Adaptation

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Adaptation

ADAPTATION IN THE SILENT PERIOD
FILMING CLASSIC FICTION:
1927 TO THE PRESENT
CASE STUDY: ADAPTATIONS
OF CHARLES DICKENS
GENRE ADAPTATIONS: WESTERNS,
CRIME, AND FILM NOIR
THEATRICAL ADAPTATIONS
OTHER KINDS OF ADAPTATION
FURTHER READING

It seems certain that the first "fiction" film, L'arroseur arrosé (The Waterer Watered, 1895) by Louis Lumière (1864–1948), was based on an 1889 comic strip by "Christophe" and that two of the most famous early American narrative films, Edwin S. Porter's (1869–1941) The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), were derived, at least in part, from contemporary theatrical and comic strip material respectively. Generally the earliest attempts at narrative cinema were taken from already existing literary or theatrical sources and have provided by far the largest proportion of script material for the cinema ever since. This process, however, has been regularly plagued by arguments over the vexed question of fidelity. To what extent should (or can) a film be "faithful" to its original source? Which aspects of literary or theatrical technique are compatible with the film medium and which cannot be successfully transferred? To what extent should filmmakers alter characterization, setting, or plot to suit their own interpretation of the original? Does it matter if the filmmaker changes the original almost completely and yet comes up with a cinematic masterpiece in its own right? Should a film adaptation, in other words, always have to justify itself in terms of its closeness to its literary original, or can the two be accepted and judged independently?

The questions continue to be debated. Most theorizing tends to split types of adaptation into three categories: strict, loose, or free (using these or somewhat similar terms). They also often distinguish between classic or well-known works where audiences already have some knowledge of the original and may expect to see this reproduced reasonably faithfully on the screen, and less famous or forgotten works where audience loyalty to the original is less significant. Many critics accept a compromise: if the essence of the original (theme, mood, tone in particular) is preserved and not deliberately or incompetently distorted, then other, less crucial, changes are acceptable. The claim that a successful adaptation should be medium specific—thoroughly rethought in terms of film and the filmmaker's own creative approach and not hampered by inappropriate adherence to literary or stage techniques—is also now commonly held. Such a view, for example, would approve of A Clockwork Orange (1971) by Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), despite its being disowned by the author of the original novel, Anthony Burgess (1917–1993), who felt that Kubrick overemphasized the violent and negative aspects of the book.

The most difficult task for the filmmaker is probably to take a classic or currently popular work and present it in a way that avoids alienating those who have a commitment to their own interpretation of the original while simultaneously producing something that works successfully as a film in its own right. These adaptations would normally fall into the category of strict or loose, though free reworkings of, for example, William Shakespeare (1564–1616) (Joe MacBeth, 1955), Charles Dickens (1812–1870) (Rich's Man's Folly, 1931; based on Dombey and Son), or Jane Austen (1775–1817) (Clueless, 1995; based on Emma) certainly exist. One of the most highly acclaimed examples of an adaptation that has managed to please both die-hard admirers of the original books and to be accepted as a cinematic masterpiece is Peter Jackson's (b. 1961) version of J. R. R. Tolkien's (1892–1973) The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003).

A more common resource, however, has been to take works that, for reasons of literary style, plot, or characterization, are more amenable to being "tampered with" and are less complete or self-sufficient in their original form, or that belong to literary genres such as detective or gangster fiction, thrillers, westerns, or science fiction, which are often considered to be marginal in terms of literary respectability and are thus less likely to arouse indignation if they are "betrayed" in the process of adaptation. Many of the finest American films fall into these categories, as do those of the French New Wave works that were based on Série noire (1979) or pulp fiction.

ADAPTATION IN THE SILENT PERIOD

The earliest narrative films were rarely more than three to five minutes long, gradually extending to approximately twenty minutes by 1910, and then increasing steadily to a standard feature length of ninety to one hundred twenty minutes by the end of the silent era. Partly to avoid copyright payments and partly to exploit audience familiarity with already existing subject matter at a time when a coherent story could rarely be told on film without the use of copious intertitles or the services of a lecturer within the auditorium to explain the plot, the first adaptations were almost invariably taken from classic authors such as Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot (1819–1880), and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in Britain, and, on the Continent, Émile Zola (1840–1902), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), and others. The sheer length of most of these works, however, prohibited any attempt at completeness, and standard practice was to choose well-known extracts or scenes that were relatively self-sufficient, such as the "Dotheboys School" scenes from Nicholas Nickleby or the shipwreck scene from The Tempest. As films gradually increased in length, valiant attempts were made to squeeze the whole plot of a novel or film into a running time of around twenty minutes. Popular titles adapted in this early period included Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903), Frankenstein (1910, and much filmed since, though never, despite such titles as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein [1994], with much authenticity), Robinson Crusoe (1913), Faust (1915), and Don Quixote (1915).

Technically, most of these early films were static—filmed from a fixed camera position, usually in long shot, and presenting action in tableau-like form. By the 1910s, however, cinematic technique had become much more sophisticated, with extensive camera movement, fuller use of screen space and camera angle and distance, a more naturalistic acting style, and creative editing that enhanced understanding of plot and character rather than simply moving the action from one setting to another. It became possible to tell stories on the screen with more completeness and complexity, though the desire to give the young medium cultural respectability led to continued reliance on Shakespeare and Dickens in particular. Soon, however, more recent "best-selling" works began to appear on the screen, such as Mrs. Henry Wood's (1814–1887) melodrama East Lynne, filmed as the first British six-reeler (sixty to seventy minutes) in 1913, and, more controversially, D. W. Griffith's (1875–1948) adaptation of Thomas Dixon's (1864–1946) The Clansman, filmed as The Birth of a Nation, one of the longest American features to date, in 1915. By the 1920s, such works predominated, with adaptations of now largely forgotten writers such as "Ouida" (1839–1908), Marie Corelli (1855–1924), Sir Hall Caine (1853–1931), E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946), and the "sensational" novels of such writers as Michael Arlen (1895–1956), whose The Green Hat was filmed as A Woman of Affairs in 1928, starring Greta Garbo (1905–1990); while the endlessly prolific Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) may well hold the record for being the most frequently filmed English-speaking author ever.

In Europe the epics of the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), such as Quo Vadis? (filmed in 1912), helped to provide material for the influential Italian historical dramas, and the novels of Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) were crucial sources for the great films of Victor Sjöström (1879–1960) and Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928) in Sweden, particularly the former's Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921) and the latter's Gösta Berlings saga (1924). In France Jean Renoir's (1894–1979) Nana (1926), Jacques Feyder's (1885–1948) Thérèse Raquin (1928) and Marcel L'Herbier's (1888–1979) L'argent (Money, 1929) were all based on works by the still controversial Zola. L'Herbier also filmed Luigi Pirandello's (1867–1936) Feu Mattias Pascal (The Late Mathias Pascal, 1925) and Feyder adapted both the best-seller L'atlantide (Lost Atlantis, 1920) by Pierre Benoît (1886–1962) and Crainquebille (Bill, 1922) by the then prestigious Anatole France (1844–1924). What is probably the greatest French film of the 1920s, however, was a different sort of adaptation: every word of Carl Theodor Dreyer's (1889–1968) La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928) was scrupulously based on the original transcripts of Joan's trial, and the austerity of the filmmaking style exactly matched the sparseness of the dialogue.

FILMING CLASSIC FICTION:
1927 TO THE PRESENT

While few people today would care whether The Green Hat was in any way betrayed by its transformation into the Garbo vehicle A Woman of Affairs, the situation is very different with an acknowledged literary classic, where readers tend to have fixed, and widely differing, views of the appearance of the characters or setting—not to mention the meaning or interpretation of the work as a whole—and naturally wish to see these perceptions respected on the screen.

There are many other problems too. Even a relatively short novel cannot be filmed word for word within the confines of the two- to three-hour limit of the average film (though Erich von Stroheim [1885–1957] claimed to have done so with his original cut of Greed [1924] from Frank Norris's [1870–1902] novel McTeague). Selection, omission, and condensation of some kind is inevitable. This normally involves suppression of minor characters and subplots, though these may be among the aspects of the book most cherished by readers. More seriously, although a ten-second shot in a film can often replace pages of description of character, landscape, or a house interior, it is rarely possible for a film to convey the detailed analysis of character psychology or motivation crucial to much of the finest fiction without resorting to lengthy stretches of dialogue. Dialogue itself is also a problem, for even the most apparently "naturalistic" speech on the printed page can appear stilted on the screen, and the complex sentence structure of a Henry James (1843–1916) or William Faulkner (1897–1962) is almost impossible to reproduce successfully. Point of view is another difficulty, especially with first-person narration in a novel; film, by its very nature, tends to employ shifting viewpoints throughout and seem to be objective and external rather than internal. Few of these obstacles are ultimately insuperable; they involve a thorough rethinking by the scriptwriter and director and a readiness to substitute techniques appropriate to film for those less suited to it—for example, Harold Pinter's (b. 1930) and Karel Reisz's (1926–2002) film The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) after John Fowles's (1926–2005) novel.

Adaptations of short stories, on the other hand, present almost exactly opposite problems, for even a long (twenty- to thirty-page) story has to be expanded to fit the minimum ninety minutes of screen time. As a result, incidents barely referred to in the story may be expanded or others invented, new characters may be introduced, plot elements concocted, and brief conversations may be lengthened or new ones created. Though few classic stories can survive this treatment without severe distortion of the original work, some authors have occasionally been better served by adaptations of shorter works than by the treatment of their novels. The Fallen Idol (1948), directed by Carol Reed (1906–1976) from Graham Greene's (1904–1991) story "The Basement Room"; The Rockinghorse Winner (1950), directed by Anthony Pelissier (1912–1988) from the D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) story; Tomorrow (1972), directed by Joseph Anthony (1912–1993) from the William Faulkner story; and The Innocents (1961), directed by Jack Clayton (1921–1995) from Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," are all at least the equal of the often more pretentious feature-length films made from the novels of these authors.

The work of almost every classic English novelist from Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) onward has been filmed at least once, and the same is true in America from James Fenimore Cooper's (1789–1851) The Last of the Mohicans and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) onward. In France, Stendhal (1783–1842), Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), Victor Hugo (1802–1885), and Zola have been constant favorites. Possibly the finest adaptations of French literature have been from the novels of Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), where Robert Bresson (1901–1999), in Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1950) and Mouchette (1967), has provided the perfect equivalent in cinematic terms of the mood, theme, and characterization of the originals, while Maurice Pialat's Sous le soleil de Satan (Under Satan's Sun, 1987) delivers great emotional power. The inherently "cinematic" novels of Georges Simenon (1903–1989) have been frequently filmed, in France and elsewhere, with Les fiançailles de M. Hire directed strikingly well by both Julien Duvivier (1896–1967) in Panique (Panic, 1946) and Patrice Leconte (b. 1947) in Monsieur Hire (1989).

Adaptations of classic Russian literature during the Soviet period tended to be hampered by excessive respect for the originals, though Sergei Bondarchuk's (1920–1994) version of Tolstoy's Vonya i mir (War and Peace, 1968)—like King Vidor's (1894–1982) American production in 1956—provided a certain degree of visual interest. Anna Karenina has also been frequently filmed, usually in simplified form, and used as a Garbo vehicle in 1935. Iosif Kheifit's film of Anton Chekhov's (1860–1904) story "The Lady with the Little Dog" (Dama s sobachkoy, 1960) was well received abroad. Most films of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's (1821–1881) fiction—including even Akira Kurosawa's (1910–1998) Hakuchi (The Idiot, 1951)—have been unmemorable, with the striking exception of Bresson's Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971), from the story "White Nights" (also filmed by Luchino Visconti [1906–1976] as Le notti bianche in 1957; restored version 1997) and, especially, Une femme douce (1968) from the story "A Gentle Creature," both of which, despite updating the settings, are typically near-perfect re-creations of mood, character, and theme, while being thoroughly "Bressonian" throughout.

From German literature, R. W. Fassbinder's (1946–1982) 1974 film of Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest surprised many with the director's unusually sober and restrained visual style and sympathetic treatment of the heroine's fate, both aspects re-creating the book with considerable effectiveness. And Eric Rohmer's (b. 1920) version of Heinrich von Kleist's novella "Die Marquise von O …" (The Marquise of O, 1970) transferred successfully to film the author's ironic and tongue-in-cheek presentation of the heroine's bizarre predicament in finding herself pregnant with no memory of any sexual encounter. Thomas Mann's (1875–1955) novella "Death in Venice," however, was controversially filmed by Visconti in 1971 (Morte a Venezia). Some critics gushed over the visual lushness of the setting and Dirk Bogarde's (1921–1999) fine performance, while others objected to the liberties taken with the central character and the awkward attempts at conveying the aesthetic and philosophical themes of the story. By contrast, Visconti's earlier film of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's (1896–1957) Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), especially in its recent fully restored version in 1996, is a masterpiece both of filmmaking and adaptation, brilliantly re-creating both the period setting and the moral and political dilemmas faced by the main character. Other major Italian successes are Bernardo Bertolucci's (b. 1941) Strategia del rango (The Spider's Stratagem, 1970), from a story by Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), and Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970) from Alberto Moravia's (1907–1990) novel, with both films expressing their director's personal vision.

The first Japanese film to achieve international success, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), was based on two stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927). The classic novels of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) and Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) have provided source material for several films by Kon Ichikawa (b. 1915) and Mikio Naruse (1905–1969) respectively, while Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001) has specialized in adapting the idiosyncratic fiction of Ko^®ô Abe (1924–1993), with Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes, 1964) becoming an international art house favorite.

Charles Dickens has been the most frequently filmed of classical English novelists, followed, especially in the 1990s, by Jane Austen, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and E. M. Forster (1879–1970). Each of Austen's six novels has been filmed, either for the cinema or for television, with the most acclaimed versions being Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995), Persuasion (Roger Michell, 1995), and the television Pride and Prejudice (also 1995), which compares favorably with the still popular 1940 version starring Greer Garson (1908–1996) and Laurence Olivier (1907–1989). The updating of Emma as Clueless (1995) retains many of Austen's themes but sets them in the context of a contemporary American high school.

The adaptations of E. M. Forster and Henry James by the team of Ismail Merchant (1936–2005) and James Ivory (b. 1928) have often been dismissed as "Masterpiece Theatre" material for their emphasis on accuracy of costume and setting and their close adherence to the details of characterization and plot at the expense of deeper thematic concerns, thus providing merely an agreeable illustration of the text rather than an interpretation of it. Perhaps in reaction to the Merchant-Ivory approach, several recent versions of James's works have attempted to modernize and make explicit what is left unsaid, and to the reader's imagination, in the originals, most obviously in The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996) and The Wings of the Dove (Iain Softley, 1997); Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999) has been accused of imposing an overtly political meaning on a nonpolitical text, and Vanity Fair (Mira Nair, 2004) turns William Makepeace Thackeray's (1811–1863) manipulative and possibly murderous Becky Sharp into a feminist heroine.

Other English classic authors frequently filmed include Emily (1818–1848) and Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), with William Wyler's (1902–1981) 1939 version of Wuthering Heights, despite dealing with only half of the book, being still the most powerful and atmospheric treatment, and the 1944 Jane Eyre maintaining its superiority to most recent versions. Thomas Hardy has been well served by Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967), Tess (Roman Polanski, 1979), and Jude (Michael Winterbottom, 1996). The exquisitely beautiful Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) catches perfectly the sense of waste and decay beneath the glittering surface of the worlds of high society and war central to Thackeray's novel. From the eighteenth century, Henry Fielding's (1707–1754) Tom Jones was filmed as a high-spirited romp by Tony Richardson (1928–1991) in 1963, an approach that captures one aspect of the novel but far from all of it, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has been filmed often, most surprisingly—and effectively—by Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) (Las adventuas de Robinson Crusoe, 1954).

Among the "moderns" Graham Greene heads the list, though his novels have rarely been filmed with much success apart from the 1947 Brighton Rock, and it is strange that so inherently cinematic a novelist should have been so poorly served on film. Of the two versions of The Quiet American (1958 and 2002) and The End of the Affair (1955 and 2004), the more recent of each title has been the more successful, but Greene still awaits his ideal adaptor. Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and D. H. Lawrence, whose works have frequently been adapted to film, have rarely been re-created successfully. Alfred Hitchcock's (1899–1980) film of Secret Agent, titled Sabotage (1936), is more Hitchcock than Conrad, and Christopher Hampton's 1996 version is more respectful than inspired. Much the same is true of probably the best of the Lawrence adaptations, the 1960 Sons and Lovers, while Ken Russell's (b. 1927) Women in Love (1969) is better suited to fans of the director than of the author. The fiction of a supposedly lesser author, W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), has fared better,

JOHN HUSTON
b. Nevada, Missouri, 5 August 1906, d. Newport, Rhode Island, 28 August 1987

John Huston, the son of the actor Walter Huston, was a boxer, actor, and journalist before becoming a scriptwriter and then writer/director. Almost all his films were based on literary sources, ranging from established literary greats such as James Joyce, Herman Melville, Rudyard Kipling, and Dashiell Hammett to other largely forgotten authors. His directorial career began with a masterpiece of both filmmaking and adaptation, The Maltese Falcon (1941), and it ended with another, The Dead in 1987.

Because he drew on such a wide variety of sources, it is difficult to identify "auteurist" elements in Huston's work. Critics generally pick out such themes as group endeavours and quests (often criminal) that fail as a result of moral flaws—particularly greed and self-interest—among the participants. This view applies to some of his best work, such as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975), though not to the majority of his other films. As someone given considerable freedom to choose his own projects, Huston seems to have rather randomly decided on works that appealed to him personally (as with the boxing theme of Fat City, 1972) or gave him the chance to travel to exotic foreign locations (The African Queen, 1951, and The Roots of Heaven, 1958).

Huston's "invisible" camera style is generally subordinated to presentation of character and plot, although lighting, camera angles, editing, close-ups, gesture, movement, and the use of space are never mechanical and always contribute to understanding and responding to the film's meaning. In his color films especially, however, Huston often conducted daring and controversial experiments, as in the attempt in Moulin Rouge (1952) to re-create the ambience of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) drained every color except red from the image to produce an overall golden glow that was promptly restored to full color by an outraged studio. One of his finest films, Wise Blood (1979), uses distorted camera angles and unnatural color effects to create the bizarre world of Flannery O'Connor's novel and its half-crazed main character.

Huston was also prepared to alter plot and characterization where necessary. The characters played by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen are markedly different from those of the novel, and the book's ending is altered to make the quest succeed (for once). In The Asphalt Jungle, Dix Handley, the "hooligan" played by Sterling Hayden, is presented with far more sympathy than in W. R. Burnett's novel, and the closing scene in which Dix dies in a field surrounded by his beloved horses is far more moving than Burnett's more prosaic ending and remains one of the most memorable images in all of Huston's work

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The African Queen (1951), Moby Dick (1956), The Unforgiven (1960), The Night of the Iguana (1964), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Wise Blood (1979), Under the Volcano (1984), Prizzi's Honor (1985), The Dead (1987)

CASE STUDY: ADAPTATIONS
OF CHARLES DICKENS

Dickens has been by far the most filmed of English novelists, with something like one hundred versions in the silent era alone, and numerous further adaptations for both film and television, continuing to the present day. The earliest films could cope only with well-known incidents or brief character sketches from the books; the sheer length of the major novels has always proved a serious stumbling block. It was natural, then, that the first attempts at full-length treatment would be with shorter works such as A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, or Oliver Twist, all filmed several times each before 1920.

Though Dickens has often been called the most cinematic of novelists, his books are far from easy to film satisfactorily. The mixture of realism and symbolism, especially in the later novels, the often larger-than-life or grotesque characters, the first-person narration of some books, the pervasive authorial narrative tone and commentary of others, the sheer scope and variety of characters, incidents and settings, and the insistent social and moral analysis of the later works in particular, all provide formidable barriers that have rarely been totally overcome. All of the thirteen novels have been filmed at one time or another, but the choice has consistently been skewed toward the more realistic, usually early, works, or to those that contain the best-known characters—where the filmmaker is often assisted by the illustrations of George Cruikshank (1792–1878) and "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne) (1815–1882), which accompanied the original publications. The complex, densely structured, darker books like Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend have generally met with far less favor.

Though few, if any, of the film adaptations have coped with all the challenges presented by the books, there have been several at least partial successes. David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations have been the most frequently filmed, with, in almost every case, the focus being fixed on character and plot rather than the social criticism that made Dickens such an important figure in his time. The most notable of these include the MGM David Copperfield of 1935, sensitively directed by George Cukor (1899–1983) and with inspired casting that included W. C. Fields (1880–1946) as Micawber, and the same studio's A Tale of Two Cities (also 1935), with a memorable performance by Ronald Colman (1891–1958) as Sydney Carton. These two films still stand as the best adaptations of these books. David Lean's (1908–1991) Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) are generally considered the classic treatments of these works and the definitive A Christmas Carol is widely acknowledged to be the 1951 Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim (1900–1976). Though Lean's Great Expectations is often considered the finest of Dickens adaptations, it can be argued that his version of Oliver Twist succeeds better in capturing the many dimensions of Dickens's work—the realistic, the grotesque, the comical, the social comment, the sentimental, the symbolic, the fascination with violence—presented in imagery that creates London both as a real city and a symbolic underworld. It does all this much more successfully than Polanski's disappointing treatment (2005). Other interesting versions of less frequently filmed works include The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Stuart Walker, 1935), Nicholas Nickleby (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947), and the ambitious but flawed two-part Little Dorrit (Christine Edzard, 1988). The well-cast and intelligently reworked Nicholas Nickleby (Douglas McGrath, 2002) unfortunately met with scant interest at the box office. In recent years the most impressive adaptations have come from British television, where the serial format of three to four hours or more can allow a fuller and more leisurely treatment of the texts. Some of the best of these have been Granada Television's Hard Times (1977) and the BBC's Bleak House (1985), Martin Chuzzlewit (1994), and Our Mutual Friend (1998)—all of them books largely neglected by the cinema.

Although all the films mentioned are set in the Victorian period, there have been some attempts at updating them. Rich Man's Folly (1931), a truncated and unsatisfactory version of Dombey and Son, is set at the time of filming, as is a misbegotten Great Expectations (Alfonso Cuarón, 1998), which succeeds in getting almost everything about the novel wrong. By far the best updating is the Portuguese director Joâo Botelho's (b. 1949) Tempos difíceis (Hard Times, 1989), where Dickens's assault on the capitalist mentality remains as relevant today as it was during his lifetime. And, although most of the films based on Dickens's works have come from the English-speaking world, there have also been German, French, Italian, Danish, Russian, and Hungarian treatments, mostly in the silent period.

GENRE ADAPTATIONS: WESTERNS,
CRIME, AND FILM NOIR

American cinema is largely a genre cinema. Melodramas, westerns, crime and gangster films, science fiction films, historical and biblical epics, comedies, war films, and musicals have formed the staple of its offerings from the very beginning. A surprising number of these are based on written sources, but because most of these are not canonical in the way that the works of Dickens or Austen are, this goes largely unnoticed and scant attention is paid to whether they have been faithfully adapted or not. As almost all of these genres focus on action, movement, setting (urban or rural), and atmosphere, and generally offer little scope for complexity of character, elaborately phrased dialogue, or intense psychological analysis, they are eminently suited for film.

The inherently "filmic" genre of the western is far more dependent on written sources than is generally realized, ranging from some of the few acknowledged literary classics such as Jack Schaefer's (1907–1991) Shane, filmed by George Stevens (1904–1985) in 1953, to the more ephemeral magazine stories and pulp novels on which films like High Noon (1952) and Stagecoach (1939) were based. In these and similar cases, little more than a basic plot and some aspects of character and setting are generally all that is taken over from source to film.

Crime and gangster films, including films noirs, are also heavily indebted to literary sources, many of them now gaining belated critical respect. Here, too, a considerable laxity in transformation from book to film has been widespread, even with major writers such as Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), where only The Maltese Falcon (1941) has survived intact in its adapted form. Less "reputable" writers such as James M. Cain (1892–1977), Jim Thompson (1906–1977), Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968), and David Goodis (1917–1967) have nevertheless provided the basis for some of the finest of American (and also French) films, once again in the form of loose or free rather than strict adaptations. Cain's Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice (filmed at least four times to date), and Mildred Pierce were turned into 1940s classics, and a sudden vogue for Thompson produced several adaptations in the 1980s and 1990s, the most successful probably being Coup de Torchon (Clean Up, Bertrand Tavernier, 1981), based on Pop. 1280, which, despite being set in French colonial Africa rather than the American South, brilliantly captures the sleaze, cynicism, and nihilism of the novel. Woolrich, under both that name and William Irish, wrote the original story that Hitchcock filmed, much altered and expanded, as Rear Window (1954), and also the novels on which Hitchcock's admirer François Truffaut (1932–1984) based La marié était en noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1968) and The Mississippi Mermaid (1969), as well as providing the source for such films noirs as Phantom Lady (1944). Truffaut also filmed, with considerable fidelity, Goodis's despairing Down There as Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Pianist, 1960).

The Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) and his novel The Hound of the Baskervilles have been endlessly reworked (or, in some cases, invented) for both film and television, with critical debate centering mainly on who has been the "best" or most "authentic" Holmes or Watson; a similar fate has met Ian Fleming's (1908–1964) James Bond. And a rather neglected figure in crime fiction, W. R. Burnett (1899–1982), provided the original stories on which such classics as Little Caesar (1931), High Sierra (1941), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950) were based.

RAYMOND CHANDLER
b. Chicago, Illinois, 23 July 1888, d. La Jolla, California, 26 March 1959

Educated in England, Raymond Chandler worked as an accountant and in a bank on returning to America before turning to writing pulp fiction in the 1930s. The success of his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), brought him an invitation to Hollywood. His involvement with film had two aspects: as screenwriter and as author of six novels adapted for the screen, some of them more than once. After a rewarding experience collaborating with Billy Wilder on the script of Double Indemnity (1944), Chandler became increasingly disillusioned with Hollywood and attacked it as a soul-destroying environment in articles written for Atlantic Monthly. Apart from receiving cowriting credit on two minor films in 1944 and 1945, his only further completed work for the screen was an original script for The Blue Dahlia (1946). He received only cowriter credit on Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) after disagreements with the director.

The first two film versions of his novels, The Falcon Takes Over (1942), loosely based on Farewell, My Lovely, and Time to Kill (1942), based on The High Window, retained only aspects of the plots and created a Philip Marlowe character very different from Chandler's original. A more serious attempt at adapting Chandler's work came in Murder, My Sweet (1944), again from Farewell, My Lovely, with Marlowe played by Dick Powell. This was followed by what is considered to be the finest Chandler adaptation, The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart as the definitive Marlowe, even though he played the role only once. The Lady in the Lake (1947) made a largely unsuccessful attempt to use the camera as first-person narrator, with Marlowe seen only in mirrors until the very end of the film. The Brasher Doubloon (1947), a weak adaptation of The High Window, starred George Montgomery as an unconvincing Marlowe.

Twenty years passed before further adaptations were made, creating problems with attempts to re-create the very specific 1940s settings, themes, and ethos of the novels. Marlowe (1969), based on The Little Sister and starring James Garner, updated the story to the 1960s and presented the hero as a figure of integrity who was out of step with the times. Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) went even further by presenting Elliot Gould as a bewildered and largely ineffectual figure in 1970s Los Angeles—and treated as a figure of fun by most of the other characters. Although the film was disliked by many Chandler admirers, it remains a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The two most recent versions both starred an ageing Robert Mitchum. Farewell, My Lovely (1975) took great pains to re-create the settings and atmosphere of the book, and a Big Sleep (1978), directed by Michael Winner and set bizarrely in contemporary London, suffered fatally by comparison with Hawks's film.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Double Indemnity (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), The Blue Dahlia (1946), The Lady in the Lake (1947), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Long Goodbye (1973), Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

THEATRICAL ADAPTATIONS

Film historians have noted the close links between theatrical melodrama of the late nineteenth century and the techniques and narrative structure of early film—in content and elaborate lighting and stage effects. The obvious similarities between a play and a film—in overall length, use of sets, the apparent realism of character and dialogue—have obscured the very real differences. Stage dialogue can sound artificial and tedious when transferred directly to the more naturalistic medium of film, and, as with fiction, a successful adaptation has to be thoroughly rethought in terms of the new, primarily visual, medium of cinema. While the faults of mechanically adapted "filmed theater" are usually obvious, there

is equal danger in attempts to "open out" a play by transferring interior scenes into exotic outdoor locations and hoping that will somehow make the work more cinematic. Some sort of balance between stage and film effects is therefore essential. Sidney Lumet's (b. 1924) filming of Eugene O'Neill's (1888–1953) Long Day's Journey into Night (1962) achieves its claustrophobic effect by respecting the spatial limitations of the stage while transforming it through skillful use of camera movement and lighting, and by varying screen space and distance for dramatic effect.

Shakespeare has been by far the most adapted playwright worldwide, even in the silent period, when extracts and condensed versions of his plays proliferated in most European countries as well as in Britain and the United States. The coming of sound brought the inevitable problem of how to make poetic dialogue convincing in the more naturalistic medium of film. It is often argued that the finest of all Shakespeare films is Kurosawa's 1957 Kumonosu jô (Throne of Blood), which is based on Macbeth. It retains almost nothing of the dialogue, even in Japanese, while majestically transforming theme, emotion, and imagery into purely visual terms, with Macbeth constantly surrounded by images of fog, nets, and labyrinths. Though Grigori Kozintsev's (1905–1973) Gamlet (Hamlet, 1964) and Korol Lir (King Lear, 1970) use Boris Pasternak's (1890–1960) translation of the plays, the non-Russian–speaking viewer, forced to rely on subtitles, can perhaps appreciate better the stark black-and-white imagery of the films.

The most admired English-language versions usually attempt a compromise between stylization and naturalism, both in speech and action; for example, Laurence Olivier used the confined space of the castle set in Hamlet (1948) and allowed the camera full rein in the battle scenes of Henry V (1944). Polanski's Macbeth (1971) accentuates the physical violence inherent in the play, and Orson Welles (1915–1985) brings his own superb visual sense to his Othello (1952) and Campanadas a medianoche (Chimes at Midnight, 1967, based on the Henry IV plays) without neglecting the spoken word. Examples of more radical transformations are the updating of Romeo and Juliet by Baz Luhrmann (1996) and the intensely personal re-creations of The Tempest (1979) by Derek Jarman (1942–1994) and Peter Greenaway (b. 1942) (as Prospero's Books, 1990). Kenneth Branagh (b. 1960), in seemingly open competition with Olivier, has filmed an uncut Hamlet (1996) and an impressive Henry V (1989), among others.

The most often filmed English dramatists after Shakespeare have been George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Noel Coward (1899–1973), Terence Rattigan (1911–1977), and Oscar Wilde (1856–1900). In most cases the results have been respectful and moderately faithful rather than inspired (though the 1928 film of Coward's The Vortex and the 1933 Design for Living had to be drastically altered to escape the censors). Anthony Asquith's (1902–1968) 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest still far surpasses later versions of Wilde, both as a film and as an adaptation, and both versions of Rattigan's The Browning Version (1951, 1994) and The Winslow Boy (1948, 1999) remain popular.

Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), Arthur Miller (1915–2005), Clifford Odets (1906–1963), and Lillian Hellman (1906–1984) are among the most frequently adapted American playwrights, though, with Williams in particular, contentious subject matter has often forced major alterations between stage and screen. A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan in 1951, remains the classic transformation of his work. Apart from the version of Long Day's Journey into Night, the best O'Neill adaptation has been John Frankenheimer's (1930–2002) The Iceman Cometh (1975). Hellman's The Little Foxes (1941) became a classic film through William Wyler, but Clash by Night (1952) and The Big Knife (1955) are largely rewritten versions of Odets. Perhaps the most interesting film based on Arthur Miller's work is Sorcières de Salem (TheWitches of Salem, 1957), from The Crucible, with a script by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).

In Europe, Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), August Strindberg (1849–1912), and Anton Chekov (1860–1904) have often been adapted. The 1951 Fröken Julie (Miss Julie), directed by Alf Sjöberg (1903–1980), is still the best Strindberg, but few of the English-language films of Ibsen and Chekov have been particularly successful. Jean Renoir (Les bas-fonds, 1936) and Akira Kurosawa (Donzoko, 1957) made very different but equally fascinating films of Maxim Gorky's (1868–1936) The Lower Depths.

OTHER KINDS OF ADAPTATION

Detstvo Gorkogo (The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, 1938), directed by Mark Donskoy (1901–1981), remains one of the finest of film biographies/autobiographies, but most such films are bedevilled by questions of authenticity, for content is more important here than transforming sophisticated literary techniques into film. Does the leading actor really resemble the subject (whose photos or portraits are usually well known)? Is the film factually accurate or truthful (and is this true of its source)? Is it slanted in favor of or against the protagonist? Are there distortions of fact, omissions, invented incidents or encounters? Some film biographies, such as Finding Neverland (2004), admit to not being completely factual, but most do not, and the majority of such films are built up by drawing on a variety of sources, augmented by scenes imagined or created by the scriptwriter. The result, as in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), may be superb cinema but should not necessarily be considered a definitive account of the subject's life.

Comic books and comic strips have proved a consistent source of film material, though the various treatments of Batman and Superman, for example, usually consist of rewritten works based on a variety of incidents taken from the original rather than an adaptation of one particular story. Many popular television series have been turned into films, such as The Addams Family (1991) or The Brady Bunch (1995), on much the same principle of selection, and the recent vogue for graphic novels has also spilled over into film, as with Ghost World (2001) from the original by Daniel Clowes (b. 1961).

Films for children tend to be either live action, as in the several versions of Little Women (1933, 1949, 1994) and The Secret Garden (most recently 1993), or animated, as with the Disney classics Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Bambi (1942), though more recent films from that studio are too often saccharine distortions of what were quite tough-minded originals. The digital animation of The Polar Express (2004) recreates the visual world of the book very convincingly. Opera on film tends to be similar to "canned theater" (Miss Julie), directed by Alf Sjo with a few exceptions, such as Joseph Losey's (1909–1984) Don Giovanni (1979) or Francesco Rosi's (b. 1922) Carmen (1984), which were well reimagined for film. And longer poems such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's (1807–1882) Hiawatha (1952) or Alfred Lord Tennyson's (1809–1892) The Charge of the Light Brigade and Geoffrey Chaucer's (1340–1400) The Canterbury Tales have become (very loosely) the basis for feature-length films. Overall, then, almost anything written, or even drawn, can be transformed into a film, either faithfully or altered almost out of recognition, with success depending as much on the skill and intelligence of the filmmaker as the often uneven quality of the original material.