DVD Chronicle

"There is no new thing under the sun," said Ecclesiastes. "Or on cinema screens," he might have added, had he carried his sad wisdom on into our era. Here is only one example of why this is the Age of Remakes: the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) lists twenty-eight different adaptations for cinema or television of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among them a quasi-pornographic French version, Docteur Jekyll et les femmes, and a lost German silent, Der Januskopf, directed by F. W. Murnau. This figure does not even include pastiches like Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or derivatives like Stephen Frears's 1996 Mary Reilly, which retells the famous story from a housemaid's perspective.

A list like this demonstrates how much film has routinely depended on the "repetition compulsion," as Dennis Lim termed it in a recent New York Times review, making the phenomenon sound like a psychiatric disorder. Obviously, there is only so much originality in Hollywood and in the film industry worldwide, whereas there is a lot of pressure from studio executives to release tried-and-true vehicles, pictures with built-in title recognition. Predictably, many remakes have been disastrous; limiting ourselves merely to attempts at translating British screen works into American settings, we encounter the two misguided Hollywood versions of Dennis Potter's television series Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective; Neil LaBute's Death at a Funeral, an unfunny redo of a very funny British original which had appeared a scant three years before; and worst of all, perhaps, Get Carter, the 2010 Sylvester Stallone vehicle crudely updating Mike Hodges's 1971 original Get Carter, a masterpiece of the British crime cinema. But let us leave the disasters to oblivion. In this Chronicle I will concentrate on effective remakes, or at least on those which raise interesting questions of originality and innovation, of cinema history as revealed in different takes over a span of years or in different film cultures.

In 2011, the remake phenomenon became news in connection with the Swedish director Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the cinema version (127 minutes) of the John Le Carré novel which, some thought, had been definitively adapted in the BBC's seven-part television miniseries of 1979 (315 minutes). Both adaptations are now available on DVD, so you can make the choice between them for yourself, putting Gary Oldman's new version of George Smiley up against Alec Guinness's embodiment of the character, who is forever polishing his horn-rimmed glasses while suavely pursuing the Soviet mole hidden within the high command of the British Secret Service, the Circus. For the record, I found Oldman's performance fully convincing, melancholy and witty in equal measure, as I did Colin Firth's performance as Bill Haydon, a fleshier, more playboy-like interpretation of the role than Ian Richardson's in the BBC series. Toby Jones as Percy Alleline, however, seemed lacking in fatuousness, a quality masterfully conveyed by Michael Aldridge in the BBC original, not least by the manner in which his Alleline attempts to hide fatuousness behind Public School bonhomie and great clouds of smoke puffed out from his briar.

Preferences for one performance over another will always be a matter of taste, and in the case of Tinker Tailor they probably matter less than how a viewer responds...