SCRIPTS REDUX PART 1

SOME TALES ARE SO GOOD that they’re worth repeating. Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story. La Bohème and Rent. The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz. Here, though, I’m thinking of more than similar themes, but downright recycling of characters and even dialogue. As a fan of SiriusXM “Radio Classics” and Turner Classic Movies, I’ve encountered several that are good fun, all the more entertaining in how one interpretation differs from the other. Here in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow are related tidbits gleaned from a variety of sources. 

Pygmalion(s) and My Fair Lady.The original Greek myth makes this one something of a six-bagger. We can only guess at the original Greek, but W.S. Gilbert composed a blank-verse play Pygmalion and Galatea in 1871 on the theme of a statue coming to life and falling in love with her creator. In 1914, George Bernard Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle portrayed by Mrs Patrick Campbell shared the Cockney accent and a lot of identical dialogue to be recited 24 years later by Wendy Hiller in the cinema Pygmalion.

Above, Mrs Patrick Campbell’s Eliza. Image from Sketch Magazine, April 22, 1914. Below, Wendy Hiller’s; image from the 1938 movie.

Bringing things more or less up to date, there’s “My My Fair Lady” here at SimanaitisSays with Lerner and Lowe’s 1956 Broadway musical and its 1964 film version.

In my first-hand experience, each of Pygmalion 1938, My Fair Lady 1956, and the cinematic My Fair Lady 1964 is a delight. (And years later, overlapping dialogue from each is lodged in my memory). 

Orson’s Resourcefulness. The 1949 film noir The Third Man (based on a Graham Greene novella sketching out its characters) introduced Harry Lime. He’s portrayed by Orson Welles as a despicable opportunist who gets what’s coming to him.

Living in England in the early 1950s, Welles spun the character into 52 radio episodes of The Adventures of Harry Lime, (U.S. version: The Lives of Harry Lime). In these, Harry is a likable con man who as often as not gets the short end of the scam.

The April 11, 1952, episode has Harry mixing it up with oligarch Gregory Arkadin, who even at the episode’s end remains a “Man of Mystery.” Indeed, Welles was so taken by the character that he expanded the radio script into a movie, Confidential Report, 1955, with himself portraying Arkadin. 

Orson Welles, left, in a scene from Confidential Report, (U.S. name: Mr. Arkadin) starring Robert Arden (in the penny-ante con man’s role) and Paola Mori (as Arkadin’s daughter Raina).

Mr. Arkadin has quite the cast, including Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, and (in a bit part) Gert Fröbe. Countessa Paola Di Gerfalco, who played Arkadin’s daughter under her stage name Paola Mori, became Welles’s third wife during the film’s production.

Reflecting Welles’s complex cinematic dealings at the time, the film had a multiplicity of releases. They’re described in Wikipedia, including the (ninth) Criterion edit (2006) that appears occasionally on Turner Classic Movies. Wikipedia also cites Japanese film director Shinji Aoyama who “listed Confidential Report as one of the greatest films of all time. In 2012 he said, ‘No other movie is destructive as Confidential Report, which gives me different emotions every time I see it. Achieving this kind of indetermination in a film is the highest goal that I always hope for, but can never achieve.’ ”

I enjoy this aspect as well as its cinematographic elements (such as the masquerade ball shown above), many of which remind me of Citizen Kane innovations.

Tomorrow we’ll see other variations of scripts redux, including another where the author does his own recycling. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023