 Starring: Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Priscilla Lane
Director: Frank Capra
Year Of Release: 1944
Plot: Drama critic Mortimer Brewster has just got married and quickly heads back to his aunts’ house before he goes off on honeymoon. However he accidentally discovers his aunts have a dead man hidden in a window seat and that this poor fellow is the 12th person they’re planning to bury in the cellar. While trying to sort this shocking development out, his evil brother Jonathan turns up, who has a different dead body that he’s trying to get rid of. |
Initially when I was watching Arsenic & Old Lace, I thought that it’d be great if Hollywood did a remake of it. It’s an immensely funny and silly movie, and one of the best farces from the Golden age of Hollywood (it’s about as close as Tinsel Town got to the best of the Ealing Comedies).
On the surface it would see that a remake is a no-brainer. The script, based on a hit Broadway play, is ten times wittier than most of today’s screenplays, and you’d think having a new bunch of actors playing the poor, harried Mortimer and his desperately sweet aunts who are actually serial murders, would be a better thing for Hollywood to be spending its money on than Big Momma’s House 3 (and yes, they are indeed planning to get Martin Lawrence back in the fat suit in 2012 – which I assume is why people think the world is going to end in that year).
However as the movie went on, I started thinking that actually a remake probably wouldn’t work. It’s generally accepted that most remakes aren’t as good as the original. The normal thing people complain about with them is that they lack what made the first version so special. They have the wrong themes, or no heart, or they change things too much, or keep things too much the same, but whatever it is, except for rare occasions such as Ocean’s 11, the remake is always judged as worse than the original.
I would argue that a lot of the time the actual problem is that while people always compare a remake to what came before, it’s impossible to make a direct comparison. When we watch an old movie, we don’t just judge it on the film itself, we also subconsciously take into account when it was made. What we accept and think is good about a film from one era, we often won’t accept in a film from another time.
This is easiest to see in special effects. The original King Kong, made in 1933, is often praised for its special effects. When you watch the movie the effects do seem impressive, but only because you know when it was made. If Peter Jackson’s Kong remake had used similar stop-motion animation and relatively simple animatronics, we’d have wondered what sort of crap he was trying to fob off on us in this CG age.
However it’s not just special effects, it’s everything, from the style of comedy or drama and the way people talk, to the way we accept characters acting and even what sorts of plot work. It would be fascinating to see what would have happened if many of the classics of the past, such as Casablanca and Gone With The Wind, had been released now for the first time. I suspect they wouldn’t be well received, as they would seem old fashioned, slow, contrived and clichéd. Tastes move on, and while we’re still prepared to accept things from the past, the only reason we do that is because we know they’re old and reflect the times they were made.
It’s like when Gus Van Sant did his shot-for-shot Psycho remake in 1998. The reason it was so badly received isn’t just because the performances were weak and it seemed unnecessary, but that filmmaking has moved on since 1960. If you do exactly the same thing 38 years on from than the original, it seems ridiculous, simply because when we watch Hitchcock’s Psycho, we subconsciously tick off that it was made in 1960, and therefore a new version that’s virtually the same seems ridiculous because what audiences expected back then is different from what they will accept now.
It’s for this reason that although I wish it would work, I genuinely don’t think you could remake Arsenic & Old Lace for a modern audience. In order to make it work today, you’d have to change it beyond all recognition. For a start, most of it is set in one room, which modern audiences probably wouldn’t like. There’s also the fact that one of the reasons farce has fallen out of favour, is because people are now less prepared to accept the sort of OTT contrivance that allows the great old farces to work. Films are still often immensely contrived, but farce tends to work by having the contrivance on the surface, whereas nowadays film audiences want them to be slightly more hidden (it’s easier to get away with it on stage, as what’s accepted on the stage and on film is different).
I have a feeling any modern film version of the Cary Grant movie would be judged as stupid, stilted and morally dubious. The only way to get around the problems would be to alter the story to the point where it would be pointless calling it a remake. It’s exactly for this reason that so many modern remakes keep little more than a few character names and the most basic of set-ups. People may complain that this is pointless, but the makers of these new versions know that despite what reviewers say, if they transposed much more of the original across, it would seem ridiculous in the modern age.
It’s rare that anything is genuinely timeless enough that it can withstand numerous makeovers and redos across the ages. Shakespeare manages it by being a genius, and there are some classic novels that can be made over and over again for new generation on the stage and screen, but compared to the amount of stories that have been told, remarkably few live past their first few years, and even fewer can withstand numerous remakes and adaptations, because what we accept from one time doesn’t work in another.
I think that as a result of all this, there wouldn’t be much point remaking Arsenic & Old Lace, no matter how excited I got about the idea when I was first watching the movie (and yes, I am sad enough to get excited about remaking an old farce). However if anyone in Hollywood wants to give it a go, I’d love to see the results, even if I have a horrible feeling it would flop horrifically at the box office. Ultimately Arsenic & Old Lace is a great film, but only because it was made in 1944.
TIM ISAAC
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