Here's a list capable of loosening the bowels of anyone professing to love the cinema. Because every single name on it belongs to a movie currently in the process of being remade by one of the Hollywood studios:Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, The Dirty Dozen, Fahrenheit 451, Fantastic Voyage, Flash Gordon, I Am Legend, I Claudius, Jason and the Argonauts, Logan's Run, Modesty Blaise, Rollerball, A Star is Born, Them! and X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes.
Every one a classic -- every one near-guaranteed to become a travesty in the not-too-distant future.
Bear in mind that in Hollywood nothing, but nothing, is sacred (there was once a TV remake of Casablanca, in which Bogart was replaced by David Soul). But there's hope, in the shape of those much loved movies as yet unmolested by the execs. To wit, the following are not being remade. Yet. There's still time.
PHOTO: AFP
Vertigo
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
PHOTO: AP
They've already done a TV version of Rear Window with Christopher Reeve in the Jimmy Stewart role, so don't think for a minute this won't be shoddily re-trod in the near future. 1976's Obsession, directed by serial Hitchcock-thief Brian De Palma, was a variation on its themes. Now it's only a matter of time before someone turns this serene temple of cinema into a heaving celluloid pissoir. And then they'll do The Birds properly, as Hitch would have wanted it.
Highway to Hell
(Mark Griffiths 1984)
This is the kind of movie you saw in a drunken stupor on late-night TV 10 years ago and never forgot. When you finally track it down on video -- good luck -- it's every inch the nihilistic trash classic you remembered. Eric Stoltz escapes from his cop escort to Death Row and goes on the lam with a superstitious hooker who's been writing to him in prison. Everybody dies horribly. Trouble is, you show this to three friends and suddenly Jerry Bruckheimer's remaking it with a NASA-sized budget while buying up and burning all extant copies of the original.
The Killer
(John Woo, 1988)
When video director Antoine Fuqua met Chow Yun-fat ("the Cary Grant of the exit-wound") after the Asian superstar's arrival in Hollywood, his first words were "Hey, you should do an American remake of The Killer!" This suggestion alone should immediately have disqualified Fuqua from playing any part in Chow's career in Hollywood. Any fool can do bloodbags and shellcasings, as Fuqua proved with the aptly-titled Replacement Killers, but only Woo could have engineered a poignant marriage between slow-mo Peckinpah and Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession. Bring me the head of Antoine Fuqua.
Detour
(Edgar Ulmer, 1944)
I can just picture some executive striding around the conference table in a fever of inspiration saying, "Yeah, now this Detour thing might work if we just pour some money into it. ..." And no one in the room will point out that Detour's power lies precisely in its Poverty Row origins. Made in six days on rickety sets and in rear-projection booths, starring the luckless Tom Neal, who later did time for murdering his wife, Detour remains so dark and poisonous it will probably send potential re-makers squealing for their mummies. Which has got to be good.
Get Carter
(Mike Hodges, 1971)
Sadly, I cheated, because they've already remade this toxic gangster classic. If you need another Get Carter, choose the blaxploitation insta-remake, Hit Man.
Night of the Hunter
(Charles Laughton, 1955)
The kind of jerry-built accidental masterpiece that every suburban idiot in film school thinks he could make just that little bit better. Never mind the uniquely bizarre friction created by the gathering of such mismatched talents as Laughton, Lillian Gish, co-author Stanley Cortez, James Agee, Shelley Winters, Peter Graves and the mighty mighty Robert Mitchum, because someone's going to get their nasty mitts on it anytime now and bugger it up six ways from Sunday.
The Magnificent Ambersons
(Orson Welles, 1942)
They can do what they like with Citizen Kane, but not with its melancholy and beautiful successor. Because there are some 30 minutes missing from the final version of The Magnificent Ambersons (an act of revenge on Welles by RKO Studios, the pigs), one can easily envisage someone deeming it worth redoing and thus "fixing" it. After all, there's Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1916 novel to draw on, so who needs Welles' screenplay?
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