Remakes

[mrbaseball]

About a month ago I got the DVD of Double Indemnity. I hadn't seen it in a million years and was really looking forward to seeing it again. It was better than ever! I really like this movie and the 3 main players MacMurray, Stanwick and Robinson were all fantastic. The guy who played the boss of the company was however laughably bad [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]This is the classic film noir in my mind. Stanwick is the perfect ice cold double dealing dame. Edward G. Robinson gives maybe his best ever performance and MacMurray shakes off his My Three Sons/Flubber/Shaggy Dog personna in fine fashion.

Anyway this DVD came with 2 disks. I didn't even look at the box and after watching I popped in the second disk hoping for some neato extras. But the second disk was the 1973 made for TV version starring Richard Crenna, Samantha Eggar and Lee J. Cobb. UHG! I watched maybe the first 20 minutes just out of morbid curiosity. The dialog was almost word for word and Crenna was remarkably bad really making me appreciate MacMurrays seemingly effortless performance all that much more. The one scene I saw with Cobb was okay but I couldn't watch anymore.

How and why would they remake this! The orignal was just about perfect. I can see remaking a King Kong for the technology but nor something like this one. Why would a classic like this ever warrant a remake? Or even The Longest Yard for that matter?