Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films

184 Pages·2022·7 MB·English

by  Agnieszka Rasmus

Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films
Screen Serialities
Series editors: Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis
Series advisory board: Kim Akass, Glen Creeber, Shane Denson, Jennifer
Forrest, Jonathan Gray, Julie Grossman, Daniel Herbert, Carolyn
Jess-Cooke, Frank Kelleter, Amanda Ann Klein, Kathleen Loock, Jason
Mittell, Sean O’Sullivan, Barton Palmer, Alisa Perren, Dana Polan, Iain
Robert Smith, Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Linda Williams
Screen Serialities provides a forum for introducing, analysing and theorising a broad spectrum
of serial screen formats – including franchises, series, serials, sequels and remakes.
Over and above individual texts that happen to be serialised, the book series takes a guiding
focus on seriality as an aesthetic and industrial principle that has shaped the narrative logic,
socio-cultural function and economic identity of screen texts across more than a century
of cinema, television and ‘new’ media.
Title in this series include:
Film Reboots
Edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis
Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake
By Laura Mee
Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television
By Maria Sulimma
European Film Remakes
Edited by Eduard Cuelenaere, Gertjan Willems and Stijn Joye
Superhero Blockbusters: Seriality and Politics
By Felix Brinker
Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films: Class, Gender and Stardom
By Agnieszka Rasmus
Hollywood Remakes of Iconic
British Films
Class, Gender and Stardom
Agnieszka Rasmus
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© Agnieszka Rasmus, 2022
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The right of Agnieszka Rasmus to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations
2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements viii
Preface ix
1 Remaking Iconic British Films of the 1960s and 1970s 1
2 From British Working-Class Gangsters to Hollywood Heroes:
The Italian Job and Get Carter 31
3 Gender, Stars and Class Wars: Alfie and Sleuth 65
4 From Devilish Masters to Evil Dames: Bedazzled and
The Wicker Man 99
5 Remaking, Cultural Exchange and Personal Legacy: The Limey 133
References 147
Index 159
Figures
Fig. 2.1 The Italian Job (1969): ‘Now, what would you like?’
‘Everything’ 39
Fig. 2.2 The Italian Job (2003): ‘This is a love story, actually’ 41
Fig. 2.3 Get Carter (1971): ‘Slags like your Sandra can get away with
it, can’t they? The Doreens of this world can’t, can they?’ 56
Fig. 2.4 Get Carter (2000): Stallone’s Carter clumsily comforts
his niece 57
Fig. 3.1 Alfie (1966): ‘Going up in the world, aren’t I?’ 73
Fig. 3.2 Alfie (2004): Ruby is now the cosmetics mogul Liz 78
Fig. 3.3 Alfie (2004): Match made in heaven 80
Fig. 3.4 Sleuth (1972): ‘We are from different worlds, you and me’ 83
Fig. 3.5 Sleuth (2007): Jude Law is Michael Caine 90
Fig. 3.6 Sleuth (2007): Caine’s iconic tough-guy image mocked 91
Fig. 4.1 Bedazzled (1967): ‘What sort of freedom of choice did
I have about where I was born and what size I was and
what a bloody awful job I landed myself in?’ 102
Fig. 4.2 Bedazzled (1967): Unlikely friendship 107
Fig. 4.3 Bedazzled (2000): Elliot and the sexy Devil 109
Fig. 4.4 Bedazzled (2000): The Devil wears Versace 113
figures vii
Fig. 4.5 The Wicker Man (1973): Sergeant Howie meets
Lord Summerisle 117
Fig. 4.6 The Wicker Man (1973): The perfect sacrifice 118
Fig. 4.7 The Wicker Man (2006): Ellen Burstyn as the queen bee
of the colony 125
Fig. 4.8 The Wicker Man (2006): ‘The drone must die’ 128
Fig. 5.1 The Limey (1999): ‘King Midas in reverse’ 141
Fig. 5.2 The Limey (1999): ‘They call him the Seeker’ 143
Acknowledgements
Minor passages from Chapter 1 appeared in ‘Hollywood Remakes of
British Films: A Case of Cross-Pollination’, in the Journal of Adapta-
tion in Film and Performance, 14:1 (2021), and in ‘“I know where I’ve seen
you before!”: Hollywood Remakes of British Films, from DVD Box Sets to
the Online Debate’, in Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 47:1/2 (2014).
Fragments of Chapter 2 were published in a different version as “‘Crossing
Frontiers, Staking Out New Territories”: Hollywood Remaking British Crime
Locations in Get Carter’, in J. Fabiszak et al. (eds), Crossroads in Literature
and Culture (Springer, 2013). Elements from Chapter 3 appeared in ‘Same
But Different: Comparing Transgression in Sleuth’, in Mirosława Bucholtz
et al. (eds), The Visual and the Verbal in Film, Drama, Literature and Biography
(Peter Lang, 2012).
Preface
Film remakes began to be rehabilitated by academia in the 1990s thanks to a
few pioneering works such as Carolyn A. Durham’s Double Takes: Culture
and Gender in French Films and Their American Remakes (1998), or Andrew
Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal’s edited collection Play it Again, Sam: Retakes
on Remakes, published the same year. Many followed suit, including two cross-
cultural studies of Hollywood remakes of French films, Lucy Mazdon’s Encore
Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema (2000), and Jennifer Forrest and Leonard
R. Koos’s edited collection Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice
(2002). Constantine Verevis’s Film Remakes (2006) cemented the discipline and
showed the remake to be a textual, critical and industrial category, not unlike
the film genre.
Since then, there have been numerous publications, not only on cross-
cultural remakes between Hollywood, Europe and East Asia (Wee 2013; Wang
2013; Smith and Verevis 2017; Smith 2016), but also within Europe (Cuelenaere
et al. 2021), proving that it is not an exclusively Hollywood phenomenon, but
one of global proportions, characterised by multidirectional transnational and
transmedia flows. New findings within seriality studies demonstrate that the
film remake is an element of larger forces at work. For Constantine Verevis
and Kathleen Loock, it is involved in processes of cultural reproduction, and
the practice of remaking is ‘one of several industrial and cultural activities of
repetition (and variation) which range from quotation and allusion, adaptation
and parody, to the process-like nature of genre and serial filmmaking’ (2012: 2).
It is also often discussed together with other forms of cinematic repetition,
continuation and renewal, such as sequels (Jess-Cooke 2009; Jess-Cooke and
Verevis 2010), trilogies (Perkins and Verevis 2012) and reboots (Herbert and
Verevis 2020), with which the remake overlaps. This has led Amanda Ann
x hollywood remakes of iconic british films
Klein and R. Barton Palmer in their edited collection of essays (2016) to use
the word ‘multiplicities’ as an umbrella term for texts that refuse to be confined
or end, such as remakes, sequels, trilogies, reboots, spin-offs and cycles.
Just like the remake, British cinema was also in many ways up until that point
a subject of scorn, not only for film scholars, but also for film practitioners – as
seen, for example, in François Truffaut’s widely-circulated proclamation that
cinema and Britain are contradictory terms, or Ben Kingsley’s statement that
he loves British cinema like a doctor loves his dying patient (quoted in ‘British
Cinema’: 344). However, even if critical discussion of British cinema is still often
imbued with pessimism and occasional proclamations of the end of the indus-
try, the sheer number of academic publications that have mushroomed since the
1990s seems to prove the opposite. Not only are there numerous anthologies
devoted to specific decades of British cinema production, such as the previously
ignored 1970s (see Gibson and Hill 2009; Shail 2008; Harper and Smith 2012;
Newland 2013; Newland 2010), but also many formerly neglected titles have
been brought back to critical attention, including Get Carter (Hodges, 1971)
(see Chibnall 2003), The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973) (see Brown 2000; Smith
2010; Murray et al. 2005) and, more recently, Deep End (Skolimowski, 1970),
which is now mentioned de rigueur in current publications (see Orr 2010;
Newland 2010).
It is also not a coincidence that the growth in the number of Hollywood
remakes of British films occurred at a significant moment when both the
remake and British film experienced critical validation in the 1990s. This found
its perfect embodiment in the phenomenon of Hollywood remakes of British
films, where British cinema was no longer a contradiction in terms and the
remake no longer a debased copy of some superior original. Hollywood Remakes
of Iconic British Films combines both of these research avenues. It does so to
offer a long-overdue study that looks at film remaking, Hollywood and British
cinema from the unique perspective of cross-cultural exchange between two
countries sharing a common language and history in film cooperation. How
does this ‘special’ relationship affect both originals and remakes in terms of
production as well as on a textual and paratextual level? Are these Hollywood
makeovers a simple face-lift, or perhaps an integral part in a continued cultural
dialogue? Does the remake tend to pursue similar concerns or become a point
of departure for something entirely new? This book proposes answers to these
questions and more.
In order to do so, Hollywood Remakes of Iconic British Films examines a range
of cult and classic titles made at the time of Hollywood’s most active involve-
ment in domestic British film production: Alfie (Gilbert, 1966), Bedazzled
(Donen, 1967), The Italian Job (Collinson, 1969), Get Carter (Hodges, 1971),
Sleuth (Mankiewicz, 1972) and The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973), which were
then remade between 1999 and 2007. Set during a period of significant cultural