Love it but is this an original screenplay????

Rating: 7/10 (22 January 2005)

After all these years we have finally watched this movie. Found it quite well made and not at all too long.
Brad Pitt seemed to be missing that good old "gleem in his eyes" in some scenes but the other characters played sincerely. Hopkins in particular was wonderful during the long last scene waiting for Joe to take him away.
One strange thing was the movie left us with the impression that we have seen this story before - some old French or American movie from the 1940-50s maybe... anyone got any ideas? Nothing mentioned about this on the DVD nor here on IMDb though.
P.S. IMDb why not add a link to "this film based on ..."? There are some many remakes these days and tracking them done is not always easy - especially when the remakes changes the title and change all the character's names!