A Foreign Affair Journal

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Friday, April 27th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

People looking for the video or DVD “A Foreign Affair” once got one search result. However, those looking for the title, “A Foreign Affair” now will find two results—two very, very different ones.

We are, typically, accustomed to remakes of great films, both versions having Academy Award redeeming qualities, or each version being touted as the “better” or the more popular one. Think about, for example, the film The Postman Always Rings Twice. In the first (1946) version, the original based on James M. Cain’s novel and the screenplay by Harry Ruskin, Lana Turner’s Cora Smith is sexy, spoiled, bratty…but undoubtedly appealing because of or in spite of her attitude (and due to her stunning creamy and blonde looks). John Garfield’s Frank Chambers is wily, thuggish, and even suggests a low-class background, but yet is endearing in his submission to the allure of Cora. Cecil Kellaway’s Nick Smith is indulgent, devoted (in an ignorant way); the sets are realistic, the black and white neither contributing to nor taking from the riveting and twisting plot.

In the 1981 version of Postman…, Cora and husband are now Cora and Nick Papadakis, possibly pointing to ethnicity as important, and are portrayed by Jessica Lange—with her more subtle, sultry, smoldering sensuality usually eclipsed only by her industriousness running of the roadside restaurant—and John Colicos—who stays close to Kellaway’s rendition, save he is a tad flashier and more demonstrative. And Frank Chambers is Jack Nicholson, whose animalistic charm elevates Chambers to a more autonomous lover to Cora, leveling the playing field between them without weakening the inextricable attachment he feels/expresses. The sets in the later version are similarly convincing, and the plot as it is played out is equally compelling.

In the same respect, sometimes the versions are dead-on replicas, only distinguished by their producers and filmmakers’ dealing with limitations or luxuries of technology: for example, consider the two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The 1956 version’s black and white might make it the more unnerving of the two, with the light and shadows as threatening as the clones puking out of their pods. Or the 1978 (color) version might be more frightening, with its special effects and close-ups conveying such convincing degrees of verisimilitude we do double-takes on our fellow audience members, to ensure they, too, are not morphing from person to pod-thing.

Now, there’s another filmic trend that is in order here, the spoofing of an original: The “original” “A Foreign Affair,” made in 1948, is a romantic comedy—Billy Wilder directs Marlene Dietrich, former Nazi lounge singer, Jean Arthur, as the “straight-man” serious Congresswoman, and John Lund, kowtowing American officer falling for the smoky, slinky Dietrich. The dialogue is rife with sharp, cracking levity, while the emphasis of plot still stays with the affair.

But in the latest work by the same title (2002), there are journeys and goals, but there are no heavily romantic overtones. There is comic wit, but it is within the relationship of not two lovers of the opposite sex in an affair but two brothers in mourning (sort of) on a destination to replace their recently deceased mother—who did the cooking, cleaning, and running of the home.

So in the case of “A Foreign Affair” I and II, then, the critical preferences will be more directed toward the genre, the turning on its head of romantic comedies by buddy movies, and the toward the number of laughs responding to two very different forms of comedy.

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