Well, there have been a lot of movies where an American producer/director/whatever has seen a great Frech/Japanese/Chinese/Russian/Turkish/whatever movie and thought “Hey, that’d be a great movie to remake in Hollywood.” Of course, most of the time it turns out being a big turd, but sometimes you get something good, so I was wondering if anyone could help me compile a list of movies made in a country outside of the US that was remade in Hollywood. The only ones I can currently think of are:
The Ring
Father’s Day
Just Visiting
The Bird Cage
(I know there’s like, five THOUSAND more, but my brain’s just not working all that well right now.
This may be blasphemous, but I prefer the American remake Point of No Return (with Bridget Fonda) to the French original, Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita. Of course, the original didn’t have cutie Bridget, Gabriel Byrne, and Harvey Keitel!
I think that The Magnificent Seven is a good remake/adaptation of Seven Samurai. I’ve seen both, I own both, I like both, and because Magnificent Seven is about an hour shorter it’s easier to find time to watch it.
The Mel Gibson crime flick Payback was based on an older British movie, Point Blank (with Lee Marvin, right?), which was in turn based on a Richard Stark novel, Payback.
Also, Last Man Standing (with Bruce Willis and Christopher Walken) is a remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which was in turn based on a Dashiell Hammett story, Red Harvest. Last Man Standing is really cool–set during that interesting era in the dying days of the “Old West,” coming up to the time of suit-wearing gangsters.
Just wanted to point out that Battle Beyond the Stars is also a remake of The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven. (A pretty crappy remake, but still a remake)
You need to insert A Fistful of Dollars* into the remake chain somewhere. Last Man Standing is the exact same movie, right down to huge chunks of dialogue.
The Seven Samurai is one of the great classics of world cinema, with great performances by Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune, and contains perhaps the best battle scenes on film, maybe even better than Alexander Nevsky.
The Magnificent Seven is a decent and fun western, but hardly approaches anything near the original. Kurosawa was hardly displeased with the remake, and neither am I, but sorry, it’s hardly a great film. There are some good performances, but there’s lots of cliche, and Horst Buckholtz verges on ridiculous.
Except for the ridiculous happy ending, I liked “The Vanishing” quite well.
The director, George Sluizer, also made the original: “Spoorloos”, which I thought a little masterpiece. Sluizer should have had the guts to give the American one, the same nailbitingly, bizarre and scary ending.
“Old Boy”, the disturbing Korean movie that won the Grand Jury prize at Cannes, is going to be remade by Universal. Apparently, Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt are being considered to play the lead characters, and David Lynch is being looked at to direct. The original was great, but if the casting rumors prove to be true, the remake may be worth a look-see.
The Man Who Loved Women with Burt Reynolds was a remake of a Françoise Truffault movie of a few years earlier. I thought the remake was fairly enjoyable - pretty cute and no worse than the original.
Then there’s Breathless with Richard Gere. Different in tone and detail from Godard’s original but likeable just the same.
D.O.A. – the original Edmund O’Brian version, not the more recent remake – is apparently inspired by a German film. I haven’t seen the original, but DOA clearly stands on its own. One reviewer placed it in his “Top Ten B-Movies” (and you have to understand that “B-Movie” is an indication of the amount of funding it got, not a judgment on its quality).
