The other day - well, at least once a week - I heard someone complain, either on social media or actually in person, that Hollywood has no new ideas. This has always been an odd complaint to me since so many acknowledged classics are either biopics or adaptations of novels or plays - can't exactly call it a new idea when it's already been a New York Times bestseller or a Pulitzer Prize winner for drama - or, and I confess this is rarely the case, remakes. Among the Top Ten of the American Film Institute's all-time American films: Citizen Kane, a roman á clef of William Randolph Hearst; The Godfather, an adaptation of a lurid pulp novel; Casablanca, an adaptation of an unpublished play that also borrows a hint of setting from Algiers and Pépé le Moko; Raging Bull, a biopic based on a memoir; Singin' in the Rain, with a central plot point borrowed from Hit Parade of 1941; Gone with the Wind, adapted from a bestselling novel; Lawrence of Arabia, a biopic based on biographies; Schindler's List, based on a historical novel; and The Wizard of Oz, the fourth film to bear that title (or some variant thereof) adapted from a series of popular children's books and plays. I've still never seen Vertigo, so I can't speak to its origins.
And at #31 on the AFI Top 100 is The Maltese Falcon, nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Picture, which earned almost five times its budget and continues to make money. I've discussed this movie with teens and twenty-somethings, with elders and sixty-whatsits. This most legendary of film noirs, with its dynamic supporting cast and iconic Bogart performance, is not only adapted from a 1930 novel (eleven years previously!), it is the third film adaptation of the novel! The first appeared in 1930, but I haven't seen it; the second was a comic send-up of the premise, 1936's Satan Met a Lady, which I have seen, regrettably. Wasn't it Michael Caine who said we should stop remaking good movies and remake the bad ones with good premises? Guess he was right...though surely The Thing and The Fly can count as exceptions to the first?
This third Falcon came out on October 18th. In this grouping, it's squarely in the middle, surrounded on either side by figures perfect for the Halloween season: the ghost of Smilin' Through, the devil of All That Money Can Buy (directed by Satan Met a Lady's William Dieterle), and the costumed alter egos of All-American Co-Ed and Dumbo...
