Movie remakes are nothing new, writes Donald Clarke.
Once a month or so, some radio station phones Screenwriter up and observes that there are an awful lot of remakes in our cinemas. Perhaps I might like to wring my hands before a microphone while musing despairingly upon this unexpected development.
"Oh dear, what a terrible gang of unimaginative philistines we are today," I don't go on to say. "Back when I was a boy - and a used jam jar got you two tickets to the Regal - we were regularly offered such breathlessly original entertainments as The Maltese Falcon, The Wizard of Oz and A Star Is Born."
Look what we're stuck with now. Within the last month, two of the most admired of all horror films - Halloween and Invasion of the Body Snatchers - have been chewed up and regurgitated before us as pulpy, spume-flecked versions of their gorgeous original selves. Rob Zombie's Halloween does have its moments, but The Invasion, a film by catatonics about catatonics for catatonics, only could be more tedious if its themes were explored through the medium of mime.
No film is now regarded as too undistinguished for reinvention. Mostly Martha, a distinctly average German drama from 2001, was recently dragged screaming from obscurity and hammered into the dreary No Reservations. The Farrelly Brothers, who, for all their decadence, have generally devised their own vile plots, drew inspiration from Elaine May's only modestly well-known The Heartbreak Kid for their latest broad comedy. Get me to a radio station. Hollywood's sudden taste for consuming its own bowels must be revealed to the world.
Well, you can probably see where this is going. The best known versions of The Maltese Falcon, The Wizard of Oz and A Star Is Born were all themselves remakes. Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and Wes Craven's
The Last House on the Left were based on films by, respectively, Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman. Martin Scorsese may not have won an Oscar for transforming The Searchers into Taxi Driver, but he got a statuette for making The Departed out of Infernal Affairs. Film has always been a cannibalistic entity.
It is worth pointing out that, when remaking films based on novels or plays, directors will often argue that they are "returning to the source material". Steven Soderbergh, for example, claimed that his Solaris had nothing to do with the Andrei Tarkovsky version and everything to do with Stanislaw Lem's visionary novel.
Steven and his pals should relax. Drawing on old films should not be regarded as any more shameful than looking towards fat, meretricious novels; static, talky plays or loud, narrative-free video games.
Heck, the film that usually leads Screenwriter's all-time top 10 list is, would you believe, a sequel to a remake. When James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein emerged in 1935, radio producers were, I would guess, just as eager to run segments on Hollywood's crisis of imagination. Those items have, in the years since, been remade more often than Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
