It used to be, all the studios saw when they acquired a successful mainstream European film was the story - as in, ‘Don’t bother to release it, let’s remake it, with stars everyone has heard of, not just a bunch of people with foreign names’.

Three Men and a Baby - a retread of Coline Serreau’s French smash Trois hommes et un couffin - is possibly the most successful to date. The trashcan of history, however, is full of remakes that failed to capture the spirit, the success and often even the vaguest inkling of what the European original had been about.

Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien is different. Dominik Moll’s film, which premiered at Cannes 2000, has had a very successful subtitled release in the US through Miramax. Amazing to relate, it also did rather well in the UK, where any French film not directed by Claude Chabrol usually struggles to make an impact. Germany likewise.

Now, however, Miramax is coming back for a second bite of the cherry, with plans for Wes Craven to direct an English-language version. The original, which tells the story of a psychotic former schoolmate who turns up and prompts a troubled young couple to discover their (murderous) inner selves, conjured up memories of the Robert Walker character in Strangers on a Train. Indeed, the film has been compared to Hitchcock (Brit critic Alexander Walker declared it would have made Hitch “grind his teeth with envy”), although the most likely echo is of Patricia Highsmith, who wrote Strangers and whose stock has always been high in France.

Even so, the film represents something of a departure for Craven, whose most recent outings have been as director, producer or (as in the case of Dracula 2000) general godfather of the horror genre. Still, he did reveal his gentler side with that 1999 weepie, Music of the Heart. The whole process of the Harry remake, mind you, is still at a very early stage, without even a writer, let alone a cast, attached.

Elsewhere, meanwhile, the remake syndrome seems to be becoming endemic. A quartet of Euro production companies (Pathé Pictures, TF1 International, Sky and Assassin Films) and the producer of East Is East, Leslee Udwin, are planning to remake Den eneste ene (The One and Only), the film which beat out all the trendy Dogme movies and exportable auteur flicks at the Danish box office in 1999. A romantic comedy which lured 850,000 Danes to the local box office, The One and Only is currently being remade in the UK, shooting in Newcastle with Patsy Kensit in the lead and Simon Cellan Jones directing.

And, on a rather more celebrity-conscious note, it appears that Guy Ritchie, who is at least as well known around the world for marrying Madonna as he is for directing Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, is planning to combine his day job with his home life by directing his missus in a remake of Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away. The Italian flick, whose original title was Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (and whose full English title is Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August), was a 1975 melodrama about a Sicilian deck-hand (played by Giancarlo Giannini) and a yacht owner’s wife (Mariangela Melato). Cast adrift in a dinghy, they end up playing sexual games with one another on a desert island before being rescued, whereupon the games come to an end and normal, class-ridden behaviour resumes.

All of which sounds ideal for Mrs R, who is one of the world’s richest women. Ritchie, for his part, reportedly wants to get away from the all-boy, guns ‘n’ stuff world of the movies he has made so far - a decision which I imagine his other half strongly supports. As to who will play the lucky (hapless?) deck-hand, that has yet to be decided; but shooting is expected to begin some time this autumn