Who Am I This Time?

Who Am I This Time? (1982)

Harry is a shy hardware store employee. But whenever he takes a part in a local amateur theater production, he becomes the part completely--while on stage. Helene is new in town, a lonely itinerant telephone company employee. On a whim, she auditions for and gets the part of Stella to Harry's Stanley when the theater group performs A Streetcar Named Desire. Before anyone realizes the growing affection between Helene and Stanley, she falls deeply in love with the sexy brute, not knowing what the real man is like.

Date of release
1982-02-02
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (16)
Runtime
53m
Genres
Drama, Romance, TV Movie
Director
Jonathan Demme

Casting

Interesting facts

Who Am I This Time? is a 1982 American made-for-television comedy-drama film directed by Jonathan Demme and based on the 1961 short story of the same name by Kurt Vonnegut. It is the fourth episode of the first season of PBS' American Playhouse series which aired on February 2, 1982.

Production

The film's score was composed by John Cale of The Velvet Underground.

Hinckley, Illinois served as stand-in for fictional North Crawford. Oakton School in Evanston, Illinois was used for the school building, including the library and playgrounds.

The quotations recited by the actors, from Cyrano de Bergerac to The Importance of Being Earnest, are often paraphrased. In the opening act, Harry Nash delivers the final lines of Cyrano, which were taken not from the well-known translations of the standard texts, but from the film adaptation Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), with translation by Brian Hooker.

Hooker's version, which Christopher Walken/Cyrano declaims, changes his final phrase to "My white plume!" Panache means plume; here, the literary reference is to King Henry IV of France, who was famous for wearing a white plume in his helmet and for his war cry: "Follow my white plume!" (French: Ralliez-vous à mon panache blanc!).

Another slight variation occurs in the final lines, when Helene accepts Harry's proposal of marriage and says, "I hope that after we marry, you'll always look at me just like this... especially in front of other people!" In the original play by Oscar Wilde, the line is, "I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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