The Newport story

High Society

(1956)

A few weeks ago I'd intended to unfairly subject this to viewing right after the nearly perfect nonmusical (well, mostly) original, but I accidentally erased it from my DVR a few minutes in. Tonight I unfairly subjected it to viewing a night after a nearly perfect musical. Still, I think it's fair to say that this is just disastrously awful.

I watched it nearly a quarter of a century ago and remembered it as awful--and I remembered Cole Porter's songs as mostly undistinguished, except for the big love song, "True Love," which is execrable (that it was a hit in a version by Pat Boone should tell you all you need to know)--and my recollection is generally accurate, but I didn't retain a sharp sense of how completely this version drains almost all the wit from The Philadelphia Story, even while keeping a large share of the dialogue. It is astonishing that anyone who thought it was a good idea to remake the film with three other stars could have failed so completely to notice what made the original great.

Let's take just two examples: for the flirtation between Tracy and Mike to be convincing, and to represent even a long-shot possibility of providing the romantic denouement, there has to be an inciting incident of mutual respect--she of him because she discovers his writing talent, he of her for essentially the same reason--followed by a slow buildup of mutual attraction whose inhibitions fall away under the influence of champagne, first at the party and then crucially at poolside. Here they're at loggerheads until suddenly he's singing a love song to her. So why should we care about (or understand) such an obviously superficial attraction? (Incidentally, Mike doesn't volunteer to fall on the matrimonial sword to bail Tracy out of her tight fix in this version.)

Then there's C. K. Dexter Haven. Aside from Bing Crosby's being a sad substitute for Cary Grant, this Haven is not an alcoholic; no, the weakness that led him to be dismissed by Tracy is . . . he writes pop songs. No, seriously, that's it: he could have been a symphonic composer, but he chose to write pop songs, so she dumped him. Now, that's lame enough, but think of the original: one of the beauties of it is that Tracy falls prey to the very weakness for which she has shunned her true love. But here, everyone's having champagne, including Dex (granted, in moderation), so the weakness she exhibits has nothing to do with the arguable one she has attributed to him. It's parallel lost.

I could go on and on and on, but why? A dreadful mistake of a film.