William Shakespeare’s text towers over all as the key source. The notion that every one among the dozens of Macbeths filmed since 1908 is a remake of James Stuart Blackton’s lost silent film from that year is patently absurd. Nobody is referring to Joel Coen’s upcoming The Tragedy of Macbeth as a remake of Justin Kurzel’s film from 2015 or of Orson Welles’s take from 1948. The odd thing is we already half know this use of “remake” to be inappropriate. In 1959, the book was loosely adapted into an American film called The Mating Game starring, of all people, Tony Randall and Debbie Reynolds. The 1991 TV series – the one that famously launched Catherine Zeta Jones’s career – is not even the “original” adaptation.
The “original” is surely HE Bates’s 1958 novel The Darling Buds of May. The Mail’s argument that The Larkins is not a patch on the 1991 “original” requires some unpacking. When Villeneuve set to work on Dune he was inspired not by David Lynch’s notoriously hectic 1984 film – or, for that matter, by the 2000 TV series – but by Frank Herbert’s still widely read novel from 1965.Ī movie adapted from the same novel or play as another movie is something else altogether In contrast, Some Like it Hot and A Star is Born really are based on cinematic sources (Some like Hot is, indeed, arguably a remake of a remake, but we don’t have space to tell that story).
They are fresh interpretations of source material that also generated earlier films. The point is that they are not really remakes. The point is not that there is anything wrong with those first two films. This was wrong of me and I beg the court’s forgiveness.
When discussing the Hollywood remake, I have, in earlier columns, been guilty of listing films such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) alongside Some Like it Hot (1959) and A Star is Born (1954) as evidence for the defence. Somewhat bafflingly the Spectator went with “Denis Villeneuve’s eagerly awaited remake of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune”. On Wednesday, our friends at the Mail warned us that the “critically acclaimed 2021 remake hits cinemas tomorrow”. We will come back to the curious assertion that the new series “‘has nothing on the original’, which first aired in 1991 for three series”.Įarlier this year, the Independent wrote about a “sci-fi/action remake of Dune”. “Viewers of The Darling Buds of May remake ‘switch off’…” the Daily Mail thundered as it assiduously gathered together a bunch of tweets that said rude things about ITV’s The Larkins. The time has come to get pedantic about cavalier use of the word “remake”.
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