Remakes: They’re déjà vu all over again

Walking through the corridor between auditoriums at a multiplex recently, I couldn’t help thinking I’d been transported 30 or 40 or even 50 years into the past.

Posters for “House of Wax” and “War of the Worlds” dominated the walls, along with “The Honeymooners,” “Batman Begins,” “Bewitched,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “The Bad News Bears,” “The Brothers Grimm” and a new Disney version of “The Love Bug.”

Everything old really is new again, and this summer the recycling seems to be happening everywhere. Even on the film-festival circuit, there are remakes of (or homages to) Max Ophuls’ “Letter From an Unknown Woman” (relocated to pre-communist China) and James Toback’s “Fingers” (now set in France and retitled “The Beat That My Heart Skipped”).

“Rock School” is a new documentary that claims to be the real-life version of Richard Linklater’s 2003 hit comedy, “The School of Rock.” Then there’s “The Lords of Dogtown,” a fictionalized version of the 2002 documentary about teenage skateboarders, “Dogtown and Z-Boys.”

Unofficial remakes are also common. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” may sound like a new version of an old Hitchcock movie, but it’s really a mixture of “War of the Roses” and “Prizzi’s Honor.” Will Ferrell’s baseball comedy, “Kicking and Screaming,” plays a lot like a warmup for this summer’s official remake of “The Bad News Bears."

Some of the new remakes (“House of Wax,” “The Big Bounce”) discard the original script and use only the title as a lure. Some (“The Longest Yard,” “The Ring”) rework the original for a current star. Historical epics ( “Kingdom of Heaven,” “King Arthur”) tend to distant themselves from previous films by insisting that they’re more authentic.

There is no magic formula for success. Last year’s remake of “Dawn of the Dead” and this year’s rehash of “Assault on Precinct 13” succeeded by picking up the pace and making the action seem more immediate. But the recent version of “The Amityville Horror” failed largely by doing the same thing.

Most remakes are unnecessary and uninspired. Still, there have been enough notable exceptions to give us some hope for the summer. Here are 10 that worked:

“Ben-Hur” (1959). Some critics prefer the silent 1925 version of this Biblical epic because of its dynamic action sequences: the chariot race and the sea battle. The remake nearly matches those scenes, and it achieves a narrative complexity that’s missing from the original. William Wyler’s nuanced direction and a literate script (rewritten without credit by Gore Vidal and Christopher Fry) helped earn it 11 Academy Awards.

“The Fly” (1986). Recently named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 movies, David Cronenberg’s ingenious reworking of a clumsy 1958 Vincent Price thriller stars Jeff Goldblum as a scientist who accidentally mixes up his molecules with those of an insect. Many critics interpreted Cronenberg’s version as an AIDS allegory. While the picture won an Oscar for best makeup, Goldlbum’s remarkable performance was passed over.

“His Girl Friday” (1940). Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s classic newspaper play, “The Front Page,” was filmed under its original title in 1931 and 1974. But the version that really clicked was Howard Hawks’ fast-paced, perfectly cast adaptation starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell – whose character, an ace reporter named Hildy Johnson, was male in the original play. A 1988 remake, “Switching Channels,” tried the sex change too, but the result was much less scintillating.

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“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978). Don Siegel’s 1956 version had unrepeatable shock value because its story of humans being replaced by “pod people” seemed to capture the political hysteria of the McCarthy period. Philip Kaufman’s inventive rehash, starring Donald Sutherland as the increasingly suspicious hero, moves the plot from a small town to San Francisco, where conformist extraterrestrials and Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid drinkers seem equally at home.

“The Maltese Falcon” (1941). The third time proved to be the charm with Dashiel Hammett’s detective novel, which had previously been filmed in 1931, starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as his favorite femme fatale, and in 1936, with Warren William and Bette Davis. The 1931 version isn’t bad, but everything came together with John Huston’s 1941 treatment, which made Humphrey Bogart match wits with Mary Astor, and marked Huston’s debut as a movie director.

“A Place in the Sun” (1951). Theodore Dreiser’s novel about a social climber who wants to ditch his pregnant fiancée was filmed in 1931 under its original title, with Sylvia Sidney starring and Josef von Sternberg directing. But the version that had the greatest impact was George Stevens’ more romantic 1951 remake, with Montgomery Clift as the hapless hero and Elizabeth Taylor as the rich girl of his dreams. It won six Oscars, including best script and director.

“Romeo and Juliet” (1968). Previously filmed with actors who were clearly too old to play teenage lovers, Shakespeare’s classic played to its largest audience when director Franco Zeffirelli put a premium on youth and cast Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in the title roles. The movie earned an Oscar for its gorgeous cinematography and turned into a surprise box-office smash, even more successful in terms of tickets sold than Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-oriented 1996 version with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. 

“Showboat” (1951). Originally filmed as a 1929 part-talkie, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s groundbreaking musical was successfully remade in 1936 by director James Whale. That black-and-white version is widely regarded as the best filmed “Showboat,” yet George Sidney’s 1951 treatment is a dance-oriented Technicolor treat, with William Warfield delivering an especially memorable version of “Old Man River.” 

“Some Like It Hot” (1959). Billy Wilder’s much-imitated farce was adapted from a forgotten 1930s German musical, “Fanfares of Love,” about a pair of musicians who pretend to be women in order to join an all-female orchestra. Wilder introduced the St. Valentine’s Day massacre to the story, lending fresh urgency to their plight. The result has often been called Hollywood’s best comedy, as well as the high point of Marilyn Monroe’s career.

“The Wizard of Oz” (1939). Long before MGM took the Yellow Brick Road, L. Frank Baum was producing rather primitive silent movies based on his “Oz” books. It now seems difficult to imagine “The Wizard of Oz” in black-and-white and without song and dance, but that’s how Oliver Hardy and Dorothy Dwan performed the story in 1925. Just 14 years later, Judy Garland and the songs of Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg transformed it into a Technicolor wonder.