10 More Movie Remakes Better Than The Original
8. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Movies are remade all the time, and it's not always taken too kindly to by those who worked on the original. Alex Proyas, director of The Crow in 1994 has been very, very vocal about his feelings towards Rupert Sanders' 2024 reboot, for example. But what about when the director of the original and the director of the remake are the same person?
In 1956, 22 years after Alfred Hitchcock made The Man Who Knew Too Much, he revisited and reproduced the movie himself. While there are plenty of different reasons that films have been given the remake treatment, one of the hardest to argue with is that the director themself believed they could do better.
Hitchcock said that the original version was the work of a talented amateur, while the second attempt was made by a professional. It must take a lot to have such a critical and honest review of your own work, and really the only person who could truly have the right to tell Hitchcock, arguably the greatest film director of all time, what he had wrong was Hitchcock himself.
There were several key differences between the two versions that speak to Hitchcock's view, outside of the fact that the story was moved across the pond to America for the remake. The 1934 effort was very much a light-hearted affair, whereas the suspense was lifted 22 years later to compliment the director's typical style, and made for a generally better-produced film. The man said it best in that this was the work of a professional against an amateur.