Alec Guiness and the Original

Not yet. I've just watched this one (again) and I'm ready to go look for the original.

Well I've been a long time fan of the original - by no means a masterpiece but a really neat little film, with Guinness in fine form as the doomed hero. I had no idea the film had been remade - found out about it here on imdb. The idea of George Byrd now becoming Georgia Byrd, with Queen Latifah in the lead, struck me as a really good one, and my curiosity was piqued - so I watched it. I really wanted to like that film, cause hell, it's got all the ingredients for success: a great original story by J.B. Priestley, an eminently likeable Queen Latifah, good supporting cast, but alas - it just doesn't deliver. "The mayonnaise doesn't take", as the French say. The film is flawed in so many respects and I won't even attempt to enumerate everything that ultimately makes this a really bad movie. But to give you an idea, some of the key characters are underdevelopped (Latifah's love interest for example - LL Cool J never really gets a chance to stand out - he just pops back at the end of the film as a nice icing-on-the-cake of sorts, which makes what should be a special relationship look like a clumsy appendage to the central plot). Many actors are equally underused (Depardieu is just here to declaim stuff in French to add an exotic note to the whole thing for American audiences, Giancarlo Esposito constantly looks like he's wondering what the heck he's doing there - and who could blame him - and Timothy Hutton hams his way through the film - it's both painful to watch and embarrassing). The excellent Susan Kellerman as "Gunther" does what she can with the poor material she was handed, and so does Ranjit Chowdhry, who actually manages to do a terrific job as the tormented Dr. Gupta. In fact, I'd say he and Queen Latifah almost manage to salvage this botched quickie, but there's only so much an actor can do. Bottom line, if you're interested in the story, watch the original, and if you want to see Queen Latifah, watch Chicago.