Let's Do It Again, Redux

Almost a week ago I posted a blog item on three films that I thought could profitably (in the artistic rather than the merely financial, sense) be remade. The three were:

• "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie"
• "Peyton Place"
• "Looking for Mr. Goodbar"

And now it occurs to me that there's another film that really could be done well as a remake. I thought about just adding it to the original post (you know, sort of ex post facto), but then I decided to do it as a new post.

And what might that fourth film be?

"Marjorie Morningstar": Herman Wouk's classic 1955 romance of a young Jewish girl in Depression-era New York who aspires to be a famous actress. There is a film version from 1958 with Natalie Wood as Marjorie (which, you have to admit, is perfect casting), but the rest of the film is flawed. Casting the brilliantly talented but very Irish Gene Kelly as the charming but self-loathing Jew Noel Airman (note Wouk's typically subtle-as-a-rubber-crutch use of symbolic names) is disastrous, and the film suffers from uninspired direction (from Irving Rapper, whose record as a director is spotty at best, although he did direct "Now, Voyager" with Bette Davis) and a schlocky script.

The rights to the novel have been purchased, it's said by Scarlett Johansson, and there appears to be a new screenplay by Frederic Raphael (he wrote "Two for the Road" and the wonderful British mini-series "The Glittering Prizes") and that inspires hope. But Johansson wants to play the lead herself, and if Natalie Wood was perfect for the part in 1958, there is another woman who is perfect for the part today -- and, as undeniably talented and beautiful as she is, it's not Scarlett Johansson. I would hope that Johansson would have the grace to step aside, produce the film and let Natalie Portman play Marjorie. With a Frederic Raphael screenplay and a halfway decent director, this could be a distinct improvement over the original.

Of course, I'd have to see what they do with the ending, which most women find offensive ("that disaster of an ending," as Marlene Adler Marks puts it in The Jewish Journal), but which the author of the novel has claimed in interviews is simply reality. I have to say that I agree with him, but it does jar a little -- and the reason for that is that "Marjorie Morningstar" is essentially a romantic novel with a realistic ending. The bulk of the novel doesn't mesh with the last twenty pages or so, and the millions of young women who identify with Marjorie and her struggles with career and romance are not thrilled, to put it mildly, when, at the end of the novel, she turns up as a greying bourgeois hausfrau, her dreams of an acting career just a fading memory. But I can tell you that, having known quite a few aspiring actresses in my day, far more wannabe thespians end up as greying hausfraus than Oscar winners.

And the ending of the novel is in line with the somewhat Proustian endings of most of Wouk's major novels, but that's a discussion for another time.

I'm rooting for Scarlett Johansson, and I hope she pulls it off and gets the film made, whether she ends up playing the lead or not.

Tom Moran