Years and years ago I saw a ...

• Apr 13, 2006 04:00 AM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

Question: Years and years ago I saw a movie about an aristocratic family who get stranded on a desert island with their servants and at some point the blue bloods have to acknowledge that the butler and other servants are more inventive, ingenious, resourceful and street-smart than they are. So the servants take charge, until — if my memory serves me correctly — they're rescued, brought back to England and everybody goes back to his or her original position in the pecking order. I saw it as a kid — I'm 43 now — and think it was an older movie already. But every time I think about this adventure/psychological drama, it seems to me that it would be a nice story to remake.

Answer: The story is definitely The Admirable Crichton, which started life as a play by James M. Barrie — yes, the man who wrote Peter Pan. It's been filmed three times already, first by Cecil B. DeMille as the silent Male and Female (1919); Gloria Swanson plays the spoiled, wellborn heiress who's shipwrecked with her family and servants and falls in love with the family butler, Crichton, when she's able to see him for the man he is rather than as her social inferior. The most recent version is The Admirable Crichton (1957), shot in color and starring Kenneth More as Crichton. The concensus is that the version in between the two, Norman Taurog's We're Not Dressing (1934), is by far the best, though it recasts the story as a jazz-age fable about reckless, rich youth and salt-of-the-earth working folk: Carole Lombard is the rich girl who's shipwrecked with her useless society friends and Bing Crosby is the lowly deckhand who proves a better man than any billionaire's son. I have a terrible feeling that a modern-day remake would look more like Madonna's 2002 Swept Away (itself a remake of Lina Wertmüller's 1974 Swept Away... By an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August), one of many movies that, though not directly based on Barrie's play, do appropriate its basic setup and its ideas about the idle rich and the so-called lower classes they look down on unless they need someone to actually do something.