Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes

By Stuart Y. McDugal and Andrew Horton

Book Overview

Play It Again, Sam is a timely investigation of a topic that until now has received almost no critical attention in film and cultural studies: the cinematic remake. As cinema enters its second century, more remakes are appearing than ever before, and these writers consider the full range: Hollywood films that have been recycled by Hollywood, such as The Jazz Singer, Cape Fear, and Robin Hood; foreign films including Breathless; and Three Men and a Baby, which Hollywood has reworked for American audiences; and foreign films based on American works, among them Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, which is a "makeover" of Coppola's Godfather films. As these essays demonstrate, films are remade by other films (Alfred Hitchcock went so far as to remake his own The Man Who Knew Too Much) and by other media as well.

The editors and contributors draw upon narrative, film, and cultural theories, and consider gender, genre, and psychological issues, presenting the "remake" as a special artistic form of repetition with a difference and as a commercial product aimed at profits in the marketplace. The remake flourishes at the crossroads of the old and the new, the known and the unknown. Play It Again, Sam takes the reader on an eye-opening tour of this hitherto unexplored territory.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520205936
• ISBN13: 9780520205932
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Nuggets Amidst the Jargon

The nineteen essays collected here (along with introduction and afterword) grapple with various aspects of cinematic "remakes", and while most have something to offer the general reader, many get bogged down in attempting to find a definition or critical space for remakes. In other words, to get to the good stuff, you're going to have to wade through a lot of critical jargon from psychoanalytic film theory and cultural studies?words such as "intertextuality," "oedipal" and "postmodernity" pop up a lot. That caveat aside, there are plenty of nuggets to reward the patient reader.Albert Kolker's "Recalculating the Hitchcock Formula" is an intriguing analysis of Martin Scorcese's Cape Fear, in which it is proposed that Scorcese remade Cape Fear by simultaneously remaking Hitchcock's Stage Fright, I Confess, and Stranger on a Train. Dan Georgakas's essay on Robin Hood effectively shows how the 1938 and 1991 versions each embodied the cultural and political trends of their time. Michael Brashinsky's considers Bergman's Virgin Spring and Wes Craven's The Last House of the Left in an examination of how a to remake a European "art" film into a low-budget slasher picture. In "The Superhero With A Thousand Faces," Luca Somigli provides a cogent analyses of the relationship of superhero film franchises such as Batman and Superman to their comic-book sources. His elegant conclusion is that such projects are based on the accumulated myth of the characters and setting, rather than being remakes. My favorite essay is Elisabeth Weis's exploration on how the film M*A*S*H was adapted for television and managed to continually reinvent itself while maintaining audience loyalty. Other essays have their moments, but the ones above will be the most accessible and interesting to the general reader.