November 23, 2010
Pre-release:
George Clooney as Napoleon Solo? George CloOOney????!!! My God. He’ll ham it up till there’s nothing left. The whole point of Robert Vaughan’s achievement with Napoleon Solo was a knife-edge balance of ham and poise. He was the only actor I’ve ever seen who could make sleaze attractive. I’m not saying Clooney won’t be able to do the humour, just that his choice for the role indicates that the suits have yet again mentally converted an analogue character into low-res digital before trying to work out who should turn it back into analogue again. Oh god, who does this mean they’re going to get for Illya?
And I thought Vaughan and McCallum were going to have cameos anyway? If they’re still alive by the time Hollywood gets its act together, that is. The writers could at least have the grace to create new young characters and use poetic licence to leave Napoleon and Illya still there though older in the 60s. Character is more important than temporal logic: only a few people care about maths but almost everyone cares about flavour.
Oooh it does make me angry. It was similar execs who cancelled a beautiful series half way through the 4th season when they HAD the setup, they HAD the actors, they HAD the fanbase, they were IN the era, they even, after the 3rd series dip, once again had the writers. And now, 40 years later, kids are going to grow up thinking suave, hilariously awful but poignantly serious and confidence-inspiring Napoleon Solo is a one-dimensional goop created by funnyman George Clooney. In the hands of anyone but Robert Vaughan the character can’t help but reduce to a humorous counterpoint for the serious and necessarily infallible Illya (a great character but a far less subtly constructed one).
It’s like my poor father: he remained convinced all his life, even though he loved the 80s series, that Sherlock Holmes was Basil Rathbone, when everyone knows that actually he’s Jeremy Brett. But in that case the character had a life of its own before either actor's interpretation. When an actor plays a brand new character, it’s his creation just as much as it is the writer’s, and it should never be played by anyone else except with the express intention of portraying the previous actor as well as the character. Which is why this whole issue was not nearly so important in the recent Star Trek film and isn’t an issue at all for James Bond. Dr Who had the cleverest solution but it’s not really usable outside Dr Who.
The only way round Hollywood’s ham-fisted approach to remakes is is to create new characters. Since that is apparently out of the question, all I can say is: please, please, George – prove me wrong.