Swept Away  (2002 and 1974) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Scoop's notes on the 2002 re-make

As I wondered about what to write about the remake of Swept Away, I debated in my mind whether it is the worst movie I have ever seen. No, I concluded, it can't be, because Island of the Dead and Barn of the Naked Dead and Plan Nine from Outer Space and Manos - the Hands of Fate were all made on shoestring budgets, by amateurs with a tenuous hold on sanity. Those filmmakers were further handicapped by having to create everything from scratch, including the script.

So, no, Swept Away can't be in that league. But I'll say this. It may well be the worst film ever made if your definition is "the one that did the worst job with what it had to work with". In addition to the existing script, they had money, an award-winning director, some professional performers, and a good concept.

And a very, very bad movie.

Without exaggeration, I can vouchsafe that if I gave you an award-winning screenplay to remake, and about $25,000 in cash, you would make a better movie.

There may be one other category where it can compete for all-time supremacy, but it would be a close contest. I suppose the worst film ever made by a director to showcase his wife as an actress would have to be John Derek's Bolero. You wouldn't have thought Madonna and hubby could have challenged them. Guy Richie is an accomplished professional director with solid hits under his belt, while John Derek was a hack. And while Madonna is not likely to take any roles from Dame Judi Dench any time soon, she does have some career accomplishments in her celluloid resumé (Evita, e.g.) that would not be attainable for Bo Derek.

Once again, however, they managed to make the least out of what they had to work with.

To refresh your memory, this is a remake of a Lina Wertmueller movie about a rich woman who abuses one of the cabin hands on a private cruise, then finds herself shipwrecked on a deserted island with him, at which point her riches become meaningless and his survival skills make him the dominant citizen of the island. He takes advantage of his physical strength and the rest of the situation, eventually turning the arrogant woman into his slave, and then into his adoring mate.

The problems:

• Stripped out of his own chosen milieu of urban gangsters, director Guy Richie seemed to wander through this film cluelessly. "Hey, how about a corny music/montage scene".
• Given the script, needing only to fine-tune it, they managed to strip all the credibility out of all of the characters. The rich-bitch played by Madonna - I've seen more subtle characters in Tex Avery cartoons. C'mon. Nobody behaves like this, either in the early bitch period or in her later period when she makes moon eyes at her man. The stereotyped poor Italian fisherman played by Giannini (his dad played the same role in the 1974 version)  - would have been considered a low point in Huntz Hall's career.
• Not only did they make the characters unrealistic, but they also removed the serious socialist thought, which looked at the uneasy social positions created by the artificiality of class stratification. They replaced this with additional bitchiness on the part of the rich woman.
• The icing on the cake is the acting. The parts are written so badly that even Meryl Streep and Ken Branagh would find it impossible to play them realistically, but Streep and Branagh are nowhere to be seen. This may be the worst acted major movie in history, at no higher a level than a high school play.

I think there have been movies when Madonna's acting was, while not Oscar-worthy, at least at a level sufficiently professional to avoid notice. After all, that's mostly what acting is about, isn't it, making the actor disappear into the character? I think she did OK in these three films:

1. In Evita, she essentially played herself. With the possible exception of Dicaprio and Rimbaud, there has probably never been a case where a performer played a person so similar to his or her own personality. My friend and occasional colleague, Mick Locke, who is far more scholarly than I, found Madonna's performance shallow, and thought she missed some opportunities that great actresses would have turned into gold, but I got lost in the movie without being aware of any acting technique, so I reckon she did the job she needed to do.
2. I actually liked her in Dick Tracy, in which she played the chanteuse and the murderer with an élan that has otherwise eluded her film efforts, and sang a lovely, subdued duet with Mandy Patinkin. In other words, she took everything they gave her to do, and did it well.
3. And then of course there is Desperately Seeking Susan, in which she successfully incorporated aspects of her own life and personality into a tailor-made role. 

Except for her best moments in those three films, her legendary stage charisma doesn't seem to translate to the screen. Her great weakness is that she can't seem to assume the role of a "real" person. I don't know enough about her life to say this, but that flaw may be a result of long periods passing since she lived and worked among everyday people. I understand that she lives a fairly sheltered life, and tends to surround herself with sycophants and theater people. If she really wants to be an actress, she needs to get out there in the real world. Disguise herself and work as a secretary in New York for a week. Hang around some diners and convenience stores in the Midwest. Take in some middle class pubs in London and Dublin. Find out how real people behave.

In this film she was supposed to play that ultra-bitch, spoiled, unhappy rich woman, but she had no idea where to draw the line between characterization and caricature. She could have benefited from a few weeks hanging out with CEO's wives, seeing what they are really like. Instead, she performed in her most subdued moments with an exaggeration that made Naomi Campbell seem as measured and thoughtful as Judge David Souter.

And then she really got nasty.

No matter what your thoughts about violence against women, I don't know if it is possible not to be rooting for the fisherman when he finally slaps her around. I'll bet even the women who saw the movie - both of them - were hoping he would shut her up.

Madonna was quoted as saying that director Guy Richie (her husband) was sometimes unprofessional during the filming. Well, the results certainly seem to confirm that, but I have to say this, for what it's worth ... Richie's movies without Madonna (Snatch and Lock, Stock ...) are slick, and pretty damned cool.

I don't know if you can say that Madonna is the worst actress of all time, but I think she certainly should get the award for the least career development. If you compare Madonna's earliest efforts (Desperately Seeking Susan) to Jessica Lange's (King Kong), you can see that while Madonna wasn't great, she probably had more potential, more raw acting talent than Miss Lange. Lange, however, worked hard at her craft and became one of the best actresses of her generation. Madonna? Well, I don't know exactly what went wrong, but flash forward eight years from Susan to Body of Evidence, and she had actually gotten worse. Flash forward another eight years to Swept Away, and she had gotten worse again. Give her another eight years, and she may yet leave behind a legacy as the worst actress who ever lived.

Personally, I'm upset because one of the divas, either Britney or Madonna, will surely steal the Worst Picture Razzie away from my main man, Roberto Benigni. I thought Pinocchio would finally be his big chance. Even though this year looks grim,  I'm sure Benigni will double the pratfalls next year. As we speak, he's working on some techniques for tripping over several new forms of fruit rinds, and I hear that he's going to attempt the much more daring "vegetable fall" next year as well, and he has publicly stated that might even attempt to step on two rakes at once, a feat which has never been done on film. He's also sponsoring some much-needed research into developing sillier bells for his cap, thus finding a way to open up the "bell bottleneck" that has limited fools to the same basic bell technology their predecessors used in the middle ages. And he's been practicing in front of the mirror hour after hour on his funny faces, so with a bit of luck he should kick some diva ass next year.

Especially if he can land his dream project:  Roberto Benigni's Hamlet. There are some who say he's too old to play a Hamlet fresh from the university, but I say fie on the nay-sayers. Roberto played Pinocchio this year, and that's an eight year old boy!

Ponder the significance of that for a minute. This is one of the worst movies ever made, and yet there were 16 scenes that were not good enough to make the cut. When you stop and let that soak in, you'll probably realize that the DVD is worth obtaining just to see how any scene could possibly be bad enough to be left out of this film.

Tuna's notes on the 1974 original

Interesting film. The scenery is spectacular, and the photography does it justice. I was totally irritated by the slow development at the beginning of the film, especially since Mariangela Melato is totally obnoxious as the rich woman, but the first act is necessary to set the characters and provide the justification for Giannini's later brutalization of Melato. Once the main characters are lost on the small boat, the story takes off, and by the time it's over, it's engrossing. I am not really sure what Wertmüller was trying to say here, but she wrapped her messages and themes in a very entertaining if talky love story.