The remake was written by David Mamet—the first screenplay by the playwright—and starred Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. In the film, Nicholson plays a Depression-era drifter who happens upon a rural diner and gets involved with the owner's wife in a plot to kill her husband. Rafelson has said of the film's reception, "The critics in America--at least when it first came out, now they have switched--didn't like it very much, but in France and in Germany and in Russia and in places that I have traveled since the making of this movie, this seems to have emerged as one of the movies that they like most of mine because of its unlikely romantic nature."[7]