From imdb.com / © Rank Organisation
I still find it disconcerting when films I enjoyed in my youth are remade in the 21st century: for example, 1980’s The Fog (remade in 2005), 1981’s The Evil Dead (remade in 2013) and Clash of the Titans (remade in 2010), 1986’s The Hitcher (remade in 2007), 1987’s Robocop (remade in 2014) and 1988’s Hairspray (remade in 2007). My immediate and automatic response to such remakes is, “What, they’re remaking that movie already? Have you no shame, Hollywood?”
This is followed by a feeling of horror as I realise just how long ago it was when those original movies were released. The first Evil Dead movie was 32 years old – 32 years! – when its remake surfaced, though in my mind it was only yesterday when Sam Raimi’s Deadites made their first-ever appearance and started making life difficult for Bruce Campbell. And actually, three of the films I remember most fondly from my youth, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) were remakes themselves. Body Snatchers appeared just 22 years after the 1956 original and The Thing appeared 32 years after its 1950 one. Scarface was an outlier, since the first Scarface came out in 1932, more than a half-century earlier.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so concerned about how soon after the original movie that a remake appears. I should be concerned about the quality of it – for remakes tend to be shite. I haven’t seen all those mentioned at the beginning of this entry, but the ones I have seen have been nowhere near as good as the originals. (The Evil Dead remake probably comes closest, but I still much prefer the ramshackle and low-budget, but resourceful, charm of Raimi’s 1981 film.) That said, remakes don’t have to be bad all the time – the aforementioned ones by Kaufman, Carpenter and De Palma testify to that.
So, without further ado, here are some films – and one series of films – I wouldn’t mind seeing remade in the 21st century, with bigger budgets and better special effects. But remade decently.
From wikipedia.org / © Rank Organisation
Hell Drivers (1957)
Blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, American director Cy Endfield moved to Britain where, half-a-dozen years later, he made Hell Drivers. Given the persecution Endfield had suffered, it unsurprisingly takes a dim view of American-style, cut-throat capitalism. It has that underrated but magnificent actor Stanley Baker as an ex-con who finds a job as a truck driver with a dodgy haulage company, which threatens its drivers with the sack if they don’t deliver loads of gravel across treacherous roads at breakneck speeds. The reason there aren’t more drivers employed to relieve the pressure, and reduce the danger, is because of a scam involving the local depot manager and its off-his-head Irish foreman (played by Patrick McGoohan like a brawnier version of Shane MacGowan). The latter soon becomes Baker’s nemesis.
As well as a political message, Endfield injects Hell Drivers with an American-style grittiness rarely seen in British films of the period. But what really makes the film a joy to watch nowadays is the cast. As Kim Newman has written of it in Empire Magazine, “how many other movies have an ensemble which includes the original Dr Who (Hartnell), the first James Bond (Sean Connery), the Prisoner (McGoohan), a Man From UNCLE (David McCallum), a Professional (Gordon Jackson), Clouseau’s boss (Herbert Lom), plus Alfie Bass, the excellent Peggy Cummins (of the cult items Gun Crazy and Night of the Demon), the inimitably boozy Wilfrid Lawson, Jill Ireland and Sid James?”
In 2026, with capitalism more cut-throat than ever, a remake of Hell Drivers would be timely. I don’t think, though, setting it in the wilds of Middlesex, West Sussex and Buckinghamshire, where the original was filmed, would work now, so it’d have to have its hard-pressed truck drivers pounding the roads of a less hospitable locale – the Alaskan tundra, say, or somewhere that retains some near-impenetrable tropical rainforest.
And to pay proper homage to the original, you’d definitely need a cast made up of actors who’ve played iconic roles in iconic TV shows or movie series. You could have one of the grittier Bonds (Daniel Craig or Timothy Dalton), one of the grittier Doctors Who (Christopher Eccleston or Peter Capaldi), plus a Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch, maybe), a Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), perhaps someone from the Breaking Bad universe (Bryan Cranston, say, or Bob Odenkirk)… The possibilities are endless.
From wikipedia.org
The Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies (1961-64)
This is a little different. I’d like to see the four movies made about Agatha Christie’s genteel sleuth of a certain age, Miss Marple, which had the delightful Margaret Rutherford in the leading role – Murder She Said (1961), Murder at the Gallop (1963), Murder Most Foul (1964) and Murder Ahoy! (1964) – rebooted as a TV show. Not just another show about Miss Marple per se – there have been ones with Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie – but one set in the universe of the four Rutherford movies.
Thus, its episodes would be set against the tableau of early-1960s England, with Miss Marple depicted as an obstinate, feisty old lady who refuses to know her place and keeps barging into and solving mysteries. There’d be as much as humour as tension and the show would have the films’ supporting characters, like the timid librarian Mr Stringer (Rutherford’s real-life husband Stringer Davis), who reluctantly helps Miss Marple out, and the exasperated copper Inspector Craddock (Charles Tingwell), who begins each instalment telling her to mind her own business but ends it taking orders from her. Meanwhile, Ron Goodwin’s jaunty Miss Marple Theme would burble in the background.
I suspect in a 2026 version Mark Gatiss would make a lovely Mr Stringer, while Daniel Mays would nicely fill the shoes of the long-suffering Inspector Craddock. But who would play Miss Marple – or more precisely, play Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple? Perhaps Dawn French, though she’d have to spend a long time in the make-up chair to recreate Rutherford’s famously jowly, hangdog features.
In the original movies, each murder that Rutherford / Marple investigated involved a British institution – a country manor, horse riding, the theatre and the Navy. She’d duly rattle establishment cages by sticking her nose in where it wasn’t welcome. So perhaps each episode of this hypothetical series would have her ruffling the feathers of other British institutions of the time – the Army, the House of Lords, Savile Row, Crufts, the country’s nascent rock ‘n’ roll industry… Miss Marple meets the young Rolling Stones? I’d pay good money to see that.
From wikipedia.org / © 20th Century Fox
Von Ryan’s Express (1965)
I never had much time for Frank Sinatra, neither as an entertainer nor as a person, but he left an impression on my 10-year-old self the first time I saw the ripping World War II yarn Von Ryan’s Express. It’s the story of an American airman, Ryan (Sinatra), downed in Italy, who joins forces with some Allied prisoners of war, led by Trevor Howard. They attempt an audacious escape into neutral Switzerland by seizing control of a train and steering it up a railway line into the Alps. Much derring-do is involved as German troops and aircraft go all-out to stop them reaching their destination.
It’s great, crowd-pleasing stuff until the ending – spoilers are coming! – which is depicted on the movie poster, painted by the great Frank McCarthy. The train has almost made it to safety. Having fought a rearguard action against the Germans, Sinatra is running after the train and has almost caught up with it. But then…. What happened next put a dampener on things. But it also lodged the film in my mind forever.
With 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino showed his love for rip-roaring if cheesily improbable World War II adventures, so perhaps he could helm a remake of Von Ryan’s Express? To stick to the innocent, uncomplicated spirit of the original, though, he’d have to forgo his use of the F-word and N-word, and his fetish for close-ups of ladies’ feet, and his nerdish references to ‘film-study criticism of the work of German director G.W. Pabst’.
© Hammer Film Productions / Seven Arts Productions
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Hammer Films’ sci-fi horror film Quatermass and the Pit was based on the 1958 BBC TV serial of the same name. Both film and serial were written by Nigel Kneale. It begins with workers on a London Underground extension project digging up an alien spacecraft full of dead, horned, insect-like creatures that are identified by scientist-hero Professor Bernard Quatermass (Andrew Keir) as inhabitants of the now-lifeless planet Mars. It transpired that millions of years ago, these sneaky Martians arrived on earth and did some evolutionary tinkering on the apes who were the ancestors of modern humanity. This tinkering included implanting in the apes an urge to conduct occasional culls whereby those with pure Martian programming exterminated those who’d developed mutations and lost that programming.
When some TV news crews descend on the scene, a power surge from their camera-cables reactivates the spacecraft and it triggers a new cull. London becomes an apocalyptic hellscape where the human inhabitants who retain their Martian conditioning roam around, zombie-like, and use newly awoken telekinetic powers to kill everyone who’s lost it.
I still find Quatermass and the Pit impressive today, and scary, though inevitably there are special effects that reflect the limitations of Hammer’s budget. I’d relish the prospect of a modern, big-budget retelling of the story.
One thing that makes the film effective, and affecting, is Kneale’s portrayal of the scientists. Unlike usual movie-scientists, they aren’t cold-blooded, delusional, self-serving or plain weird. Instead, Quatermass and his colleagues, Dr Roney (James Donald) and Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley), are portrayed as decent human beings, working with an eager curiosity, a sense of duty and a sense of humour. Keir and Donald were both Scots, so maybe a modern movie could cast Brian Cox as Quatermass and James McAvoy as Dr Roney. Actually, I think a third Scottish actor, Karen Gillan, would be excellent as Barbara Judd.
To be continued…
© Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
