Many of this year’s hit movies have been sequels or remakes, though as Kyle Westphal of the Chicago Film Society likes to note, Hollywood has been recycling popular intellectual properties for generations. So for this week’s Movie Tuesday post, I thought I’d spotlight five remakes and sequels in American cinema that actually improve upon their predecessors. These are rare feats, considering that the film-based-on-another-film subgenre has got to be one of the hardest in which to produce an outright masterpiece. How to overcome the sense of familiarity that the source material brings with it? How to create something that feels original?
Son of Paleface Bob Hope repeats as the son of a frontier dentist in this 1952 sequel to his highly successful The Paleface—only this one is much, much funnier, directed by a then recent graduate of the Warner Bros. cartoon shop, Frank Tashlin, and full of outrageous visual gags (a wheel comes off Hope’s car during a chase; he stands up, throws a noose over the side, and holds up the axle—“You’d better hurry up,” he tells the driver, “this is impossible!”). In glorious Technicolor, complete with Jane Russell and Roy Rogers. —Dave Kehr
