A struggling working-class type haphazardly falls in with a rich and arrogant fussbudget, and after initial complications and against all odds they somehow strike up a romance.
It all started 44 years ago with Lina Wertmuller‘s Swept Away. Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini played the warring lovers. The best scene was when Melato asked Giannini to sodomize her, and Giannini said “sodomy…what’s that?”
Thirteen years later Gary Marshall and screenwriter Leslie Dixon delivered a differently plotted, broadly comedic American version called Overboard (’87), with Kurt Russell as Giancarlo and Goldie Hawn.
15 years later Guy Ritchie‘s Swept Away remake (’02) appeared with Madonna in the rich bitch role, and the less said about that the better.
Now comes an Rob Greenberg‘s Overboard remake (Lionsgate, 4.13), but with the genders reversed — Ana Faris as Kurt and Eugenio Derbez as Goldie, and with Dixon back as a cowriter. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn than Greenberg doesn’t even know who Wertmuller is. Hollywood film culture has really downgraded and mongrelized itself over the last 25 or 30 years.
![](https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/themes/amory/patreon-banner.jpg)