If film-makers have an urge to make new versions of films, it is the flops they should remake, not the successful ones, Sir Michael Caine told The Times yesterday.

With classic films such as Humphrey Bogart’s Casablanca and Henry Fonda’s Twelve Angry Men now being remade, the Oscar-winning star of more than 90 films said: “If you remake a good film, you’re on a hiding to nothing.”

Caine, who appeared in the 1972 classic Sleuth, is in Venice for the world premiere of a film of the same name at the Film Festival this week. He was talking after witnessing film-makers’ misguided attempts to remake some of his own films, including Alfie and Get Carter, classics of British cinema.

It takes a brave or foolhardy actor to follow in the footsteps of one who won Oscars for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules – with further acclaim for The Ipcress File, Educating Rita and The Quiet American.

While Jude Law irritated audiences with his smug Alfie, which paled in comparison with Caine’s depiction of a cheeky charmer, critics failed to comprehend what made Sylvester Stallone think he could compete with Caine’s portrayal of the London gangster Jack Carter.

Both films flopped at the box office. Reworking a successful formula rarely has the same sparkle, Caine believes.

While the 2004 Alfie was named as one of the worst remakes in an online poll, Caine acknowledged yesterday that it failed because the 1966 original – which made him an international star – was “a film of its time”. Get Carter has been described as one of the greatest British films, but the 2000 version was condemned by critics and the public voted it the worst remake of all time.

Film-makers did, however, get it right with another Caine classic, The Italian Job, partly because the new version, starring Mark Wahlberg, bore little resemblance to the 1969 original.

That, it seems, is the secret: only make a remake that is not a remake. Caine has done just that with Sleuth. “It is 99 per cent not a remake”, he said. “The name of the play is where the resemblance ends. It’s only inspired by the earlier film.”

The original Sleuth, a 1970 Tony award-winning psychological drama, was scripted by Anthony Shaffer and co-starred Laurence Olivier as the bitter writer who takes revenge, through a deadly, twisted game of wits, on a hairdresser and part-time actor who has run off with his wife.

This time Caine is the older man, and Jude Law is the younger man. The new script is by Harold Pinter, the Nobel laureate, who has completely rewritten the screenplay.

The original Sleuth, directed in 1972 by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, earned Oscar nominations for Caine and Olivier. This time the director is Kenneth Branagh, who paid tribute to Shaffer’s “wonderful job” but confirmed that the film’s mood, visual effect and characterisation were completely different, with “Pinter’s darker, more blackly comic sensibility”. Caine’s latest performance was inspired by reading about an irrational and psychopathic condition called morbid jealousy. He said: “Larry [Olivier] was great fun, very theatrical. He played it as a dangerous eccentric. I play it as a psychopathic murderer, more realistic and quite a bit scarier.”

He added: “The original was based on a rather archaic snobbery. This is still snobbery, but intellectual, someone who proves he’s superior.”

The set establishes the differing moods, he said: “In the first Sleuth, my character lived in a lovely old English country house, all chintz and flowers. Here you go inside and it’s steel, glass, marble and concrete, very minimalist. Immediately you’re in Pinter country.”

Two years ago Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His classics from the 1960s included The Caretaker and The Servant. Sleuth brings together Caine and Pinter, who has a cameo role, 50 years after they went to the same school, Hackney Downs Grammar. The film will be released in Britain on November 23.

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