Post by Eddie Love on Nov 13, 2010 22:13:00 GMT -5
If you’re like me, when you think of Hammer Films the mind conjures up images of Christopher Lee! Peter Cushing! Cybil Shepherd!...Okay, maybe you don’t think of Cybil right away. But, until this upcoming slate of new Hammer pictures comes out, she starred in the last film that the studio released. It was the garish, wholly unnecessary remake of Hitchcock’s pristine masterwork THE LADY VANISHES. Is it bad? Sure. Is it unwatchable? Okay, maybe not completely.
The classic storyline remains the same. A young woman strikes up a friendship with a tweedy Englishwoman on a train traveling through Europe on the eve of war. When the young woman awakens from a nap, not only can the older woman not be found, her fellow passengers deny she was ever on board the train. With the help of a young man with whom she initially had an antagonistic relationship, she tries to find her friend.
The principal changes in the script seem to be designed to make the film’s heroine aggressively unlikable, and in this the filmmakers and their star succeed. In the original she’s a high-spirited, but sensible young woman. Here she’s a braying loudmouth. No longer a young Englishwoman on holiday she is now an American and a much-married, madcap heiress. We know this because she introduces herself as “a much-married, madcap heiress.” Shepherd’s a lovely woman, but she comes off as really unattractive. She seems to have no consciousness of her own affect at all. She doesn’t move with any elegance and is louder than all the other actors. Never a great talent, she was later able to dial it back with some mature sophistication on Moonlighting. Watching this, you understand the reputation that series rehabilitated.
Angela Lansbury plays the title role and Elliot Gould (?!?) plays our hero. He’s better than Shepherd, but miscast. Towards the end of the film when he’s supposed to spring into action as a resourceful lead, he takes on this discordant Bob Hope type shtick of bumbling cowardice.
The story-line stays essentially the same, although with some odd changes. In the original, the heroine seems to question her own sanity, Shepherd not at all. Also, she’s all over Gould pretty early on, so the delightful romantic tension of the original is gone. (Plus the two have no chemistry.) But most of all, the film includes a scene towards the beginning where the principals all take a bus to the train station where we see Gould and Lansbury sitting right near each other. There are fewer than ten people on this bus, so the notion that her very existence would later be questioned is ridiculous.
The rest of the cast is fine for the most part, but I found Lansbury too broad. Meanwhile, the scene-stealing Englishmen abroad played by Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne in the first film, so memorable they were to appear together often afterwards, are here played by Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael, and the two are so low-key, they barely register. The only member of the cast I particularly liked was the inimitable Herbert Lom as the doctor who aids our heroes.
Typical for Hammer this is an admirably lavish production and with an ambitious and lush musical score. It didn’t bore or appall me when I watched it, but I have no earthly clue why it was made. If you’re going to take on the task of re-making a film that was perfect, and you aren’t upping the ante cast-wise, it seems to me you need to add some flavor to the story or setting. Here, they replicate the film’s setting in the 1930s, although closer to the actual outbreak of WWII and the Nazis are explicitly the villains. But they also add some odd motivations for some of the heavies that I never got straight, nor could I tell how it factored into the abduction of Lansbury. It you must remake something like this, why not go all out and update it (ala THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE) rather than attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the original which seems an impossible task.
The classic storyline remains the same. A young woman strikes up a friendship with a tweedy Englishwoman on a train traveling through Europe on the eve of war. When the young woman awakens from a nap, not only can the older woman not be found, her fellow passengers deny she was ever on board the train. With the help of a young man with whom she initially had an antagonistic relationship, she tries to find her friend.
The principal changes in the script seem to be designed to make the film’s heroine aggressively unlikable, and in this the filmmakers and their star succeed. In the original she’s a high-spirited, but sensible young woman. Here she’s a braying loudmouth. No longer a young Englishwoman on holiday she is now an American and a much-married, madcap heiress. We know this because she introduces herself as “a much-married, madcap heiress.” Shepherd’s a lovely woman, but she comes off as really unattractive. She seems to have no consciousness of her own affect at all. She doesn’t move with any elegance and is louder than all the other actors. Never a great talent, she was later able to dial it back with some mature sophistication on Moonlighting. Watching this, you understand the reputation that series rehabilitated.
Angela Lansbury plays the title role and Elliot Gould (?!?) plays our hero. He’s better than Shepherd, but miscast. Towards the end of the film when he’s supposed to spring into action as a resourceful lead, he takes on this discordant Bob Hope type shtick of bumbling cowardice.
The story-line stays essentially the same, although with some odd changes. In the original, the heroine seems to question her own sanity, Shepherd not at all. Also, she’s all over Gould pretty early on, so the delightful romantic tension of the original is gone. (Plus the two have no chemistry.) But most of all, the film includes a scene towards the beginning where the principals all take a bus to the train station where we see Gould and Lansbury sitting right near each other. There are fewer than ten people on this bus, so the notion that her very existence would later be questioned is ridiculous.
The rest of the cast is fine for the most part, but I found Lansbury too broad. Meanwhile, the scene-stealing Englishmen abroad played by Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne in the first film, so memorable they were to appear together often afterwards, are here played by Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael, and the two are so low-key, they barely register. The only member of the cast I particularly liked was the inimitable Herbert Lom as the doctor who aids our heroes.
Typical for Hammer this is an admirably lavish production and with an ambitious and lush musical score. It didn’t bore or appall me when I watched it, but I have no earthly clue why it was made. If you’re going to take on the task of re-making a film that was perfect, and you aren’t upping the ante cast-wise, it seems to me you need to add some flavor to the story or setting. Here, they replicate the film’s setting in the 1930s, although closer to the actual outbreak of WWII and the Nazis are explicitly the villains. But they also add some odd motivations for some of the heavies that I never got straight, nor could I tell how it factored into the abduction of Lansbury. It you must remake something like this, why not go all out and update it (ala THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE) rather than attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the original which seems an impossible task.
