Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice

7. Sadie Thompson Redux: Postwar Reintegration of the Wartime Wayward Woman

The Unfaithful (Sherman, 1947), Miss Sadie Thompson (Bernhardt, 1953), Mogambo (Ford, 1953), and Gaby (Bernhardt, 1956) are films that seem related only by the sexual transgressions of their heroines. The Unfaithful is a noir melodrama with Ann Sheridan in the role of Chris Hunter, a housewife who has murdered a man in her own home, a man who turns out to have been her lover during her husband’s wartime absence. Miss Sadie Thompson stars Rita Hayworth as a woman with a questionable past whose arrival on a South Pacific island incites a missionary to reform her, and at the end to rape her. Mogambo tells the tale of Victor Marswell/Clark Gable, a white hunter in Africa, and his affairs with two very different women: the wise-cracking, sexually casual companion to wealthy men (Eloise Y. Kelly/Ava Gardner) and the aristocratic, well-mannered wife of a British anthropologist (Linda Nordley/Grace Kelly). Kelly wins Marswell when the latter does the “noble” thing and leaves the decent married couple intact. Gaby stars Leslie Caron as a ballerina who, when she learns of her fiancé’s reported death at the front, overreacts to her refusal to sleep with him on the eve of their one-day C H A P T E R S E V E N ��� Sadie Thompson Redux: Postwar Reintegration of the Wartime Wayward Woman JENNIFER FORREST 169 whirlwind romance by sleeping with other soldiers on the eve of their transfer to the front. When her fiancé miraculously returns, Gaby is no longer pure of body and feels that she cannot legitimately marry him. However different their stories, all four films are also remakes. The Unfaithful is a remake of The Letter (Wyler, 1940), itself a remake of Jean de Limur’s 1929 film of the same name. Miss Sadie Thompson is the second remake of Sadie Thompson (Walsh, 1928), the first being Lewis Milestone’s Rain (1932).1 Mogambo is directly related to the 1932 Victor Fleming film Red Dust in which Gable played the male lead opposite Jean Harlow, and for which John Lee Mahin reworked his original screenplay. The latter film, however, did spawn a 1940 contribution to the Maisie cycle with Congo Maisie (H. C. Potter), and Torrid Zone (Keighley, 1940); while these films neither recognized nor credited their filiations with Red Dust, each clearly reproduces its narrative structure.2 Finally, Gaby is a remake of Waterloo Bridge (LeRoy, 1940), with the latter being a remake of James Whale’s 1931 film of the same name. Not only, therefore, are these four films all remakes, they are second remakes as well. Hollywood has always regularly recycled material in order to cut down on general production costs. It has also striven to cater to—and keep satisfied—its audiences with a steady menu of the same-but-different . In the 1950s, Hollywood refashioned successful and less successful films from the 1930s in what was either an attempt both to woo people away from their television sets and to recreate the “homogeneous ” audience of the prewar, or a way to buy some time until filmmakers figured out what the postwar, “fragmented” audience3 wanted (Ray 138).4 And yet, one cannot adduce The Unfaithful, Miss Sadie Thompson, Mogambo, and Gaby as merely the result of sound industry economics or just recourse to previously tried and true production packages designed to stave off impending financial disaster. Since there was hardly a rotating shelf of films lined up in order to be reworked and updated, one must wonder why studios chose to remake some pictures not only once but twice, sometimes more.5 One must also consider: (1) why the degree of remaking in which the studios engaged from the 1930s through the 1950s has never been duplicated since,6 (2) if there is a relation between remaking and the production of the seamless Classic Hollywood picture, and (3) why many 1950s filmmakers fell back upon already “twice-told tales.” The answer may reveal that the originals and remakes of the old Hollywood studio period differed very lit170 JENNIFER FORREST tle in their social and cultural functions and, in light of the worldview disseminated by the studios, that they were anything but financially and aesthetically competitive with each other. According to Robert Ray, Classic Hollywood filmmakers—major five and minor three studios—strove to dominate both the domestic and international markets through standardizing filmmaking such that...