BROOKE GLADSTONE: Early next month, a new film opens called the Stepford Wives. Not that there hasn't been a Stepford Wives before. And finishing now for an imminent release is The Manchurian Candidate. Sound familiar? And coming up early next year? King Kong. Raiding and retreading old movie classics is in itself a time-honored tradition, but it has a mixed history at the box office, as WNYC's Sara Fishko explains. [MUSIC]

SARA FISHKO: Chairman and CEO Ted Hartley's office at RKO Pictures in Century City is decorated with one spectacular item -- the actual sled with the Rosebud logo from the actual set of the classic RKO movie Citizen Kane. That is one film Hartley is certain, that will never be remade.

ORSON WELLES: Rosebud...

TED HARTLEY: There's no point in remaking that; Orson Welles took that as far as it could go, and it represents a triumph for that director of his vision.

SARA FISHKO: Leslie Dixon, who wrote the re-makes of the Thomas Crown Affair and Freaky Friday agrees.

LESLIE DIXON: That's the cardinal rule: Don't remake something that is the finest film ever made. Don't re-make Citizen Kane.

SARA FISHKO: Also Edwin Marshall of Harbor Light Entertainment. He's busy developing a re-make of Rashamon. But still, some things are untouchable.

EDWIN MARSHALL: Take, for instance, probably you know the sacred cow of all would be Citizen Kane. Should that be re-made? I don't think so.

SARA FISHKO:But what about Orson Welles' second film as director -- The Magnificent Ambersons, about a Midwestern family in the 19th Century. [CLIP FROM '42]

WOMAN: How lovely your mother is.

MAN: I think she is.

SARA FISHKO: Not so sacred.

WOMAN: She's the gracefulest woman; she dances like...

SARA FISHKO: It was remade a couple of years ago for A&E. [CLIP FROM 2002]

WOMAN: How lovely your mother is.

MAN: I think she is.

SARA FISHKO: Studios like RKO and MGM, with long histories stretching back to talkies' golden age comb their vaults for likely prospects for reconsideration. The allure of the re-make is powerful.

PHILIP KAUFMAN: Even with a Hitchcock film, like Suspicion, which we're doing with Dimension-- [CLIP PLAYS]

WOMAN: Are you courting me?

PHILIP KAUFMAN: -- Hitchcock was a superb director--

CARY GRANT: Afraid I am.

PHILIP KAUFMAN:-- and Cary Grant was great in that film. The only thing was the ending didn't quite work, and there were some slow spots in it.

WOMAN: Here we are in the house that I was born in.

SARA FISHKO: Hitchcock, of course, wasn't beyond remaking his own movies in different eras, different countries. Maybe he'd have loved the idea of someone, if not him, having another crack at Suspicion.

WOMAN: I love him.

SARA FISHKO: In this case, the someone is to be director Philip Kaufman. He's not afraid to play around with old material. [CLIP FROM BODY SNATCHERS/OLD VERSION] [WOMAN SCREAMS] His 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers took that iconic picture of fifties fear and re-situated it.

PHILIP KAUFMAN: We, you know, spent months sort of discussing the theories of the thing and alienation --you know, the sense of loss of self and so forth.

SARA FISHKO: The Don Siegel original was about the takeover by aliens of a small town. [CLIP PLAYS UNDER]

PHILIP KAUFMAN: We took that paranoia of a small town and carried it into the big city where paranoia had begun to reside. [CLIP FROM BODY SNATCHERS/NEW VERSION]

WOMAN: Matthew, I've lived in this city all my life. But somehow today I felt everything had changed. People were different. Not just Jeffrey, but everybody. [TRAIN BELL CLANGS]

LESLIE DIXON: Remake something that might be a bit dated but have a very good premise at the heart of it, and then re-invent it a bit -- twist it - do something a little different to justify the remake's existence.

MAN: [SINGING] ROUND, LIKE A CIRCLE IN A SPIRAL, LIKE A WHEEL WITHIN A WHEEL...

SARA FISHKO: That's what Leslie Dixon did for the re-make of the trendy sixties movie The Thomas Crown Affair. She kept the title and the seductive patter between the two lead characters. She just dropped the plot.

LESLIE DIXON:I did not think that the critics would be out with their knives, because I knew they'd all re-look at the movie and go-- oh, some interesting things, but some of it doesn't work. I was not committing an assault on a classic film.

SARA FISHKO: The re-make of the Thomas Crown Affair did pretty well in the marketplace, and so did Body Snatchers. Some remakes actually overtake the originals. The Judy Garland A Star Is Born comes to mind, and The Maltese Falcon.

STUART Y. McDOUGAL: We think of the Bogart version as sort of a definitive version, but in fact it was the third version that studio had made.

SARA FISHKO: Stuart Y. McDougal co-edited the book Play It Again, Sam: Re-takes on Re-makes.

STUART Y. McDOUGAL: We've forgotten about the earlier two versions, because they're not nearly as good, and John Huston somehow captured something about the novel which has made it a permanent part of our film world. [MUSIC]

SARA FISHKO: And then there are the ones that don't do well at all. Poor Jonathan Demme remade everybody's favorite mystery romance, Charade. [CLIP PLAYS]

CARY GRANT: Do we know each other?

SARA FISHKO: Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, no less, playing cat and mouse.

AUDREY HEPBURN: Because I already know an awful lot of people, and until one of them dies, I couldn't possibly meet anyone else.

SARA FISHKO: He remade it as The Truth About Charlie to bad reviews and worse box office. A bit of a disaster, but Demme recovered quickly and has recently made a much-praised documentary --and what is he doing at the moment? He's putting finishing touches on his remake of John Frankenheimer's Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington in the Frank Sinatra role and Meryl Streep as that memorable mother, originally played by Angela Lansbury. Ah, the allure of the re-make. [MUSIC FROM HITCHCOCK'S PSYCHO] Perhaps the ultimate remade film -- more of a reproduction, really -- is the mysterious Gus Van Sant version of Psycho. [CLIP FROM OLD VERSION

MAN: Dirty night.

WOMAN: You have a vacancy?

SARA FISHKO: Van Sant went all the way with it, using the same script Hitchcock used and many of the same framings of the same shots he used.

MAN: Cabin one. It's closer in case you want anything. Right next to the office.

SARA FISHKO: It's not a remake -- it's a copy. [CLIP FROM NEW VERSION]

MAN: Cabin one. It's closer in case you want anything. Right next to the office.

WOMAN: Oh, I, I...

SARA FISHKO: Van Sant said at the time it was an attempt to popularize a classic. Never mind that it was already among the most popular and profitable films in history. It baffled critics and audiences alike. It also angered them. People do get testy about re-makes of their favorite. Philip Kaufman shudders when recalling a moment during the shooting of Body Snatchers with the actor Kevin McCarthy. In the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, a spectator, a somewhat scruffy-looking street person, caught his eye.

PHILIP KAUFMAN:This guy was pretty high on something, as evidenced by the fact that he had taken all his clothes off, and he was sort of lying, using the curb as a headrest, watching us shoot, just off camera. And then he sort of called Kevin and myself over -- Kevin was running into the car, screaming they're here, they're here -- and he said-- "Are you guys shooting Invasion of the Body Snatchers?" And we said yeah. He said "The original was better." [MUSIC] [LAUGHS] So-- you know, you can't be deterred by purists who are lying in wait for you.

SARA FISHKO: So at this point, why not Citizen Kane? Why not get a new sled, already? You can still keep the old one. Films are immutable. Once they're made, they're made. Maybe an original is made even more glorious by the fact that through all the sometimes misguided efforts to re-make it, it somehow endures and shines. For On the Media, I'm Sara Fishko. [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Coming up, the professionalization of mud-slinging, an editorial dustup in Wisconsin, and TV news you don't have to explain to your kids. This is On the Media, from NPR. [FUNDING CREDITS]