February 18th, 2008
1. The Vanishing (1993)
The movie-within-a-movie in Robert Altman's 1992 Hollywood satire The Player was originally pitched with no stars and a downbeat ending where the heroine, falsely incarcerated and put on death row, gets gassed just before new evidence exonerates her. But once the film goes through the studio mill, it comes out hilariously compromised, with a new, test-audience-approved ending where Bruce Willis rescues inmate Julia Roberts at the last second. The English-language remake of the disquieting Dutch abduction thriller The Vanishing is the movie-within-a-movie in The Player—and remarkably, the original film's director, George Sluzier, can be held responsible for selling out his own work. For much of its 109 minutes, the remake is simply a poor facsimile, attempting to recapture the magic through mostly note-for-note scenes and sequences, but with most of the tension conspicuously sucked away. And then it gets to the ending, so unforgettably chilling and uncompromising in the original, now only slightly less vulgar than it might have been if Bruce Willis had shown up for a last-minute rescue.
2. Scarface (1983)
Brian De Palma's famously brutal remake of Scarface deviates from Howard Hawks' thrillingly Neanderthal original wildly enough that its film-closing dedication to Hawks and legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht rings bitterly ironic. Both films are steeped in the eras that birthed them. The original Scarface was a thinly veiled portrayal of Al Capone as a heartless working-class brute, while De Palma's iconic update re-imagines the title mobster as a psychotic Cuban immigrant who washes up on American shores as part of the Mariel Boatlift. Though the original Scarface was as brutal and violent as the times would allow, its hilariously over-the-top remake is permeated with graphic bloodshed, cartoonish drug use, and all-around bad behavior that would be inconceivable in 1930. Besides, how many Paul Muni posters do you see adorning the mansions of rappers on Cribs? In their own transgressive, boundary-pushing way, however, Hawks and company were gangsta.
3. Last House On The Left (1972)
Wes Craven's low-budget thriller Last House On The Left exploited turn-of-the-'70s anxieties about teen freedom in the post-counterculture era by making two 17-year-olds' trip to the city to see a rock concert a descent into Charles Manson-inspired hell. But their kidnapping and eventual murder backfires when their hippie-ish killers happen on the girl's square parents, who put two and two together and exact violent revenge. Craven's film couldn't be any more a product of its time, but more than the modern trappings, explicit violence, and gone-memorably-awry fellatio scene set it apart from its surprising source: Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film The Virgin Spring. Set in medieval Sweden and based on a ballad from the era, Bergman's film concerns, at least in part, the shift from pagan values to Christian forgiveness, and it ends with an unexpected miracle. Craven's film also deals with shifting values, but offers less hope that the times to come will be kinder.
4. You've Got Mail (1998)
You've Got Mail and its forebear, 1940's The Shop Around The Corner, are very much of their time, but only the original can be called timeless. E-mails and Internet chat rooms have overtaken pen pals and love notes in reality, but in the world of cinematic romance, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan's bland cyber-flirtation holds none of the intrigue and anticipation of Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan's excruciatingly oblivious letter-writing courtship. While the nuts and bolts remain the same—rival business associates antagonize each other in real life while unknowingly carrying on a secret romance via the written word—and Hanks and Ryan are passable facsimiles of the original pair, Shop's setting in interwar Budapest and its infidelity subplot lend some weight and pathos to the lovelorn shenanigans. By comparison, Mail's self-consciously sentimental depiction of harried Manhattanites locked in corporate warfare seems somewhat crass. Shop's lightning-in-a-bottle combination of charm, wit, and delicate sentiment is the reason it's in the National Film Registry, while its progeny is on an endless loop on basic cable—and the musical update starring Judy Garland, 1949's In The Good Old Summertime, has been essentially forgotten.
5. City Of Angels (1998)
There are dozens of superficial differences between Wim Wenders' 1987 arthouse classic Wings Of Desire and Brad Silberling's weepy 1998 remake City Of Angels. For example, the love interest is a doctor instead of a circus performer, and her love affair with an angel who becomes human for her takes some very different turns. (Spoiler alert: In Wings Of Desire, the angel and the woman get together at the end; in City Of Angels, they get together and then the woman dies.) But the real irreconcilable difference between the two films stems from what they're trying to do. Wings Of Desire is a love letter to Berlin and its inhabitants, as seen through the eyes of an immortal who wants to share the joys and pains of the people he observes every day. City Of Angels is a dopey tearjerker with a contrived twist ending. Advantage: Wenders.
6. Breathless (1983)
It's understandable why Hollywood would seize on some foreign films as prime remake bait. (After all, anything with sword-wielding samurais or creepy ghosts only needs a few tweaks and weapons upgrades to become perfectly palatable to American audiences.) But Breathless? Jean-Luc Godard's idiosyncratic 1959 riff on B-movie poses and youthful ennui? Remaking that film is like a writer scrawling his own version of someone else's autobiography. Nevertheless, oddball writer-director Jim McBride took a crack at it in his 1983 Breathless, which stars Richard Gere as a fugitive from the law, tooling through Las Vegas and Los Angeles in pursuit of a bewitching French college student. McBride's Breathless has its charms, but it has nothing significant to say about French or American culture. It just borrows Godard's scant plot and uses it to make the kind of peppy trash that the characters in the original Breathless might've liked.
7. His Girl Friday (1940)
During preparations for his remake of 1931's The Front Page (the first film adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's classic stage play), director Howard Hawks had his secretary read the part of hard-charging male reporter Hildy Johnson in a scene with unscrupulous editor Walter Burns. Hawks liked the gender switch so much that he had screenwriter Charles Lederer rework the story to make Hildy and Water a divorced couple, reunited one last time for a hot story on a soon-to-be-executed anarchist. The change brought a romantic-comedy element to Hecht and MacArthur's pitch-black media satire, with the potent sexual chemistry between His Girl Friday stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell creating a very different Walter-Hildy dynamic than that between Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien in The Front Page. While The Front Page centers on two men held together by circumstance to achieve a professional goal, His Girl Friday is about two impulsive ex-lovers who choose lust and excitement over boring old domesticated love. The plots are similar, but the stories couldn't be more different.
8. Thieves Like Us (1974)
Edward Anderson's 1937 novel Thieves Like Us—based on the real-life story of Bonnie and Clyde—was first adapted to the screen in 1950 as They Live By Night, and directed by Hollywood iconoclast Nicholas Ray. A quarter-century later, another rebel, Robert Altman, put his own indelible stamp on the material. Both films follow Anderson's basic plot: A baby-faced bank robber becomes a media sensation, sparking jealousy in his colleagues and concern in his girlfriend. But They Live By Night emphasizes the gritty details of young love and underworld adventuring, while Altman's version is dreamier and more lyrical, playing up the complex relationships between criminals and their families. In other words, it's a Robert Altman film, pushing the plot into the background in order to take a better look at the people.
9. The Killers (1964)
Based on the Ernest Hemingway short story, 1946's and 1964's The Killers have the same basic setup: A pair of hit men hold a group of people hostage while waiting for their mark to show up. As it happens, their would-be victim expects them with mysterious passivity. But that's where the similarities end: Richard Siodmak's 1946 noir staple is photographed in marvelously expressive black-and-white, which helps sustain its despairing tone more than the script's lethargic parade of double, triple, and quadruple crosses. By contrast, genre master Don Siegel places his cheerfully sadistic 1964 version largely in broad daylight, with splashy colors, fast cars, cheap process shots, and titillating acts of violence, most notably in an infamous scene where Ronald Reagan smacks Angie Dickenson around. Critics trashed Siegel for his viciousness, but his take remains the livelier of the two, and his bantering hit men served as a precursor to John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
10. The Wicker Man (2006)
Robin Hardy's 1973 original: A dated but still-spooky mystery movie in which self-righteous, prim Christian cop Edward Woodward charges around a private island, hunting a missing girl and encountering a creepy conspiracy of silence. It's slow in places, as when Christopher Lee literally stands around, musingly observing some snails fucking, but it's atmospheric and horribly tense, first because of the discomfort Woodward induces everywhere he goes, then because of the discomfort he endures as he finally realizes what's going on. Neil LaBute's 2006 remake: An instant camp classic, in which Nicolas Cage charges around a similar island, punching women in the face and yelling eminently quotable, laughable lines like "How'd it get burned? Howdigeburnd?" Cage's frothing performance is a good part of the problem, but even a master thespian would have had problems with the script retooling, which for instance requires his bee-allergic character to stumble into a field of beehives, then charge out yelling, amid shocky, lunge-filled camerawork that tries and fails to make it look like the scary killer beehives are coming after him or something. LaBute packs the film with cheap fake-out scares (It was all a dream! Boo! Oh wait, this is a dream too! Boo again some more!) and dim-witted misogyny (like bees, women are totally all female, and want to kill you!), and his desperate, forced attempts to make the proceedings scary have the opposite effect.
11. Dawn Of The Dead (2004)
On its own, Zack Snyder's re-do of George Romero's zombie classic Dawn Of The Dead isn't so bad, but it certainly isn't on the level of Romero's film. In 1978, Romero fused a well-plotted survival tale—about four non-zombies who hole up in a shopping mall and turn it into a mini-utopia—to a wickedly satirical critique of consumerism and class struggle. The original Dawn Of The Dead is simultaneously funny, thrilling, and repulsive, a towering achievement in horror filmmaking that tries to make viewers sick to their souls, not just their stomachs. Snyder's version, scripted by James Gunn, adds more survivors and faster zombies, becoming a rollicking action flick that pits good against evil instead of a morally ambiguous think-piece in which good and evil are harder to discern. Unlike a lot of '00s horror remakes, Dawn Of The Dead does take more from the original than just its title, but it leaves behind the brains… which no respectable zombie movie should do.
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