10 Movie Remakes Involving Auteur Directors

Verdict: Godard’s “Breathless” is a startling, inspirational, beautiful, weird and progressive film; McBride’s remake is an imitation that pales into pointlessness in every way except its day-glo palette by comparison.

Bonus Round: Undeterred by the relative obscurity of this go-round (or perhaps heartened by its recent reclamation by Quentin Tarantino who cites the 1983 film as one of his favorites), it appears another Godard classic may be in for the remake treatment with “Alphaville” which is reportedly moving forward with cinematographer Frank Byers attached to direct.

Original: “The Virgin Spring” (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)

Remake: “Last House on the Left” (Wes Craven, 1972)

Perhaps just as a surprising as the highbrow provenance of Craven’s notorious but now super-tedious exploitation horror is the fact that a filmmaker as revered, influential and prolific as Bergman did not inspire more remakes. But the Swedish master’s tendency for overtly philosophical storytelling and for experimentalism (check out our recent rundown of 15 of his Most Essential Films) doesn’t lend itself to straight-on remaking (even Woody Allen‘s most heavily Bergman-esque films like “Interiors” are deeply-indebted-homages rather than retreads). And in order for oblique remakes to happen, the films have to have a strong and simple plot that can be lifted and adapted and repackaged. Unusually for Bergman, “The Virgin Spring,” which was itself based on an old Swedish ballad, has such a plotline —it boasts a simplicity and linearity rare in Bergman’s work, though he weaves a great deal of symbolism and religious allegory around that narrative. And so the central story of a young girl who is raped and murdered by a marauding gang, who then unwittingly take shelter in her family home only to become the targets of bloody revenge by her parents, is the only thing to survive the transition from medieval Sweden to 1970s America, and from Bergman’s clean, vivid and intellectual style to Craven’s messy, shambolic, shock-value approach. It’s hardly a fair comparison —”Last House on the Left” was Craven’s debut film, and has a student-y, ultra-lo-fi feel to it, from its creaky acting to its defiantly amateurish filmmaking, and the topicality that Craven tries to introduce in portraying the gang as a Manson Family-esque group of perverts and junkies makes it feel doubly dated. Add the narratively unnecessary bumbling policemen, the “Home Alone“-style booby trapping of the house by the girl’s father, not to mention some odd diversions from the source structure, as when the gang discovers that they’re in their victim’s house which reduces the ironic tension of the set up considerably, and you have a remake that is as simplistic and crude as the original is simple and evocative.

Verdict: Well, this is easy —the Oscar-winning “The Virgin Spring” is one of Bergman’s shimmering minor classics, and “Last House on the Left” is these days best left for film cultists with an academic interest in the history of low-budget horror cinema.

Bonus Round: “Last House on the Left” inspired its own remake by Dennis Iliadis in 2009 starring Garret Dillahunt, Aaron Paul and Monica Potter. At least the eyelines match in that one, though classing up a film that’s main selling point is its exploitation campiness always feels a bit pointless.