Anastasia (1956 / 1997)

At the beginning of the Russian Civil War, Czar Nicholas II, along with his family, was assassinated by the Bolsheviks. However, there were rumors that his daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, had escaped. As years passed and rumors intensified, several women came forward claiming to be Anastasia. These rumors serve as the backstory for two very different films about the legendary princess.
 
The first film is a fairly straightforward historical drama, based loosely on the real life Anastasia-imposter Anna Anderson. The remake is a fantastic animated musical adventure designed to vie with Disney’s pantheon of princesses. If it is dubious that such a wildly divergent interpretation could be considered a remake, one need only look to the film credits where it claims a basis in the 1956 Arthur Laurents screenplay. Who am I to argue?

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945/2009)

I’ve always felt that Dorian Gray gets cinematic short-shrift compared to his contemporaries, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. While everyone else has had brides and sons and run-ins with Abbot and Costello, Dorian has been largely absent from the big screen. In the 60 years that span between the two films I am about to discuss, no significant addendums have been made to Dorian’s tale.

The most remarkable thing about the two films I am about to review is how utterly similar they are, though produced so far apart. Of course, there are the pacing and aesthetic changes that one might expect, and the recent version is able to be more explicit where the original is not. But what is truly remarkable is how both films treated the source material virtually the same, in my opinion, right down to hitting the same marks and making the same mistakes.