Adapted or Misadapted?
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen ADAPTED OR MISADAPTED? BY JOHN SIMON Thanks to the Christmas season, we are deluged with holiday movie fare, most of it, appropriately, tinsel. But there is also that occasional...
...on film, with all of Spain lying around waiting to be used, such decimation fills us with a sense of waste...
...How crude must be Hiller's eye: the Don's battered rapier does not merely get twisted like bunting, it ends up spiraling like a vine around a thick tree trunk...
...Elaine May's direction is uncomfortably reminiscent of Mike Nichols', but most of the actors ("except for cute Cybill Shepherd) are good or excellent, and Owen Roizman's camera work is clean and elegant...
...And for no other director has that fine cinematographer, Giuseppe Ro-tunno, done work that any Holly-woodite could equal...
...Already the stage musical struck me as a horrid contemporary counterpart to Chu-Chin-Chow, and vilely pretentious...
...It may not be great acting, but it is a great triumph of personal dignity...
...But the drawback is more than compensated for by the acting and cinematography...
...In all these categories it does well enough or better...
...Let me cite also two splendid finishing touches: the cinematography of Oswald Morris, whose sensitivity to color and shading makes dusky interiors as various and poignant as other cine-matographers' sunny exteriors...
...from introducing additional people and places beyond some bedrooms, a basement and a garden...
...But all this was as nothing to the bloated, hollow posturings of Arthur Hiller's film, which looks as if Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade had switched from giant inflated Mickey Mouses and Santa Clauses to huge rubber Cervanteses and Tor-quemadas...
...But ridiculous is not necessarily funny...
...that his anachronistic, ineffectual knight-errantry does not seem to save a single soul...
...She goes from cool demi-vierge to Lenny's willing bedmate and back to daddy's docile daughter at two fell swoops...
...What the movie Sleuth must chiefly depend on is the literacy of the screenplay, the proficiency of the direction, and the bravura of the acting...
...Dale Wasserman's smug vulgarization of both Cervantes the man and Don Quixote, his supreme creation, began as a television spectacular, continued as a Broadway musical comedy, and emerges now as a cinematic superextravaganza...
...Yet there is an even graver problem: Both principals in Sleuth are improbably clever, witty, even brilliant, and outsmart each other with a zest and efficiency that are nothing short of prodigious...
...Even playing Milo with a faintly lower-class accent-presumably the one Caine is most comfortable with?is a mistake...
...Even this much expansion may at times weaken the sense of two men pitted against each other in a space almost as confined as the boxing ring...
...Or that he feels out of place among these goyim...
...what we have here is a bad menage a trois...
...The other method is provocative ambivalence...
...Poor Wasserman cannot even manage the second-person singular...
...In the process, it has gone not merely from bad to worse, but, rather, from awful to unspeakable...
...Miss Loren has a warm, sad, daunted yet indomitable quality as Aldonza or Dulcinea or anyone at all that radiates womanliness and authenticity even in the heaviest weather...
...perhaps hairdressers are subtler) becoming, as the plot thickens, an ever rarer intellect...
...It may help avoid facial monotony, yet it adds a whiff of glacial artiness...
...we keep hearing things like "thou may become" and "thou called upon me...
...she proudly corrects him, "Dulcinea...
...Friedman's middle-class Minnesota girl, Sue Ellen Parker, becomes wealthy and spoiled Kelly Corcoran, wisecracking sophisticate but also obedient, corn-fed virgin...
...Michael Caine has some difficulty with Milo...
...but, on the whole, the intimacy of the contest is maintained...
...Such is Sleuth, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own play...
...and the score of John Addison, whose simple main theme sounds deceptively familiar at first, but, through clever orchestrations and barely perceptible departures, leads to unfamiliar, tantalizing enhancements...
...And what horrors of language: "A tigress crouching in the dark, still keen in tooth and claw," the impudent Tennysonian borrowing coming on top of the basic imprecision-is a tigress supposed to be keen only in the light...
...It is done, somehow, with those almond eyes curving upward as the full mouth curls downward, while, in between, the cheekbones strive gloriously outward...
...The fact that Sleuth is still running on the stages of New York and London-and, for all I know, Tulsa and Timbuctoo-may be the biggest handicap the movie faces...
...His Quixote makeup is worse than quixotic, making him look like a caricatured cross between Montgomery Clift at his most depressed, and John Updike at his most manic...
...Shaffer's respect for verbal finesse, savoring of ultracivilized repartee, ability to blend psychologically revealing dialogue with wittily pyrotechnical hyperbole survive in the film version, even though a mild form of self-censorship has been exercised...
...a mule of a different color: drab...
...This becomes manifest at the very outset, where the arrest of Cervantes and his servant, while performing some auto sacramental in the town square, generates no excitement through either the shooting or the editing...
...What are we to make of Lenny, forlorn and dejected, alone on a sofa as the film ends...
...for the harsh and often quite inappropriate singing voices, whether grafted on or the performers' own...
...There are times when Sir Laurence is a little too grand for the part-too much the great actor to be squeezed into such miniature shenanigans without slightly ripping them...
...Still, the picture does not quite know what it is doing, where it is heading, or why it is there in the first place...
...Not, I think, because of any greater or lesser reality or stylization than the cinema's, or all those other, customary explanations...
...In other words, though both media depend on stylized or simulated reality, we somehow keep in mind that the stage actor has so much less up his sleeves-has, virtually, no sleeves at alland so fall in more lovingly and admiringly with whatever trompe I'oeil he can pull off...
...It is enough to make you climb the most reachable wall...
...Here, I think, the filmmakers' third device, moralizing, takes over, and they have ineptly tacked on a Room at the Top-style comeuppance...
...he invests the part with a vocal and visual tremor that could wreck a seismograph...
...As for Neil Simon's new seriousnessI never thought it would come to my wishing he'd put back the gags...
...and for the metallic, megalomaniacal clangor with which the soundtrack hurls all this at our cringing ears...
...And his prolonged breakdown scene as he faces imminent death (splendidly managed by Keith Baxter on stage) is not so sustained and convincing as it might be...
...he has been overpretty, as in The Bible, or studiedly strident, as in recent Fellini items, but he has never before been commonplace...
...n even more peculiar adaptation is The Heartbreak Kid, which Neil Simon wrote and Elaine May directed from Bruce Jay Friedman's very short story, "A Change of Plan...
...At the theater, we tacitly realize that these are human beings up there, naked but for a bit of make-up, costuming and a trick or two of lighting: The faking is all up to the actor, without benefit of process photography, retakes, splicing together, stunt men and what have you...
...On stage, the transitions between the prison and the various locations of the Don's adventures have to be imagined...
...The film's (and play's) underlying theme-the skills of experienced, crafty age versus the resourcefulness and vigor of youth?is thus couched in histrionic as well as human terms...
...A special word of damnation must be reserved for Laurence Rosenthal's unsurpassably brassy and blaring orchestrations...
...But he does bring to the part an almost bewildering variety of effects, a charm that may well be unrivaled in our theater and cinema, and a laudable restraint in never pulling out all the stops of his supremely powerful instrument...
...but what chance is there of a naive hairdresser like Milo Tindle (in the play, he was a travel agent...
...So, too, the first wife, here called Lila, has to be a nagging grotesque who is then turned into a pitiful victim-giving her supposed depth at the cost of simple believability...
...Add to this the tinnily tuneless melodies, the rancidly coy and pseudoprofound lyrics, and a good deal of choreographic claptrap, and you had a musical reeking of uplift like a padded bra...
...Why is Lenny, who has gone over so well with the proper Minnesotans at the wedding, suddenly left haranguing two kids who, presently, also leave...
...James Coco's Sancho is routine B-picture stuff, and the others disappear into a welter of clashing accents and acting styles...
...he kneads more than usually diverging elements into a piece of credible human clay...
...The trick-and it is a pretty feeble one in this relatively unsuccessful story-is the speed and casualness with which these bizarre yet binding events scramble on and on...
...Yet the film remains what the play was: a battle of wits in the double sense of intelligences and epigrammatists...
...One method was elaborate contrast: Jewish milieu versus wasp ambience, ridiculously downgrading the former into crassness and ridiculously upgrading the latter into snobbish prissiness...
...she always expresses...
...On stage, furthermore, the compression of a sprawling novel into a few tidy episodes almost manages to pass for theatrical convention...
...And as Sancho remonstrates, "Aldonza...
...The theater can get away with these things...
...The direction is more like that of the old Mankiewicz, respectable if not great, than that of the recent Mankiewicz, responsible for Cleopatra, The Honey Pot and Tliere Was a Crooked Man...
...So Lenny is both a bumbling Jewish comic and a determined, persistent, ungainsayable suitor-stretching ambivalence to the point of self-contradiction...
...It is especially damaging for a plot whose basic device is reversals, and which progresses by putting one switcheroo in front of the other...
...John Castle, as Sanson Carrasco, does manage to stand out a little, and there is the indestructible Sophia Loren...
...If Wasserman is trashy, Leigh monumentally unmelodious, Darion all attitudinizing doggerel, what depths are left for the director to plumb...
...Believe...
...What Friedman has written in an absurdly rushing style and preposterous foreshortening - rather like a comic film sequence in accelerated motion-is the account of how a young Jewish man dumps his unprepossessing bride in the middle of a Miami honeymoon to dally with a blonde Minnesota hoyden and, despite the opposition of the girl's staid middle-class family and all manner of complications, manages to woo and win the Midwestern nymphonly to begin, in the middle of his second wedding, to lust after his new bride's mother...
...and walks off, her shoulders bravely squared, into the twilight...
...The movie had several problems: how to fill out a story of less than ten pages...
...Wasserman's dramaturgy-to say nothing of Mitch Leigh's score and Joe Darion's lyricsal-so comes out much more wooden against real landscapes and cinematic sets that, albeit crudely, recreate actual dungeons and hostelries...
...Miss Loren's face never turns vulgar or ludicrous...
...The usual bad adaptation is like a bad marriage...
...Is it that he has bored and lost this alien world...
...Or just that when you finally possess your hard-won dream, you no longer want it...
...It does have one mildly irritating aspect: overmuch hovering on automata, figurines, moving skeletons, pictures, and various bric-a-brac Wyke has collected...
...The greatness of Cervantes' hero-if anyone needs to be reminded-lies in his ambiguity: that he himself recants in the end...
...Believe...
...It is, simply, that we are aware, however unconsciously, that in the movies it is the camera, the technology that performs the tricks, and they had better be perfect...
...And daddy - despotic, rocklike, near-incestuously adoring his girl, and adamantly opposed to Lenny-must paradoxically crumble into acquiescence the moment Lenny refuses to be bought off...
...on film, we are given complete transformations back and forth, and they alone suffice to suspend any kind of belief...
...And, though he handles accents quite well, they don't seem to come to him with ease...
...One of them, Andrew Wyke, a famous detective-story writer, might indeed be that fiendishly cunning...
...Among the many muddled things, the ending is muddiest...
...But there is also that occasional tastefully designed bauble, spreading charming, perishable joy...
...In the past...
...Upon the old knight's death, the reformed Aldonza consoles the tearful squire: "Don Alonso is not dead...
...Some attempt at an amalgam is discernible: Simon has gone relatively easy on the gags, May has slightly shortened her cabaret routines, and Friedman has been pretty much ignored...
...It gives the film an added-perhaps irrelevant, but irresistible-mythic fascination: the duel between the great stage actor and the lionized movie-star personality...
...She never merely looks...
...Even when she has to fake in singing those dreary songs, while someone else's poorly matched voice shrills out of her mouth...
...Incongruity has become rampant...
...This is meant to make the atmosphere more ominous and to introduce, as it were, further characters, even if they are mere automata or effigies...
...Another adaptation, Man of La Mancha, proves a horse, nay...
...Peter O'Toole is much too quirky, neurotically skittering an actor to convey the sweet, childlike conviction of the Don...
...Laurence Olivier makes the aging crime writer and bon vivanta man who could commit murder to maintain the illusion of his cerebral and sexual supremacyinto a bright, magnetic though mean and ridiculous, and ultimately pathetic figure...
...Sancho...
...Hiller offers mostly circular pans and extreme closeups, and has no sense of rhythm...
...dashingly thrown together are Friedman's absurdism, Elaine May's protracted monologue or duologue technique, and Neil Simon's customary farce...
...how to make its outrageous events a bit more believable to suit the more fleshed-out characters...
...finally, how to introduce a little morality into this amoral tale...
...This is good in itself, but even better when pitted against Olivier's consummate artistry...
...Moreover, scenarist and director have wisely refrained from "opening up" the play...
...But Caine has a very real charm of his own: an impudent enjoyment of his masculinity, a canny proletarian refusal to be snowed by excessive refinements, and the self-confidence of the plebeian risen by sheer shrewdness...
...The extremes of Wyke's chauvinist xenophobia have been trimmed, and such presumably eyebrow-raising lines as the one about "a passing sheep rapist" are delivered sotto voce and in long shot...
...For by now almost everyone knows the plot of Sleuth, if only by hearsay, and a known ending is as embarrassing for a thriller as the mark of Cain for a fratricide...
...In Wasserman's edulcoration, the Don not only transfigures Aldonza-Dulcinea, Sancho Panza and his own dying self, he also manages to convert a whole prisonful of assorted jailbirds-for and with whom Cervantes stages a gross oversimplification of his tale-into raring to go on the great, ennobling Quest...
...Caine is more personality than performer, has a limited emotional range, and is poor at accents-a particular minus in this part...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 1
