Strick, it will probably come as no surprise to you that I, too, have seen the original The Lady Killers. It has been a long time because that one doesn't come around often. But now that there is a new version, one of the cable networks that plays old films will dig it up.

There are some interesting remakes of films, and I'll give a few examples.

Janet Gaynor was in the original A Star is Born, in 1937, with Frederic March. This was remade in 1954 by Judy Garland with James Mason, and most recently in 1976 by Barbra Streisand with Kris Kristofferson. While the most recent one did win an oscar for Streisand's song "Evergreen," I don't think there was a lot that people really loved about that version. The one that comes to my mind first is the first "remake" of the story, with Judy Garland.

In 1940, James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan made The Shop Around the Corner. That was was remade by Judy Garland and Van Johnson in 1949 and put out under the improbable name of In the Good Old Summertime. It was again remade in 1998, this time by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail [note to AOL, grammatically that should say You Have Mail]. Each of these has a lot to recommend them without reference to the other versions.

In 1934 Alfred Hitchcock made the first of his two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the first one with a British cast of Leslie Banks and Edna Best (and I really do like her roll in this!) and in 1956 with Doris Day and James Stewart "Sorry we were late, we had to go pick up our son!".

An absolute little gem of a mystery is Hitchcock's 1935 The 39 Steps with Robert Donat and Madeline Carroll. In looking this one up (I've been to IMDB a lot this week!) I found a remake I'd never heard of, produced in 1959 with Kenneth More (well known to Americans as Jolyon Forsyte from the 1967 version of the Forsyte Saga, remade in 2002 and played again as part of Masterpiece Theater). I never went to see the 1978 remake of The 39 Steps with Robert Powell (though I see by the cast list it had some good supporting folks). I wasn't interested because I liked the earlier version so well and the trailer looked like the story had been "sexed up" with a lot of violence. I see that there is another version in production at this time, but no information about it.

The 1949 classic film Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer was a remake of a 1940 film with Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook. I hadn't seen this until recently when one of the classic movie channels did Wynyard movies all day to celebrate her birthday. I'd never heard of her before, or of this movie.

There are some films that should have been left alone. Sabrina, An Affair to Remember (the acting wasn't that good, but the story really grabbed you), anything Hitchcock made that he didn't redo himself, anything Judy Holliday made, anything Kathryn Hepburn made. Anything Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy made (unless Howard Keel does the remake). Anything Howard Keel made. . .

I'll stop for a breath now. But you get my drift, I think. There are a lot of interesting films out there, some are okay as remakes, some are better, some are a great waste of time. It all depends on who does it and how they handle it.

SRS