It’s fashionable to prefer the 1934 version to the 1956. I do, even if the remake is a better film. The earlier has the rough edges, power and concision of the Beatles in Hamburg. The latter has the polish and lush arrangements of their later studio tracks.
The biggest difference between the two, however, is not the enhanced production, or alien locations, or even the differences between a fresh and exciting director to the same one at the height of his powers. The biggest difference is that the mid-50s were the peak years of the domestic melodrama genre, emotional technicolor films from Sirk, Ray, and Minnelli that explored the struggle for control within a marriage, the balance of career and…