Here’s the trailer for the original, which starred Yves Montand.
Maybe he was trying mighty hard to look like Gary Cooper.
As an aside, let me say that Some Like It Hot was (and perhaps remains) well-known and popular inside Russia under the title In Jazz, There Are Only Girls, In his autobiography, Tony Curtis tells how it was warmly received by Soviet audiences in the early '60s, and how the final line (“Nobody’s perfect.”) always brought the house down,
This film was a big favorite of my father’s. I saw the restored version of the original when it was released (with some sections of dialogue run over stills or black background, where they had the dialogue track, but had lost the original scenes). It’s an impressive film, beautifully shot, but with time the tinges of racism start to show – this :Shamballa"-like Shangri-la is run by a truly ancient Belgian priest? And when he’s dying they need to go to a lot of trouble to bring in a very western humanitarian to take his place? And it’s all well and good that the various characters who were on the plane learn the Joys of the Simple Life and make themselves useful, but I can’t help noticing that it’s the native Asian people ho are doing all the heavy lifting while the Europeans get to live in the Big Open House with the huge staircases, and ride horses.
the musical remake was an attempt by the studio to try to revive The Movie Musicals, with the crack writing team of Burt Bachrach and Hal David providing the pop music. But it was, IK think, a misdirected effort. Mad magazine’s parody aptly skewered the movies flaws, including the inane songs (“The World is a Rhombus without a Circumference and Nobody knows what this Simile means…”). We still get the Europeans in Charge, with the added attraction of John Gielgud in yellowface. And the Ronald Colman character asks the expiring priest “Why do you want me in charge when Chang has been working here all these years?” Why, indeed?
Oh, yeah – the thing that really spoiled the Capra version for me wasn’t its dated nature or the Eurocentrism, but a stupid little thing that Capra added on to the beginning. To explain the premise of the film to the audience at the very start (As the sergeant is supposed to have said, “First I tells them what I’m going to say, then I tells them, then I tells them what I said.” You can’t take the chance that the audience will miss the message) Capra has a note
In these days of wars and rumors of wars - haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight? / Of course you have. So has every man since time began. Always the same dream. Sometimes he calls it Utopia - Sometimes the Fountain of Youth - Sometimes merely “that little chicken farm.” / One man had such a dream and saw it come true.
Well, that killed it for me. Comparing Shangri-la to a Chicken Farm. Because my memories of chicken farms was of driving past large breeding grounds in the summer on our way to the Jersey Shore, vast hives overflowing with chicken shit festering malodorously in the summer sun. After that I couldn’t dissociate the image (and smell) from the premise.
Super duper! 
I blame that film for breaking up Bacharach and David’s long-time partnership. They ended up suing each other (and Dionne Warwick also got dragged into the lawsuits somehow). A sad end to what had been one of the most successful musical collaborations of that era.
INSIDE MAN and INSIDE MAN MOST WANTED. The original has Spike Lee directing and Denzel Washington. The sequel went direct to video. Don’t sell it short. The 2nd film is more than a sequel. The crime (bank heist with hostages) is known to the new team of FBI agent and hostage negotiator. They recognize this same thing happened before and try to head off a repeat of the perpetrator’s escape. A nice twist is referencing happenings in the 1st film/crime. The sequel has Roxanne McKee as the crime mastermind. It also has WW II Nazi gold, neo-nazis and throw back to the first crime. Both are very entertaining.
I watched it the other night. The final third was very different from how I remember the original, and (IMHO) not an improvement.
I like Never Say Never Again.
Terrible Remakes
The Truth about Charlie (2002) – even with Jonathan Demme directing, this is a terrible remake of Charade (1964) that doesn’t seem to understand what the original is about. Apparently he also wanted to do an homage to Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, which doesn’t help.
The Jackal (1997) – a remake of Fred Zinneman’s The Day of the Jackal, based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel. Disowned by both Zinneman and Forsyth. Edward Fox (who played the Jackal in Zinneman’s film) refused to appear in a cameo. It got terrible reviews.
King Kong (1976) – I’ve written about this elsewhere recently on this Board. Heck, I reviewed it when it first came out. Ignore at all costs.
King Solomon’s Mines (1985) – I kno it’s not supposed to be serious, and to be a poke at the Indiana Jones films, but it’s still awful. And it’s got a terrific cast – Richard Chamberlin, Sharon Stone, Herbert Lom. They even got John Rhys Davies from the Indiana Jones movies. And J. Lee Thompson directed – he used to be pretty good (The Guns of Navarone, Taras Bulba) before he sold his soul to the devil.
I like the 2012 remake of Schwarzenegger’s “Total Recall” with Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, and Jessica Biel better than the original because the original killed off Sharon Stone’s character too soon. The remake developed Beckinsale’s character and made her the total nemesis of Farrell’s character. Also, and to be expected, the special effects were more sophisticated.
I feel just the opposite – I prefer the original, in part because the "travel through the earth elevator "idea is scientifically ludicrous, and, even if it isn’t, the elevator is stupidly built and unsafe. Travel to Mars seems more plausible.
Besides, the whacko ideas and images are a lot more impressive and fun in the original.
As I’ve pointed out before, the original movie exhausts most of the Philip K. Dick story it’s ostensibly based on in the first half hour or so. Most of the rest of the movie seems to be taken from Robert Sheckley’s novel The Status Civilization (with the Atmosphere Plant from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars thrown in for good measure. The remake doesn’t have any of that.
Lynch’s Dune is weird and introduces weirding modules, but it has its appeal. It also has the weirdest take on the Baron Harkonnen and the mentats.
The Alan Smithee version is interesting for restoring scenes that Lynch shot that add depth to the story. It also has the opening slideshow montage to explain the backstory that is helpful if long and cluttered. But the editing is dreadful. It reuses the Navigator scene (one of the most dreadful scenes), and it inserts clunky voiceover that completely breaks the flow of the scene.
The SyFy channel miniseries is much more faithful to the original story and themes, and has time to involve more elements of the story, but it’s TV budget effects are cheesy (like the kangaroo mouse), and the costumer had a weird fetish for strange hats. Oh, and Princess Irulan plays a bigger role, attending the dinner party scene on Arakkis with Paul’s family.
I also don’t like the way Duncan Idaho dies in an explosion.
The new Villenueve movies are visually stunning, and I enjoy the casting. However, there’s little explanation for pretty much anything, such as the mentats, the technology choices, why swords, etc. And since the anti- computer backstory is never explained, there are elements of effects that are completely out of place like the orbital map of Dune that’s a holographic projection.
I’m torn because I like the acting and there are truly artistic visual elements that demonstrate the story without dialogue. But it also twists a few things, and once again the whole Harkonnen population is depicted to match the Baron. Everybody is bald.
But it has the best 'thopters and stillsuits.
There were bout four silent versions of H. Rider Haggard’s novel She. They were all pretty short and not real adaptations. The fifth, made by a lot of the same crew that made the original King Kong came out in 1935, and was the only film to star Helen Gahagan before she went into politics. The film was visually impressive, and influenced Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as well as some Ray Harryhausen movies. Ray Harryhausen himself oversaw the colorization of it in the 200s. It’s probably the overall best version of the story, although I think that time has not been kind to Haggard’s story of the evil, cruel female ruler of an African tribe (even though the movie switched the locale to Asia). There were two subsequent versions that, from all accounts, weren’t very good. So this is a case where the first remake that had a decent length was good, but subsequent remakes weren’t.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea has a twisted history. A couple of versions tie it together with its sequel The Mysterious Island. There were two very short silent versions that weren’t really adaptations. The first one of any length, from 1916, combines it with Mysterious Island. It’s overall pretty good, and the underwater scenes are superb. It’s also the only version to depict Captain Nemo as Indian until The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen over 80 years later.
The part-sound 1929 film The Mysterious Island Lionel Barrymore is a very weird production that basically throws out Verne and rewrites the story of 20,000 Leagues (not “THe Mysterious Island”), but it ain’t Verne at all. Worth a look because of how overall weird it is.
Disney’s 1954 version is probably the overall best, although it makes some drastic revisions to the story (such as having Nemo discover Nuclear Power – the film was bound up with the building of the real nuclea-powered Nautilus). Visually impressive. I’m convinced that Harper Goff’s liberal revamping of the design of the Nautilus inspired the whole field of “Steampunk”.
There were several derivative works and remakes, mostly for television, with two in 1997 that weren’t very satisfactory (even though one was by Hallmark, and the other starred Michael Caine).
In this case, the remakes, except the Disney one, were definitely worse.
I think the 1965 version of She is good. Not the greatest film ever, but above average.
I found the 2014 remake of RoboCop to be inferior to the 1987 original.
It was an OK movie but the original is a classic with a lot of macabre humor that the remake lacked.
I’ll buy that for a dollar.
I have not seen the remake, and don’t have a strong urge to do so. I would rewatch the original.
Brian
Exhibit A: Zero Hour and Airplane!
I did not even know they made that. I liked part of Robocop, but too much violence.
Interesting.
Other than the above great example, are there others?
It’s pretty much a “good in parts, only OK overall” Bond movie for me.
I never bothered to watch it. Robocop 2 is pretty good, though. Directed by Irvin Kershner.