DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Enjoyable remake of BEDTIME STORY with only minor variations. The contest for ascendency between two gigolos still makes a very funny comedy, perhaps more so because it has less competition than the story had in 1964. It is much like seeing a new production of a play you once enjoyed. It loses a point for borrowing so but from the original but still rates a +1.
Back in 1964 Ralph Levy, a television director, made the first of only two theatrical films he was to make before returning to television. BEDTIME STORY was for the time a minor and somewhat fluffy comedy about two gigolos' contest to see which one would have to leave a French Riviera town too small to support more than one gigolo. There was Lawrence, played by David Niven, who had made Beaumont-sur-Mer his private hunting ground for finding rich women to fleece. And then there was Freddy, a brash young American soldier with no respect for the culture and no affection for the women he was preying on. Freddy was one of Marlon Brando's most memorable roles and perhaps the only time Brando ever got to play broad comedy. And Brando was hilarious throughout the film, but particularly when Freddy was pretending to be Ruprecht, who was the retarded product of too much inbreeding of nobility.
With only minor changes to most of the script--if memory serves, most of the film even has the same dialogue--the script has been effectively recycled to make DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS. BEDTIME STORY's script was by Stanley Shapiro (who also produced that film) and Paul Henning. DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS' executive producer Dale Launer cut some scenes (including a few of the better gags), rewrote the ending, and put his name in front of the other two for screen credit. The story remains the same. Whoever can be the first to charm $50,000 from visiting soap queen Janet earns the right to rule the roost in Beaumont-sur-Mer. The loser must leave town. The new director, Frank Oz, does little with the principle characters that Levy did not. Michael Caine, the new Lawrence, plays his role surprisingly David- Niven-ish, right down to the thin moustache. Frank Oz seems to have known what he wanted from the part but his ideas were formed by seeing the earlier film. Steve Martin puts a little more of his own interpretation into Freddy, but in places like the Ruprecht scenes he is more mimicking Brando than creating his own character.
What is surprising about seeing the remake is how good the writing seems to be today. In 1964 one would have hardly considered BEDTIME STORY to have had a really well-crafted script. Yet today that same script seems to be much closer to the caliber of A FISH CALLED WANDA than to that of BEETLEJUICE or SCROOGED. It deals in genuinely funny situations, not just funny personalities. What was ordinary writing in 1964 is well above average in 1988. Had this been a completely original script, DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS would have gotten an easy +2. As it stands it still gets a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzz!leeper
leeper%mtgzz@att.arpa
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews