This is the first part of a three-part column.
I have a notion for what might be a four-play repertory season, or an anthology, or maybe a film festival. As I’m not sure which, and am unlikely to bring any of the three to fruition, I see no harm in sharing the notion. It involves plays, all successful in their own time, that no one would think of as imperishable masterpieces, though all worthy of a certain respect. What they have in common I’ll get to in a minute. For now let me just say that one is British, one French, and two American, and it’s unlikely that you are familiar with any of them. They’ve largely fallen out of the standard repertoire, as even the most successful plays ultimately will. In part, they go unrevived because they all date from an era when large casts were less prohibitively expensive. But in a surprising way, they’ve all lingered in our cultural memory to some extent, as you’ll see.
The most familiar of the four—or at least the title most likely to be widely recognized—is the British specimen, James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (1902). The French contribution is Marcel Pagnol’s Topaze (1928). Both have the good fortune to bear the author credit of artists well-known from other works: Barrie is famous and widely loved as the writer who gave the world Peter Pan. Pagnol, though less celebrated outside France as a playwright, would be familiar to film buffs (and to the fans of Broadway musicals based on films) as the writer-director of works like The Baker’s Wife and the Fanny trilogy. Perhaps unjustly, our American candidates are much less well-known: James Montgomery’s Nothing but the Truth (1916) and John Willard’s The Cat and the Canary (1922). Both authors seem to have concentrated their efforts largely on theater, as opposed to Barrie, who wrote novels as well as plays, and Pagnol, who veered from playwriting to filmmaking. There may be a moral in that, about how quickly fame disappears when it’s based solely on theatrical achievement, or it may contain a large irony. Because the point of this column, what the four plays have in common, is that, while all four of them have more or less faded from the stage (the arguable exception being The Admirable Crichton), what keeps them alive in cultural memory is their repeated use in film. Each of them can be found in multiple film versions that span the last century, sometimes veering wildly from genre to genre or style to style. Nothing but the Truth, perhaps the least embedded in myth of the four works, boasts only three film versions; for The Admirable Crichton, Wikipedia lists no fewer than eight, including Chinese and French adaptations so obscure that even an accumulator of arcana like myself might not bother to hunt them down.
The film versions of The Admirable Crichton offer a fascinatingly wide range of genres. You probably recall, from hearsay if not from an actual encounter, the basic premise of Barrie’s comedy, which Charles Frohman initially produced in London in 1902 and New York in 1903: A group of British society folk are haughty to their servants on board a yacht—until a storm drives the yacht to run aground on a desert island. Here the roles are reversed: Crichton, the put-upon butler, is the only man aboard with the survival skills to keep the whole upper-crust lot from starving to death. He becomes de facto king of the island, and Lady Mary, the formerly standoffish young girl of the yachting party, warms to him. But, in Act 3, when a passing liner rescues them, old-fashioned class relations reassert themselves, and Lady Mary, reunited with her aristocratic fiancé, bids Crichton a regretful farewell.
Crichton was a tremendous success in its own time, running two full years in London, where it starred H.B. Irving (son of the great actor Henry Irving) and Irene Vanbrugh (the original Gwendolen of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest). It did nearly as well in New York, where it starred Sybil Carlisle as Lady Mary with the great William Gillette (a few years ahead of his triumph as Sherlock Holmes) as Crichton. But its one New York revival—in 1931, starring Walter Hampden and Fay Bainter—barely lasted a few spring months. Since then, its productions have occurred mainly outside London and New York, as a historical curio for regional theaters (one would like to have seen the Manchester production that featured Janet McTeer as Lady Mary). Even musical adaptations—though several have been attempted—have yet to reach Broadway. (Though one did have a brief run in London’s West End. Later for that.)
On film, however, the matter is very different. Crichton has been in the public mind, in one form or another, virtually since feature-length films were first turned out. The play made its cinema debut in a presumably rather conventional 1918 British silent, which I won’t pretend to have seen, directed by one G.B. Samuelson. The next year, there followed an almost surreally lavish romantic spectacle version by Cecil B. DeMille. Retitled Male and Female, it spent a great deal of its early footage showing Lady Mary (Gloria Swanson) at home in London, being waited on by a covey of maids as she stepped into and out of a palatial marble bath that suggested an Oriental potentate’s fantasy. And the Oriental-fantasy notion was extended in the latter part of the film, when Crichton’s island romance with Lady Mary gave rise to a Babylonian flashback of a previous life—no, I’m really not making this up—inspired partly by D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and partly by a then-familiar poem, by William Ernest Henley, that begins “I was a King in Babylon/ And you were a Christian slave.” It may sound ludicrous now, and it certainly had little enough to do with Barrie’s ironic comedy, but the moviegoing housewives and shopgirls of 1919, whose reality bore no relation to the grandeur of Gloria Swanson’s marble bathtub, flocked to it in droves—possibly even while on their way to vote for the first time.
The notion of filming The Admirable Crichton then seems to have lain fallow until 1934, when Paramount, apparently under the influence of laughing gas, let loose an escapade called We’re Not Dressing. Directed by the studio’s most freewheeling comedy specialist, Gregory La Cava, this hilariously disjointed, cartoonish version features the improbable pairing of Bing Crosby and Carole Lombard in the roles only vaguely based on Crichton and Lady Mary. From the Babylonian, we’ve moved to the vaudevillian. Not only is La Cava’s famous willingness to let actors improvise during takes visible onscreen—at one point Crosby blows a line and Lombard corrects him—but, yes, she remarks at one (presumably scripted) point that their situation reminds her of an old play she once saw. You think adaptation can’t get more irreverent than that? Wait. The not-so-aristocratic passengers on Lombard’s yacht include Ethel Merman and the onetime Ziegfeld Follies comedian and eccentric dancer Leon Errol, who share a tipsified number called “It’s a New Spanish Custom.” (Merman was also meant to have a second number where she romps in a bearskin among jungle beasts while singing “It’s the Animal in Me,” but this was cut; the studio later released it as a “soundie,” a precursor of today’s music videos.) And the island they run aground on is inhabited, natch—by a team of very unnatural naturalists played by George Burns and Gracie Allen. What Gracie does to the English language Paramount did to Barrie’s play. I haven’t even mentioned the rich girl’s pet bear, to which Crosby is periodically obliged to croon a lullaby. Further than this screwball comedy could hardly go.
It took nearly a quarter century for the British film industry to rediscover the potential of Barrie’s play. What emerged was a reasonably conventional product in the affectionate period style of post–World War II British film comedy that harked back nostalgically to the palmy pre-World War I days of the Edwardian era. Lewis Gilbert’s 1957 film, also titled The Admirable Crichton but renamed Paradise Lagoon for U.S. distribution, starred the popular comedian Kenneth More as Crichton opposite the sparkling Sally Ann Howes, only a few years after her move to adult roles from a long apprenticeship playing teenage ingenues on stage and screen (her appearance in the 1945 ghost-story omnibus film Dead of Night drew particular attention). The possible British film career that Howes’ appearance in The Admirable Crichton promised was cut short by her becoming a Broadway star: She went directly from filming Crichton to replacing Julie Andrews in the original New York production of My Fair Lady.
Becoming a permanent New Yorker also may have kept Howes out of the running for the lead role in the one stage musical of Crichton to get any major attention: a London show titled Our Man Crichton, which played several months in the West End starting in December 1964, with More again playing the title role. The music, by one David Lee, attracted little enthusiasm, though some reviewers admired the “deft” lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer (also noted as a drama critic and, some years later, as the English-language adapter of the Boublil-Schönberg Les Misérables). The production, by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s gifted Clifford Williams, also won praise. Starring opposite More was Millicent Martin, newly famous for her TV appearances on That Was the Week That Was. But Martin, whose personality hardly matched the aloof Lady Mary, played Tweeny, the upstairs maid (whom Crichton ultimately marries), and shifting the main focus to this very secondary character probably didn’t help the show’s chances. It did, however, ultimately inspire more work for Martin and for David Kernan, who played one of the yachting party’s helpless aristocrats, when they again teamed up some years later, in the creation of the popular revue Side By Side By Sondheim. But by then their stint in a Crichton musical was long forgotten.
The Admirable Crichton’s film history, unlike its musical adaptation’s, doesn’t end there. Fast-forward a bit less than two decades, strip away the frou-frou of the Edwardian costumes, and watch the story get reborn into a tough, sexy, violent modern world, reeking with Marxist class consciousness. Tough, sexy, violent and Marxist? What director could I be talking about if not Lina Wertmüller, Italy’s flavor of the decade in 1974, when she cast two stars she’d previously worked with, Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini, in a film with the ornate title Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto). The American distributors, like most other people, abbreviated the title to simply Swept Away. Wertmüller treated Barrie’s elaborate social comedy much the way the public treated her archly poetic title, stripping it down to its bare essentials. In her version, the Communist crewman and the highfalutin heiress are stranded all by themselves, with no old duffers or dowagers about for comic relief; the ironic ending is tainted with bitter pain instead of Barrie’s gently rueful what-might-have-beens. In the feverish intensity of Wertmüller’s clash of classes and genders, few commentators found recollections of Barrie’s play.
Interestingly, Swept Away made a strong enough impression to exert an influence on films even further removed from Barrie’s world of teacups and euphemisms. It would take a deconstructionist critic a major effort to calculate the percentage of Barrie remaining in Garry Marshall’s Overboard (1987), a romantic comedy with a plotline so convoluted that it must have taken Marshall and screenwriter Leslie Dixon all of the dozen years separating Swept Away from Overboard to think up all the elaborate twists that allow them to ward off any charges of plagiarism. In this version, the working-class hero (Kurt Russell) is not an employee but an independent contractor, a carpenter, hired to do renovations on the yacht of the wealthy heroine (Goldie Hawn). He is a youngish widower with two sons, she temporarily estranged from her philandering husband (Edward Herrmann). She has a butler (Roddy McDowall), but his name is definitely not Crichton, and he functions more as a helpful Cupid than as a potential suitor. Her domineering mother (Katherine Helmond) also gets into the act, and a spell of amnesia, a divorce in absentia, a relearning process, and a recovered identity have to intervene before the formerly mismatched lovers can sail off into the sunset. This is the only version of the story that explicitly allows the Crichton and Lady Mary figures to get together at the finish (though We’re Not Dressing hints at the prospect), confirming what William Dean Howells once told Edith Wharton: “What Americans always want is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
There was no happy ending, however, for Swept Away’s second and more literal remake: the 2002 American version, using the same title, which starred Madonna and was directed by her then-husband Guy Ritchie. As if to underscore how much time had elapsed since Wertmüller’s version, the role of the working-class sailor was played here by Adriano Giannini, whose presence offered reviewers the temptation to make unkind remarks comparing him to his father, who had played the role in Wertmüller’s 1974 version. Few of them resisted the temptation, adding to the list of reasons for which the film was roundly panned.
After that inglorious finish, it must be time to move on to the other works on my list. I’ll tackle them beginning with part 2.
