Rimejk (remake)

A Preliminary Taxonomy

1.

§  a silent film remade as a sound film: Ben Hur (Fred Niblo, 1926, and William Wyler, 1959);

§  a silent film remade by the same director as a sound film: Ernst Lubitsch’s Kiss Me Again (1925) and That Uncertain Feeling (1941) or Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956);

§  a major director’s silent film remade as a sound film by a different major director: F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, the Vampire (1979).

2.

§  A sound film remade by the same director in the same country: Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (1936) and A Pocketful of Miracles (1961);

§  a sound film remade by the same director in a different country in which the same language is spoken: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, England, and 1954, United States);

§  a sound film remade by the same director in a different country with a different language: Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman… (1957, France, and 1987, United States).

3.

A film made by a director consciously drawing on elements and movies of another director: Howard Hawks’s and Brian DePalma’s Scarface (1932 and 1983); Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1959) (and Rear Window [1955] and Psycho [1960]), and DePalma’s Obsession (1976), Body Double (1984), and Raising Cain (1992).

4.

§  A film made in the United States remade as a foreign film: Diary of a Chambermaid by Jean Renoir (1946, France) and Luis Buñuel (1964, France);

§  a film made in a foreign country remade in another foreign country: Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961) and A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964);

§  a foreign film remade in another foreign country and remade a second time in the United States: La Femme Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990, France), Black Cat (1992, Hong Kong) (thanks to Scott Higgins), and Point of No Return (John Badham, 1993);

§  a foreign film remade in the United States: La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931) and Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945) and Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960, and Jim McBride, 1983).

5.

§  Films with multiple remakes spanning the silent and sound eras: Sadie Thompson (Raoul Walsh, 1928), Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932) and Miss Sadie Thompson (Curtis Bernhardt, 1953);

§  films remade within the silent and sound eras as well as for television: Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929 [the third silent remake of the silent film]; Sam Wood, 1937; David Lowell-Rich, 1966 [the Lana Turner version]; and, for television, Robert Ellis Miller, 1981 [with Tuesday Weld]).

6.

§  A film remade as television film: Sweet Bird of Youth (Richard Brooks, 1962, and Nicholas Roeg, 1989);

§  a film remade as a television miniseries: East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955, and Harvey Hart, 1981);

§  a television series remade as a film: Maverick (Richard Donner, 1994) and The Flintstones (Brian Levant, 1994).

7.

§  A remake that changes the cultural setting of a film: The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946, United States, and Michael Winner, 1978, Great Britain);

§  a remake that updates the temporal setting of a film: Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944) and Farewell My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975); A Star Is Born (William Wellman, 1937, George Cukor, 1954, and Frank Pierson, 1976); Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1948) and Against All Odds (Taylor Hackford, 1984);

§  a remake that changes the genre and cultural setting of the film: The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935) re made as a western, Geronimo (Paul H. Sloane, 1939); the western High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1954) remade as the science fiction film Outland (Peter Hyams, 1981).

8.

§      A remake that switches the gender of the main characters: The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931); His Gal Friday (Howard Hawks, 1941);

§      a remake that reworks more explicitly the sexual relations in a film: William Wyler’s These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour (1961); The Blue Lagoon (Frank Launder, 1949, and Randal Kleiser, 1980).

9.

§  A remake that changes the race of the main characters: Anna Lucasta (Irving Rapper, 1949, with Paulette Goddard; Arnold Laven, 1958, with Eartha Kitt).

10.

A remake in which the same star plays the same part: Ingrid Bergman in the Swedish and American versions of Intermezzo (Gustav Molander, 1936, and Gregory Ratoff, 1939); Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn (Mark Sandrich, 1942) and Holiday Inn (Michael Curtiz, 1954).

11.

A remake of a sequel to a film that is itself the subject of multiple remakes: The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1975) and The Bride (Frank Roddam, 1985).

12.

Comic and parodic remakes: Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) and Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1954); Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951) and Throw Mamma from the Train (Danny DeVito, 1987).

13.

Pornographic remakes: Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) and Ghostlusters (1991); Truth or Dare (Alex Kashishian, 1991) and Truth or Bare (1992) (thanks to Peter Lehman).

14.

A remake that changes the color and/or aspect ratio of the original: The Thing (Christian Nyby, 1951, black-and-white; John Carpenter, 1982, color and Panavision); Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956, black-and-white and Superscope; Phil Kaufman, 1978, color and 1.85 to 1 aspect ratio).

15.

An apparent remake whose status as a remake is denied by the director: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974).