Although it actually descends from radio, since its earliest days television - which devours material like a hungry Hydra - depended on the heritage of the cinema, filling its empty hours with movies. In its infancy, in fact, ancient flicks constituted the best entertainment on the box, providing a haphazard history of film for people without access to the works in any other way (a benefit Martin Scorsese discusses in some of his excellent documentaries). The improvements in technology that brought videotape and DVDs to consumers, along with the proliferation of cable television channels, now means that all of us have seen many more motion pictures in our homes than in theaters, an extraordinary fact that nobody in Hollywood ever anticipated.

In addition to providing matter for the small screen, particular movies also of course inspire successful television series that attain their own identity, like "Naked City," "Alice," and "M*A*S*H." In an oddly reciprocal, not to say incestuous, relationship, the film industry also now and then looks to television for subjects and ideas. After great popularity in one medium, such shows as "The Untouchables," "The Twilight Zone," "The X Files," "Star Trek," and more recently, the immensely popular "Sex and the City," have undergone, with varying degrees of success, the transition to the big screen and the darkened auditorium.

The latest example of television repaying some of the great debt it owes to the cinema, however, represents a curious and puzzling example of stubbornly anachronistic thinking, not an entirely new phenomenon in Hollywood. "Get Smart" began life as a comedy series back in the 1960's, and, like almost any other cultural artifact of any era, evolved out of a particular context that defined its appeal and even its identity, which in our time seems entirely irrelevant and even perhaps puzzling to its intended audience.

The series, to begin with, depended upon the atmosphere of the Cold War and the consequent fascination with international espionage, involving that constant and convenient enemy, the Soviet Union. That situation itself accounted for the popularity of spy fiction, some of it, notably the novels of Len Deighton and John le Carré, of a high order of quality; the most famous, of course, remain Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, which as everybody knows, spawned an apparently immortal cinematic franchise all their own.

The situation comedy, appearing in that atmosphere and competing with straight TV spy shows, depended on its audience's awareness of the cinematic context. Quite simply, it lampooned the international situation and the serious shows and movies (especially the Bond flicks) employing their characteristic subjects, methods, and devices for broad comedy. "Get Smart" grew out of the collaboration of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, funny men who could never be accused of subtlety, perfectly suited for television.

That history and that context, though probably a good deal more interesting than the new movie based on the series, may explain the failure of the film version of "Get Smart"; it does not, however, explain its existence. Beyond the appearance of the currently and inexplicably popular Steve Carell as the bumbling, inept agent Maxwell Smart, hardly anything in the movie suggests any basis for appeal to the young people who constitute the audience for the picture.

The plot, characters, and action of the series, which originally depended upon the general awareness of James Bond's savoir faire, physical prowess, and gadgetry, seem embarrassingly juvenile and entirely silly on the big screen. The whole work in fact appears improvised around a series of flat gags and meaningless gestures - a completely irrelevant cameo by Bill Murray epitomizes the perception that the friends of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry show up in the movie without any particular purpose, just for the fun of it all.

Don Adams, the original Maxwell Smart, used his nasal voice and stand-up comic's timing to deliver the familiar tag lines that Steve Carell, more or less imitating his predecessor and mugging with his familiar demeanor of puzzled innocence, repeats without a good deal of conviction. Nothing in the movie - the people, the plot, the jokes - justifies its appearance beyond demonstrating once again that success in one medium does not guarantee the same result in another. The whole enterprise really should have been called "Get Dumb." 

Get Smart

(PG-13), directed by Peter Segal

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