DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN, BUT NOT AS GOOD

While watching TV this week, I stumbled across a combination of shows which brought on a severe fit of geezer pique.  The first was a quick dip in the new Hawaii Five-O which struck me as nothing special.  Then again, I was never a big fan of the original, so I didn't stay with it long enough to form an honest opinion.  Still, I couldn't understand why they bothered to remake it.  I then changed channels to HBO and landed in the middle of the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still with the effervescent Keanu Reeves as Klatu, the alien judge of mankind's foibles.  Not that Michael Rennie gave a nuanced performance in the 1951 original, but if Reeves were any stiffer, they would have had to wheel him around the set on a hand truck.

This movie was so moralistic and eco-dogmatic that I was surprised Al Gore wasn't hired to play Gort, the robot arm of extraterrestrial law.  A joyless mess, it wasted the talents of everyone involved, but especially John Cleese who played a humorless scientist sympathetic to the invaders.  Just writing "John Cleese" and "humorless" in the same sentence makes my blood pressure soar.  The original was also burdened by a "mankind better watch out" message, but it was secondary to the '50s B-movie sci-fi milieu of flying saucers and Theremin riffs.  Apparently, Keanu Klatu was too virtuous to buzz around the universe in a gas-guzzling spaceship; he traveled in a biosphere, no doubt fueled by pixie dust.

However, this is not a rant about how much better all film and TV originals are compared to their later incarnations, although in this case it's beyond question.  In other cases, the remake is better than the original.  An Open Salon debate last year argued about the greatest film version of A Christmas Carol with almost everyone agreeing that the 1935 adaptation with Reginald Owen was eclipsed by later versions (although many dunderheads didn't agree with me on the supremacy of the 1951 remake with Alastair Sim.)  There is also the odd example of the two John Wayne Westerns, Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966) which are essentially the same film with different supporting casts, but nearly equal quality.

No, my quarrel with remakes deals with a particular category of revisionism, specifically those movies and shows where the main character is so connected to the original actor that any change is disorienting and usually disastrous.  In the case of Lt. Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-O, I don't think it matters whether Jack Lord or Alex O'Laughlin plays the role except for reasons of nostalgia.  In other cases, the update is a travesty.

People's exhibit A and B are the film remakes of two 1950's TV staples, The Phil Silvers Show, also known as Sgt. Bilko, and The Honeymooners.  These were both shows created and written for their stars (Phil Silvers and Jackie Gleason respectively), and reflected the unique gifts of the actor involved.  Unlike a theatrical role such as Hamlet which was meant to be played and reinterpreted by generations of performers, Silvers' hustling peacetime army sergeant and Gleason's bombastic Brooklyn bus driver were perfect admixtures of actor and role.  Over the course of episodes and seasons, it became impossible to separate one from the other.

So what was the incentive to revise and recast Bilko in a full-length movie in 1996?  Simply that the character already existed?  Was Hollywood so lame that it couldn't come up with a similar character and parallel plot without ripping off a classic?  Did they think that the name would draw older viewers of the show?  I have nothing against Steve Martin, but he worked mightily at channeling Silvers without coming close.  For one thing, he didn't have the gifted and driven Nat Hiken, the TV show's creator and principle writer, literally killing himself to make the show shine.  This film was a dud that probably destroyed any chance a young viewer might hunt down the original.

The 2005 Honeymooners attempt at reprising Ralph Kramden as a black man is even more incomprehensible.  I confess that I didn't see this film, so it's possible that Cedric the Entertainer was brilliant.  If so, wouldn't he have been just as brilliant in a comparable situation without the touchstones so laboriously created and inhabited by Gleason and company?  Given the time differential, it's even more unlikely that old viewers of the show would run to see the movie, so there seems even less incentive to invoke the source.

It is in film, however, that the most egregious rip-off has been perpetrated.  Anyone who ever saw The Pink Panther or A Shot in the Dark knows that Peter Sellers is Inspector Jacques Clouseau.  Even in the weaker sequels, Sellers takes threadbare plots and elevates them with comic genius.  Why then have several other actors, including Alan Arkin and Steve Martin, donned mustaches and trench coats in order to make pale imitations?  Well, for the money, obviously, but is a bumbling police detective such a hard character to create that studios felt the need to cannibalize and degrade the master franchise?  Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers did pretty well with Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebbin in the Naked Gun series.

I hope that my dyspepsia is based on more that my age and general crankiness.  I had the good fortune to grow up with TV in the 1950's when stations and networks, desperate for programming, would throw nearly anything on the air to fill time.  Movies and cartoons from the 30's and 40's and industrial and military PR films such as Industry on Parade, and The Big Picture were mixed with live theater and variety shows as well as the low-budget 50's horror movie oeuvre.  It probably warped me in ways I can't imagine, but by its sheer volume and diversity, it also made me a discerning viewer and critic.  The majority of programming was terrible, but it pains me to see the best of it hacked up for lack of imagination and inspiration.

To those of you too young to remember those days, I suggest that you hunt down the DVD's and watch the originals.  I know that they're in black and white, the plots are dated and the pacing laborious by current standards, but watch them anyway.  You won't regret it.