Born Yesterday

The triumphant trio of Holliday, Holden and Crawford in Cukor's 1950 version of Garson Kanin's sharp stage comedy is a hard act to follow. Ironically, however, in this once-more-without-feeling remake, sketchily updated to the '90s, Griffith's performance in the not-so-dumb broad role is closer in some ways to Kanin's conception than Holliday's. Kanin wanted to play on opposites, requiring gangster Harry's moll to be a clean slate on which the not-so-smart journo (Johnson), hired by Harry to give her class, could write. Where Holliday was always too sophisticated a butterfly right from the off, Griffith's copycat performance starts dumb - but then never takes wing.