inversion of a movie scene—as when the distraught heroine seeks disguised counsel from Piano Man, the wise and sympathetic black discreetly tickling the ivories to death. "If you were this friend," she asks after relating her own dismal story, "what would you do?"—"Ah'd kill mahself." (p. 100)

[Three] hours is too relentless for a simple and simpleminded joke. Durang finally says nothing beyond, ad absurdum, that the movies are absurd. (p. 101)