Therefore any film adaptation wouldn't really need high caliber acting........with the director only needing to move the characters around like chess pieces to manipulate the audience......(Hitchcock was one of the few directors who recognized the importance of using the finest actors to better engage us in all the murderous goings-on....)
Neither the first film adaptation of Levin's book in 1956, nor the 1991 remake boasts any memorable performances. The first film at least received service
able work from Robert Wagner as evil smoothie Bud Corliss and Joanne Woodward as one of his targets.
35 years later, the remake suffered from embarrassingly dead-eyed, wooden work from Matt Dillon and Sean Young. (Dillon and Young announce their dialogue at one another as if they're still sitting around at the initial script table read....)
The principal enjoyment in the 1956 film comes from watching the malignant Corliss carefully engineer his first murder while oh so carefully (or so he thinks) covering his tracks. Further fun comes from seeing all his machinations begin to fray and come undone, despite his bumping off of additional people who might expose him.......
Wagner doesn't have to exert himself much here, just behave like the pleasant, callow young guys he usually played in studio films.........with the added attraction of killing people. Woodward gives it her all as a pathetic heiress infatuated with him......but as we pointed out, this is no showcase for actors. The only star on display here is Levin's storyline....
The remake arrived with much higher aspirations.......a wanna-be, pseudo-Hitchcock romance, complete with a lumbering, pervasive imitation Herrmann score by Howard Shore. Director James Dearden must have dreamed of channeling "Vertigo" and "Marnie" into this mess, but he's ruinously thwarted by Dillon and Young, who play their scenes like they're reading passages from the phone book to each other. The only real actor on hand is Diane Ladd, portraying Dillon's decent, clueless mom.....
The murders, naturally, are nastier and prolonged in the remake and the cinematography sometimes aspires to the studied, deliberate studio phoniness of "Marnie".....but even with Ira Levin's whip smart plot twists still in play, the woeful, indifferent acting is the only thing that makes an impression. When a scene includes a TV playing "Vertigo", all you can think of is "now there's a movie we'd rather watch than this one..."
If there's another remake in the works......we can only hope they get it right this time.....for the 1956 version, 2 stars (**), for the 1991 remake...1 star (*).......paging Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone......
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