5 Classic Movies That Were Actually Remakes

Wait, wasn’t I just complaining about how a remake of this would be blasphemous? Well, truth be told: the 1939 version wasn’t the original. In fact, there were a number films adapted from L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel. One of the first was 1910’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a 13 minute one-reeler that featured a number of unknown actors and spawned two sequels. Next was the 1914 production, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, which was loosely based on Baum’s novel and was reissued a year later as The New Wizard of Oz. The most famous of the early versions was released in 1925 as Wizard of Oz, the first feature-length attempt at Baum’s novel – albeit one that drastically departed from the material – that starred a young Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodsman. But we will always click our heels three times and find that there’s no film quite like the one made in 1939.

John Huston’s directorial debut and the movie that made Humphrey Bogart a star was a second attempt to adapt Dashiell Hammett’s noir fiction masterpiece. While we all remember Bogart as hard-boiled private eye Sam Spade, Mary Astor as the duplicitous femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Peter Lorre as the squirrely Joe Cairo, the original version starred Ricardo Cortez, Bebe Daniels and Otto Matieson in the same roles (though Daniels' character's name was different). The 1931 adaptation was also filmed before the censorship of pre-Code Hollywood, which means the sexuality of the source material is not shied away from. Still, the one made a decade later is what we remember best; it was a huge hit for Huston, introduced the world to Bogie and set down the template for all other film noirs to follow.

Sometimes filmmakers even remake themselves. Cecil B. DeMille did it with The Ten Commandments in 1923 and 1956. So why not the Master of Suspense himself? Alfred Hitchcock's first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was made in 1934 during his British period, starred Peter Lorre as the nefarious assassin Abbott, and is considered to be one of the best movies he made across the pond. So why did he make another version over 20 years later? True, he partly wanted to fulfill his contractual obligations to Paramount Pictures. But making the remake also gave him the opportunity to play with a bigger budget and cast one of his favorite leading men. The basic plot remains the same, though the locale changes from Switzerland to the more exotic French Moracco. Both are excellent films, but modern audiences might prefer a color movie starring James Stewart.

Adapted from Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, William Wyler’s classic epic that featured Charlton Heston in his most iconic role and a literal cast of thousands was in fact remade from a 1925 silent version directed by Fred Niblo and starring Ramon Novarro. But even that version was a remake of an earlier silent movie by Sidney Olcott, a 15-minute one-reeler made in 1907. All three featured large-scale chariot races as their action centerpiece, but of course nothing can beat Wyler’s stunning chase, which became a legendary cinematic moment. Naturally, filmmakers couldn’t leave well enough alone and made a 2003 animated version that saw Heston reprising his role in voice only, and a 2010 miniseries that aired on CBC in Canada.

With three gritty and violent movies, director Sergio Leone redefined the Western and turned a little known actor named Clint Eastwood into a star. While the final installment of the Dollars Trilogy is the best, Leone’s opening salvo popularized the Spaghetti Western, so named because the movies were made by Italian directors. A Fistful of Dollars was remade from Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film, Yojimbo, which itself drew heavily from the Western genre. Eastwood inaugurated his iconic Man with No Name character, a lone drifter who comes upon a town torn apart by two warring families and hires himself out as a mercenary to both until all is destroyed. Leone claimed that his version was inspired by other sources than Kurosawa’s movie. But Kurosawa felt differently, and he and his producers successfully sued for proper compensation.