Is It Time To Remake The Party?

...Reasons for Leaving Well Alone

1. Farce is Very Difficult to Do

There is a great deal more to farce than people losing their trousers. Making a farce involves painstaking choreography, immense self-discipline and perfect comic timing, because if any one person misses a beat, it can bring the whole thing to a grinding halt. It can be very difficult to judge how funny something is when you€™re creating it, and there is only so much that you can fix in the editing room. If directing a normal comedy is like trying to play a scale on a piano, directing a farce is like trying to play Rachmaninoff€™s Third Piano Concerto with John Gielgud shouting at you (go and watch Shine if you don€™t get the reference). Blake Edwards made The Party work because he was a disciplinarian on set, allowing the cast to improvise but always putting his foot down when a joke wasn€™t working. The film effectively invented video playback, with Edwards mounting a video camera onto the film camera so he didn€™t have to wait for the rushes to see if a joke was worth including. The bottom line is that, when it comes to farce, you are sunk if you don€™t have a director you understands comedy. And on the basis of comedy remakes in recent years, finding someone who does may prove difficult €“ though we can at least the director of Gambit out of the running.