Hey, Alice! Ralph Isn’t Going to Be the Same Anymore

How sweet it isn’t.

Perhaps he’ll be a huge surprise. Perhaps his talent runs deeper than he has shown. Perhaps a great challenge will yield great work. Based on past performance, though, naming Tom Arnold to play Ralph Kramden in a theatrical movie version of “The Honeymooners” is like asking a tortoise to soar.

Bang-zoom right to the moon.

Yet producer Frank Price did just that last week for a planned Savoy Pictures rendering of “The Honeymooners,” scheduled to start shooting in 1996. Arnold, Price said, “is perfect for this role.”

No role is sacrosanct. If it’s permissible to have multiple Lears, Othellos and Hamlets (and don’t forget the growing crowd of James Bonds), it should be permissible to have multiple Ralph Kramdens. But Price’s anointing of Arnold as ideal was a regular riot, the deafening har-de-har-de-har-har of the month.

It’s unlikely that anyone could match Jackie Gleason as Ralph, but John Goodman would have a better chance than Arnold. As would even Andrew (he’s dropped the “Dice”) Clay, judging by the pilot for “Bless This House,” his coming CBS comedy series about a coarse postal worker and his family. His opening line, delivered to his wife: “Hey, Alice!”

Not that Arnold hasn’t displayed some comedy skills in an infant movie and fleeting television career--the best of Tom coming when he was a supporting player on ABC’s “Roseanne,” which he wound up co-producing with his former wife until their raucous split. It’s only that those skills appear lowly measured against his predecessor’s genius. That Gleason genius is inseparable from his creation of Ralph, a lower-middle-class Brooklyn bus driver whose loud-mouthed irritability and layers of fat and frustration nourished this comedy from the 1950s, which has charmed audiences for decades.

The inevitable comparison will be made, and from what we know of him, Tom Arnold is no Jackie Gleason.

He’d find it as easy being Jackie Mason. There you go. Why not Jackie Mason as Ralph? When Alice wants to know why he’s in such a foul mood, Ralph replies in a thick dialect: “Don’t ask.”

Why would Price feel that Arnold is ready for Kramden? Don’t ask. In his brief stints heading a couple of sitcoms, Arnold indicated that he may not be ready even for top bananadom, to say nothing of tackling an indelible character in a series that was not only consistently funny but also tapped the lives of working-class Americans while helping define an entire TV age.

Adapting “The Honeymooners” for the 1990s would be difficult in any case, but doubly so with Arnold.

Like all good comedies, “The Honeymooners” could not have succeeded without superior writing. And that writing helped produce the show’s wave after wave of hilarity. Yet much of Gleason’s comedy, the nuances and dimension, was intuitive and couldn’t be scripted.

For example, there appeared to be no surface reason for Ralph’s wife, Alice, to remain married to him (or for viewers to like him). It wasn’t riches that made her stay. They barely scraped by while tumultuously coexisting in a sparsely furnished two-room walk-up on grim tenement row. Nor was it Ralph’s personality, which was miserable. Only rarely did he utter a kind word to her.

Yet there was, indeed, something that endeared Ralph not only to Alice but also to much of America. It was that glint of humanity. As Gleason did with the Poor Soul and his boozing playboy Reggie Van Gleason III, he instilled in Ralph something that resonated separately from the show’s gags. Ralph had vulnerability, a deep-down hurt that made you pull for him despite his tirades and rantings. Will Arnold achieve that?

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It won’t be easy, either, finding someone to effectively re-create Art Carney’s Ed Norton, the good-natured lug of a sewer worker whose guileless antics triggered some of Ralph’s biggest and funniest explosions. Their volatile comradeship was priceless. Nor will it be a cinch casting Alice, a wisecracking character most closely identified with Audrey Meadows. When Ralph’s ambitious get-rich-quick schemes inevitably failed, Alice was there to caustically remind him. And though the fuming Ralph would respond by threatening to slap her around, he was all bluster and bluff, evidenced by their trademark schmaltzy kiss at the end of each episode.

While Norton and Alice are significant, though, it’s Ralph whose casting is most critical to “The Honeymooners,” putting the pressure on Arnold.

Bringing Ralph to the big screen is in the entertainment tradition of exploiting good feelings about the past, including the trend toward making theatrical movies out of vintage TV series. Unlike “Dennis the Menace,” “The Brady Bunch” and other such comedies transferred to movies, however, “The Honeymooners” is no tailored-for-camp self-parody but one of TV’s true epics. Screwing it up would earn the producers a belt right in the kisser.