TVGuide.com's Entertainment ...

• Mar 23, 2006 04:00 AM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

Question: TVGuide.com's Entertainment News reported that "Nia Vardalos is penning Talk of the Town, a big fat star vehicle for Tom Hanks." Is this a remake of the Cary Grant/Jean Arthur movie The Talk of the Town, or is it a different story with the same title?

Answer: I'm thinking totally different story with the same title. All I've heard about the plot of the new Talk of the Town, which My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) writer and star Nia Vardalos is writing from an idea by Tom Hanks, is that it involves a man (presumably Hanks) who's suddenly forced to make an unexpected career change. This doesn't sound at all to me like the vintage dark comedy The Talk of the Town (1942), in which Jean Arthur plays a small-town schoolteacher and Cary Grant is a local man on the run after having been falsely accused of and arrested for the crime of arson. And by the way, the old Talk of the Town was recently released on DVD as part of a boxed set of Grant films put out by Sony. The other titles in the set are Holiday (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), His Girl Friday (1940) and The Awful Truth (1937) — it's a great set.