The release of Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 got me to thinking about how many ’70s films have been remade in the last few years, and I thought it might be fun to make a list of the ten best such films. Until I realised that I couldn’t even come up with ten remakes of ’70s films that I liked. So instead, this is going to be a much simpler list of ten good remakes of films that were already pretty good – or at least, well-known and “classic” – to begin with. Not that the remake is in every case, or in most cases, better than the original, but not one of these pisses too heavily over the beloved memory of a great work. In the end, I didn’t put it together as a Top 10 (I’m sure to have forgotten something), just a chronological list.
Remake of: The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931)
The story goes that Howard Hawks was hosting a party where the talk turned to film dialogue, and to demonstrate to his guests what really great, witty repartee sounded like, he asked his secretary to read from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play with him. Before too long, he realised that it was even funnier with a girl reading the part of the reluctant reporter dragged from happy retirement by a tyrannical ex-boss, and funnier still if that ex-boss was also an ex-husband. And so it is that by changing hardly any lines at all, he made one of the finest comedies known to film history, the battle of the sexes given life by Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in career-peak roles, spouting dialogue at a rat-a-tat pace that has hardly ever been matched. It’s simply one of the funniest movies ever made.
Remake of: The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock, 1934)
The director, no stranger to self-aggrandizement, suggested that the original was made by a gifted neophyte while the remake was the work of a master in full control of his skills. It would be more obnoxious if it weren’t completely true: the ’56 MWKTM sees Hitch in the middle of a decade of unparalleled cinematic genius, even if it’s not necessarily the best of his films from that period. Arguably, it’s not even as good as the British original – arguably. That film was generally much tighter, and featured Peter Lorre in his first English-language role as a far more sinister villain. But the remake offers Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, and a real corker of a finale, nine minutes without dialogue as all the characters creep around the Royal Albert Hall. Would that more filmmakers saw fit to revisit themselves; comparing the two versions offers a sort of crash course in the development of Hitchock after his jump to Hollywood.
Remake of: Yojimbo (Kurosawa Akira, 1961)
The original was already a “Western”, in the sense that while it was set in Japan and the lone gunman had a sword, it was unambiguously meant to hearken back to the cinema’s long tradition of life on the American frontier (and it was based on a Dashiell Hammett gangster/detective novel. Go figure). So when an Italian took that Japanese Western and put it back into the West, you’ve got… a real mess of international influences. Whatever, the remake is still awfully good, if not nearly up to Kurosawa’s original (like anything could be), and even if one of the reasons it so good is because it steals dialogue and even shot set-ups from the first one. Besides, it gave a young TV actor named Clint Eastwood his first taste of movie stardom.
Remake of: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
The original is probably still more memorable, with its pervasive Cold War paranoia that it gives it a certain “oomph” that nothing in the remake can quite match. That said, the second version is probably better in both the sci-fi and horror departments – important things for any sci-fi horror film – having a much eerier, more apocalyptic vision of the story, especially in the extraordinary, brutal ending that demolishes with the most extreme prejudice the original’s overtone of “this will all be better if we clap our hands for fairies”. Or however the original is meant to end. Not with a scream from the bowels of hell like this one, that’s for sure.
Remake of: Pennies from Heaven (written by Dennis Potter, 1978)
The original BBC miniseries is one of the great things in television history, and that’s that (it’s also five hours longer). But the remake, moving the action over to America but maintaining the Depression-era setting, does just fine for itself. Starring Steve Martin in his first serious movie, and giving Bernadette Peters a rare starring role – and for these and other reasons, falling promptly off the face of the earth when it premiered – and at a time when decent film musicals were impossibly thin on the ground, provided one of history’s finest, most under-appreciated song-and-dance pictures, mixing the joy of showmanship with woozy melancholy in every number.
Remake of: The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951)
The first one is a find Cold War allegory, if a bit slow and talky. The second is balls-out thrilling, pitched with so much energy that they didn’t even have time to transfer the whole title. It’s also maybe the best film of Carpenter’s career. Few horror movies are as genuinely bone-chilling as this, and almost none of the many films to feature state-of-the-art, guaranteed to gross you out twice over gore effects use those effects to anywhere near the same effect. But still, the film’s best moments are based in good old-fashioned human-scale suspense, especially the wicked, bravura choice to make Hollywood’s ultimate cuddly grampa, Wilfred Brimley, into a psychotic killer.
Remake of: La jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
Rivalling Hitchcock in the self-aggrandisement department, Gilliam once suggested that Marker’s film was a perfectly formed acorn, his was a sprawling oak tree. La jetée was also a bizarre and completely successful formal experiment, while Gilliam’s remake was “only” one of the best science-fiction mystery thriller action films ever made, and the first time that Brad Pitt got to show us that was actually a real-live actor. And generally speaking, the film is maybe the finest meeting of Gilliam’s urge to create weird and visually outlandish alternate realities with his much less obvious urge to create movies that normal people might actually want to watch.
Remake of: Seven Samurai (Kurosawa Akira, 1954)
Okay, maybe I’m being a bit too clever with this one, and The Magnificent Seven is a much safer way to make the same point. But don’t tell me that it’s not the same basic story: an agrarian people, threatened by thieves, send out for help and receive instead a pack of heroes who are much less heroic than their billing, but who manage to rescue the community anyway. Sure, there are nine “warriors” in A Bug’s Life, eight if the two pill bugs count for one – and there were eight swordsmen in Kurosawa’s film, even if one of them wasn’t really a samurai. Anyway, the later film proves, if nothing else, that certain narrative tropes can survive any amount of bending and still produce a damn fine outcome. It’s often derided as one of Pixar’s lesser works, which I’ll agree with, if only according to the same logic that in a list of the ten wealthiest people in the world, one of them must necessarily be the “poorest”.
Remake of: Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone, 1960)
I’m pushing the rule a little bit: the original isn’t much good at all, exact as a time capsule of jet-set era cool. And you can argue that Soderbergh’s film isn’t much good besides being cool, either, if only it wasn’t one of the most hellaciously entertaining movies of the decade. Probably the film that cemented George Clooney as the great contemporary old-style movie star, it’s an effortlessly fun saunter through one of the finest caper plots in modern memory, and there is absolutely no film in the same time period to make Las Vegas look so flat-out gorgeous as this one. It’s two hours of empty calories, perhaps, but we all like to gorge on candy from time to time.
Remake of: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Certainly the worst film on this list, not just on its own merits, but probably in terms of how well it stacks up to its illustrious predecessor as well. But yet, no matter how badly I want it to completely suck, I cannot but admit that taken on its own terms, and especially compared to the many other classic horror remakes to have cropped up in the last ten years and change, there’s something going on here that simply, undeniably works. Maybe it’s not much more than Nispel’s more competent than necessary direction, and the exceedingly fine cinematography by the compulsively ill-used Daniel Pearl – Lord knows, it isn’t the cast – but years after the slasher film had long since run its course as anything but the most tired possible formula to structure a horror film, TCM ’03 manages to wring a couple instants of real tension, and a whole lot of gloomy, grimy atmosphere out of the withered old corpse of a thousand Friday the 13th knockoffs.