10 Films That Were Secretly Remade

6. Assault On Precinct 13 Is Rio Bravo

Not that we're suggesting that Westerns are the principal rip-off merchants in Hollywood - far from it. They're just as susceptible to being unofficially remade as any other genre. The original Rio Bravo wasn't made with the best intentions - was made as a response to High Noon, an allegory for blacklisting in Hollywood, which star John Wayne gleefully joined in with - but there's no denying it has a solid premise. Wayne's Texas Sheriff John T Chance rolls into the titular town having arrested the brother of a powerful local rancher, hoping it'll help out his buddy, the drunk local deputy (played by Dean Martin). The rancher and his buddies don't take too kindly to that, and it's up to the sheriffs and the rest of their rag-tag group to hold off the gang whilst trapped inside a single building. It's a neat little premise, with some in-built tension and the single location making for a claustrophobic atmosphere. In fact it was such a success that Wayne himself remade it a scant seven years later, with Hawks directing again and Robert Mitchum in the role of the lush. Four years after that the pair made Rio Lobo, another film with basically the same set-up. None of these were technically remakes, but Wayne and Hawks being on board meant that they got away with it. A little less official was when John Carpenter swiped said set-up for his second film, 1976's Assault On Precinct 13. This time the action is updated to a crime-infested ghetto in South Central Los Angeles, where an officer delivers a gang member he's just arrested to a local precinct that's in the process of shutting down. Which is unlucky, since then the rest of the gang turn up to bust him out, and it's up to him, what's left of the staff and even a plucky prisoner to fight them off. Carpenter acknowledged the debt to Rio Bravo, originally titling his screenplay The Anderson Alamo, and wrote it under the pseudonym John T Chance.