Movie remakes are nothing new, but the current crop contains some bizarre choices

Now is the season of unlikely remakes. Sidney Lumet's classic courtroom drama 12 Angry Men (1957), Joseph L Mankiewicz's Sleuth (1972), Delmer Daves' 3.10 To Yuma (1957) and John Waters' Hairspray (1988) are just some of the films that have been recently retooled for contemporary audiences.

12 Angry Men (already remade by William Friedkin) has now been given the Russian treatment. The film, about a dozen sweaty New York jurors on the hottest day of the year trying to work out whether a defendant is guilty as charged, seems like quintessential American fare. All the jurors, whether Lee J Cobb's bullying racist or Henry Fonda's Clarence-Darrow-like idealist, were American archetypes.

Reginald Rose's screenplay was full of references to baseball games and Madison Avenue advertising campaigns. Nonetheless, the maverick auteur Nikita Mikhalkov (an Oscar winner for Burnt by the Sun) has remade the movie with Russian actors and a Chechen defendant.

Meanwhile, Kenneth Branagh has recruited the Nobel-Prize-winning writer Harold Pinter to rework Anthony Shaffer's screenplay for Sleuth. In the original film, Michael Caine played the young upstart having an affair with the wife of a malevolent old writer (Laurence Olivier.) At the time, the clash between Caine and Olivier gave the movie its frisson.

The former was the face of swinging London – the son of a fishmarket porter-turned-movie star. The latter was Britain's greatest classical actor. The film wasn't just about a cuckolded thriller-writer playing sadistic games with his wife's lover. It was about a clash of classes and generations. Now, in a neat reversal, Caine himself is playing the older man with Jude Law (like Caine, a former Alfie) as the young pretender.

What is unusual about James Mangold's remake of 3.10 to Yuma is just how faithful it is to the spirit of Daves's original. 3.10 to Yuma was one of a crop of Westerns made in the mid-Fifties about smalltimers, in extreme situations, who react with unexpected heroism. The tone of the film isn't so different to that of Shane or High Noon.

In the remake, a struggling rancher (Christian Bale) agrees to put notorious outlaw Russell Crowe on the 3.10 to Yuma, the train that will take him to captivity. This is a very traditional Western without anachronisms, without nods to the modern audience or Sergio-Leone-like self-reflexive humour. It works because it is so well-crafted and because Bale and Crowe make such compelling protagonists.

Of course, there have been remakes almost as long as there have been movies themselves. The sword-and-sandal saga Quo Vadis?, for example, was first made into a film in 1902 and has been adapted for the screen at regular intervals ever since. Ben-Hur and The Three Musketeers have an almost equally long screen history.

Hollywood has always kept an eye on foreign films that it can customise for US audiences. In many cases, cinemagoers won't even be aware that the film they are seeing in their multiplex is directly lifted from a foreign prototype. Few of those flocking to taste the new Catherine Zeta Jones comedy No Reservations, in which she plays a head chef at a swanky Manhattan restaurant, will realise that the film is a remake of the 2001 German movie Mostly Martha.

Back in the heyday of the studio era, it wasn't unusual for those behind the US version to try to destroy the negative of the original film. This was what happened with Thorold Dickinson's 1940 version of Gaslight (also known as The Murder in Thornton Square), starring Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard. When MGM bought the rights and decided to remake it with the director George Cukor and stars Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, the studio attempted to burn Dickinson's original – something that caused huge resentment among the British craftsmen who struggled so hard to make it.

Then again, this was an era before DVD, television or even much in the way of repertory cinemas. Film-makers didn't necessarily expect their movies to have a life beyond their first releases. It has been reported that the British wunderkind Joe Wright is to make yet another Hollywood version of Gaslight. If ever this new Gaslight is greenlit, at least we won't need to worry about the Cukor film being destroyed to make way for it.

In contemporary Hollywood, remake rights are increasingly big business. In recent years, countless Asian horror and gangster films have been cannibalised by Hollywood – everything from The Grudge to The Departed. Many European arthouse movies have likewise been turned into US comedies or thrillers.

Sometimes, European directors have been whisked over to Hollywood to remake their own movies – but invariably with less success than first time round. George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1993), with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland, wasn't a patch on his original and infinitely more creepy European version of the same movie in 1988. The Danish director Ole Bornedal's 1997 US remake of Nightwatch for Miramax wasn't up to the standards of the film he made in Denmark in 1994.

Invariably, when European directors try to rethink their work for American studio paymasters, they risk straining out the originality and local identity that made their work distinctive in the first place.

Hollywood has always preyed on its own back catalogue, too, looking for movies with a recognition factor or merchandising possibilities that it can reinvent for a new generation. Whether it is Superman or Lassie, if there's a potential audience out there, the studios will invest in new models. Sometimes, the cynicism is breathtaking. Sometimes, the remakes are so ill-conceived they fill you with dismay. Did we really want to see remakes of The Poseidon Adventure or The Wicker Man? Box-office returns would suggest that the answer is in the negative.

There are often complex legal issues surrounding remakes. In the late Fifties, the Irish writer Kevin McClory worked with British screenwriter Jack Whittingham and Ian Fleming on a treatment for what they intended to be the first Bond movie. The film was never made, but Fleming drew on the material when he wrote Thunderball. This gave McClory (who died last year) the pretext for launching one of the most bitter series of legal actions in recent film history. After accusing Fleming of plagiarism, he secured the film rights to Thunderball. Although he collaborated with the James Bond producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli on the official 1965 film of Thunderball, he spent many years arguing in the courts that he had rights to make 007 movies. He was behind the unofficial Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again, and subsequently made several other attempts to remake Thunderball. After all, Bond movies – official or otherwise – were a licence to print money.

Most remakes are embarked on for mercenary reasons. Arguably more intriguing are the remakes that come from left-field, when the film-makers haven't slavishly copied the original film or looked to it as a way of making easy money, but have reinterpreted it in their own idiosyncratic way.

Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a French remake of James Toback's US indie film Fingers, seemed fresh precisely because it was so unexpected. The traffic had hitherto been almost all one-way, from Europe to Hollywood and not the other way round.

Likewise, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars surprised audiences with its sheer chutzpah: here was a spaghetti Western remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. To add to the confusion, Yojimbo was itself (at least partly) a remake of the American film noir The Glass Key, while Kurosawa always acknowledged his debt to the Westerns of John Ford.

Michael Haneke is shortly to deliver a shot-for-shot US remake of his 1997 film Funny Games. When Gus Van Sant came up with his 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, he was accused of being sycophantic and unoriginal rather than praised for a provocative formal experiment. Haneke is likely to fare better with the critics, by dint of his reputation as one of the untouchables of contemporary arthouse cinema.

Even so, it will be fascinating to see how Funny Games is marketed. The original was a satire on voyeurism, violence and the media as much as it was a thriller. However, young audiences going to see a movie with Michael Pitt and Naomi Watts won't relish a media studies lesson being thrust down their throats. They will want thrills – and they will leave it to the academics to ponder all of Haneke's Brechtian devices.

Remakes are self-evidently here to stay. They almost constitute a genre in themselves. What is refreshing – if 3.10 to Yuma, Sleuth and 12 Angry Men are the measure – is that film-makers now don't simply see them as exercises in moneymaking plagiarism and pastiche but – sometimes – as opportunities for fresh and original work.

'3.10 To Yuma' opens in the UK in September

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