A number of films directed by Alfred Hitchcock have been remade, with official remakes of Murder! and The Man Who Knew Too Much being directed by Hitchcock himself. North by Northwest and Saboteur are also considered by some scholars to be unofficial remakes of Hitchcock's English espionage thriller The 39 Steps . [1] [2] [3] This list does not include sequels (such as the films that followed the 1960 version of Psycho ), but it does include films based on the same original source materials as were used by Hitchcock (such as the multiple films based on Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel The Lodger ).
After the success of Gone Girl , in January 2015 it was announced that David Fincher would direct a remake of Strangers on a Train with Ben Affleck to star with a script penned by Gillian Flynn. [33] In April 2024, it was reported that Netflix had greenlit the remake, now titled Strangers. [34] Fincher is also reportedly attached to remake Rope , with Denzel Washington rumored to star. [35]
In March 2023, it was reported that Paramount Pictures acquired the remake rights to Vertigo, with Steven Knight set to write the script and Robert Downey Jr. set to star. [36] As of March 2025, Knight is still working on the screenplay. [37]
In February 2024, it was announced that Kevin Williamson is developing a television series based on Rear Window for Peacock and Universal Television. [38]
ACCORDING to the critic's sheet, the screenplay to Robert Sparr's "Once you Kiss a Stranger," playing with "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed," was suggested by a novel by Patricia Highsmith. I assume the novel is "Strangers on a Train," for "Once You Kiss a Stranger" builds upon the same premise of murder by surrogate that Alfred Hitchcock used in his great 1951 film.But in place of the psychological complexities of Hitchcock's "Strangers," this movie substitutes a few sexual simplicities. And for the multiple personalities crises of Farley Granger and Robert Walker, it offers a one-dimensional parody of psychotic menace as bad-girl Carol Lynley preys upon good-guy Paul Burke.
In sequences inspired by Rear Window, he begins to follow the woman... ...but he keeps his distance because he's caught in the same dilemma as Jimmy Stewart was in the Hitchcock picture: He is, after all, technically a Peeping Tom, and he wouldn't know the woman was in danger if he hadn't been breaking the law.
But I doubt that De Palma wants us to take his explanations very seriously; the pseudoscientific jargon used to "explain" the case reminds me of that terrible psychiatric explanation at the end of Psycho - A movie De Palma has been quoting from all along.
Body Double, opening today at the United Artists Twin and other theaters, again goes too far, which is the reason to see it. It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film (Vertigo), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies.
