The Art of the Remake: Revisions and Revivals

PSYCHO
1960, Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 109 min.
With Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh

PSYCHO has become an American icon, impossible to describe without giving away too much. The film's plot and central imagery have become a part of modern folklore, instantly evoked by the mention of the shower sequence or the Bates Motel. Made at the height of Hitchcock's most productive Hollywood period, PSYCHO, with its story of guilt, obsession, and mother love gone awry, is one of the most masterful and suspenseful manipulations of audience point of view ever put on film. 35mm. (BS)

PSYCHO
1998, Gus Van Sant, USA, 105 min.
With Vince Vaughan, Anne Heche

"With this thriller—which is innovative in the extreme to which it takes the practice of copying—director Gus Van Sant reminds us that all forms can be used as blueprints and that homage may be a euphemism."—Lisa Alspector, Chicago Reader

Van Sant's reputed "shot-for-shot" update of the Hitchcock classic remains one of the most controversial and fascinating remakes in film history. It's actually not a shot-for-shot remake, making the variations all the more significant, but the close correspondences between the two films compel one to consider how crucial other factors (color, casting, pacing, etc.) can be. 35mm. (MR)

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
1946, Tay Garnett, USA, 113 min.
With Lana Turner, John Garfield

James M. Cain's 1934 tale of two lovers conspiring to bump off an inconvenient husband provided the definitive paradigm for film-noir plotting. The story had already been filmed in France and Italy before this first American version, and the official 1981 remake is flanked by numerous unofficial remakes, including BODY HEAT and JERICHOW. Director Garnett's approach is both romantic and sardonic, its balmy atmosphere counterpointed by a streak of black humor. 35mm. (MR

JERICHOW
2008, Christian Petzold, Germany, 93 min.
With Benno Fürmann, Nina Hoss

One of Germany's most distinctive and accomplished filmmakers, Christian Petzold (SOMETHING TO REMIND ME, YELLA ) crafts tight, unsettling films with ruthless precision. In this neue-noir variant on THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, a taciturn hunk (Fürmann) gets a job working for a Turkish immigrant (Hilmi Sözer) with a successful chain of snack bars and a beautiful, restless wife (Hoss). Petzold reconfigures the classic noir triangle by giving more weight to the betrayed husband, brilliantly fleshed out by Sözer into a complex and tragic figure. In German with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)

NINOTCHKA
1939, Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 110 min.
With Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas

In Lubitsch’s most famous comedy, Garbo satirizes her own saturnine image as a straitlaced Russian envoy who journeys to Paris to fetch back three straying commissars (Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach) but finds herself succumbing to capitalism, champagne, and a charmingly decadent Count (Douglas). Avoiding simplistic politics, Lubitsch (along with screenwriters Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch) tweaks both the self-indulgent West and the self-righteous East, with laughter and romance working together to rewrite ideology. 35mm. (MR)

SILK STOCKINGS
1957, Rouben Mamoulian, USA, 117 min.
With Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse

This remake fascinates on two fronts: as a 1950s version of a 1930s original, and as a musical version of a nonmusical original. Produced by the fabled Arthur Freed unit at MGM and featuring a Cole Porter score, SILK STOCKINGS was one of the last classic musicals before bloat took over the genre. Highlights include Charisse's sensuous striptease to the instrumental "Silk Stockings," and Astaire and Janis Paige's hilarious send-up of movie technology in "Stereophonic Sound." 35mm widescreen. (MR)

NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE
(NOSFERATU: PHANTOM DER NACHT)
1979, Werner Herzog, Germany, 107 min.
With Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz

"You will never see a better Dracula film."—Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune

Herzog's version of the Dracula myth is the most chilling since Murnau's 1922 NOSFERATU, which it honors without imitating. It is a truly Medieval vision, stripped of Romantic and Victorian frills, with a remorseless fixation on death and apocalypse, evoked by rushing clouds, parades of coffins, and hordes of rats. Kinski's superbly disciplined interpretation of the vampire is creepy, sepulchral, and repellent, more vermin than human. English-language version, filmed simultaneously with the German one. 35mm. (MR)

WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
1971, Mel Stuart, USA, 100 min.
With Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson

"Probably the best film of its sort since THE WIZARD OF OZ...Delightful, funny, scary, exciting, and, most of all, a genuine work of imagination."—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Based on Roald Dahl's classic fantasy, with eye-popping, post-psychedelic art direction by Harper Goff and songs ("The Candy Man") by Leslie Bricusse & Anthony Newley, WILLY WONKA overcame an unsuccessful initial release to become one of the best-loved cult films of the 1970s. An impoverished newsboy and four appallingly greedy kiddies are admitted into the mysterious realm of eccentric confectioner Willy Wonka (Wilder), where a host of gaudy and grisly surprises await them. 35mm. (MR)

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CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
2005, Tim Burton, USA, 115 min.
With Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore

"CHARLIE is absinthe in movie form, a white chocolate space egg of a picture that has a giddy hallucinatory quality...it's fascinating."—Stephanie Zacharek, salon.com

The chocolate is richer and a tad more bitter in Burton's imaginative version of the Roald Dahl fantasy. The sets are awesome, the musical numbers (featuring digitally replicated Deep Roy as all the Oompa Loompas) spectacular, and Depp (channeling Michael Jackson and Marilyn Manson) coolly creepy as the cryptic candy man Willy Wonka. 35mm. (MR)

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS
1955, Douglas Sirk, USA, 89 min.
With Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson

Critically dismissed at the time of its release, Douglas Sirk’s melodrama is now regarded as one of the key films of the Eisenhower era, richly fascinating from sociological, feminist, and formalist viewpoints, with an especially stunning use of decor and color. A middle-class widow (Jane Wyman) falls in love with a nonconformist gardener (Rock Hudson); family and community disapproval leads her to sacrifice love for respectability, with bitterly ironic results. 35mm. (MR)

ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL
1974, R.W. Fassbinder, Germany, 94 min.
With Brigitte Mira, El Hedi Ben Salem

Fassbinder's admiration for the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk motivated this ethnically enhanced spin on ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. Two outcasts, a grandmotherly cleaning-lady and a broad-chested Moroccan transient worker, fleetingly find solace in an ill-fated affair. Fassbinder portrays the trajectory of this union with terrible accuracy, from Emmi’s fragile blossoming under the influence of lovesickness, to Ali’s inevitable drift back to the bars, buddies, and casual women of his past. In German with English subtitles. 35mm. (BS)

Archival print!
FAR FROM HEAVEN
2002, Todd Haynes, USA, 107 min.
With Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert

After getting the Fassbinder treatment in ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS returned to the U.S. to be reworked by yet another Sirk devotee, writer-director Todd Haynes. Moore stars as a suburban housewife whose perfect life unravels, much like Jane Wyman's in the 1956 version, but Haynes ups the ante by foregrounding such elements as racism, sexism, and homophobia that simmered beneath the surface of Fifties films. Archival 35mm print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. (MR)

BOTTLE ROCKET
1996, Wes Anderson, USA, 91 min.
With Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, James Caan

"Fresh, character driven, often funny, and unfashionably upbeat (as well as offbeat)."—Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Like BOOGIE NIGHTS, SLING BLADE, NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE, HALF NELSON, and RAISING VICTOR VARGAS, Wes Anderson's first feature had its genesis as a short film. Expanded from a 1992 short that also starred the Wilson brothers, BOTTLE ROCKET is a quirky heist film centering on three Texas buddies who haphazardly pursue a life of crime. Like Anderson's later films (RUSHMORE, THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS), it's mainly about hanging out with a group of endearingly eccentric people. Martin Scorsese named BOTTLE ROCKET as one of his ten favorite films of the 1990s, comparing Anderson's affection for his characters to Leo McCarey's and Jean Renoir's. 35mm. (MR)