This week, a stage production of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's is in previews on Broadway. Naturally, people are curious, and will compare Emilia Clarke's performance as Holly Golightly to Audrey Hepburn's. While critics might debate whether Hepburn really was the right actor to play Holly, being too classy (and therefore not a "real phony," to use O. J. Berman's classic phrase) for a girl who takes money for sexual favors (which are smoothed out by Hollywood into "trips to the powder room"), the image is indelible: the tall thin brunette in stunning Givenchy dresses and a footlong cigarette holder. (Likewise the image of Frankenstein's monster is forever associated with the make-up job on Boris Karloff for James Whale's version of Mary Shelley's novel.)
Clarke admits it: you can't top perfection. One of the things about a visual text like a film is that it creates icons, larger than life as the cliche goes, and they are hard to replace. How many times have we heard or even uttered the phrase, "I can't believe they're remaking..."
But how many different versions of classical myths do you think the ancient Greeks saw? How many different versions of various historical kings and queens did Elizabethan groundlings see? Why should we get bent out of shape when remakes come out? (Yes, of course many do suck, but usually they suck anyway, regardless of comparisons to an "original.")
Consider this: in 1936 Alfred Hitchcock made a film about a man falsely accused of murder who travels across a nation to clear his name and find the spy ring that's plotting to export a serious national secret (and that was responsible for the murder). It was called The 39 Steps. A few years later, in America, he makes the same kind of film, but set in America instead of England and Scotland: Saboteur. Finally, a little less than twenty years later, he makes the story yet again, this time having the man travel North by Northwest, which is of course the film's title, taking him from New York to Mount Rushmore. This last version, starring Cary Grant, Eva-Marie Saint, James Mason, and a cropduster, has become an acknowledged classic of the Hitchcock canon. Which film is really "better"?
And speaking of Hitchcock, this week will also mark the beginning of a new series on A&E, Bates Motel, a "prequel" to the Master's masterpiece Psycho, about Norman Bates as a teenager, living with his mother, who has an actual name! What's interesting is that the series is set in the present-day, rather than in the fifties. This allows the producers to focus on what really matters, the mother-son dynamic, rather than getting the period details right. (Save that for Mad Men.)
Since so many films are adaptations of books anyway, it's hard to point to a single authentic representation (a real phony, as it were). The actors who headed up the Hogwarts case of the Harry Potter series will remain important for at least a generation, especially Alan Rickman as Professor Snape, but some time a new Potter will emerge (especially if those who retain control also pay attention to numbers). Think of the various reboots of comic book heroes, especially Spiderman. John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn is an emblem, but the Coen Brothers still made a beautiful version of Charles Portis's True Grit. Warner Brothers made two versions of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon before Humphrey Bogart played the lead part and made it part of our "code of honor."
Remakes can allow us to re-think the "source" text one again, and even perhaps to question the notion of an original source. Psycho is a good example, it being based on a novel that itself was based on a true story. The great comic team of Zucker-Abrams-Zucker took about an old action film Zero Hour and turned it into Airplane!, the definitive comedy of the early 1980s. A real phony, indeed.
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