THE MOVIES : ‘WOULD YOU REPEAT THAT, PLEASE?’ : SEQUELS: A FRESH DELUGE

The sequel has been part of the movies’ modus operandi from early days. It goes back at least to “The Squaw Man’s Son” in 1917, a capitalizing on Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. De Mille’s very successful first feature. At the start of the 1930s there was a remake of “The Squaw Man” itself, which bombed terribly at the box office--a fact of history that more makers of remakes ought to bear in mind.

The series is another venerable trade item. Andy Hardy went through 16 outings between “A Family Affair” in 1936 and “Andy Hardy Comes Home” in 1958.

But the sequel / series with a Roman or Arabic numeral in the title is a more recent item, and Francis Ford Coppola bears some responsibility in this matter. “The Godfather, Part II” in 1974 has been credited with starting the trend.

“Godfather II” was always a very special case, of course, designed to stand alone on first viewing but then to be cut together with “Godfather I” and the whole thing seen as a single feature. So it has been, on television and in revival houses, sometimes identified as “The Godfather Saga.” The parts together measure the warmth of the Corleone family against the chill horror of their professional doings and indicate that the killing and ruthless ways of the business take their toll on family life as well.

There is persisting talk of a “Godfather III,” and no one should rashly bet against it. But at this writing it appears to be about the only numbered film that won’t be visible in 1989.

As the accompanying box reveals, the list of sequels and other numbered items announced or scheduled for 1989 is not just a trend, it is a deluge. The films derived from earlier films probably constitute at least 25% of all films Hollywood will make this year.

What we have here is not a continuing trend but a fresh deluge. Consider: The spring will have seen “Police Academy 6.” The summer will bring us “Ghostbusters II,” with Bill Murray and the original gang, including Sigourney Weaver, whom the new story has given a child named Oscar, a coincidence that allegedly predated her two Academy Award nominations. The Summer will bring us “Karate Kid III,” “Lethal Weapon 2,” “Star Trek V” and two series items that do not carry numbers: “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and “Return of the Musketeers.”

“Crusade” can in fact be thought of as “Indiana Jones 3” and “Return” is in effect “Musketeers 3” in the present series, which began with Richard Lester’s very free 1973 remake of the classic, with a wild script by George MacDonald Fraser, which begat a sequel, “The Four Musketeers,” in 1974, neither of which bore much resemblance to Dumas as seen in 1935 (Walter Abel and Paul Lukas), 1939 (Don Ameche and the Ritz Brothers) or 1948 (Gene Kelly and Lana Turner).

But we digress.

The fall will see before us “Back to the Future II,” which was shot back-to-back with “Back to the Future III,” to take advantage of Michael J. Fox’s limited availability and to make the confident assertion that you can’t have too much of a good thing. Also in view are “Ernest III,” “The Gods Must Be Crazy II,” “The Stepfather II,” “Meatballs IV,” “The Gate II,” “Empire of Ash II and III” and “Halloween 5.”

This outpouring of cinematic reincarnations is amusing or appalling, depending on where you sit. Sequels and series are not inevitably inferior to the originals. Sentimental memory says that “Love Finds Andy Hardy” (1938) was probably the best of the 16 Hardys, although it was the third in the series. Love was personified by the young Judy Garland and the young Lana Turner, which helped.

“Godfather II” was at least the equal of the first and was in many ways subtler--colder of eye and more indicting in message. “Star Trek IV” has been cited as the best of that lot so far, the sharpest and cleverest in its look at the reaction of a sensible future to our clangorous present.

Sequels often try harder, as No. 2s are always supposed to. “Indiana Jones 2” worked furiously to outdo the razzle-dazzle trickeries of the first, and did. Messrs. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg thus set up a powerful expectancy for No. 3, which is naturally the object of the exercise.

Still, the law of diminishing returns has not yet been repealed, which I remember noting many a year ago in a similar connection. There may or may not be anything further that can usefully be said about a set of characters and a situation, and the sequel thus becomes not so much an extension as a replication with not much fresh to say. The magic tarnishes all too soon.

Film purists would prefer an original script every time--preferably not even an adaptation of something from another medium or another language. But that is not the way of the world, any more than is universal brotherhood or the free lunch.

The motion picture, like television, is a marketplace commodity and subject to the iron laws of trade, such as that lack of profit goeth before a fall. Subsidiary laws hold that what has worked once should be tried again, and again and again, until it ceases to work. (This is to say, until it runs out of steam or audiences or, as is likely, both.)

Adlai Stevenson in one of his campaigns said that Republican policy was to try everything, but not for the first time. This wisdom may have been invented in Hollywood or it may simply have been borrowed as a way of coping with the film industry’s radically changed circumstances, which followed on the arrival of television and inflation (in that order).

It is one thing for a studio to make originals when it is turning out 50 or more films a year at an average cost well below a million dollars. (There was really no choice except to make nearly all originals.) It is a different matter when a $12-million budget for a film is thought to be modest and cost-efficient, and you are producing only a dozen or so films a year.

A compounding factor in the rise of the sequel has been that after the passing of the founding fathers of Hollywood the industry has been largely run by executives with more trust in market research than in their own creative instincts. The moguls tended to be gamblers with an arrogant confidence in their own hunches. Later leaders have preferred to hedge their bets.

In economically dangerous times for the movies, a bottom-line prudence has colored many decisions--thus the proliferation of sequels and series. If it works, not only don’t fix it--try to make another one just like it.

As the late Leslie Halliwell noted in ‘The Film Guide,” the profits from the Andy Hardy movies underwrote many an ambitious commercial failure at MGM in the ‘30s and ‘40s, just as Abbott and Costello and Ma and Pa Kettle kept Universal-International afloat during otherwise dark times. Today the numbered repeat can ease the downside risk on the risky, costly and admirable films that continue to be made (“Gandhi,” “Out of Africa,” “Gorillas in the Mist,” “The Last Emperor”).

Everything in the industry changes, and very little changes. The series and sequels are markedly less innocent than they used to be, but then again the world (e.g., the audience) has surrendered a lot of its own innocence, too.

As before, the reworkings, in their technically proficient and undemanding ways, play well for audiences whose central demand is for diversion and respite, not heavy engagement or the stressful enlargement of the boundaries of the medium.

Horror continues to be its own reward, although the horror gets more graphic right along. It is still played for laughs, but the laughs grow more nervous right along. Nothing stays quite the same, even in sequels. The shocks are nastier; the action pictures are more graphically violent, the language would have given Will Hays quadruple apoplexy, the loving embraces have gone from vertical to horizontal.

On the other hand (and there is one), the best of the follow-up films build upon sympathetic and often complex characters and rich environments. They can use the pre-existing material as a kind of shorthand to let the new work get on with a fresh story.

I would even place a small bet on a renewed (if relative) innocence as a dark horse in the sequel stakes. Horror, including comedy horror, is its own genre. But the feel-good comedy, silly or otherwise, can be detected in the year’s budget, and I suspect there will be more of it. As is always and forever the case, the script’s the thing, and when it is first-rate, everything else is secondary, including the numbers.