Remakes come in four basic categories:
BETTER THE FIRST TIME. “Sabrina,” “King Solomon’s Mines,” “Great Expectations,” “Unfaithfully Yours,” “The Heartbreak Kid,” “A Kiss Before Dying,” “Diabolique,” “The Nutty Professor,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Arthur,” “To Be Or Not To Be,” “Out of the Past,” etc. This category is by far the largest and the fastest-growing.
THE WEIRD EXPERIMENTAL REMAKE. Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of “Psycho.” This is a category of one, not likely to grow at all.
THE REIMAGINED REMAKE. “War of the Worlds,” “The Thing,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “Bedazzled,” “Breathless,” “The Man Who Loved Women,” “The Departed,” “No Way Out,” “A Star Is Born,” etc.
BETTER THE SECOND TIME. Five examples:
“His Girl Friday”
The 1931 “The Front Page,” based on the play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, starred Adolphe Menjou as editor Walter Burns and Pat O’Brien as reporter Hildy Johnson. Aided by Charles Lederer, Howard Hawks changed Hildy’s gender, and gave Rosalind Russell a non-choice between Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy, thereby introducing a staple of romcom plotting, the “Ralph Bellamy character”—the guy the girl is bound to dump eventually.
“The Fly”
The 1958 original is famous for one of the campiest moments of poignancy in movie history—the fly’s body with Vincent Price’s tiny head crying out “Help me!” The Watson and Crick paper on the double helix was published only five years earlier, so DNA hadn’t yet entered the public vocabulary. Charles Pogue and David Cronenberg artfully mix genetics with teleportation (“Brundlefly”), and Jeff Goldblum gives his most memorable performance, as a guy in the grip of a full-on manic episode. The makeup won an Oscar, and Geena Davis gets to speak one of the most riffed-on lines in movie history: “Be afraid…be very afraid.”
“Heaven Can Wait”
Warren Beatty’s and Buck Henry’s improvement on the 1941 movie, “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” borrowed its title from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1943 classic with Don Ameche and Gene Tierney, thereby confusing the issue on two fronts, since Lubitsch’s movie opens in Hades. Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon are great, Julie Christie is as lovable as the good Julie Christie in “Fahrenheit 451,” and the scene where Jack Warden realizes Warren Beatty is actually a football star and not a millionaire playboy is one of the greatest ever heart-tuggers. The scene I wait for: Warren Beatty telling the valet, “Don’t show me any more hats.”
“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
Arden Oplev’s take on the book plodded dutifully along, an earnest blend of Nazi nostalgia and sadomasochism. With the golden glow of his camera, David Fincher takes the hex off the novel’s gray prose and the Swedish gloom of the original.
“Cape Fear”
Martin Scorsese’s lurid hommage to the earthbound 1962 original is one of cinema’s all-time visual treats, featuring Juliette Lewis’s Oscar-nominated performance, one of the most stunning debuts in movie history. Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange have never been better, and Robert De Niro, as a well-inked Psychopath for All Seasons, camps it up for all he’s worth. Robert Mitchum, the bad guy in the original, becomes a police lieutenant…Martin Balsam goes from police chief to judge…Gregory Peck, the morally compromised hero of the original, becomes De Niro’s lawyer….and Bernard Herrmann’s score, adapted by Elmer Bernstein, shows up again in full glory, with its ominous eight-note theme—the greatest first eight notes since Beethoven’s Fifth. The prolonged shipwreck descends into gore porn, but is redeemed by De Niro talking in tongues as he sinks to his watery death.