I just caught the last few minutes of the 1952 A Prisoner of Zenda starring Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. It’s a shot-for-shot remake in Technicolor of the 1937 black and white classic with Ronald Coleman and Madeleine Carroll. I’m not sure what you can say about it other than Stewart Granger is no Ronald Coleman. If you absolutely had to make a Technicolor version you could do a lot worse for Princess Flavia than Deborah Kerr, the actress for whom, if Technicolor hadn’t already been invented it most certainly would have been. James Mason makes a delightfully dastardly Rupert of Hentzau although not nearly as charming as Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was in the 1937 version.
Can anybody think of another example of a black and white picture that was remade, shot for shot, in Technicolor? The closest candidate I can think of is Psycho but the 1998 version isn’t quite a shot-for-shot remake. There’s at least one shot that’s the way Hitchcock wanted to shoot it but didn’t quite have the technology for: in Hitchcock’s version the opening shot was supposed to have been a long pan-zoom and in the 1998 version that’s what it was. Some of the location shooting was different in the remake because the locations had changed over 40 years.
