In 2004, there was a TV movie version of Die Nibelungen, (which aired in the US under the title Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King. Obviously not as good as Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, but they tried. And, for a 2004 TV movie, the CGI version of Fafnir wasn’t bad.
Completely unnecessary remake: Poltergeist 2015 (or thereabouts)
Pretty much. Ideas don’t matter. Execution does.
If the remake of Total Recall didn’t suck, it would be great. We’d have two awesome unreliable-narrator-space-adventure-action flicks!
It’s risky to remake a good movie, since your work will be compared against the original. But it’s risky to remake a bad movie, since maybe nobody cares.
Which one? 
1907 version:
At ten minutes, it’s a little too short. It is important, though, for the copyright lawsuit it caused. (See the wikipedia page for details.)
1925 version, starring Ramon Navarro.
Some people like this version better than the Charlton Heston version. It’s good, but I like the Heston version better.
1959 version, starring Charlton Heston.
The famous one, and still the best.
2003 animated version, with Charlton Heston doing the voice
Haven’t seen it, and the wiki page does not inspire confidence.
2010 Canadian TV miniseries.
I have only seen a few minutes of it. Really low budget. At 184 minutes, it’s shorter than the 1959 version. I don’t think I missed much.
2016 version
The CGI was cool. The 3-D had its moments. Morgan Freeman is always good. But, on the whole, the 1959 version is still the champion.
This thread seems to be comparing a lot of TV shows and theatrical films. In that vein, 1977 was a good year for TV movies.
The BBC version of Dracula, starring Louis Jordan and Frank Finlay, was better than many theatrical films of the story.
The NBC version of The Four Feathers, starring Beau Bridges and Jane Seymour, was better than most theatrical films of the story.
What were the two previous versions of The Maltese Falcon?
The Hobbit (1977)!!!
There was a 1931 version, starring Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels.
There was a 1936 version, titled Satan Met a Lady, starring Warren William and Bette Davis. This one changed a lot of names and plot points, and was played somewhat for comedy.
The Cortez version has its good points. Cortez is far sleazier than Bogart, and Bebe Daniels is about seven times sexier than poor miscast Mary Astor.
Thanks for the info, I was totally unaware.
Youtube doesn’t have the 1931 film, any ideas?
I got mine as part of a three-movie set of all the Falcons:
I notice Amazon also lists a two-movie set of Satan Met A Lady and the 1931* Falcon*.
Don’t forget Will Smith’s awful Wild Wild West! There was also a remake of the Rockford Files in the works until someone wised up and decided to cancel it.
I haven’t given it much thought, but while the Gus van Sant may not be the worst remake ever, the gap between the two Psychos may be the biggest gap between two versions of the same film, ever, because the original is so good. The Gus van Sant looks like somebody’s grad student film school project-- an “A” project, if it comes to that, but not a movies for theatrical release.
Wait, I take that back on the biggest gap-- that may between the two To Be or Not to Bes. The secomd one just kinda makes fun of the first one, and the first one is my favorite movie ever, so I get pissed off thinking of the Mel Brooks one.
Another “Why bother Hitchcock?” is the 70s era remake of The Lady Vanishes with Cybill Shepherd, Elliot Gould, and Angela Lansbury. It should have been decent, but it was gawdawful.
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(sorry I screwed up the number)
The 1933 version is my favorite movie of all time, and I hated the 1976 version. IMO, Jackson’s version was entertaining but suffered from Jackson’s penchant for Wretched Excess. Having Kong fight three Tyrannosaurs while falling down a cliff tangled in vines in my book was just too over the top.
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Just so. A lot of the much later remakes suffer from the.
The 1933 KK isn’t my favorite movie of all-time, but it is dear to my heart (along with its B-side film, The Most Dangerous Game.
+1 for agreement. I love the original, and the original book.
There are three Freaky Fridays, and the first one, with Jodie Foster, known, but not with star power as the kid, and Barbara Harris as the mother. This film got it right in following the mother who was a kid desperately trying to be an adult and learning first hand how much work it was, and having to go to he own school conference, and here what teachers thought of her.
The Parent Trap trap was a rare one where the first remake got it right, and the second one was superfluous. The original was called Twice Blessed, starred real twins who couldn’t act, and lacked the schtick of the not knowing about each other. Disney added that, plus the very talented Hayley Mills, and made a great film. No more remakes needed.
The Fredric March sound [Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde* was a big improvement over the silent one with John Barrymore, but aside from giving some other talented people a chance to essay the roles, it really has no justification,
The Ingrid Bergman/Charles Boyer Gaslight needed to be made. The original was more just a filming of the stage show; The remake actually explored the possibilities for opening up the film onto the big screen. Plus, better actors.
Everything Irene Dunne made should never have been remade. A hell of a lot of her films were, though, which is why she isn’t better remembered. She was hugely popular in her time though.
My definition of “necessary” and “unnecessary” isn’t the same as "good’ and “bad”. Never say Never Again is a good remake of Thunderball, but the original movie was and is good, so NSNA isn’t “necessary”.
The first version of The Maltese Falcon was halfway decent, but didn’t get the setting or the mood right at all. And the second (Satan Met a Lady) was abysmal – a comedy that wasn’t even funny. Huston’s version got everything right. It was necessary.
Of course it’s completely subjective, but what the hell.
as for “is it just another adaptation of the same book or is it a remake?” is one of those usually pointless questions like asking about whether a tree falling in a forest makes a noise if there’s no one there. Generally when somebody makes another film based on the same source material they know about and are often influenced by that previous version. Don’t tell me that the folks who made the recent Ben Hur weren’t familiar with Wyler’s epic version, and probably the Francis X. Bushman silent version, too.
You can definitely say a movie is a “remake” of a previous movie if that movie was the first version of the story, or if it made such significant changes from the source material that the remake re-used. There’s no doubt that the George Clooney Solaris was a remake of Tarkovski’s film, not Stanislas Lem’s novel. Or that the recent total Recall remake is based on the film, not Philip K. Dick’s short story.
But, in contrast, the 2007 version of Sleuth is more than a remake of the 1972 version, because it’s got a completely new script by Harold Pinter, who reportedly didn’t even see the original. Pinter’s supposed to be an incomparably greater playwrite than Shaffer, but I’ll take Shaffer’s version anyday – it’s got more humor, more quotable lines, and it’s a conscious homage to and send-up of the conventions of the Classic Mystery (in much the way Watchmen critically examines comic book superheroes).
I agree completely about the Reuben Mamoulian/Fredric March ** Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde** – it’s a Necessary remake (and there had been a LOT of previous versions, not just Barrymore’s), while most of the versions following (like Spencer Tracy’s) were pretty much Unnecessary.
I saw the Cortez version on TCM several years ago. It’s not too bad, really, although it’s kind of creaky in the way that many early sound films were. But it benefits from being pre-Code, so they could include the more sordid aspects of Hammett’s novel that were sanitized in the Bogart version. Spade’s affair with Archer’s wife, for example, is more explicit, and at one point Spade strip-searches Bebe Daniels.
The fact that three versions of The Maltese Falcon were made within only ten years is also a nice thing to point out, whenever anybody complains about Hollywood’s fondness for remakes as though it were something new.
Thanks!
Masterpiece films that no one needs to remake include Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey and while we’re on the subject of Kubrick, let’s add Dr. Strangelove to the list.
I think most would consider* The Wizard of Oz *(1939) a worthy remake.
I didn’t know there was an earlier one.
- There are a vast number of such prior versions from the early years of Hollywood, when studios were scrambling to turn out hundreds and hundreds of reels of content from gum wrappers and weather changes. Most are forgotten, some are lost.
There was the silent Larry Semon version mentioned above (which features Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodsman!) and there were several earlier silent films made by L. Frank Baum himself.
I agree that the 1939 version is the definitive version, although you should observe that Baum never had the idea that Oz was “just a dream”. Dorothy went back several times in the course of his Oz books.
every now and then someone tries to be more faithful to the Oz books, but it hasn’t been well-received. Even the 1985 Return to Oz, which tried to bridge the ideas of both Baum’s universe and the conception of the 1939 film didn’t do all that well at the box office.