I don’t really have a problem with movie remakes; after all, the classic and multi-Academy Award winning 1959 version was a remake of the earlier 1925 silent film version and of an earlier short film and an even earlier stage play. Truthfully though, it is not a remake of the earlier film versions but a newer adaptation of the original source novel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Hur:_A_Tale_of_the_Christ#AdaptationsAnd there have been a few remakes that were IMO superior to the earlier film version.
As much as I love John Wayne (and I saw the original True Grit at the movies with my dad when it came out), the more recent version of True Grit was IMO a better movie, a more accurate depiction of the time period and much closer to the novel, especially the ending.
And whether or not one likes Lillian Hellman as a playwright or of her leftist politics (which I do not) or of the subject matter; however, from purely a film buff’s perspective, the later film adaption of “The Children's Hour” (the 1961 version with Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, and James Garner) was a much better film than the earlier 1936 film version “These Three”; a film that because of the production codes at the time had to omit the very key lesbian part of the story out and make it into a more acceptable hetero love triangle, but that didn’t seem, even in 1936 to be as so controversial as to propel the story line as to why the school teachers were so ostracized and scandalized by the accusations. Both films interestingly were directed by William Wyler.
TCM last night ran a Humphrey Bogart film marathon and I re-watched Key Largo and The Maltese Falcon. But the 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon is actually the third adaptation of Hammett’s novel to reach the screen, having been beaten by ten years in the pre-code 1931 adaptation directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Ricardo Cortez. There was also the 1936 light-comedy adaptation Satan Met a Lady starring Bette Davis and Warren William that served as a loose adaptation and was received rather poorly. Most people, including me, and except for extreme film buffs are unaware of those earlier film adaptations.
I also don’t have a problem with film adaptations of novels making editorial decisions to omit some sub-plots, omitting some scenes that don’t add much to the overall story arch, omitting some minor characters or in some cases combining similar characters into a composite as it is nearly impossible to make a 2-3-hour movie from an “epic” novel and include everything, every detail and sub-plot, every character.
And what film adaptation has ever done true justice to Tolstoy’s War and Peace for example. Or in what was in my and many other’s opinion, Tolstoy’s superior novel “Anna Karenina” – and how many film adaptations have been made of that? A lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina#FilmWhile most movie adaptations have focused primarily on the ill-fated love affair between Anna Karenina and Count Vronskiy, few have really delved very deeply into Konstantin "Kostya" Levin who is the moral voice of the novel and a counter point to Anna and Vronskiy and the Russian upper-class as a whole. But much of Levin’s struggles are emotional and internal and largely narrated (Levin’s thoughts) in the third person, something that doesn’t translate well on film.
But getting back to this most recent film version of Ben-Hur - sure the 1959 movie version differs somewhat from the novel, for instance leaving out Iras, the daughter of Balthasar as Judah’s first love interest and who later becomes Messala’s mistress and eventually kills him (no, in the novel, Messala does not die after the chariot race) and it does not address that Judah and his wife Esther eventually go to Rome and establish an underground Christian church during the reign of Nero and a few other events in the novel. But otherwise it follows the plot of the book pretty closely.
But I don’t understand the editorial choice in this most recent film version to make Judah and Messala adoptive brothers rather than childhood friends. They also make Sheik Ilderim a Nubian rather than an Arab and also seem to make him a much more central character. But hey, now days you’ve got have an older wise Black guy and whenever you have to cast an older wise Black guy, I think it’s some sort of unwritten law that it must be played by Morgan Freeman.
