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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 7, No. 11 |
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CLASSIC MYSTERIES
At right, Jacqueline Bisset in the Farley Granger role in TV's remake of Hitchcock's "Strangers On A Train." |
POE, HIGHSMITH NOT SERVED WELL BY TV
of TheColumnists.com
Over the last 20
years, television has been the Promised Land for mystery fans
who want to see some of their favorite mystery stories dramatized
on the screen. Movie studios seldom make mystery feature films
anymore, so TV’s steady appetite for them is usually cause
for celebration.
But every now and then TV decides to adapt a golden mystery classic
for the tube--and somehow comes up with something embarrassing,
if not plain awful.
Consider these two prime examples of classics that TV really
botched bigtime:
* MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
(1986)
The original 1841 short story was a milestone in the history
of the mystery genre because Poe gave readers the first fictional
detective--Auguste Dupin--and, so doing, set down many of the
“rules of the genre” that other mystery writers, including
Arthur Conan Doyle, would follow for years to come.
Poe’s Dupin is an eccentric young man from a once illustrious
family, reduced to poverty when the story begins. The story‘s
narrator, presumably Poe himself, befriends Dupin during a visit
to Paris in the early 19th century. Together they share “a
time-eaten and grotesque mansion” that has been deserted
for years because of “superstitions into which we did not
inquire.”
Dupin likes to stay home behind heavy drapes all day, reading
and sleeping. At night, he likes to roam the streets of Paris
with his new friend, the narrator, who serves the function that
Dr. Watson would serve in Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes stories
a few decades later.
When Dupin learns of the savage murders of two women in the Rue
Morgue district of Paris, he and his friend visit the crime scene.
By analyzing the clues left behind, Dupin eventually concludes
these “locked room” murders were committed by an orangutan
that had escaped from the care of its owner, a sailor.
In several earlier feature film versions of the famous story,
the writers weren’t satisfied to just have Dupin cleverly
solve the mystery. They insisted on more. In the 1932 "Murders
in the Rue Morgue" and the 1954 version called "Phantom
of the Rue Morgue," the writers reduced Dupin to a supporting
player and made up two new main characters--both of them “mad
scientists” (Bela Lugosi, in 1932, Karl Malden in 1954),
who used an ape to commit murders at their command.
But the 1986 CBS TV movie didn’t stoop to the mad scientist
gimmick. This was to be a classy production, actually filmed
on location in France, giving it a rather rich period feeling.
But look what they did to poor Dupin:
When we first meet him in the movie, he’s no longer a brilliantly
eccentric young Frenchman with daring new theories about crime
scene analysis. Instead, he’s now a retired, middle-aged
French police inspector. Worse yet, he‘s played by overweight,
aging Oscar-winning actor George C. Scott, who seemed about as
French as Gen. George Patton on a weekend furlough in Paris.
Scott’s Dupin has a beautiful young daughter named Claire
(Rebecca DeMornay) who becomes romantically involved with a young
man named Philippe, played by Val Kilmer. If you are familiar
with DeMornay and Kilmer, you will know that they are seldom
mistaken for Parisians. And, by the way, Poe never heard of either
character.
Because the Prefect of Police (Ian McShane) believes a young
man named Adolphe Le Bon (Neil Dickson) may be the killer, Claire
Dupin goads her father into getting involved in the murder investigation
in order to clear the innocent Le Bon.
Le Bon is in the original story and the movie Dupin eventually
figures out who the real culprit is by pretty much the same route
he used in Poe’s story. But nearly everything else in the
movie was whipped up out of whole cloth by screenwriter David
Epstein.
Did we really need Dupin to have a sexy young daughter and a
clean-cut Yankee-looking beau? Did we need a cast of Americans
and Brits, plunked down in a Paris where all the signs on stores
are, unaccountably, in English? Did we want an old and fat Dupin
whose only eccentricity was his American accent? I think not.
* ONCE YOU MEET A STRANGER
(1996)
This is a 1996 CBS TV movie version of
Patricia Highsmith’s"Strangers On A Train." The
best-selling 1949 novel is about up and coming architect Guy
Haines, who’s trying to divorce his vulgar and promiscuous
wife, Miriam, so he can marry Anne, the decent, high-class woman
he really loves. On a commuter train, Guy’s approached by
Charles Anthony Bruno, a heavy-drinker with a twisted psyche.
Bruno hates his father and wants him dead, so he chats Guy up
and proposes they “swap murders.” Bruno will kill Miriam
if Guy will kill Bruno’s father. With no apparent motives
for either killer, the police will be baffled by the two murders,
Bruno explains. Meanwhile, Bruno and Guy will be free to establish
unshakeable alibis.
Guy doesn’t really take Bruno seriously, but then Bruno
actually murders Miriam and shows up, demanding Guy fulfill his
end of their “bargain.”
When Alfred Hitchcock filmed the novel in 1951, he made wholesale
changes in Highsmith’s story, making Guy a famous tennis
player, totally altering the murder plot and inventing an action
finale with the two men battling to the death on an out-of-control
merry-go-round.
That was nothing compared to what screenwriter Whitfield Cook
and director Tommy Lee Wallace did with Highsmith’s story
in their 1996 TV version, "Once You Meet A Stranger."
Take the case of this major switch: Architect Guy Haines becomes
former TV child star Sheila Gaines (Jacqueline Bisset) and Charles
Anthony Bruno becomes crazed superfan Margo Anthony (Theresa
Russell)! That’s right: Two male characters become female
characters. That meant sex changes all through the cast of characters.
Margo wants her “mother” killed instead of a father
while Sheila has a husband who’s become expendable.
Rather than adapt the novel, it seems Cook adapted the script
of the Hitchcock movie instead, trying to find parallels to many
famous Hitchcock scenes that were never in the book. A fine example:
The merry-go-round finale. Cook and Wallace stayed away from
merry-go-rounds, but used a revolving wheel of lights at a disco
to jazz up their finale.
A central theme in Highsmith’s book--that even a reasonably
stable, normal person can commit murder under certain circumstances--was
totally lost in this absurd update on her story. It also gave
director Wallace the chance to demonstrate he’s no Hitchcock.
As for the undercurrents of Bruno’s homosexual attraction
to Guy that were in Highsmith’s book, but not so evident
in Hitchcock’s film, they may or may not be present in "Once
You Meet A Stranger." Sure, Theresa Russell does give Jackie
Bisset the occasional smoldering look, but that was just acting
ala Russell in the 1990s, when she was one of the screen’s
naughtiest leading ladies and even gave the kitchen sink smoldering
looks.
Here's some additional bad news for fans of "Strangers On A Train": It's being remade this year as a feature film.
On the whole, TV generally does right by even the most complex mysteries. But before we pat the networks on the back and tell them “job well done,” it might be prudent to remember these two woeful examples of how to botch a mystery classic.
©2006 by Ron Miller.
This column first posted Feb. 27, 2006.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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