Sorry, Wrong Movie...

Woe to the poor young movie buff in the late-20th century, scanning the local TV guide in the hopes of stumbling across one of the classic films he'd been hankering to see for a long time. In those early-VCR/pre-TCM days, one had to become actively involved if he wished to actually see a particular movie. You had to be in front of the set at the given time and pray for no pre-emptions, power failures or static on-screen. So imagine the horror that awaited young Irvin or Marty, settling in with the 27" in his grandma's basement to catch the great 1948 classic Sorry, Wrong Number with Miss Barbara Stanwyck only to discover....

The 1989 TV-movie Sorry, Wrong Number starring Loni Anderson!

This is most likely the only time one would find Anderson and (a slumming) Hal Holbrook in the same airspace, unless perhaps it was at her then-husband Burt Reynolds' house for a dinner party! The on-screen husband in this movie, Carl Weintraub, has a considerable number of credits considering I've never heard of him before in my life! Turns out he also appeared in another one of Anderson's re-dos, Coins in the Fountain in 1990! Anderson had also done A Letter to Three Wives in 1985. The only reason I didn't put those two in this post was because I've already noted them here.

Or how about the nail-biting classic Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum, redone in 1991 with Richard Chamberlain as the sadistic phony preacher in search of some stolen loot?

This redux lacks the atmospheric direction of the great Charles Laughton, has Diana Scarwid in Shelley Winters' old role and doesn't even bother trying to cast an actress of any notoriety in Lillian Gish's part...

Now, granted, the 1965 William Castle shocker was no sterling screen classic, but it did offer the ferocious charms of Joan Crawford to help offset some of the teenage inanity on display. This 1988 remake, I Saw What You Did, offers no such recompense.

Instead the movie enlists two Carradines, Robert and David, for "star power" and hopes in vain that the two young stars (and an even younger Candace Cameron as the sibling of Shawnee Smith) can carry the rest of the dramatic load.

While we have you on the line, let's take a peek at Dial M for Murder, not the 1954 Hitchcock thriller with Ray Milland a Grace Kelly, but a 1981 remake with Christopher Plummer and Angie Dickinson.

Stepping into the roles once essayed by Bob Cummings and John Williams are Michael Parks and Anthony Quayle. (This venerable tale was done once more as a feature film with Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998 and called A Perfect Murder that time.)

Another Hitchcock movie, the revered 1954 suspense drama Rear Window, was given a redux in 1998. Now we aren't about to pick on the severely injured Christopher Reeve and actually applaud the fact that he, in his disabled state, was able to continue working as an actor and director...

However, like so many remakes of good movies, the end product just didn't quite do it. And the less said about a dressed-down Darryl Hannah in a rendition of Grace Kelly's role the better.

On paper this one looked fascinating. A remake of the 1962 Bette Davis-Joan Crawford thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with real-life sisters, Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave.

In execution it was a dour, dreary, wrong-headed mess, completely lacking the delicious tension and high-pitched emotional flourish of the original.

One nearly always thinks of Doris Day and Mary Crosby in the same vein, right? WRONG. Somehow the slinky babe whose character was responsible for seducing and shooting J.R. Ewing on Dallas wound up as the frantic target in Midnight Lace, a redo of Day's 1960 melodrama.

Stepping into Rex Harrison's (!) shoes was Gary Frank of the TV series Family.

This glitzy 1988 pairing, of Robert Wagner and Lesley-Anne Down, was brought about for the TV remake of 1958's Indiscreet.

The original got by on it's star power (no less than Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman), not on it's thin story of forbidden romance. So this pale imitation really didn't stand much of a chance from the get-go.

If Wagner and Down in any way fell short of Grant and Bergman, imagine John Shea and Jenny Robertson stepping into the pair's shoes for a 1992 remake of one of their more enduring works, 1946's Notorious!

This time, once again, someone was doing over a Hitchcock film that had been a tremendous hit. WHO was even asking for these pale remakes?!

At least this one, 1984's Sentimental Journey, was a remake of a film that wasn't exactly a blockbuster the first time around (in 1946, with Maureen O'Hara and John Payne.) Here, Jaclyn Smith and David Dukes played a married couple faced with the oncoming death of the wife.

Smith insists upon adopting a young boy (a girl in the original) so that Dukes will have someone on-hand to love after she's gone (this was pre-Tinder and possibly even pre-Great Expectations dating service?) Smith later did a lacking remake of 1950's Three Secrets in 1999.

This one was rough. 1985's The Bad Seed was a remake of the 1956 camp classic that had netted Oscar nominations for several of its participants. This pallid, pastel update starred Blair Brown and an utterly resistible Carrie Wells as the title figure.

In Henry Jones' old role of the skeptical and cantankerous handyman, David Carradine took over. Lynn Redgrave also appeared as the smothering landlady (only in this instance, bedecked in horrible '80s clothing, including some gaudy aerobic gear!)

Now the 1939 film Jamaica Inn (yet another Hitchcock redo) was not exactly an indelible classic (in fact, it's the one sound film of Hitch's that I've never been able to get all the way through), so perhaps this 1983 one isn't all bad.

One thing going for it is the fact that Jane Seymour (in Maureen O'Hara's old role) was often highly watchable during this part of her career. Also, apart from Patrick McGoohan in Charles Laughton's part, the movie boasted some great character actors like Peter Vaughan and Billie Whitelaw, so this one might be worth a look.

Jane was back at it the following year, this time in a double dose, for Dark Mirror (the TV title eliminated the "The" no matter what this artwork says), a remake of the 1946 Olivia de Havilland thriller The Dark Mirror.

In the 1980s, pre-Dr. Quinn, Seymour was an EXCEPTIONAL bad girl in a slew of projects, the highlight of which was East of Eden (a remake done as a miniseries.) This movie was a camp hoot but, since it costars Stephen Collins, it isn't likely to be popping up a lot on the tube.

Still going "dark" for a moment, I give you 1976's Dark Victory, starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Anthony Hopkins! Note the way the advertising imposes a smiling, long-haired Montgomery over the short-haired photo of her after enduring a brain tumor removal. What the hell were they thinking? "Samantha Stevens Does Cancer?"

This was one of several serious telefilms that Montgomery made in the wake of Bewitched to reinvent her screen persona and avoid being typecast as a sitcom spellbinder. Note Michele Lee in the inset as her best friend. It may have been an okay film (I don't recall seeing it), though I doubt it made anyone forget Bette Davis' famous 1939 tearjerker!

Christmas is nearly upon us, so I may as well begin to wrap things up in that vein. You say you don't recall 1977's It Happened One Christmas ever being a feature film beforehand? Well, you'd be right if you were going strictly by the title...

The story, however, was a re-envisioning of 1946's immortal It's a Wonderful Life, which starred James Stewart and Donna Reed. Here, we have Marlo Thomas as their grown daughter, about to commit suicide off the side of a bridge until an angel (Cloris Leachman) comes to save her. So it's both a distaff remake and a continuation all in one!  (Or to some, a rip-off!)

I end for good with one more television remake, this time of the musical Kismet (filmed sans music in 1944 with Ronald Coleman and Marlene Dietrich and then in its musicalized form in 1955 with Howard Keel, Ann Blyth and Dolores Gray.)  Here, the headliner is Jose Ferrer.

You see, I promised I Dream of Jeannie's Barbara Eden that she could have equal time with Bewitched's Elizabeth Montgomery. Here she is in yet another belly-baring, Arabian-flavored role! (And don't miss her shirtless pal in the background.)

In fact, that's a great place to end this post. It's getting warm in here! This might be one occasion in which the remake is (in at least one way) more "entertaining" than the original. We know there are more of these (Tuesday Weld's 1981 take on Madame X comes to mind), so share any recollections you might have if you wish!

Still Quoting....!

"When I worked on The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), Vanessa Redgrave tried to convert me to a form of communism, Trotskyism, whatever the hell it is. Talented broad, but everyone ducked behind a camera when she came around. I asked her, 'Vanessa can you shoot a pistol?' 'Why?' 'Well, when the revolution comes...' 'No, no,' she interrupted. 'Someone else will do that.' Some Trotskyite. She travels by Rolls Royce." - ROBERT DUVALL on VANESSA REDGRAVE

"Then, I thought to myself, 'Darn it, maybe I can't do what Vanessa Redgrave can, but can Vanessa Redgrave do what I can do? Who's kidding who here? - RAQUEL WELCH on VANESSA REDGRAVE

"What seemed like such a nice, simple, artless performance in Superman (1978) was the finest kind of acting. Reeve's timing-and humor-has to be just about perfect to make the character come off." - director SIDNEY LUMET on CHRISTOPHER REEVE (who he directed in Deathtrap (1982.)

"It was my father who told me I should develop my body seeing as how I wasn't born with much of a brain an' it was the only thing I had to fall back on. Then I saw Steve Reeves an' I thought, 'Jesus, anybody can go to school an' become a lawyer, but I wanna be able to pull down a temple, shift a bridge, take on a whole Roman army. ...That's a man to me.'" - SYLVESTER STALLONE on STEVE REEVES

"It's the man's tremendous wit that just keeps coming across. Listen, there's no acting style. Most people just play themselves. Spencer Tracy used to say to me after a scene, 'Did I ham that one up?' If I said yes, he'd say, 'Okay, let's do it again.' There's that same honesty in Burt Reynolds. He's a throwback to the old school." - MYRNA LOY on BURT REYNOLDS (whose mother she played in The End, 1978.)

"He is the one the ladies like to dance with and their husbands like to drink with. He is the larger-than-life actor of our times. He is gifted, talented, naughty-but nice." - FRANK SINATRA on BURT REYNOLDS (and in whose Cannonball Run II, 1982, he appeared.)

"Burt has a quality that nobody else has. He's funny, sexy, glib, likeable and still very macho. But Burt tries to be all things to all people... He thinks that unless he's doing...intense dramatic work-then he's not an actor. But I don't think he's comfortable with that kind of intense emotional revealing. He doesn't like to reveal himself that way in life, yet he's mad at himself because he can't do that on the screen." SALLY FIELD (one-time romantic partner and costar in Smokey and the Bandit, 1977, The End, 1978, Hooper, 1978, and Smokey and the Bandit II, 1980) on BURT REYNOLDS in 1985.)

"She's one of the reasons I left show business... We'd give her a new scene, and she couldn't remember the lines. She couldn't sing and, surprisingly, she couldn't do the dances. And all through the horror of it all she was smiling and grinning and unreal. There's no denying her appeal to the public. That's what makes her so dangerous. She almost smiled me into bankruptcy." - PAUL GREGORY (producer of the 1959 musical The Pink Jungle, which closed prior to its scheduled 1960 Broadway opening and involved at least seven Actors Equity motions) on GINGER ROGERS

"Don't let her fool you. Tangle with her and she'll shingle your attic." BOB HOPE on JANE RUSSELL (his costar in The Paleface, 1948, and Son of Paleface, 1952.)

"...One of the best actors alive. But my opinion of him as an actor is much higher than my opinion of him as a man." - JOHN HUSTON on GEORGE C. SCOTT (who he directed three times in The List of Adrian Messenger, 1963, The Last Run, 1971, and The Bible: In the Beginning, 1966, the last of which included a booze-fueled relationship with Ava Gardner in which Scott reportedly beat her to the point of hospitalization.)

"But everything [on High, Wide and Handsome, 1937] became a little bit brighter when I got to know Randolph Scott, one of the finest men in Hollywood... Now a retired millionaire, he's still as handsome as he was in 1937, totally charming and loads of fun." DOROTHY LAMOUR on RANDOLPH SCOTT

"Randy Scott is a complete anachronism. He's a gentleman. And so far, he's the only one I've met in this business full of self-promoting sons-of-bitches." - director MICHAEL CURTIZ on RANDOLPH SCOTT (who he directed in Virginia City, 1940.)

"I think his mother had gained such an incredible influence over him that he virtually abdicated his own rights to any individual personality... Finally, he had to invade other bodies to register at all. He had to inhabit, he was like a ghoul, he had to feast off somebody else! But he did it so well, it became an art. He was not a genius, Sellers, he was a freak." - SPIKE MILLIGAN on PETER SELLERS (his frequent stage, television and movie cohort.)

"Talk about unprofessional rat finks." - BILLY WILDER on PETER SELLERS (who Wilder directed, uncredited, in Casino Royale, 1967.)

"Norma, who I have always like and got along with, was at notorious loggerheads with Joan [Crawford.] You see, she was treated as Queen of the Lot because of her marriage to the boss, Irving Thalberg. Joan had made a lot of money for the company, and I imagine that's what annoyed both of them; it was a competition of who was really the Queen of the Lot." ROSALIND RUSSELL on NORMA SHEARER and JOAN CRAWFORD (all three stars of The Women, 1939.)

"And you can tell Miss Shearer that I didn't get where I am on my ass." - JOAN CRAWFORD on NORMA SHEARER (to the press.)