Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice

1. Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction

Great films are not made. They are remade! —Stand-In (Garnett, 1937) In Stand-In (Garnett, 1937), Atterbury Dodd/Leslie Howard, the representative of the East Coast bankers who own Colossal Pictures, is sent to correct the financial mismanagement of the studio. He enters Mrs. Mack’s boarding house inhabited by stand-ins, has-beens, stuntmen, and bit players and meets “Abe Lincoln” at the door. While waiting downstairs, Dodd overhears the actor wearing the familiar top hat, beard, and coat tails of the sixteenth president of the United States tell a fellow boarder, herself reduced from silent star to talkie extra, that he has been waiting for seven years for the remake of The Battle of Gettysburg1 to make his comeback . That there will be a remake, he is convinced. That he uses the term “remake” locates the practice as standard in current studio production. “Abe Lincoln’s” assurance that Hollywood will always return to themes of cultural, historical, and mythological importance to Americans links the remake to standard production formulas, from genre pictures to series C H A P T E R O N E ��� Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction JENNIFER FORREST AND LEONARD R. KOOS 1 and sequels, to star vehicles that capitalize on a performer’s established persona, and to imitations of others studios’ successes. Stand-In’s “Abe Lincoln” could just as easily have answered the door as a cowboy, waiting for the lull in the production of Westerns to end, and determined to be prepared for when opportunity knocks. But his preparation is limited to the visual portrayal. The boarding-house scene in Stand-In deftly plays on the irony of an actor having assumed his role to the point of iconographically becoming Abe Lincoln, and yet who is utterly unable to remember the words to the Gettysburg Address, needing unexpected prompting from the very British Dodd. Although the viewer knows that this down-on-his-luck bit player’s screen life is over, it is not only because he has forgotten his lines, nor that he is a has-been like many of the silent stars that didn’t successfully make the transition to the talkies, nor even that he is no longer marketable like Lester Plum’s child actress who Hollywood didn’t want anymore once she grew up, but because the studios simply aren’t making Civil War movies or biographies of the life of Abraham Lincoln at this time. After all, one can hardly predict when a picture will be remade. Some remakes appear within a few years of an original (Pépé le Moko [Duvivier, 1936] was remade two years later as Algiers [Cromwell, 1938]), some fifty years later as in Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Mazursky, 1986), the remake of Boudu sauvé des eaux (Renoir, 1932). “Abe Lincoln” has made the colossal error of becoming a type with very narrowly circumscribed market value. He would have done better to be a cowboy, since the Western was a very successful genre during the 1930s, and thereby lessen the margin of error in specializing in a type. However limited “Abe Lincoln” is as a type, he serves as a living symbol of the recyclable nature of film material.2 What is clear from “Abe’s” presence is that there will always be remakes, if not of The Battle of Gettysburg , then of some other film. His comment above all shows how much the remake was an institutionalized element of Hollywood production, and this long before the thirties. While genre films, cycles, series, and sequels, and star persona vehicles have found their legitimate place in film theory and criticism, the same cannot be said for the remake, which, at least since the fifties, has been treated as a less than respectable Hollywood commercial practice. Remaking is far from being a uniquely American phenomenon, but because American film production has dominated world cinema since the late teens, Hollywood receives the lion’s share of critical attention. The perception of Hollywood as exclusively a commercial enterprise makes its 2 JENNIFER FORREST AND LEONARD R. KOOS recourse to the remake reflect the worst in Western capitalist production, a type of production where catering to the tastes of a mass public entails forfeiting on film substance. Or does it? In Stand-In, the caricatured foreign Hollywood director Kodolfski explains to Atterbury Dodd that the studio viewing of the “finished” but terribly flawed film...