BEAU GESTE

Universal's re-remake of Beau Geste, the venerable P. C. Wren tale of derring-do and swashbucklery at Fort Zinderneuf, will no doubt be summarily dismissed by the "serious" critics of cinema, both here and abroad. Such dismissal is not entirely unjustified. It is a well that has long-since run dry. But in the interests of fair play and offbeat comments guaranteed to startle, this reviewer would like to dwell on four points. Perhaps someone will take note.

First. This started out as a well-done version of the hoary old story of the brothers who wind up in the command of a sadistic Foreign Legion sergeant. It was a gratuitously emasculated version of the original story, done brilliantly not once, but twice before. One entire brother was omitted, the theft of the jewel was omitted, plot twists were omitted en masse. But nonetheless, it held the interest. It was nicely mounted. Until Doug McClure walked on the screen. Everyone in the theater laughed. Now before there is instant assumption that I am going to pan McClure, let me assure the readership that he performed more than adequately. He did all that could be done with the part doled out to him, a role whose dimensions were as vast as the horizon line in Bosnia. But McClure was laughed at. People smiled as he tended the sick brother lying in his bunk. They snickered and found the corners of their mouths turning up. It ruined the mood of the story. The reason for this unrestrained mirth contains a key to the senseless casting currently being done at Universal, and it contains a dire warning to either Mr. McClure or his agent, since his studio obviously cannot see what is right in front of them.

McClure is the most natural, most certain, most exquisite comedic talent to come along since Cary Grant grew gray in the service. He is what Rod Taylor has tried to be, what James Garner has failed miserably at being, what Tony Randall grows too raucous really ever to be, what Jack Lemmon does very well indeed. He is a funny man. A handsome, athletic, all-around leading man with a built-in laughmaker. When McClure walks onscreen, people sit up and want to laugh. To cast him in deadly serious roles where his grimacing and Superman good looks are incongruous is in the nature of a capital crime.

Had Universal one whit the intelligence they pretend to possess, they would launch McClure instantly in a series of big-budget sophisticated comedies, sit back and rake in the dividends. A word to the wise . . .

Second. The film inevitably falls before the derision of the audience, because it is fifty years out-of-date. It devolves on points of "old school tie" honor, of stiff-necked patriotism to hollow causes, of the sort of "into the valley of death" horse manure no audience of 1966 is going to accept. Not when they are faced full daily with a dirty, and some say immoral, war on the front pages of their newspapers. No one is going to accept the nobility of dying in the saddle (a scene Leslie Nielsen, who is far better than that, should have refused to play) when they can see newsphotos of bombed-out schools and churches with innocent civilians napalmed and disemboweled. No one really believes, any longer, that war is noble, that the esprit de corps is excuse for atrocity and stupidity and following atrocious, stupid rules of combat. Which brings us inescapably to the most important point about this film, which is

Third. The practice—often lamented in these pages—of remaking films that were made as classics originally. Stagecoach, She, Room for One More, Mutiny on the Bounty, Rashomon, and now Beau Geste: each of these was made the first time out as well as it could ever be made. Each has had a new edition released in the last few years and each one, without exception, has been an artistic disaster. The strangling stench of venality behind these remakes is so gagging that only the horse-blindered producers who have fostered them could hope to accept the hypocrisy of their being brought into being. And only these same men could hope to swallow the rationalizations used to ballyhoo weak excuses for their latest incarnations.

If the film industry does not stop this ceaseless, senseless cannibalization of its own body, it will disenchant the filmgoing audience beyond hope of recall. How much longer can audiences be expected to swallow the patent lies of four-color lithography and slanted Coming Attractions? How much longer can people be expected to invest their trust, their ticket money, their time and their sense of wonder in shabby redone warhorses butchered by second-rate visionaries? What dreadful ghouls imagine they can match the marvels wrought for us first time out by Kurosawa, Ford, Laughton, Gable, John Wayne or Thomas Mitchell? What front-office callousness can be deemed even remotely acceptable for the production of inferior versions of treasured classics held dear in memory by movie lovers; films whose discovery by younger generations has been irrevocably lost or mutilated by the release of witless surrogates, merely for the money to be gained from a shameful resort to the reputation of the former version?

It is a disgrace the industry continues to flaunt in the faces of cinemaphiles who have deplored it for many years.

And fourth. Sympathy is herewith extended to Nielsen, McClure, Guy Stockwell, Telly Savalas and a fine supporting cast, who have been made to play a microcephalically written screenplay of sheerest ineptitude. The clichés roll off the typewriter of this film's Phantom Author like squares of toilet paper.

There are few excuses suitable for a scenarist who has turned out a script of this caliber. If he is a wise man he will spread the rumor that he was hammerstunned drunk throughout the entire period of scripting. In which case someone ought to offer him a better grade of panther sweat.

Cinema / December 1966