> Hm... I was in the play last spring (for my high school), and a cable station just happened to be showing the movie around the same time. That is the only time I can honsestly say that a high school production was better than a Hollywood movie. Mind you, I'm probably overstating the quality of our production there, so I don't think the movie was /terrible/...
>
> Then again, perhaps that's a good reason to remake it... the new version would likely end up better than the old. :)

It's not uncommon for a play to be preferred to a movie when it is viewed first. The live theater experience can be so much more immediate and, I dunno, visceral in a way that it has a greater impact than a film version seen after the fact.

Comparing a play with a movie isn't, therefore, very fair. Unless you use objective criteria that have nothing to do with your personal enjoyment of the experiences, the comparison has more to do with the mediums than the content.

Since Howard proposed a remake of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I've gone back and forth about whether or not that one makes sense to remake. I think the conclusion I came to is, no. Two big reasons:

(1) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a very good movie. It may not be great and timeless, but for the kind of movie musical it is, it's done about as well as these things can be done at all. Good songs, good choreography, hilarious comedy with spot-on comic timing, and some of the most watchable characters ever in the supporting roles.

There are a lot of films ripe for remaking, but they're all ones that had unrealized potential -- great ideas that got lost along the way. "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" was a wonderful remake of the inferior "Bedtime Story" because the casting in the original film (David Niven and Marlon Brando) was all wrong, and the performances didn't sit well with the material. "Homeward Bound" was a successful remake of "The Incredible Journey" because the remake changed the documentary format into a narrative form where the animals were free to become fleshed out characters.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes doesn't have any of these kinds of flaws. Marilyn Monroe pretty much IS Lorelei Lee. (What actress could possibly replace Marilyn, and what sane actress would try??) Jane Russell pretty much IS Dorothy Shaw. Charles Coburn pretty much IS Sir Francis Beekman. And as for the direction, it's hard to imagine a remake not attempting to outdo the original's musical and comic scenes, which are successful precisely *because* it doesn't look like they're trying to outdo something but simply be.

(2) The story and the culture that drove it just doesn't exist anymore. A stage revival can work, sure, because (a) the only way to see Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on the stage *is* as a remade stage show, and (b) stage audiences gather audiences with tastes broader than their own place in time and culture, while the expensive of movies tends to require them to be appealing to greater audiences.

To remake "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," the story has to be ripped out of the mid-20th century and plunked down into the early 21st century. It cannot possibly survive that transition. It depends too much on the more rigidly defined gender roles of the time -- sometimes conforming to them, but more frequently playing *off* them. Modern society doesn't really have those gender roles to play off. However much modern feminists (rightly or wrongly) insist that gender roles are still too strongly defined today, the *perception* of gender roles and more importantly how we feel about them in principle as a society has changed dramatically. The result: "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" no longer has the frame of reference in society that gives it its effectiveness.

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Again, my stance on remakes is that the best films to remake aren't likely to be remade, because their is no demand for them. I'd love to see a remake of Frank Capra's dirigible-in-the-arctic adventure film "Dirigible." It's a great idea executed poorly. You haven't heard of it because it wasn't very good. But it had all the ingredients for a great entry in the genre: an epic love-triangle romance, incorporating themes of honor, brotherhood, and self-sacrifice, set in the backdrop of a sprawling adventure story. It's the kind of thing David Lean turned into timeless classics several times. The material was great. The execution was the problem. The bar on a remake wouldn't be very high: the potential on a remake is greatness, but even a modestly good remake would still be a successful undertaking.

Instead, they remade "Flight of the Phoenix," a minor classic in the same genre, and churned out something that was inferior to the original in almost every way. Highly disappointing for me, even though I try to judge each movie on its own terms rather than as comparisons to other work.