For example, just as the major comedy of the summer, The Man With One Red Shoe, is about to hit theaters on the heels of a massive publicity blitz, a French imitation of the movie, The Tall Blond Man With One Red Shoe, is showing up at video rental houses and local "art" theaters. But this summer is hardly the first time the French have pulled this devious trick to add a few dollars to the U.S. trade deficit.
For years Frech industrial spies have somehow been able to infiltrate American movies in production, pilfer rough drafts of scripts, get them across the Atlantic, and then crank out low-budget imitations in soundstage sweatshops along the Rivera. Big-budget movies like Superman III and Dune are able to spend enough on stringent security measures to keep French spies from nabbing plot, dialog, and characterization. But smaller-budget movies -- often light-hearted comedies that are America's most special contribution to world cinema -- simply cannot stave off determined French infiltration.
And so the profits of these smaller films are seriously eroded. Sometimes the French change the name of the film, as they did with Pardon Mon Affaire, a blatant rip-off of Gene "Willie Wonka" Wilder's amusing The Woman in Red. But usually they have the gaul to use virtually the same title as the American-made original. Hence we have the French Dear Inspector undermining Brenda "Midnight Cowboy" Vacarro's brilliant performance in the TV-movie Dear Detective; an ineffectual rendition of Richard "American Gigolo" Gere's Breathless in the French movie of the same name; and finally the Red Shoe fiasco this summer.
How can Americans detect these imitations in the future? Occasionally, as with Pardon Mon Affaire, the title of the movie is badly misspelled, indicating hasty post-production. And almost invariably the actors speak so incoherently in the movie itself that the filmmakers are forced to place captions at the bottom of the screen (even the best French actors, like François Truffaut and Catherine Deneuve, are able to get only bit parts in American movies).
Inventiveness and originality have always been uniquely American traits -- it is "Yankee Ingeniuity" that has made the American film industry the greatest in the world -- and American audiences should show their appreciation of these traits by making an effort to see movies in their original forms. American audiences may be tempted by the lower prices of video rental stores and run-down art theaters, and they may think they are getting the same product inside a similar wrapping, but by viewing tawdry copies of Original Art, Americans are only undermining the very values they hold dear.
Copyright © 1985,1996 by Kelvin Thompson
All Rights Reserved
(Updated July 20, 1996)