Today on TCM, one of my favorite movies of all time comes on, Out of the Past. It was released in 1947 and 36 years later was remade as Against All Odds. Jeff Bridges stepped into the shoes of Robert Mitchum, James Woods into the shoes of Kirk Douglas, and Rachel Ward into the shoes of Jane Greer. Despite the incredible talents of Bridges and Woods, they still couldn’t fill those shoes. Step into them, yes. Fill them, no. But the real problem was Rachel Ward. Not because she wasn’t up to the task, although it’s arguable she wasn’t but that’s a discussion for a different time and a different post on acting, but because they gave her the wrong character. Hell, they gave the movie the wrong character and that doomed the whole enterprise before the movie was even halfway done.
I have never had a knee jerk reaction to remakes. I’ve even written more than a few posts on the subject (including one here at the Morlocks) where I say, with all sincerity, remake whatever you like. Remake Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and The Godfather for all I care. You may embarrass yourself in the process, do a great job unexpectedly, or just provide an interesting counter to the original. Either way, I really don’t care. When Gus Van Sant set out to make a shot by shot remake of Psycho, much of the movie watching world was up in arms. Why? The original wasn’t going anywhere and the remake, within a year of its release, was already more than halfway down the road to oblivion. And had it worked, great! We’d have another masterful version of the same story to compare and contrast. In my book, that amounts to an embarrassment of riches so, like I say, remake any movie you want. Go crazy with it. But when you fail, I’m letting you know it. Which brings me to Against All Odds.
I saw Against All Odds before I saw Out of the Past. Well before I saw Out of the Past. In fact, thanks to cable and its proclivity for showing the same movie around the clock, back in 1983 I saw Against All Odds, all the way through or in bits and pieces, many, many times over. I thought it was an okay movie and didn’t really think of it in any one way or another. I enjoyed watching Jeff Bridges interact with James Woods and thought it had a pretty good visual sense about it but, otherwise, it acted more as background noise on cable than anything else. If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have said it was okay and give it a look if you have the time but if you can’t get around to it, no great loss. That’s still pretty much how I feel about it but when I finally did see the original, years later and thanks to TCM, I was floored. I not only loved it but couldn’t help but immediately think, “That’s why I wasn’t impressed with Against All Odds! They defanged the femme fatale! Those idiots!” Let me put in this way: Out of the Past contains one of my favorite lines of all time delivered by one of my favorite actors of all time, Robert Mitchum, as Jeff. The line concerns Kathie Moffit, played superbly by Jane Greer. When Jeff is talking about Kathie to his sweet girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), he tells her just how damned awful she is as a human being. Ann thinks he’s taking it too far and says, “She can’t be all bad. No one is,” to which Jeff responds, deadpan, “Well, she comes the closest.” That line has no place in the remake. It wouldn’t work even if spoken by Jeff Bridges. That’s a problem. It’s a big problem. The Kathie Moffat character, renamed Jessie Wyler and played by Rachel Ward, is good at heart. Oh dear. Oh, sweetie, no. No. You may as well remake Double Indemnity and make Phyllis Dietrichson an innocent who got manipulated by a big, bad man. It’s not that you’d be offending me by changing the story. Again, I have no problem with remaking anything. It’s that if you don’t make Phyllis Dietrichson the driving force of all bad that happens in Double Indemnity, you don’t really have a point.
One of the great things, of the many great things, about Out of the Past, is that however bad the Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) seems to be, and he’s pretty rotten, Kathie is actually worse. Better still, she’s manipulating everybody, especially Jeff who doesn’t even figure out what’s going on until he’s on the hook for more than he ever expected to be, all thanks to Kathie. The other great thing (and I hate to do this because I want to believe everyone has already seen it but, just in case, SPOILER ALERT) no one gets out alive. No one! And it’s not like Jeff couldn’t have. Like most private eyes mixed up in bad things before him, from Sam Spade to Philip Marlowe and a dozen in between, he could have walked away in the end with Ann, especially since, like Spade in The Maltese Falcon, he was playing her like Sam played Brigid, calling the police on her just like Sam does with Brigid, but instead both Whit and Jeff are offed by Kathie before the cops kill her. In Against All Odds, Jessie and Terry (the Jeff character), walk away, still alive, still in love, and better for the experience. It’s just… it’s… no. No. (END SPOILER)
Remakes are a tricky thing. I fully encourage them and welcome them for just about any movie. Yes, I’d rather see original fare but if you can do something more (just witness John Huston’s adaptation of The Maltese Falcon after it had already been adapted in 1931. Both versions are good but the 1941 version brings so much more to the game.) then do it. But be careful. Often just one small but important change to plot or character can doom the whole undertaking. When they decided to remake Out of the Past they took on a challenge, one that could be met under the right circumstances. But they made a change, a change I believe was designed to appeal to an audience looking for a doomed love story instead of a gritty noir. That was a mistake. The story is gritty noir and by removing the “fatale” part from the “femme” they took a great movie, and a great story, and made it toothless. What are the odds?