They’re back — and at a cinema near you

Here, starting with the release of Spartacus this week, films that would normally be reserved for marginalised movie clubs and repertory cinemas are suddenly mingling with the multiplex big boys. Classics are back in action, familiarity is de rigueur, and old-school is the new wave.

“I’m personally delighted and flattered to have two films among this group,” says Landis today, surveying an unprecedented UK release schedule packed with classic reissues, including Brian DePalma’s Scarface, The Red Shoes, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Godfather and John Carpenter’s The Thing. “And you’ve got to be excited about seeing films like these in a crowd. The Thing is a terrific movie, probably John Carpenter’s best, and Spartacus is even better on the big screen — and you just know damn well that people are going to stand up and say: ‘I am Spartacus!”

The rerelease boom, however, is not just an accidental crush of golden oldies to be swept aside by the next delivery of new Hollywood baubles. It is an entirely new model of movie-going, and represents the sudden confluence of exhibition conditions, audience appetites and available product.

The relatively recent digitisation of film, for instance, together with the emergence of more than 300 digital screens throughout UK cinemas, has meant that studios such as Universal, with hefty back catalogues, now boast a new method of making profit from past hits. Where once they might have transported ancient, damaged and expensive prints (up to £5,000 each) of classic movies to specialised cinemas, they can now access a pristine digital master of the same movie (courtesy of the studio restoration team) and copy it cheaply and flawlessly for the hundreds of digital screens around the country.

“When we used to talk about the transfer to digital, one of the pluses that everyone could see was the catalogue,” says Simon Hewlett, managing director of Universal Pictures International UK, which is testing the market this year with five digital rereleases, including the Landis movies. “It allows us to go back and delve into past movies, and to have a repertoire of titles that we service out to cinemas.” Hewlett adds that he sees this new influx of oldies as “a long-term prospect, where these titles appear on a regular basis, and during the course of the year we’ll add quite significantly to the repertoire”.

Other titles on the rerelease wish list, he confirms, include Jurassic Park, Jaws, E.T. and Back to the Future. He is confident, too, that there is an audience for rereleases, as the successful performance of other recent reissued classics, both arthouse and mainstream, has continually proved. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 classic The Conformist, for instance, was a hit for the BFI last year, raking in a healthy £100,000, which in context is nearly twice the haul of Sienna Miller’s recent US indie film The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Other films such as Grease were rereleased last September and had the blockbusting result of more than 13,000 admissions in one day.

And yet it’s not as simple as cranking out an oldie and hoping for the best, explains Crispin Lilly, the vice-president of business affairs for Cineworld Cinemas.

Choosing the right title, he says, is everything. “I know some cinemas decided to rerelease Titanic a while back and it died a death,” he explains. “Because I think Titanic was very much of the moment, and probably isn’t going to stand the test of time.” Lilly adds that there are no definitive rules for selecting the right rerelease but adds: “The film has generally got to fall into one of two camps: it’s one of those films that just has to be seen on the big screen, such as Spartacus, or it really benefits from being seen with an audience around you, such as Dirty Dancing or The Sound of Music.”

Furthermore, there’s a gender aspect to the successful rerelease title, according to John Letham, the managing director of Park Circus, the UK’s largest independent distributor of classic films. “We’ve found that movies that appeal to a female audience, such as White Christmas and The Sound of Music, work well,” he says. “Whereas male-skewed genres such as science fiction and action don’t. The ideal titles for us are the ones that are slightly female-skewed and yet appeal to men too. I’m thinking of Casablanca here — women love it, men love it, it’s got everything.”

Letham says that age is no barrier to classic status, and points to the forthcoming reissue of Shallow Grave, exclusively for the Edinburgh Film Festival, as proof that the definition has become more flexible. Shallow Grave is only 15 years old, and now it’s a modern classic,” he says, adding that the real winner in the rerelease boom is the act of cinema-going itself.

His thoughts are echoed by Hewlett, of Universal, who is contemplating a reissue of Shaun of the Dead, and explains that, although none of the cinema reissues is tied to any specific DVD releases, it all feeds the same machine. “There is a halo effect for us,” he explains. “If Spartacus is in the cinema and people are going to see it, and other people are hearing that it’s back in the cinema, it tends to have a knock-on effect for us in terms of DVD sales.”

And it is DVD sales, Letham says, contrary to expectation, that are actually driving much of this new audience interest in classic films. “When people start to rummage about in their DVD extras they begin to be more cine-literate. They start becoming interested in not just the latest material but, say, the past work of a certain director. They start making connections with past films, and they want to go back and discover, or rediscover, them.” Letham adds that the great paradox of DVD-watching is that it eventually teaches you that DVDs are the wrong way to watch films. “You realise, while watching DVDs, that no director does his work for DVD. It’s done for the cinema, for the big screen and for a big audience.”

Letham, whose company is rereleasing Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes in December, says that you can only really understand the power of a cinematic reissue by experiencing it. “I was at a screening of The Red Shoes in Cannes this year,” he says. “And the audience were bursting into applause midway through the movie!”

Of course, the implication here is that the rerelease boom is the first “everyone’s a winner” business model in the history of the medium. And certainly, on the surface, it’s hard to decry any system that puts classic movies into multiplexes and tries to expand the limits of our movie-going culture. As Jane Giles, the head of distribution at the BFI, describes it: “It feels like the Paris cinema scene 20 years ago, where you’d find a film that was five years old playing on a regular basis. I think it presents a very interesting cinema landscape for the audience and a real diversity of choice.”

Indeed, adds Giles, the rereleases themselves are providing not just entertainment for the masses, but a vital service for the future of the art form itself. They are, she says, helping to educate a new generation of movie-makers who might otherwise learn all their tricks from the video store. “I have questions about what type of films the film-makers of the future will make if their only understanding of the medium is through a small-screen experience,” she says. “If they don’t know the classics and how they appear on the big screen, how will that affect the way they ingest film, and the way it comes out?”

And yet, does the presence of classic reissues not illuminate a weakness in the quality of modern films? And is there not something limiting about the entire rerelease bandwagon? In other words, The Sound of Music is a great film, but, OK, we get it.

Landis himself certainly has his doubts. A refugee from the Hollywood studios after a “bad experience” while making the critically reviled Blues Brothers 2000 (the script went through 17 drafts), he can see all the contradictions and ironies in the system. For instance, thanks to a fearful corporate climate in Hollywood, he says, Animal House and The Blues Brothers would not be made today, and certainly not by the studio that is now rereleasing them as classics. Now they would be seen as risky investments, he says. Similarly, he notes that many of the films that we celebrate as classics, such as The Thing, It’s a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz, were flops and minor failures when released. The very act of attending a studio rerelease, he says, is potentially problematic. “When they rerelease these movies it’s still about branding,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Oh gosh, Animal House! I’d love to see that picture on the big screen! I’d love to re-experience it.’ Which, when you think about it, is quite a conservative thing to do.”

But still, he says, he is honour-bound to support the rereleases, because fundamentally they’re great movies and, he jokes, because he gets paid if they’re successful. But mostly, seriously, he says that the rerelease phenomenon should be embraced because it suggests a filmmaking continuum of quality.

“A great film from 1912 and a great film from 2002 are still great films,” he says. “And what they do, in their greatness, is remind you of how unique the cinemagoing experience can truly be.”

Wish list: play them again, Sam

West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961) Four years before Wise’s rerelease champion The Sound of Music, this is really the one to get them stomping down the aisles. Officer Krupke, I Feel Pretty, America, and so on, each one a tap-a-long classic. Plenty of room for Sharks and Jets-style fancy dress, too.

Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972) Directed by the effects guru behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, and with all of that movie’s visual grandeur but none of its pretension, this timely, eco-friendly movie — about a gardener in space, played by Brue Dern — is ready for its close-up.

The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946) It hasn’t seen the inside of a cinema since a brief rerelease in Finland in 1962. Audiences everywhere have thus been deprived of the chance of snuffling back tears together as bonkers Jane Wyman forces her traumatised son Jody to shoot his pet deer.

Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973) An infectious blend of rapid-fire one-liners and jazz-propelled mayhem, this sci-fi comedy is the ultimate audience-pleaser.

Hondo (John Farrow, 1953) This great forgotten John Wayne western, set among the ravishing landscapes of Utah, truly demands to be seen on the big screen. Best of all it was originally shot in 3-D. Remastered, it could give Pixar a run for its money.

Miss list: we don’t give a damn

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) No. No. And again, no.

Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002) An Oscar-winning musical abomination. Tracks such as Razzle Dazzle, All That Jazz and Cell Block Tango can only send audiences fleeing for the exits.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) In space, no one can hear you reaching for the fast-forward button. In the cinema you have to endure its 160 minutes.

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) Strange this, but here is a movie that’s scarier on your own, on DVD.

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) It’s been remastered, redone and redux’d. But it’s still a bit of a mess.

When are they out?

North By Northwest, June 19; The Blues Brothers, July 24; Once Upon a Time in the West, July 24; Scarface, Aug 21; In the Realm of the Senses, Aug 28; The Thing, Sept 11; The Godfather, Sept 25; Animal House, Oct 30; The Red Shoes, Dec 11