That's (above) part of the opening title of the original 1944 version. Behind the letters the shadow of a mysterious crippled man walks slowly, inexorably toward the camera. We never see his face. Who is he? Why is he crippled? The music whips us into a frenzy of excitement. Just who is this man?
After the titles we fade to the city at night and a car careens recklessly through the streets. Other cars screech to a halt to avoid hitting it.
The car pulls up to the entrance of an office building. A mysterious figure with his back to camera...a new figure, not the man with crutches...gets out and lumbers up to the locked door. It's noir...everything is in shadow.
The stranger's knocking summons the night watchman, who recognizes him and takes him up to his floor in an elevator. The watchman tries to make idle small talk but the stranger, still with his back to camera, deflects it.
Okay, let's see how the 1973 remake (above) handles the same opening. This time there's no careening car, no shots of the city at night. An unidentified man makes his way to the door of an office building at night. I hesitate to call him a mystery man because we see his face the whole time.
So, where are the shadows? Granted, it's a TV movie and they probably had to shoot the cheapest way, but noir IS cheap to shoot. Some scenes in the original noirs were shot with a single light source. I guess the producer just didn't care enough.
Generic titles appear over the man as he walks into the lobby. Without shadows the lobby's architecture is revealed. It's that bright, optimistic style that was so popular in that period...something totally at odds with the dramatic nature of the story.
The watchman (above) doesn't walk over to the door. He just sits there and watches the stranger sign in. People in this film do a lot of sitting.
Back to the old black and white film: the stranger gets off the elevator and looks down into a sort of courtyard that contains empty desks where clerks work during the day. Your first impression is that he's looking down into hell.
Now we see the stranger's face for the first time. It's on a long upshot. He hobbles along the upper floor like a rat skulking in the rafters.
We watch as he painstakingly lets himself into his barely-lit office, and with great effort sits down. From the way he moves it's evident that he's been shot. The downshot tells us that this is a man who has the attention of the gods. They're watching him, waiting to see what happens.
He turns on his dictaphone and begins to dictate his confession. We learn that he's an insurance salesman who helped a woman kill her husband for the insurance money. Now he's been shot and has only a short time to live.
Notice the dim light. With only minutes to live, he himself is an insubtantial shadow at the threshold of the nether world. We're watching a soul painfully pass out of this life into the great unknown.
Back to the seventies version: we fade out from the stranger standing in front of an elevator in the lobby, to him walking around his desk and painfully sitting down. The lighting is typical TV lighting. No nether world, just brown light, if there is such a thing.
Aaaaargh! That's all I have time for. Which version do you prefer?
14 comments:
The black and white one looks like it has character. I like the composition of the pictures. The choice of venue looks interesting in of itself. It is appealing to my eyes. The pictures of the other one makes me feel that it is just going through the motions. Perhaps the black and white filmmaker was more visually literate, and more creative. Also I wonder if just having black and white values simplified things?
Let's see who is better . . . Billy Wilder or Jack Smight? Duh.
Though Smight did a number of fine films he did nothing compared to the greatness of most of Billy Wilder's. And Wilder wrote the original script as well. (Though James M. Caine was pretty great too.)
By the 1970s not just the film grammar of noir but all of the tools were pretty much gone. The excuse in that era for not doing the kind of expressive lighting that defined the old school stuff was that it took too much time. Fast emulsion Eastman Color Negative film also meant that producers could get away with shooting quickly and cheaply with minimal flat light sources. The results speak for themselves, loud and clear.
Fascinating!
Jaime Weinman also did a good article on this remake, but your compared them more visually:
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2006/08/straight-down-line-remake.html
This is insightful! More posts like these, please!
Damn it! I haven't seen either version once again. I can't get enough of Barbara Stanwyck nor the brilliance of Billy Wilder's films. No question about it which film is better. It speaks for itself, though there are plenty of 1970s masterpieces like Taxi Driver, Manhattan, Annie Hall, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which have great, gritty characterizations, in my honest opinion.
Why do they even bother with these kind of remakes, especially if they know they're never going to capture the beauty and brilliance of the original film itself? Remember King Kong a couple of years ago? That film, despite having those updated CGI effects, outright sucked and was terrible compared to the original due to Peter Jackson's "creative" meddling.
I'll say it again, Eddie. Color usually gets in the way of a story.
Huh? Found this in my email inbox today.
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Have no idea why they sent me this, when it was for you.
Good news though, getting really close to getting accepted into college. I got waitlisted from a really good one today and they told me I had all the right credentials to get in. Will keep you posted.
A metaphor for the spectacular nosedive in craftsmanship of modern popular culture. Call the original Billy Wilder version "B.H." (before hippies), and the other "A.H." (anno hippies).
Eddie, I absolutely love these movie analysis posts of yours. They say such much about what the art of film-making is all about.
Please educate us Generation Y-ers, just how did it all turn to crap so darn quickly?
Roberto: Thanks! That letter sounds like spam, but I put it up anyway, just in case its legit.
Mike: Haw!
Mattie: I agree with Mike. The hippies believed that slick, professional media had been corrupted by "The Man," and that primitive execution was a sign of grass roots authenticity.
I imagine that's why the barbarians who sacked Rome felt no desire to emulate achievements like The Pantheon. They thought Romans were corrupt and that their technical achievements were just eye candy to divert people so they could subjugate them.
That's not true, but that's what barbarians always believe, and probably always will believe.
Gee, that last comment of mine was a little darker than I intended. I didn't mean to imply that all hippies were barbarians.
Remaking Classic Noir films for television was a standard show-offy conceit of the era. Never expect such exercises to yield better or comparative results. Not stateside, anyway. The UK was always a step ahead in the television-as-cinema-just-distributed-differently department. This has been the case nearly since TV began, really.
An interesting comparison to make would be between an attempt to remake a classic and an SCTV parody of the original. Which takes itself more seriously and "looks more professional" is kind of a given, of course, but truly, which is better CRAFTED? I suspect the latter would come out on top nearly every single time.
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