The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
here they were together again, fighting heroin. Small world. But the odd thing, he said, the really interesting thing was that he knew so many of the inmates too. They'd only been kids when be...
...With that end in view, the industry, when it's smart, offers the summer trade the most original work it canmNew York, New York, or Star Wars, for instance--so people will feel a movie really is an alternative to the tired stuff on the tube...
...In similar fashion, as the writerdirector of this film, he obviously feels that the whole idea of remaking Beau Geste is so campy, it hardly, requires elaboration or invention beyond just having thought of it...
...Brooks used exactly the same gag in one of the scenes in Young Frankenstein...
...Everytime he got one leak stopped up, the water simply forced it way through somewhere else...
...Beheker, a Loving Wi]e, a Woman o/ Feeling and Hal/a Marriage, titular ironies all, portray a certain kind of middle-aged woman caught between transition and tradition, living well but nervously in New York and its environs, highly-educated at Ivy League or Seven Sisters' Schools but without job skills, sexually-ignorant and sexually-cloistered, deracinated Jews acutely conscious of being lonely outsiders in a non-Jewish world, but having no sense of belonging to an EuropeanJudaic heritage...
...And so on...
...All is the fact that dad, now divorced from morn and living in Houston, hasn't even bothered to see his son in eight years...
...wife, mother, were added seductress, sex-object, career-woman, but the world kept changing, never noticed that these women were trying to change with it...
...But in recent years the film industry has developed its own equivalent of the re-run mentality, and this summer more than in previous ones, it seems to be getting the upper hand...
...Only after we get beyond the concept and the east might we expect to get down to some inherently original material...
...Since Remake's cast includes Trevor Howard, James Earl Jones, Michael York, Ann-Margaret, Peter Ustinov, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear and Ed McMahon (in addition to Feldman himself and, of course, Gary Cooper), ~it is also an attempt to carry the film by mere presence...
...The films are Marty Feldman's The Last Remake o/Beau Geste and nobody-in-particular's The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training...
...Instead of Matthau, this film gives us William Devane as the absentee father of a member of the team...
...Trailing along after the annual Airport and Black Sunday, this summer RoIlercoaster is hoping to take us for the ride...
...Such women, still believing the myths, started playing more roles--not less...
...In one weekend he turns a bunch of stumblebums into a crack team and makes up eight years of neglect to his kid...
...Like Marty Feldman, The Last Remake of Beau Geste depends excessively on what it is, as opposed to what it can do, to be funny...
...For that matter, the first time we ever saw Marty Feldman, it was in Young Frankenstein when he met Gene Wilder at the Transylvania Station and directed him to "Walk this way...
...The dialogue doesn't make any sense or even have any funny lines in it, but the very fact that it is taking place is supposed to amuse US...
...Hollywood always used to be accused to making movies for adults that were, morally and philcsophicaUy, too juvenile...
...That market had to be created, in effect, by popular demand...
...The Weingarten woman's world is anarchic, despite its Lord and Taylor's' well:kept" apImarance (a facade that incorporates the woman herself, who knows she is kept, knows she is financially dependent...
...The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training has, if possible, even less to recommend it...
...If her values ever did pertain in that remote past known as youth, no longer are those values the verities, eternal or Commonweal: 533...
...The only sequel with any originality and wit you might get a chance to see this summer is Another Thin Man, which provided the only laugh you ever got out of Marry Feldman in the first place...
...He cannot have been much surprised at what happened after the lights went out in New York...
...These women were getting older, not better, and the men in their lives, by whose specifications they had defined those lives, were as restless and harassed as they, but the women thought that the men had more options...
...The Heretic has followed officially from The Exorcist, like The Deep from laws, while Audrey Rose has, like Orca, tried to horn in on the action...
...All four of Weingarten's novels, Mrs...
...The trouble is that Feldman's ideas about movie comedy are so heavily influenced by Mel Brooks, they're hardly Feldman's at all...
...In fact, the movie industry used to be so loath to repeat itself that it couldn't see the legitimate worth of playing its own re-runs---the classics of the 30s and 40s---in summer festivals at repertory theaters...
...Nobody writes about these women, now in' their forties and fifties, still running in place, trying trying to catch up...
...By the time we get to Remake there have been too many boxes within boxes, too many carbon copies of the ideas that once made some movies 19 August 1977:$$2 funny for those ideas to be even legible any more...
...It certainly isn't a reminder of the original Bad News Bears, for in that film Walter Matthau supplied a lot of vinegar as the dipso ex-ballplayer who took on the coaching of the Bears only with the greatest reluctance...
...What I'm referring to, of course, is Hollywood's penchant for sequels and, beyond that, for all sorts of deriva,tire schiock which tries to do the same thing as a re-run ---to exploit some earlier success and milk it dry...
...But this is unfortunately the point where Remake becomes most derivative...
...It doesn't have, for instance, Peter Ustinov, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear or even Marty Feldman, nor is it at least a reminder, however pale, of a movie better than itself...
...John Fisher College in Rochester, New York...
...As Feldman then hobbled off, Wilder followed attempting to imitate Feldman's spastic, hunch-back shuffle, That was a pretty good gag too, but it was out of W. S. van Dyke's Another Thin Man, where a dottering butler fed the same line to William Powell and was followed with the same mockery...
...These films just gd to show that the old formula still works...
...Seen today, Beau Geste itself is such a sketch to Feldman that he can't resist including part of a scene from it in his own film, contriving a dialogue between himself and Gary Cooper in which they appear to sit at the same table in the same room...
...To daughter, NANCY YANES HOFFMAN is a n essayist and an adjunct assistant professor of English at St...
...T~frOSe women who were graduated college in the forties and fifties knew that if they studied hard enough, wore their white gloves to _9 luncheons and interviews, met the right men and knew how to make them think they were interesting enough, so these men would offer the job of a lifetime or a house in the suburbs--then the dreams of the glossy magazines would come true...
...This puzzled and amused the director...
...But one day, they woke up to find that they were pushing, or passing, or past forty, and somehow all the dreams hadn't come true...
...When the Bears arrive without a coach for the All-Sun Belt Championship (or whatever) at the Astrodome in Houston, Devane is given a chance to make it all up to his kid by doing the coaching himself...
...I'm afraid the only alternative Hollywood can offer is, again, an historical one--Treasure Island, or a Chaplin or John Ford film...
...THOMAS POWERS SUMMER RERUNS OOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE SCREEN Since there are nothing but reruns on television, summer is the time that Hollywood hopes the public will go out to a movie...
...When the looters spilled into the streets it was just another leak in the dike...
...The old formula is: the more words there are in the title, the less there will be to the film itself...
...Far from adding a bi.t of vinegar, the adult is the pre-sweetening on this film...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Nothing much had ever been done for his kids, after all...
...Last and, one might wish, least in this sequence of sequels, serials, second-hand soap and rip-offs, two new comedies are now trying to do for that genre what the films just mentioned have done for the thriller, horror film, etc...
...And on top of that, Brooks's own ideas are themselves such a scavenger hunt through movie history that they're seldom truly original either...
...Or nobody writes well about these women ---except perhaps Violet Weingarten...
...The relationship between Devane and his kid in the sequel doesn't...
...Dad of course turns out to be the greatest coach that ever knocked the dirt from his cleats...
...When Feldman has a blind man serving soup in the legionnaire's mess in Remake, it's funny enough, except that the edge is taken off our amusement by our sense of d~]tz vu...
...The relationship between Tatum O'Neal and Walter Matthau in the original Bears made the grade in this regard...
...They'd only been kids when be first met them, members of the Savage Skulls and the Death Angels, tearing up the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant on hot summer nights, and now here they were again, in their mid-twenties, strung out on junk...
...Now Hollywood does it the other way aroimd, which is worse...
...Or if they had, they were the wrong dreams at the wrong time...
...It was apparent he felt like someone trying to plug a leak in a dike...
...Besides, the relationship to an adult, and so to the whole adult world, is the crucial one in any kids' movie just as it is in the real lives of kids...
...In a movie that's aimed at children as an audience, no matter how much dirty talk there is in the kids or "bad news" in the world where they live, in the end that world should be capable of decent human relationships and at least some moral order in which a kid can believe...
...With his goggle eyes that go off in different directions and his under-slung, faintly idiotic smile, Feldman looks so silly that he knows a little mugging will be as likely to get him a laugh as any performanee he might put on...
...Like a big fish eating a small one, Orca The Killer Whale has tried to swallow whole the popularity of laws, and The Deep has attempted to contain the appeal of both...
...That leaves the Bears themselves, and although a couple of ~hem can act, or at least ham it up engagingly, they don't have enough collective personality to carry the movie...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 17
