10 Movie Remakes Involving Auteur Directors

Original: “The Heartbreak Kid” (Elaine May 1972)

Remake: “The Heartbreak Kid” (Peter & Bobby Farrelly, 2007)

We’re already on record as huge fans of the all-too-short directorial career of Elaine May (here’s our Retrospective), and her 1972 “The Heartbreak Kid” is probably her most satisfying and complete film — boasting not only her brilliantly skewed sensibility, but a watertight script from Neil Simon and a career-defining turn from Charles Grodin. It’s the deeply down-in-the-mouth tale of a nebbish but pompous young man who gets married impetuously and already starts to fall for someone else on his honeymoon. In the 1972 original, the film evolves into a three-way character study, with Grodin’s second-guessing bridegroom caught between Cybill Shepherd‘s manipulative daddy’s girl and his strident new wife, played to an Oscar nomination by May’s own daughter, Jeannie Berlin. Spin forward three-and-a-half decades, though, and the Farrellys attempted one of those remakes that manages to entirely miss the point of the original. Gone are the subtlety of the relationships and the characterization in favor of broad pratfalls and twists upon twists, all of which contribute to a schizophrenic and frenetic tone that sits at uncomfortable odds with the basic misanthropy and darkness of the premise. As acerbic and unkind as May’s original film often is to its characters, and as unlikeable as they are, they are desperately relatable — Ben Stiller‘s wacky attempt to divest himself of Malin Akerman in order to couple up with Michelle Monaghan in the remake, however, just comes across as strained and unpleasant, and the attempts a a similar kind of world weary black comedy strike a very sour note. Why on earth should we care about the romantic entanglements of such charmless individuals, who are nothing but horrible to one another? The genius of May’s original film, and everything that the remake lacks, can be summed up in the final shot of the 1972 movie as Grodin sits by himself on a sofa at his own wedding, with people passing back and forth, but no one talking to him. Simply by holding on that shot, and on Grodin’s ever-so-gradually deflating expression, May turns comedy to tragicomedy, and delivers more insight into the nature of human relationships than the steadily mounting casualty rate of the remake could ever manage.

Verdict: Elaine May’s “The Heartbreak Kid” is a bittersweet ’70s classic that deserves to be bracketed with the likes of “The Graduate“; the remake isn’t really fit to bear the same name, which is ironic, since the title was reportedly forced on the Farrellys who had wanted to change it.

Bonus Round: In addition to Berlin’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Eddie Albert got a nod in the Supporting Actor category for his role in the original film as Shepherd’s doting, suspicious, truculent, and somewhat bigoted father.

Original: “The Thing From Another World” (Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks 1951)
Remake: “The Thing” (John Carpenter, 1982)

While only credited as producer on the 1951 film, the great Howard Hawks is widely acknowledged to have been a major creative influence over the film. While John Carpenter’s version is a far more faithful adaptation of the source, science fiction novella “Who Goes There,” than it is a rehash of the Hawks/Nyby film, Carpenter’s often-asserted admiration for Hawks means the “remake” tag is at least partly applicable here. The differences, however, are huge, and watching the 1951 film now you can almost believe it was an entirely separate film, were it not for the similar setting and the identical (and now iconic) opening title treatment in which the words “The Thing” seem to burn through the screen. In fact, though it may have been admirable for the time (and it was regarded as one of the best films of its year), the 1951 film now feels pretty creaky — more indebted to the B-movie monster pics of the period than to the kind of existential horror that the source novella and Carpenter’s remake deal in so effectively. In the earlier film, the alien, for example, does not have the fascinating shapeshifting ability that makes it so insidious, and so the danger it represents remains external to the men. The anxiety of the times, in regards the atomic bomb and a widespread mistrust of science and scientists, is reflected in the character of the quasi-deranged boffin who insists the alien be saved even at the expense of all of their lives, for the sake of progress and scientific advancement. Hilariously referred to as an “intellectual carrot” at one point, the humanoid creature of Hawks/Nyby’s film is just a monster (composed of vegetable matter to boot) to be defeated by the brave derring-do of the soldiers stationed on the base. In Carpenter’s tremendous revisioning, though, the alien’s ability to mimic human form, along with its telepathy and some absolutely brilliant creature effects by Ron Bottin and Stan Winston (who made the alien/dog hybrid), make it a far more terrifying adversary, and the crew who must take it on are less a stoic square-jawed model of military bravery than a rag-tag motley crew characterized by desperation rather than heroism.

Verdict: Hawks and Nyby’s film is a superior 1950s monster movie, but for actual scares and atmosphere it can’t hold a candle to the evergreen, stripped back brilliance of Carpenter’s classic, which also boasts an all-time great horror score.

Bonus Round: If you’re still unconvinced that Carpenter had any particular homage to Hawks in mind with “The Thing,” just look again at the film playing in the house in Carpenter’s “Halloween” — that’s right, it’s “The Thing From Another World.”