Sequels, Remakes, and Reboots Part III: Sequels

Of the three things being discussed in this series, sequels are generally speaking the hardest to come to a vague defense of.  And yet, they've been around for decades to say nothing of centuries. The biggest argument against them is that they seem to be nothing more than a money grab. But, truth to tell, one can say that of almost any commercial endeavor, especially in regards to movies. Movies are a business, after all, something most people forget.

While we like to think of sequels as being of relatively recent vintage, they really aren't. They stretch back to at least the 1910s. But back then, nobody just numbered the films. One of the early examples of a sequel comes, fittingly enough, from the serial format. The first serial was done in 1912, called What Happened to Mary?. It was a success--as well as being one of the early movie tie-ins where a novelization was done in serial format in the newspapers--and inspired a second serial called Who Will Marry Mary?. Admittedly, neither one of those sounds like an edge of your seat cliffhanger, but then again, it took a couple of years for the serial format to really develop into that. That wasn't the only serial from the era to gain a sequel. 1916's Pearl White thriller The Exploits of Elaine got one called The Romance of Elaine.

Of course, I'm just speaking cinematically. You can take it back a lot farther than 1913. In fact, you can take the numbered sequel routine back to a guy whose name may or may not have actually been William Shakespeare. Seems he did a few Part 1 and Part 2 type plays back in the day. In fact, you can take it father back than that to the Greeks, with the Thebes plays by Sophocles and The Illiad and The Odyssey. "Yes, but those are classics" you may be saying. They're classics now, but they were pop entertainment--in particular Shakespeare's work--in their day.

Sequels proliferated in novel format once the printing press was invented. Accordingly, a number of said sequels were essentially repeats of the novel that preceded them. Sound familiar? This was done mostly to assert the author's ownership over the properties.

The point is, this sort of thing has literally gone on for centuries and isn't likely to change any time soon.

Up until about the 1970s, however, sequels--or at least movie sequels--tried to tell somewhat different stories and have completely different titles. The sequel to the 1931 Frankenstein wasn't called Frankenstein 2, it was called The Bride of Frankenstein. While some of the nuts and bolts of the story were similar, it also wasn't a direct repeat of the first movie, either. Not even serials told the same exact story or numbered their sequels.

There were a couple of examples of sequels being numbered prior to the 1970s--Quatermass 2 from 1957 being possibly the earliest example--but starting in that decade, the floodgates started to open. While both The Godfather Part II and The French Connection II were both considered better than their respective first movies, they also seemed to help get the trend of numbering started. The Exorcist II, Rocky II and Jaws 2 followed by the end of the decade. Then came the 1980s.

For reasons that film historians will be debating 100 years from now, if they're not already debating it, the sequel concept really caught fire in the 80s. It mostly seems to have started off with the slasher film. 1981 brought us both Halloween II and Friday the 13th Part 2, both of which were just sucessful enough for the studios to ensure that we'd be spending much of the decade watching their spawn. Sequel after sequel to those and other horror franchises followed and so long as they made a profit, they kept getting made. Comedies--most notably raunchy juvenile comedies like Porky's and Meatballs started getting in on the act as did action movies. The single biggest problem with a large number of these is the fact that they really did simply repeat the first movie--and nowhere near as well. I enjoyed the first two Police Academy films when I was a teenager but quickly abandoned the series after the third film when I realized that not only did it suck, but it simply repeated all the jokes in the first two. Mind you, this is coming from someone who didn't always have the greatest of taste in movies when he was a teenager.

The trend was so bad by 1983 that Siskel and Ebert's "Worst of the Year" show for that year was dedicated to nothing but sequels. I have to admit, there were some pretty wretched sequels unleashed on the public that year. They highlighted such rotten sequels as The Sting II, Staying Alive--the sequel to Saturday Night Fever and the only film on the list of sequels to not have a number--, Smokey and the Bandit 3, Jaws 3-D (which I kinda like even though it is a bad movie), and Amityville 3-D. At the end of the show, they implored audiences to not watch any sequels unless they said so.

I will be fair to the 80s, however. There were some sequels that were very good in that decade, mostly in the science fiction genre. I'm not sure what it is about science fiction, but the sequels to sci-fi movies are rarely dumb repeats. The Star Wars and Star Trek sequels are all fairly decent. Even the "bad" entries in those series are better than most comedy and slasher sequels. I'm sorry, but I'd rather watch the much hated Star Trek V: The Final Frontier than the same numbered Nightmare on Elm Street or Police Academy movies. None of the 80s Indiana Jones movies--even the much maligned Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom--are bad movies either. Continuing with the sci-fi theme, Aliens was also an excellent sequel. We just won't talk about the 90s Alien movies.

Part of the problem, which again goes back to the 70s, is that following the law of diminishing returns, sequels got lower and lower budgets as the series went on. The original Planet of the Apes series is a prime example of this. The excellent make up jobs on all of the apes in the first film gave way to bad Halloween masks in later entries. The diminishing budgets may not be as evident in comedies like the Revenge of the Nerds series, but it comes up front and center in an effects heavy series like Superman. The budget and effects for the notorious Supergirl and Superman IV were so bad that they killed the series until the 2000s.

Lately, however, that doesn't necessarily follow. Movies are trying to put more money into the sequel, to make it bigger and more spectacular than the film that came before. Sometimes that pays off. A fairly surprising source of good sequels nowadays seems to be in the comic book genre. With the exceptions of a few notable missteps like X-Men III--a movie I truly regret seeing--the comic book genre has really stepped up. The latest Thor and Iron Man movies were, if not better than their predecessors, at least as good as. Spider-Man 2 and X2 were also better sequels. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy got better as it went along.  In the coming months we'll have sequels to both Captain America and X-Men that both look like they should be good. Again, like Sci-Fi movies, the thing that these newer comic book movies have going for them is their ability to tell different stories in each film. That helps make the movies at least seem fresher, or at the very least, not make us think "didn't we see this story already?".

Of course, there's a lot of other sequels coming this summer and even more in 2015. The thing is, some of them will be good. They certainly have the capacity and lately haven't been too bad at it. Well, except for comedy sequels. They still haven't figured out that idea. Other sequels--like the forthcoming Dolphin Tail 2--will make us wonder why in God's name a sequel was necessary. Others still just may make us hate humanity for their existence.

So, at the end of the day, should you listen to Siskel & Ebert's advice from 30 years ago? No sequels unless directly told otherwise. Not necessarily. I still watch sequels and in a few weeks will be happily dropping money to see the second Captain America. I'm fairly sure it will make a mint, too. So long as sequels make money, sequels get made no matter how good, bad, or indifferent. That's the way it's always been, that's the way it is, and that's the way it's always going to be.

Serial Saturday: The Crimson Ghost (1946)

1946 was a turning point in the history of motion picture serials. It marked the last year of serial production for Universal studios. It also really helped mark the beginning of the end for Republic serials. Republic whiz kid director William Witney, freshly returned from World War II, would make The Crimson Ghost the last serial he directed. It would also mark the last true masked mystery villain in a Republic serial. Every mystery villain from here on out would either be a character talked about but not seen until their unmasking or a voice barking out commands.

The serial itself is your standard-issue mystery man serial. Professor Chambers (Kenne Duncan in his last serial appearance) has created an anti-atomic bomb device called The Cyclotrode, which can not only stop nuclear missiles, it can cripple transportation and communications. He demonstrates a prototype of the machine to his colleagues at the university, unaware that one of them is secretly a madman wearing a skull mask and crimson robes calling himself The Crimson Ghost. The Ghost wants to get hold of the Cyclotrode for his own nefarious plans, including selling the device to a foreign power. Opposing him is two-fisted criminologist Duncan Richards (Charles Quigley) and Chambers's secretary Diana Farnsworth (Linda Stirling). The duo go up against the villain and head henchman Ashe throughout the 12 chapter chase, being threatened with death by explosions, poison gas, deadly slave collars, death rays, and cars going over cliffs. In other words, the standard stuff.

This was Quigley's last appearance as a serial hero. He is best remembered for this serial and 1939's Daredevils of the Red Circle, where he was the de facto leader of the trio trying to track down villain Charles Middleton. After this, Quigley would appear in a few more serials for Columbia, always in villainous roles whether as the head villain or a henchman. He actually makes for a pretty good hero, not quite up to the standards of Kane Richmond maybe, but good. He's aided immensely but some great one-liners in the script. Point in fact, The Crimson Ghost may have the snappiest dialogue of any serial ever.

At SerialFest 2001, I put forward the theory that there were three types of serial heroine: Serial Queen, who could basically hold her own against all comers. The Damsel in Distress, whose sole purpose seemed to be to be put into peril. Finally, there was what I called Pretty Background Scenery, a heroine who basically sat around in the office or the hero's house and took very little part in the proceedings, letting the men fight it out amongst themselves. Republic's second advertised Serial Queen, Stirling got to be all three during the course of her six serials. She was a full fledged Serial Queen in The Tiger Woman and Zorro's Black Whip fulling kicking people in the teeth, put into constant peril and in need of constant rescue in The Purple Monster Strikes and Manhunt of Mystery Island, and beautiful but with little to actually do in this one and Jesse James Rides Again. It's a pity, because her first two serials demonstrated what she could do. She still gives as good a performance as anyone saddled with such a thankless role could, but one is left wanting more from someone advertised as The Serial Queen.

Clayton Moore, like director Witney, had also just returned from World War II. This was his first serial since 1942's Perils of Nyoka (starring Republic's first advertised Serial Queen Kay Aldridge). In that one, he was the hero and most people know him today as TV's The Lone Ranger, so it's a bit of a pleasant surprise to see him as a bad guy. He played the henchman role again in 1952's Radar Men From the Moon, but he's much better here. Also, footage of him from this one shows up in 1950's Flying Disc Man From Mars. Moore was one of the top five serial leading men and one of the few to do as well both as hero and villain. Moore's next serial, which also had Linda Stirling in it, returned him to the hero role in Jesse James Rides Again.

As for The Crimson Ghost himself, he was voiced by character actor I. Stanford Jolley. Jolley popped up in a bunch of late era serials and, while not the most imposing looking villain, he still had a great oily presence. His voice work as the title character is top notch.

The main problem with the serial is the same problem that most of these mystery villain serials had: the suspects. None of them particularly make any sort of impression. The four actors fill their necessary spots as the bland fellow, the suspicious acting fellow, the helpful fellow, and the grouchy fellow, but that's it. Republic's best guessing game remains The Adventures of Captain Marvel, which really showed audiences how the game could be played. As it is, we wait for the Scooby Doo ending of The Crimson Ghost knowing that the identity of the character is going to be as random as usual.

That said, this is probably Republic's last truly great serial. Witney, who had revolutionized the way serials were filmed with the choreography of the fights in the 1930s, dropped out of the genre after this. He apparently saw the writing on the wall and went on to direct Roy Rogers features. Other serial supreme director Spencer Gordon Bennett would leave Republic the following year, finishing the genre off at Columbia. Republic's legacy would be left in the hands of such lethargic directors as Fred Brannon and Franklin Adreon.

But with it's memorable looking villain, witty dialogue, and inventive fights, this is a fitting finale for it's director. It also gained it's own legacy, with punk rock band The Misfits co-opting the villain's visage for their mascot. It also became one of only two Republic serials colorized in 1990. The colorization looked decent for the time, though the serial itself makes enough use of light and shadow that it should only be viewed in black and white. Olive films is releasing the serials The Invisible Monster and (ironically enough) Flying Disc Man From Mars on Blu Ray later this year. They should also seriously considering The Crimson Ghost as well.

Favorite Fridays: My Fair Lady (1964)

It seems fairly rare for a movie based on a hit Broadway show to actually retain cast members from the show. Sometimes this is because it takes too long to get the movie version going. Movie fans famously missed out on Michael Crawford playing the title role in Phantom of the Opera because of how long it took to get that film version going. Other times it's a simple case of the studio deciding to recast with more famous actors such as Kiss Me Kate. But every so often, we movie fans get a taste of the magic that Broadway audiences got. My Fair Lady is one of those times even though it almost wasn't.

Hollywood legend has it that producer Jack Warner wanted Cary Grant and James Cagney to play, respectively, Henry Higgins and Alfred Doolittle in his big screen version of My Fair Lady. Cagney turned it down on the grounds that he was retired. But, as the story goes, Grant told Warner that not only would he not do the movie, he would never do another movie for Warner Brothers if Warner didn't quit fooling around and get Rex Harrison to reprise his stage role. I don't know  if that story is true or not, but if it is, it proves Cary Grant was a pretty classy guy. As for Doolittle, Cagney's turning the film down left the door open for Stanley Holloway to reprise his role.

Of course, not everyone from the Broadway cast made it into the film. Wilfred Hyde White takes over for Robert Coote as Pickering. More controversially, Audrey Hepburn was cast in place of Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle. Rex Harrison didn't want her to begin with even if he did later state she was his favorite leading lady. The Motion Picture Academy was apparently so outraged that Hepburn got the part over Andrews that she wasn't even nominated for Best Actress, even though the movie itself got 12 nominations--including for Best Actor (Harrison), Supporting Actor (Holloway) and Supporting Actress (Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Higgins)--and won 8, including Best Picture, Actor, and Director (George Cukor). Instead, Andrews was given Best Actress for Mary Poppins that year basically as a consolation prize for losing out on the role of Doolittle.


Well, I'm going to be the guy who out and out says it: Nuts to that. Audrey Hepburn is superb as Eliza Doolittle. She got robbed and mistreated by the Academy. Yes, her singing is dubbed by Marni Nixon about 90% of the time. So? The list of actresses who got dubbed in a musical movie is long and mighty: Ava Gardner in Show Boat, Rita Hayworth every single time she sang, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Debbie Reynolds in Singing In The Rain to name a few. The fact is, she acts the part. One of Harrison's concerns was if someone who was so classy all the time could play a "guttersnipe" with a cockney accent. The answer, of course, is yes, she could. You can question Jack Warner's decisions on a lot of things, but his casting of Hepburn was dead on. Point in fact, this may well be Hepburn's best movie.

By the way, she does do some singing in the film. She sings the first minute or so of Just You Wait as well as it's reprise. She also sings the sing-speak parts of The Rain In Spain and the beginning of I Could Have Danced All Night. So give her some credit, people. The simple fact is--and this will drive all the Andrews apologists nuts--that Audrey Hepburn did a better job at the part than Andrews would have. Hepburn was primarily a film actress and Andrews, at that time, was primarily a stage actress. Those are two entirely different styles of acting. And no, Andrews as Mary Poppins was not better than Hepburn as Eliza.

Most people know that this is a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's 1914 play Pygmalion. However, the musical takes most of it's cues not strictly from the play but from the 1938 film version with Leslie Howard (who was a rotten Higgins, but that's a topic for another post). The ending that tends to outrage most people was written by Shaw himself for that movie. He hated that ending, but it stuck. The premise of both versions is that arrogant professor of phonetics Henry Higgins takes in flower girl Eliza Doolittle with the bet that he can pass her off as a Duchess at the Embassy Ball six months later. Higgins, who calls himself "a confirmed old bachelor and likely to remain so", doesn't seem to realize that this "heartless guttersnipe" has a few lessons to teach him as well.

This is one of the few movie musicals to transplant every song from the play to the screen. Not even The Sound of Music did that. It is a common practice for the movie versions to drop a song or two and replace it with another often lesser song.  But anyone who fell in love with the Broadway soundtrack will be delighted to know that it's transplanted whole to the movie. Considering that this may well be the best soundtrack for a non-songbook musical, it's well deserved. In fact, the only movie musical I can think of that's not a songbook musical that's it's equal may be Kiss Me Kate, and even that one may fall a little short despite a wonderful Cole Porter score. But every song in My Fair Lady is wonderful. My personal favorite is I Could Have Danced All Night.

Harrison doesn't sing his songs so much as he sing-speaks them. But it works, and why not? It worked for Robert Preston in The Music Man, too. The more important thing here is that this is as close as modern audiences will ever get to seeing Harrison's defining role. He may have done other movies before and after, including The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Anna and the King of Siam, but he's forever Henry Higgins. After seeing him in the role, I can't imagine anyone else in the part. It is one of those perfect marriages of actor and role, the proverbial lightning in a bottle. He was honored with Best Actor and it was a well deserved honor.

Hepburn may not sing most of the time, but she acts the songs out fantastically. Holloway as her ne'er-do-well father gives a masterly comedic performance and his two songs are easily showstoppers. Come to it, Holloway should have won an Oscar as well. He steals every scene he's in from every other actor. Again, as this is modern audience's chance to see what delighted Broadway audiences for years. Jeremy Brett, who was also dubbed, manages to not make lovestruck Freddy Eynsford-Hill not a creepy stalker, which is definitely one way to look at the character, but a charming, well-meaning goof. Hyde-White was always a great character actor (and always looked to be about 80, even back in 1949's The Third Man) and he's a perfect foil for Harrison as Pickering. And if Hyde-White wasn't dubbed, he's a better singer than you'd think. He plays off Harrison beautifully. His reactions to A Hymn to Him is hysterical. Cooper's Mrs. Higgins and Mona Washburn's delightful Mrs. Pearce also due their bit as foils to Higgins. Let's not forget Theodore Bikel as "that hairy hound from Budapest" Zoltan Kaparthy. He's in the movie only about five minutes, but he's an absolute delight.

Horrifyingly, copyright holder CBS has treated this movie shamefully over the years. They let the negatives deteriorate, leading Film Restorationists Robert A. Harris and James Katz to due a Herculean restoration in 1994, which did actually lead to a re-release (which is where I first saw the movie). The DVDs have apparently been skittish over the years. But most shameful of all is the fact that the Blu Ray of this was massively mishandled. That's a heart breaker. This is my favorite musical and one of the main movies I most wanted on Blu Ray. Being as this is the 50th Anniversary, it is to be hoped that CBS corrects this, but there has been no word on such as of this writing.

Still, it really is a wonderful movie. Among musicals, only Singing in the Rain can be argued as being better. But that may simply be because Singing in the Rain has the great dancing, the only thing missing from this. That said, My Fair Lady has a fabulous cast, gorgeous sets, and hands down the greatest original soundtrack ever.

3D THURSDAY: GRAVITY (2013)

I am of the opinion that there are certain movies you need to see in 3D. Some of them--mostly from the 80s--are pretty pointless without it in fact. Let's be honest here. Nobody watches Comin' At Ya! unless they are watching it in 3D. Other movies stand on their own in 2D but are also very different experiences in 3D. Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder is one such example. Surprisingly, Alfonso Cuarron's Gravity is another.

Surprisingly because unlike Dial M which was shot in true 3-D--the only way they could do it in 1954--Gravity is converted from 2-D. Conversions are always a tricky proposition. Even the really well done ones like Marvel's The Avengers don't look as good as real 3-D. The good ones fall just short and the bad ones--I'm looking at you Harry Potter--are spectacular insults to 3-D. They leave you not only wondering why you're wearing 3-D glasses, but why you paid extra to do so.

Gravity, however, doesn't look like a conversion. Part of that is because only 27 of it's 91 minutes were converted. The rest of it is CGI, so the 3-D is real by way of virtual twin cameras. Impressively, it's impossible to tell the difference between the two. Of course, it also helps that the movie seems to have been shot with 3-D in mind instead of just as an afterthought.

Gravity tells a simple story. George Clooney is astronaut Matt Kowalski, on his last space flight. Sandra Bullock is Doctor Ryan Stone, on her first space mission. While making repairs on the Hubble, a destroyed Russian satellite sets off a catastrophic chain reaction of debris that destroys their space shuttle. Trapped in space, the two have to find a way back to Earth by making their way over to the ISS.
After the amazing 17 minute opening shot, once the disaster strikes, the film becomes an incredibly tense ride, more so in 3-D. I saw this in the theater in 3-D and found myself hyperventilating when Bullock first spins out into space. Even at home that scene caused my heart to race, that's how effective it is.

Unfortunately, the effect is lessened in 2-D. This is one of those cases where 3-D gives genuine perspective to what is going on and actually heightens the sense of danger. The last time 3-D was used quite that effectively was in 1953's Inferno with it's deep and dizzying shot of the canyon Robert Ryan is trapped in. This is 3-D as a You-Are-There experience.This is what 3-D is meant for the most and puts the film firmly in the Top Ten of 3-D movies, right alongside the classics of the Golden Age.

The experience is helped along by the cast. Clooney and Bullock truly sell the film. Clooney exudes the confidence of a veteran astronaut while Bullock captivates use with her performance as the rookie who must step up or die. According to interviews with Bullock, it was a rough movie to shoot and she fully deserved her Oscar nomination for it.

In addition, Alfonso Cuarron became the second director in a row to win Best Director at the Academy Awards. Ang Lee previously took the same Oscar for 2012's Life of Pi. The mere fact that 3-D movies are winning major Oscars now shows that the form is gaining legitimacy. It is not unreasonable to think that one day a 3-D movie will take the Best Picture Oscar.

Some people have questioned the science behind the film, but that always seems to happen with a picture like this. Truth to tell, the overall premise of the debris chain reaction is in the realm of theoretical possibility, so the film's science isn't all that shaky. On top of which, it's effects are every bit as groundbreaking as those seen in 2001. Point in fact, I think it's a better movie, too.

At any rate, the next time you wonder what 3-D is good for, I suggest you watch this. Then you may just get it.