Remington Steele Has Horrible Taste in Movies

This past, autumn with nothing to occupy the devil's playground,
I decide to compare how many movies I had seen with those of TV
detective Remington Steele. For those who don't remember the
show, Steele would solve cases by drawing analogies to classic
motion pictures. I'm batting around .900, one I hadn't seen was
"Little Murders."

"Little Murders" starred Elliot Gould and was directed by Alan
Arkin. It was written and based on a play by legendary comics
creator and screenwriter Jules Feiffer. So, I thought, "Okay, I have Netflix." So I got hold of "Little Murders," and let me tell you, I have seldom seen a movie which
suffered so much from being a play brought to the screen. The
interesting part of the DVD, however, is the commentary track
with Feiffer and Gould giving their separate recollections.

The movie itself, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a romantic
dark comedy which inserts the random urban violence of the
late-1960's New York City into the happy Broadway plays of the
mid-1950's. A young couple meets, and falls n love, and tragedy
befalls them just as the happy ending seems about to kick in.

I have to say that as a comics fan, it is somewhat odd to see
Jules Feiffer completely ignore his comics career. He was
entirely focused on "Little Murders" and how it got made, and
how it was a a play, and what he did on it. Elliot Gould does
mention Feiffer's cartoon career briefly, but apart from that,
if you didn't know Feiffer had been a cartoonist, you'd never
know from the commentary track.

But I do know about Feiffer's cartoon career, and "Little
Murders" shows a lot of Eisner influence, but it's a darker New
York. Feiffer claims it was a response to the Broadway plays of
the 1950' and 1960's, and I can sort of see it, I suppose. But
the left turn into absurdist violence for the final quarter of
the movie is a touch surreal for a movie.

In a play, you can get away with more wackiness than in a movie.
When the characters in "You Can't Take It With You" act like
loonies, you can sort of buy it on stage, just because the
actors are actually there, in the room, with the audience,doing
this stuff. In the movie, well, we buy it because we saw the
play or we know it was a play, and we see Jimmy Stewart and
Jean Arthur and Lionel Barrymore, and Frank Capra directed, and
these people are just good at making movies, and if they tell
us to believe something, by Jeffrey, we believe it. Or maybe,
those people just knew where the line was and not to cross it.

"Little Murders," as a movie, has a surreal bent that would
work better on stage. Feiffer says in the commentary that he
did not think it would be possible for him to adapt it, but he
did after reading the first treatment. Perhaps he was right. I
am reminded of the tag line for Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita:"
"How did they ever make a movie of _Lolita?_" Answer from
audiences: They didn't.