TV vs. movie remakes

What's left of the Fox Movie Channel showed something called Too Good to Be True this morning. Loni Anderson and Patrick Duffy star in this TV movie remake of... Leave Her to Heaven. Oh dear. To be fair, though, the original movie Leave Her to Heaven is adapted from a book. And it's not as though this was the first time TV stole from the movies, something that I've commented on in the past. Quite a few popular TV shows were adapted from movies, something I mentioned just two months ago.

Also, it needs to be mentioned as well if I haven't done so in the past that it's not as if the movie makers are any more original. They aren't now -- look at how many successful TV shows have been turned into movies over the past decade or so, which is what drove the post I linked to above. More interestingly are the movies that were taken from teleplays. Back in the 1950s there were some prominent anthology TV shows that introduced one-hour (or longer) plays which were broadcast live. Rod Serling wrote Requiem For a Heavyweight for one such show, Playhouse 90 in 1956; that was turned into an outstanding movie in 1962. TCM recently aired Charly, which was also broadcast earlier as a teleplay, although that one was based on a short story.

As for Too Good to Be True, it's going to be on again in April, while the original movie Leave Her to Heaven shows up this Sunday at 11:00 AM ET.