Some more thoughts on remakes

I see that the movie kicking off tonight's final night of Jennifer Jones' turn as Star of the Month on TCM is The Barretts of Wimpole Street, at 8:00 PM. The title should sound familiar, since there was a famous 1934 movie by the same name. Interestingly, both versions were directed by Sidney Franklin, a man who didn't do that much else. At least, not in the sound era. He did do The Good Earth and The Guardsman, and a whole bunch of silents.

Anyhow, this puts Franklin in the relatively small list of people who directed the remake of a movie they had already directed. There's also Alfred Hitchcock with two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Frank Capra who did Lady For a Day and the remake Pocketful of Miracles. There are probably several others, although offhand I can't recall them.

The other interesting thing is the number of remakes in the 1950s and early 60s. As somebody on the TCM boards mentioned, there was probably a good reason for it in that the 50s brought wide-screen and much more common use of color to Hollywood. It would probably be easy for TCM do one of their monthly spotlights on 1950s lavish color remakes. Douglas Sirk did two of them in Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, for example.