Books, Arts & Manners: Urban Plight, Slightly Varnished

Terrence McNally’s play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune was a slightly specious but not unlikable piece about the awkward, fumbling mating of a waitress and a short-order cook. For the movies, McNally had to open up his play and deintellectualize it; not that it was very highbrow to begin with. Most of the opera and music stuff had to go; “Clair de lune,” with which Johnny woos Frankie, was allowed to survive, albeit not in the title. It is amazing that McNally was even permitted to be his own adapter, an assignment of which he acquitted himself with skill, though it must have hurt to cut some of his favorite things. On the other hand, he was able to write in a homosexual neighbor of Frankie’s and his boyfriend, stuff that he is equally fond of.

With two superstars, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, in the leads, a slick ex-television director at the helm, some pretty fancy production values, and all sorts of extra characters and plot elements thrown in, the Clair-de-luneless Frankie & Johnny (that trendy ampersand again!) is a very different, but still surprisingly palatable, kettle of fish. We have known McNally as the writer of clever, even bitchy comedies (I’m not complaining; they were funny even when, on occasion, I was the butt of their jokes), but we have not known him as the canny updater of the vintage screwball comedies. If McNally is allowed to continue in this mode—he is much more sophisticated than those writers, some uncredited, who concocted Garry Marshall’s previous directorial hit, Pretty Woman—we all stand to be enriched.

JS

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John Simon

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Terrence McNally’s play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune was a slightly specious but not unlikable piece about the awkward, fumbling mating of a waitress and a short-order cook. For the movies, McNally had to open up his play and deintellectualize it; not that it was very highbrow to begin with. Most of the opera and music stuff had to go; “Clair de lune,” with which Johnny woos Frankie, was allowed to survive, albeit not in the title. It is amazing that McNally was even permitted to be his own adapter, an assignment of which he acquitted himself with skill, though it must have hurt to cut some of his favorite things. On the other hand, he was able to write in a homosexual neighbor of Frankie’s and his boyfriend, stuff that he is equally fond of.

With two superstars, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, in the leads, a slick ex-television director at the helm, some pretty fancy production values, and all sorts of extra characters and plot elements thrown in, the Clair-de-luneless Frankie & Johnny (that trendy ampersand again!) is a very different, but still surprisingly palatable, kettle of fish. We have known McNally as the writer of clever, even bitchy comedies (I’m not complaining; they were funny even when, on occasion, I was the butt of their jokes), but we have not known him as the canny updater of the vintage screwball comedies. If McNally is allowed to continue in this mode—he is much more sophisticated than those writers, some uncredited, who concocted Garry Marshall’s previous directorial hit, Pretty Woman—we all stand to be enriched.