New Look at Two Originals

Rear Window, Shmindow.

If someone wants to have a go at remaking a film classic, why not? If no one balks at multiple versions of “Hamlet,” what’s wrong with aiming fresh eyes at other masterworks?

You do wonder about Gus Van Sant’s coming new “Psycho,” said to be virtually a shot-by-shot replica--so what’s the point?--of Alfred Hitchcock’s terrifying original. But a new “Rear Window” with more exotic challenges facing the hero? One with quadriplegic Christopher Reeve even more helpless than hobbled Jimmy Stewart as a voyeur in a swanky New York loft, where he utilizes state-of-the-art technology to spy on his neighbors and then fight for his life against one of them? Sounds like a plan.

So it’s not the concept, but weak execution that shatters ABC’s new “Rear Window,” which is not half the suspenseful thriller that its Hitchcock-guided predecessor was.

No less a bummer is another of the weekend’s high-profile movies, HBO’s surface-slick biography of famed columnist-radio commentator Walter Winchell, who wore a snap-brim fedora and began swinging gossip like a nail-tooth club seven decades before Internet gabber Matt Drudge spewed his first innuendo.

Winchell (played here by Stanley Tucci) was washed up years before he died in 1972. But if you’re looking for the grandpappy of the gossipy tabloid tickle driving much of today’s media reporting, Winchell is your guy.

It’s that media drift, in fact, that makes the framework for “Rear Window” much less titillating today than it was when Cornell Woolrich’s story became a movie in 1954.

An invalid with nothing to do but peep on his neighbors through the rear window of his darkened apartment? No big deal. We’re all rear-window voyeurs now.

Hidden-camera snooping has begun spreading like rot across the landscape of TV news in Los Angeles, for example, very little of it valid, almost all of it gimmicky, gratuitous invasions of personal privacy on behalf of theatrics and ratings. And the practice is continuing in other cities, too.

Its TV genesis came 50 years ago with the advent of Allen Funt’s harmless “Candid Camera,” which peeked at people responding to bizarre situations strictly for laughs, and in ways that were benign and almost quaint compared with today’s gotcha-on-tape trend that also spills into entertainment.

As in Fox going on a caught-on-tape bender this season, devoting a prime-time hour Thursday, for example, to “Busted on the Job 3,” which advertised “shocking but true surveillance footage of employees’ inappropriate behavior in the workplace.”

These keyhole scenes were billed to include a hotel maid trying on a guest’s lingerie, a cop stealing doughnuts and a preschool teacher taking food from napping students. And oh, yes, a supermarket employee licking the top of an open yogurt lid, then closing it and putting it back.

On a more cosmic level, 1998 has seen not just a leaking, but a tidal wave of supposedly secret grand jury testimony that, driven by 24-hour news channels, was immediately flushed into mainstream reporting about President Clinton’s sex-related troubles.

And what have we had this week if not another panoramic window into private dialogue with TV’s breathless coverage of the freshly released Tripp-Lewinsky tapes? At last, the electronic media can put voices to the transcripts that the Los Angeles Times and other publications printed weeks ago.

Was that really CNN’s senior White House correspondent, Wolf Blitzer, bearded and sage-like, giving live, in-depth analysis earlier this week of Monica S. Lewinsky professing her love for Clinton?

Compared to all of this, the secret ogling that Reeve’s Jason Kemp does in “Rear Window” is tame. Paralyzed from the neck down and hardly able to breathe on his own following a head-on car crash, Jason whiles away the darkened hours watching residents of another building who conveniently never draw their shades.

Ultimately, he suspects one of them, a volatile artist, of murdering his wife. When the guy learns he’s being watched, and who is doing it, Jason finds himself in jeopardy, especially as he can’t breathe very long without his vent hose, which tends to pop out.

This teleplay by Eric Overmyer and Larry Gross has Jason en route to making a new life for himself, just as Reeve has done so admirably following the 1995 horseback riding accident that rendered him a vent-dependent quadriplegic.

Yet Reeve is pretty much a monotone here, and instead of cool, elegant Grace Kelly, who lit up Jimmy Stewart’s disabled photographer, his romantic interest is a tepid Daryl Hannah. There is no chemistry between them, nor can director Jeff Bleckner sustain any tension in this movie, whose most watchable moments come when Jason directs his computer-driven technology by such voice commands as “Send” and “Disconnect.”

Which you’re pleased to do.

Just as the nation ultimately detached from Walter Winchell. But only after his amazing career in which, says his biographer Neal Gabler, the enormously powerful gossip columnist forged a cult of his own personality that drove journalism away from serious news and commentary toward entertainment and the dirt-dishing and celebrity hype that often resonate loudly today.

Unfortunately, Scott Abbott’s script for HBO’s “Winchell” is based not on Gabler’s much-praised book (whose rights were sold elsewhere) but on another biography by Herman Klurfeld, who was Winchell’s close associate and, in this account, wrote nearly everything Winchell put in his column and on the air.

In fact, “Winchell” is largely an ode to Klurfeld, played (by Paul Giamatti) as the protagonist’s moral conscience, who protested when Winchell allied with the commie-hunting McCarthy crowd in the 1950s.

Winchell is framed here as good cop/bad cop rolled into one.

The bad includes his Red-baiting years (refusing in this account to help a blacklisted friend) and his allegiance to frivolous gossip, scandal mongering and P.R. plantings, much of which reached his divine ears as he sat through the night at the Stork Club in New York.

The good is epitomized by his very early anti-Hitler crusade, which then conflicted with the Hearstian policies of the New York Mirror, which published his column that at its zenith appeared in 2,000 newspapers. And he extended that influence through a weekly radio broadcast that he delivered staccato-style following his famous opening: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea--let’s go to press!”

Director Paul Mazursky keeps the story moving just that snappily. Tucci, however, is a one-note Winchell, and there’s no texture here beyond the “dots and dashes and lots of flashes” of a Winchell report. Especially vague is his relationship with his family, and as much a blur is his conversion to right-wing McCarthyhood after adoring Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

For much better insights into a Winchellesque figure, and a much better movie, rent “Sweet Smell of Success” with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis.

Winchell was largely a memory when he died at age 74 after coming across as the caricature that he was when trying to transfer his act to TV. In today’s climate, though, he’d be on “Larry King Live” and “Meet the Press.”

* “Winchell” airs at 8 p.m. Saturday on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA-L (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17, with an advisory for coarse language).

* “Rear Window” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC. The network has rated it TV-PG-LSV (may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for coarse language, sexual situations and violence).