Update of 1939 classic is in dire need of laughs

One exasperated character in "The Women" yells: "What do you think this is, some 1930s movie?"

If only.

"The Women," the original directed by George Cukor and co-scripted by Anita Loos, was the comedy highlight of 1939 - the greatest year in movie history. (It also saw "Gone With the Wind," "Wuthering Heights," "The Wizard of Oz" and a half dozen other top films.) With its all-female cast, it dealt affectionately with women, who, as Joan Crawford, one of the stars, put it, "are hardly spoken of, outside a kennel."

This remake is all wrong. It's not a remake at all but an adaptation that seeks to get "serious" in the name of "modern" causes.

Now Mary Haines, the glamorously mature perfect wife originally played by Norma Shearer, is a hippy-looking thing who badly needs a pair of scissors applied to her wild mane of blond straw.

For this film to work, you've got to sympathize with Mary. She's the center of everything. Her catty friends don't quite know what to do when they learn that Mary's husband is having an affair with a cheap perfume counter sexpot, played by Eva Mendes (Crawford in the original).

At first, they just gossip.

Mary is played by the heavily face-lifted Meg Ryan in a vulgar, commonplace way that makes us question whether Stephen, Mary's husband, was such a jerk after all. Mendes plays the "other woman," Crystal Allen, as a seriously sexy slut rather than for comedy. There's no question that she presents a temptation for any susceptible husband. Defending her wardrobe, she says, "When Stephen doesn't like what I'm wearing, I take it off."

Overall, she isn't funny.

Nor is much else about this rehash.

Writer-director Diane English, creator of "Murphy Brown" on TV, spent 14 years trying to get a studio to back this project, and once she got her chance, she stuffed it full of issues. Somebody forgot the jokes. The one-liners could have bee n lifted directly from the original. Clare Booth Luce wrote the play that came before the 1939 movie.

Take Sylvia. As played by Rosalind Russell in the original, she was the funniest character of a quite hilarious bunch. She was the two-faced gossiper who ratted on Mary, aligned herself with Crystal and, finally, got her comeuppance.

Now Sylvia is played by Annette Bening, and, for whatever reason, she's a confused career woman who, in the film's most ponderous scene, gives Mary's teen daughter a serious talk about the meaning of life.

All the women are poorly photographed, but Bening is the one who should sue.

Just to be sure that we don't start laughing, a prolonged birth scene is thrown in with Debra Messing screaming in pain.

The women I talked with at the doggie park at the Beach the other day told me they were going to see this movie no matter what I said, mainly because of the all-star cast, but also because they were tired of "silly action movies." There are no movies for women, they said.

They would do better to rent the original.

With the clout of "Sex and the City" and even the harried "Mamma Mia!," it had been looking like a promising year for women at the box office.

They deserve better.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com