The big Hollywood studios continue to insist that audiences will line up around the block to see movie remakes, though that is counter to conversations I overhear at theaters or among movie-goers. Even my students groan at the idea, often asking me why Hollywood insists on remaking popular movies. Remake mania is so rampant that studios are reworking films from less than a generation ago.
ANTOINE FUQUA’S ‘THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN’ DOES NOT DISAPPOINT, WHICH IS MUCH MORE THAN YOU CAN SAY FOR MOST REMAKES.
Among the retools for 2016 was Ben-Hur, which has been called the biggest box-office bomb of the year so far. The reboot of Ghostbusters hit the screens this summer, which alienated fanboys, but the movie delighted many of my female students who accepted its shortcomings in exchange for women characters of all sizes and types. Happily, not all remakes are cause for groans and moans. I just saw Antoine Fuqua’s interpretation of The Magnificent Seven, which was a well-executed update that can compete with the original in terms of star power, action scenes, and a satisfying ending. It’s a bona fide classic western that looks contemporary.
Remakes and reworkings have been part of Hollywood since the silent era, but the differences between then and now have to do with those in charge of the studios. In the past, the studios may have operated under the iron fist of ruthless moguls, but these industry pioneers understood film from exhibition to production and back again. Their affection for the titles they produced is evident in the way they referred to films as “pictures,” short for “moving pictures.” Updates and remakes were often as well crafted as the originals with much attention paid to casting according to the star images of a different generation of actors. A few days ago, I watched High Society, which is a remake of The Philadelphia Story. The story went from a romantic comedy to a musical, and the roles were re-tooled for stars with different images from the original. Louis Armstrong was added as a kind-of Greek chorus to the story, a fitting addition given the references to goddesses in the dialogue and to the Greek-like statues in the set design.
‘HIGH SOCIETY’ RETOOLED ‘THE PHILADELPHIA STORY’ WITH AN APPROPRIATE CAST FOR A MUSICAL.
Today’s marketing-driven studios run on business models that refuse to see film as an art form. Their lack of interest in their titles beyond the bottom line is reflected in the way they refer to movies as “product” and “franchises.” The word “product” in reference to any movie under any circumstance always makes my skin crawl. Small wonder that many contemporary remakes leave much to be desired. However, the concept of reworking a cherished movie for a new age and a new generation, or reworking a foreign film for a domestic audience, is a sound one.
RENOIR’S ‘LA CHIENNE’ BECAME LANG’S ‘SCARLET STREET.’
The subject has been on my mind this year because I am toying with the idea of adding a section on remakes to one of my courses. I have just begun poking around, but I have already discovered a number of remakes that I did not know were remakes! For example, Scarlet Street, the classic film noir in which meek-mannered clerk Chris Cross is taken down by femme fatale Kitty March, is a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1931 drama La Chienne. Renoir’s satirical drama tells the story of a socially backward office clerk named Maurice Legrand who rescues a prostitute from a beating by her pimp. His male fantasy of “saving” Lulu so that she will become his lover gets in the way of the reality of the situation, in which she is bilking him for all he is worth. I knew that Lang had adapted his 1954 crime drama Human Desire from Renoir’s 1938 film La Bete Humaine, which is the story of a train engineer who falls in love with a troubled married woman. Now, I see a tighter connection between the two directors, though their styles are quite different.
‘VIKTOR UND VIKTORIA’ FROM GERMANY, 1933
In looking at contemporary movies that are remakes of titles from the 1980s and 1990s, I discovered that several 1980s films were actually remakes of foreign movies. Blake Edwards’s Victor Victoria, about a down-and-out female singer in Depression-era Paris who finds success masquerading as a gay male singer, was based on the 1933 German musical comedy Viktor und Viktoria. Director Reinhold Schunzel made a French version of the film at the same time, George and Georgette.
Last summer during TCM’s two-month exploration of film noir, I discovered that the Kevin Costner spy thriller No Way Out from 1987 was a reworking of the 1948 film noir The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland. In both stories, the protagonist is assigned to investigate a murder in which he is a suspect, though authorities do not know his identity. Al Pacino won a Best Actor Oscar for his role in the 1992 drama Scent of a Woman in which a cantankerous blind man bonds with an outcast from an exclusive prep school during an ill-advised excursion to New York City. Scent of a Woman was based on the Italian comedy Profumo di donna by Dino Risi.
THE BRAZILIAN FILM ‘DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS’ LOOKS CONSIDERABLY RACIER THAN ‘KISS ME GOODBYE.’
One of my favorite romantic comedies of the 1980s, Kiss Me Goodbye, is a remake of a 1976 Brazilian film titled Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. Ah, the good old days, when female stars were regularly cast in vehicles to showcase their star images. In this Hollywood romantic comedy, Sally Field stars as a widow who is about to marry a nerdy professor, played by Jeff Bridges, when the ghost of her dynamic, charismatic first husband, James Caan, shows up. The chemistry of the trio, and their sparkling star turns, are fun to watch. In addition, scenes of Field conversing with Caan in front of others, who cannot see or hear him, crack me up every time. The talented Sonia Braga starred in the Brazilian version.
French comedies were the source for several American remakes during the 1980s. Among the most popular was Three Men and a Baby, featuring a trio of Hollywood stars who were hot in 1987, Steve Guttenberg, Tom Selleck, and Ted Danson. The story of three bachelors who get stuck caring for an infant girl was taken from Trois Hommes et un Couffin by Colline Serreau. Not every 1980s remake is a keeper. The 1976 French comedy Le Jouet, directed by Francis Veber, was turned into a vehicle for Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason called The Toy. The story revolves around the spoiled, rich son of a spoiled, rich businessman. The boy buys a human being as a toy.
ANDREW LAU’S ‘INFERNAL AFFAIRS’ BECAME SCORSESE’S ‘THE DEPARTED.’
Among more recent films, I knew that Martin Scorsese’s 2006 cop drama The Departed was his interpretation of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs. Both are doppelganger stories in which a cop infiltrates a crime syndicate to take it down, while another cop on the force is on the take, undermining those efforts. I thought Scorsese effectively turned the story into one of his repeated themes, the fine line between a heroic protagonist and a violent antagonist. Another crime thriller, Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, features Al Pacino as a wayward cop tracking a psychopath in Alaska. Wired and brittle, he can’t handle the midnight sun, cracking under the lack of sleep. Insomnia was taken from a Norwegian film with the same title by Erik Skjoldbjærg. The story must have resonated differently in a part of the world where everyone faces the difficulties of sleeping in constant daylight.
If I do develop this idea in a course, or a section of a course, I want it to be more than merely showing the original and then comparing and contrasting it to the remake. I don’t want the conversation to be reduced to “the original was better.” So, I thought I would run the idea past my very knowledgeable Morlocks readers, who have been helpful to me in the past. Let me know what you think and which remakes you have found worthy, reprehensible, or otherwise notable.