However, Feldman may have miscalculated by paroting the Brooks tone in a way that makes unflattering comparisons inevitable.Īlthough there's no difference in the games they like to play, Feldman seems a shaky, bush-league terrible jokers compared to a prodigal, big-league terrible joker like Brooks.

While 'Remake' may seem just what the doctor ordered for incorrigible, indefatigable horse-laughters, it's rather more likely to be unfondly remembered as Feldman's bungling attempt to ingration himself as a comedy writer-director-star with the American movie-going public.Īfter the success of Mel Brookes' 'Blazing Saddles,' the all-too-apparent and treacherous model for Feldman's dumb jesting, one feels reluctant to underestimate the commercial potential of anything in the painfully facetious, blatantly obvious and/or vociferously, smutty veins. Marty Feldman's farcical adaptation, 'The Last Remake of Beau Geste,' opening today at the K-B Cinema, is not exactly a devastating or irresistible put-down of the original's nostalgic heroic cliches and conventions, which were rendered more or less faithfully in three earlier films. In any given decade there are always several actors, British and American, who could have a swell time impersonating the extravagantly noble, self-sacrificing (and, if the truth be known, self-satisified) Geste brothers.Īt the moment Edward Fox, for example might make a sensational 'Beau,' the nickname of the eldest brother, Michael, whose desire to help conceal his aunt's deception leads him into theft, flight and a perilous tour of luty in the French Foreign Legion, where he is loyall if uncomprehendingly followed by siblings Digby and John. Percival Christopher Wren's 52-year-old adventure novel 'Beau Geste' is such diverting valorous hokum that it's safe to assume movie versions will never cease being made.

Beau geste novel