Cinema
Maverick (`PG', selected cinemas)
A poor game of charades
Mark Steyn
Sick of all those repeats on television? Then why not go to the movies and see, urn, The Beverly Hillbillies? The current line-up of big screen attractions looks like the re-runs you wouldn't mind watching if you were in a motel room in Des Moines, it was 4 am. and the only other channel had a tele-evangelist hitting you for a $90 Last Supper dinette set. In Hollywood, money talks but it won't sit down at a typewriter and tap out a script. So, when the studios and stars and agents and directors have done lunch and done their deals, the one missing ingredient is the story. This has always been a lazy adaptation-inclined medium: in the Thirties, Hollywood bought up the proven hit titles of middlebrow liter- ature — The Prisoner of Zenda, Anne of Green Gables; now, no one reads, so they're pillaging our only surefire common culture, baby boom television. Trains, Planes and Automobiles got it right a few years back, when Steve Martin and John Candy hop a Greyhound and try to get a community sing-song going. Steve Martin tries a little Cole Porter and the other pas- sengers write him off as a fancy-pants showtoon faggott; John Candy offers the theme to The Flintstones and within sec- onds the whole bus is bellowing along: `Have a yabba-dabba-doo time! A dabba- doo time! You'll have a gay old time!' You can tell everything about the new multi- million dollar live-action version from the theme song: the natural swing of the origi- nal Hanna-Barbara session singers has been replaced by the plodding, mechanical beat of the 1352s' rock cover version — cal- culated, pre-programmed, relentless.
Funnily enough, the more 'Steven Spiel- rock' (which, funnily enough, isn't funny enough) throws his millions at the screen the more the players look as if they're just playing charades on a rainy afternoon in the front room. Perhaps it would have been different with more intense actors like De Niro or Hoffman: 'This Fred Flintstone guy, how do I get under his skin?"Er, he's a cartoon, Dustin. You could try lying down in an artist's desk drawer between 14,000,000 other animated cell drawings.' But, even then, you'd still be unlikely to merit the proprietorial confidence beloved by movie trailers: 'Arnold Schwarzenegger is the Terminator!' but neither John Good- man nor anybody else will ever be Fred Flintstone. Unlike books, these television adaptations have to cope with the fact that the originals are still going out night after night. Even with Maverick, by far the remotest of the titles (it ended on ABC in 1961), James Canter briefly returned to the role of the cowboy gambler as recently as 1981.
Hollywood's solution to this problem is to stick the original television stars in the movie in supporting parts, just to remind you how much better they were than the upstarts who've usurped them. So, in Mav- erick, Garner turns up not in the title role but as an elderly lawman, his effortless lazy charm a sharp rebuke to Mel Gibson's frantic mugging. In The Flintstones, the real Fred — that's to say, a Hanna-Barbara drawing — is seen on the front page of the Bedrock newspaper, and you realise how much you miss the original's crude drawn- on five o'clock shadow. Most confusing of all, in The Beverly Hillbillies, Buddy Ebsen, who played the newly oil-rich Jed Clampett in the original sitcom, does a one-scene guest shot as television detective Barnaby Jones, and thereby ensures himself a foot- note in motion picture history: he's the first actor to play his 1970s television char- acter in a 1990s remake of his 1960s "Poled timming for our delayed flight" television series.
If you can follow that last sentence, you'll appreciate how tricky these adaptations can be. There's an innocence about these Sixties television shows that's hard to cap- ture and harder to update. This time, when the Clampetts strike oil and move from Arkansas to California, they invite 'Cousin Bill' over to see them; cue shot of the White House. Unfortunately, Clinton's trailer-trash Presidency is funnier than any- thing in the movie, and, in updating the joke, you make it false: today's Clampetts wouldn't go anywhere near Beverly Hills; who wants to wind up like Jacko or 0. J? Instead, all the film stars want to live on ranches in Montana: now there's a movie. Recently, one of Eddie Murphy's directors came looking for property in my part of New Hampshire. My friend Martha the realtor showed him around for a few days and then decided she didn't want to sell him a house and didn't want him in the neighbourhood: he was too weird.
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