When is a remake not a remake is one that will keep the pedants occupied long past my own bedtime and on the whole I'm content to let them pick the bones out of it whilst I savor and/or am disappointed by the latest example to find itself on a screen near me. You could argue that one of the clues is when a remake retains the Original title, Kiss Of Death, Ocean's Eleven, The Manchurian Candidate etc but then along comes The Ladykillers, which retains both title and approximate plot of the Ealing entry but then moves the action several thousand miles West by several decades forward leading pedants back to Square One. When they change not only the country but also the title the additional factors that come into play are 1) are you, as a viewer, aware of this situation and 2) have you seen the original. I suspect that anyone who saw Julien Duvivier's magnum opus Un Carnet de bal will be disappointed, to say the least, with Lydia which he made four years later (1941) in Hollywood, whilst those who never saw, or perhaps have never heard of Un Carnet de bal, will find Lydia vastly enjoyable - it is, after all, the work of a Great director, albeit one saddled with a 'revised' script that tends to turn the original on its head. For the record Un Carnet de bal featured a recently widowed lady who, more or less on a whim, decides to trace the men with whom she danced at her very first ball as a teenager and is, inevitably, disappointed at what she discovers. The action was, then, set largely in the present with an elderly lady encountering elderly men; this time around the lady in question is a spinster and is reminiscing with three of her old beaux in the present which means that, by definition, the bulk of the film is flashbacks to forty years earlier. Those with no knowledge of Un Carnet de bal will relish the initial ball scene with shades of both Max Ophuls in the swirling camera and Busby Berkely in the phalanx of art deco lady harpists, and the lush score by Miklos Rosza whilst those who have seen Carnet will feel keenly the absence of Louis Jouvet, Fernandel etc and gaze open-mouthed at the hopelessly inadequate substitutes of whom only Joseph Cotton makes even a half-decent fist. Mixed feelings then; on the one hand it's still a Duvivier movie, on the other, there's only ONE Un Carnet de bal.