tgd@clyde.UUCP (Tom Dennehy) (03/07/84)
Movie remakes are risky business. In the theater, they're called
revivals, and are very often (unless done very badly) greatly
celebrated events. The cause for celebration usually falls into
one of these categories:
- It is an absolutely faithful staging of an work from a time
when theater craft was significantly different than now, and
as such, is fresh, sentimental, curious, or all three. The
current Broadway productions of On Your Toes and My One and
Only are examples.
- It marks the return of an actor in a favorite role. Robert
Preston as Harold Hill, Carol Channing as Dolly Levi, Yul
Brynner as the King of Siam, Robert Morse as Finch, Al
Pacino as Teach (American Buffalo) spring to mind.
Unfortunately, this too often is a crutch for one-character
performers (Channing, Morse).
- An old-fashioned work is given a new perspective. Most
Shakespeare, The "new" Pirates of Penzance, Peter Brook's La
Tragedie de Carmen.
- The return of a performer in a different role. Katherine
Hepburn has played both female roles in The Glass Menagerie.
- The "we'll keep doing it 'till we get it right" effect. The
Quaid brothers are getting raves for a new production of
True West, a Sam Shepard play which had been uniformly
panned by the same critics a little more than a year before.
Harold Pinter seems to be getting better understood with
age, but unfortunately not by yours verbosely.
BUT movies are different. Remakes are sneered at - the
uncreative filmmaker's crutch. I think this has a lot to do with
the timelessness of a film - why bother remaking Cassablanca when
we'll always have Paris with Bogie and Bergman? A stage
production exists only during performance and must be
painstakingly recreated each and every time it is to be shown.
It cannot exist in more than one place at an instant ("...at
theaters and drive-ins everywhere"). Plays are magic. Plays are
special.
It is important that each generation of performers be given a
crack at the warhorses of the stage. BUT NOT ON TELEVISION.
Let's suppose. Suppose we have a complete Elia Kazan filmography
on videotape. Suppose we decided to watch ESPN or MTV last
Sunday and recorded the ABC Theater production of "A Streetcar
Named Desire". When sometime about mid-week we get a sudden
craving for Tennnesse Williams, which tape do we watch? Brando
or Williams? Leigh or Ann-Margaret? Malden or Quaid? Frankly,
the choices are barely distinguishable.
Can anyone confirm or refute the use of the screenplay from
Kazan's film? The entire "look" of the production, from sets to
shot placement to light and contrast, gave me heavy deja vu.
Good performances all around. Not great, but good. What was
missing was DESPERATION.
I didn't get the sense that Randy Quaid was not just shy and
homely, but that he never had gotten this close to marriage
before, and probably never will again. To reject Blanche has got
to hurt, hurt deeply, hurt BAD. RQ just seemed pissed off.
Stella is ripped up and empty. She can't have the genteel life
of the past and her Blanche is preventing her from embracing her
present, clutching it in the rain, raking her nails across its
back. I just read resignation from Beverly D'Angelo.
The bloom is not quite far enough off Ann-Margaret's rose as
Blanche to be as fragile as she must. She's got to be brittle;
everyone she offers herself to breaks another little bit off,
until Stanley snaps her in two. AM seemed too too resilient, too
able to plot, too strong.
Nothing new from Treat Williams as Stanley. Acting techniques
have changed in 30 years, but the impression is the same.
Maybe I'm just irked that your average megatrash mini-series seem
to be more carefully prepared than ABC's "Streetcar". As good
as a work is, it can't stand on its past alone. If you think of
this production as Blanche, then the creative force backing it
was Stella. We'd have been better off giving it to Stanley.
Or else wait for Dustin Hoffman's "Death of a Salesman" opening
in New York soon.
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Tom Dennehy AT&T BL Whippany, NJ {whuxb|clyde}!tgd