It’s no surprise that I hated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy when I finally got around to seeing the movie. I’m a huge fan of the TV version made back in the seventies with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Where the movie tries to cram all the multitude of betrayals and deceptions found in John Le Carré’s book into two hours, the series takes five or six, allowing your sense of the intricacies of the plot to develop along with Smiley’s. The movie screws up the chronology of the story, putting Smiley’s interview with Connie before he talks to Ricky Tarr, which makes no sense at all since it’s Ricky who provides the identity of the Soviet courier and Connie’s memory that ties him to Karla. Plus having Irina executed on camera is cheap sensationalism not found in either the novel or TV series (and yeah, if you don’t know the story, these sentences might as well be written in Urdu). But as I was watching (and fuming), I found myself wondering why the movie had to be made at all. The TV version was definitive. Why mess with it?

The logic of remakes usually escapes me. I understand why studios keep remaking Batman and Spiderman movies—they’ve got an audience of fanboys that will keep going back to see each version. But why remake something where the original version is perfectly good, other than the obvious “to make money” answer? Sometimes there’s ego involved, as when Gus Van Sant did his weird shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. And sometimes there’s a legitimate interest in trying to see the same work from a different perspective, as with the Coen brothers and True Grit (and no, PG, I don’t want to have that argument again!). Shakespeare can be remade indefinitely, as can classic novels like Pride and Prejudice, because each generation sees the plays slightly differently. And a book like The Great Gatsby that was never turned into a movie successfully can be tried repeatedly by directors who think they might get it right this time (although my hopes for Baz Luhrman aren’t high). But if a work has been done successfully the first time, I’d argue that the director needs to have a very good argument for doing it again—something beyond just “this time I’ll be the one doing it.”

So far, remakes have steered clear of classics like Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, although the latter has been remade under other names, like the Charles Bronson version (no, I’m not kidding). I like to think this is because nobody has the chutzpah to believe they could redo them successfully, but my guess is no producer is dumb enough to believe a remake would be financially successful (particularly in the case of GWTW). There’s also the “signature part” argument—All About Eve could probably be remade and has been done on Broadway as a musical, but what actress would be willing to put herself up there against Bette Davis’s performance?

I guess I’d argue that the only works that really scream to be remade are failures. If a work has promise and gets botched the first time around, remaking it makes a certain amount of sense. It’s generally acknowledged that David Lynch butchered Dune, the popular novel by Frank Herbert, so a remake like the one that’s currently in the works has some logic. But I’m still not sure I’ll see it. I return then to my original point: in most cases I’m more interested in seeing original work than in seeing new versions of old stuff. And Gary Oldman, superb though he is, just isn’t George Smiley. Alec Guinness is.