Reeling back the years in search of movie magic

They keep springing up like old friends from the distant past: Get Carter, Traffic, The Ladykillers and, now, The Italian Job. Except they're not our friends. They're like those pods in the basement in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers: evil, soulless versions of people we think we know and love.

They are all (or in The Ladykillers' case, will be) American remakes of well-known British originals, of films or TV dramas that earned sterling reputations or heavy receipts or rave reviews in their country of origin. Thereafter, they're left to languish in culty obscurity, often for decades, until some 23-year-old in a Hollywood studio spots their retread potential and alerts Legal Affairs to snag the remake rights.

The process that then ensues, involving the usual squadrons of hacks and shaky-handed script-surgeons, is analogous to removing the spine from a kipper, throwing the meat away, then building a whole new fish around the bones. A stupid and pointless procedure indeed, especially when one examines the mutant results for firmness of flesh, freshness, odor and edibility.

Certain questions inevitably arise. Firstly, what is so wrong with US movie-making that its practitioners feel compelled to plunder the cinematic heritages of other countries for new -- or, pardon me, old -- plots and stories? Is it because they have so thoroughly strip-mined their own cinematic and televisual culture that they must now start on ours? Certainly, if you've sunk to the level of remaking TV shows like Scooby-Doo and McHale's Navy you are millimeters from the bottom of the barrel and it's time to seek fresh fields to defoliate.

But given the generally dismal quality of most new British films, what will there be for the Americans to remake in 20 years' time? Maybe Baby? Greenfingers? What deformities of deformities will they be shooting back at us by then? Trapped between the immovable, sclerotic Hollywood behemoths and the leveling anarchy of European co-production financing arrangements, which way can British cinema jump if it wants to remain viable instead of functioning as Hollywood's Airstrip One?

Peter Collinson's original Italian Job, released in 1969, managed to be so unreconstructedly English -- or so unreconstructibly London -- that it sank its own chances at the American box office. US viewers of my acquaintance need moment-by-moment explanations to comprehend it. And that doesn't make them stupid or insular; quite the contrary, it's a pretty stupid and insular movie in the first place. And Job One was simultaneously so fiercely Euroskeptic, albeit avant la lettre, that today it feels like a blueprint for 20 subsequent years of football hooliganism, pissing in foreign fountains and all those things that prompt the French to call us les fuckoffs.

The Italian Job is not American. It's not European. It's English, for good or ill, and Little English at that. For me, these are the things -- the cultural environment, the social surroundings -- that make Collinson's movie so fascinating to watch, and that partly redeem it. Certainly it's not the lame, dated jokes, the lazy writing, the slack narrative pacing, the boring matiness of the male ensemble or the overall emptiness of the film. I can't cut it any breaks today just because it knocked me out as a 10-year-old watching it on BBC2. But its many faults make it an ideal candidate for the remake treatment, the rule being, of course: only remake crap, because remaking Citizen Kane is just asking for trouble.