With Remakes, Something Is Often Lost in Translation

Americans love foreign cars.

American homes are full of foreign-made electronics, kitchen gadgets, and furniture.

Americans love Chinese food, Japanese sushi, Italian pasta and pizza, Vietnamese spring rolls, Thai pad Thai.

But when it comes to foreign films, xenophobia prevails. With the exception of last year’s embrace of Ang Lee’s martial-arts action picture “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” most Americans have demonstrated that they refuse to pay money for films with subtitles, for films that demand accommodating language barriers and cultural differences, for films whose stars are not on the cover of this week’s celebrity chronicles.

The result is a predictable trend in Hollywood whereby terrific--sometimes even classic--foreign films are greedily snapped up by Tinseltown studios and remade and repackaged for American audiences.

The remakes range from successes including “The Magnificent Seven” to abysmal failures including “Breathless” and “Sommersby” (the remake of “The Return of Martin Guerre”).

Every remake is freighted with the problem of originality. At best, a redo such as “Insomnia,” will live up to the original by essentially copying it. In the first film, a taut psychological drama directed by Norwegian Erik Skjoldbjaerg, the exceptional Stellan Skarsgard plays a cop who comes unraveled as he investigates the brutal murder of a young woman in the land of the midnight sun. In the remake, directed by “Memento’s” Christopher Nolan, Al Pacino plays the cop with Robin Williams cast as the crafty murderer.

But any faithful remake essentially requires that a director follow in the footsteps laid down by another. (The most egregious example here is the case of Gus Van Sant, who remade Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” by reshooting it frame-for-frame.) The point of the process seems nothing more than an academic exercise in monkey-see, monkey-do. If original thinking is brought to bear, it requires that the redo specialists apply new ideas and innovations within the confines of essentially the same story. If there were no serious flaws in the original film, the question presents itself: Why bother?

In the legion of mangled crossovers, no single culture has been more abused than the French. Roger Ebert, movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, once remarked that there seems to be, “a trend in which Hollywood buys French comedies and experiments on them to see if they can be made into English with all the humor taken out.”

In honor of films defiled in the trans-Atlantic or Pacific adaptation process, we herewith offer a compendium of favorite foreign films that argue to be seen in lieu of the remakes. For the sake of fairness to poachers of foreign products, we also include a few first-rate remakes.

We chose our favorite low-lights from France and other offended countries.

“A Bout de Souffle” (“Breathless”): Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 New Wave classic about a Parisian hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American girlfriend (Jean Seberg) was remade in 1983 by Jim McBride and stars Richard Gere. “Quel horreur,” as they say in France.

“M”: German director Fritz Lang’s harrowing and humane 1931 thriller stars Peter Lorre as a child murderer who is as anguished as he is cunning. The 1951 remake, set in Los Angeles instead of Berlin, finds David Wayne attempting the impossible feat of following in Lorre’s footsteps. “Abysmal,” quoth one film fan.

“Godzilla”: Roland Emmerich’s 1998 remake was only the latest to try to outdo or update or cash in on a sequel to the Japanese original, 1954’s “Gojira,” which had inserts by Raymond Burr added for its United States release called “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.”

“La Chevre” (“The Goat”): In Francis Veber’s hilarious 1981 comedy, Gerard Depardieu plays a detective who sets off to Mexico to locate the missing daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Underfoot is the industrialist’s accountant, an amateur sleuth played by Pierre Richard. The lame American remake, 1991’s “Pure Luck,” starred Danny Glover and Martin Short as the bungling duo.

“Les Comperes”: Veber teamed again with Depardieu and Richard for this 1984 comedy in which the desperate mother of a runaway 16-year-old boy leads two of her former lovers (Depardieu and Richard) into believing that each is the father of her missing child. The tepid remake, “Father’s Day,” teamed Robin Williams and Billy Crystal but drew far fewer laughs.

“Les Fugitifs”: Veber surfaced on this side of the Atlantic in 1989 when he chose to copycat himself in the encore production of the American remake of his successful French comedy. Nick Nolte and Martin Short tried hard in the resulting “Three Fugitives,” but they are no match for the original with Veber regulars Depardieu and Richard.

“La Cage aux Folles”: Mike Nichols’ “The Birdcage,” the remake of Edouard Molinaro’s divine 1978 comedy, is a nicely polished piece of work, but why redo the perfection of the original, which stars Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi as gay partners who must pose as a straight couple in order to meet the ultra-conservative prospective in-laws of Tognazzi’s son? Nathan Lane and Robin Williams played the comic roles in the remake, but “pour quoi?”

“L’Homme Qui Aimait les Femmes” (“The Man Who Loved Women”): Blake Edwards took Francois Truffaut’s 1977 comedy, removed all of the sophistication, charm, clever pacing, jaunty attitude and that certain “je ne sais quoi” that feels like love in a Truffaut film and made his own version. Burt Reynolds actually does a fairly decent job in the 1983 remake, but everything else is “tres, tres, tres” wrong.

“Le Retour de Martin Guerre” (“The Return of Martin Guerre”): Sometimes even Jodie Foster makes mistakes. Take “Sommersby,” Jon Amiel’s pretty but passionless 1993 remake of Daniel Vigne’s extraordinary 1982 French hit. Richard Gere was no match for his French counterpart in the role, the busy Depardieu. And Foster came on cool and chilly where Nathalie Baye burned.

“La Femme Nikita”: Luc Besson’s stylish bad-girl 1990 drama has the distinction of having been remade in America by John Badham as “Point of No Return” and in Hong Kong as “Black Cat.” No word on the Asian effort , but the movie remake with Bridget Fonda was a pale cousin to the original with Anne Parillaud as the street punk who gets recruited by French intelligence to be an assassin.

“Jakob der Lugner” (“Jakob the Liar”): Frank Beyer’s 1974 East German film, a best foreign film Oscar nominee about a Jew whose false tales spread hope in a Polish ghetto, was remade as “Jakob the Liar” with Robin Williams, Alan Arkin and Armin Mueller-Staller.

“Abre los Ojos” (“Open Your Eyes”): Cameron Crowe got in over his head when he took young Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar’s stylish psychological story of a yuppie’s comeuppance and turned it into “Vanilla Sky.” Vanilla indeed, despite the presence of Penelope Cruz, who also appeared in the original.

“Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chasseur Noire” (“The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe”): Not even Dabney Coleman and Tom Hanks could make much of “The Man With One Red Shoe,” Stan Dragoti’s 1985 remake of the story of an innocent man mistakenly believed to be a spy. Pierre Richard starred in the original 1972 farce.

From time to time, the remake specialists get it right. Among the first-rate ones are:

“A Fistful of Dollars”: Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai picture “Yojimbo” inspired two American films. The first and best is Sergio Leone’s classic 1964 spaghetti western “A Fistful of Dollars” with Clint Eastwood. The second is Walter Hill’s dull remake “The Last Man Standing.”

“The Magnificent Seven”: Kurosawa’s classic 1954 film “Shichinin No Samurai” originally was released in the United States under the title “The Magnificent Seven.” (It later bore the title “The Seven Samurai.”) In 1960, it spawned an American remake, “The Magnificent Seven” that has become a classic in its own right. In both films, residents of a village hire a group of men (samurais in Kurosawa’s film, gunslingers in John Sturges’) for protection.

“Intermezzo”: The young Ingrid Bergman stars opposite Gosta Ekman in Gustaf Molander’s 1936 film about the affair that blossoms between a young pianist and a married violinist. Bergman made her Hollywood debut in the 1939 remake directed by Gregory Ratoff and starring Leslie Howard in the role of the violinist.

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Deborah Hornblow is a staff writer for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.