The Addams Family

Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1991 film turns on a man presented as the Uncle Fester who vanished twenty-five years ago. Its source is not a newspaper strip or the television series but Charles Addams’s single-panel cartoons for The New Yorker. The family first appeared on 6 August 1938 and went unnamed for decades; Addams supplied names and temperaments only for the 1964 television series. What was adapted held pictures, not a story; the film works the same way, thin plot with weight carried frame by frame. Sonnenfeld had been a cinematographer; this was his first as director. He hired Owen Roizman to shoot it but said at the outset that he would choose the lenses and design the shots. The wide angles do the work: nobody points at the joke in an Addams drawing, you find it. Thing was played by the magician Christopher Hart, shot in two passes with Hart face down on a mechanic’s dolly in a black sleeve, his body removed frame by frame by Alan Munro’s team. Ruth Myers was nominated for the costume design Oscar, won by Albert Wolsky for Bugsy. A good fit if you watch the whole frame rather than the speaking actor, since the joke waits at its edge. Not for you if you need a plot to carry you; the source had none.