The History of British Literature on Film, 1895–2015 9781623560430, 9781501304460, 9781623561154

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Attractions, tricks, and fairy tales: Visual and theatrical culture in the Brit-Lit film, 1896–1907
2. “Crude, Vicious, and Lascivious Entertainments”: The rise of the Brit-Lit feature film, 1907–20
3. Internationalizing the Brit-Lit film: Hollywood and the world film market, 1920–27
4. Sound, studios, and censorship: The Brit-Lit film, 1927–39
5. The empire strikes back: Britain’s reclamation of Brit-Lit, 1939–57
6. Traditions and revolutions: The Brit-Lit film, 1957–79
7. The Brit-Lit film after film, 1979–2015
Notes
Bibliography
Flim Index
General Index

Citation preview

The History of British Literature on Film, 1895–2015

THE HISTORY OF WORLD LITERATURES ON FILM, 1895–2015 Series Editors: Greg M. Colón Semenza and Bob Hasenfratz Forthcoming Volumes in the Series The History of German Literature on Film (2017) Christiane Schönfeld, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland The History of American Literature on Film (2018) Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, USA The History of French Literature on Film (2019) Kate Griffiths, Cardiff University, UK, and Andrew Watts, University of Birmingham, UK

The History of British Literature on Film, 1895–2015 GREG M. COLÓN SEMENZA AND BOB HASENFRATZ

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Greg M. Colón Semenza & Bob Hasenfratz, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Semenza, Gregory M. Colón, 1972– The history of British literature on film, 1895–2015/Greg M. Colón Semenza & Bob Hasenfratz. pages cm. – (The history of world literatures on film) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-6235-6043-0 (hardback) 1. Motion pictures and literature. 2. British literature–Film adaptations. 3. Film adaptations. 4. Motion pictures–History. I. Hasenfratz, Bob, 1957– II. Title. PN1995.3.S46 2015 791.43’6–dc23 2015000517 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6043-0 PB: 978-1-5013-2985-2 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6115-4 ePub: 978-1-6235-6187-1 Cover images (clockwise from top left): Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde showing John Barrymore, 1920, dir. John S. Robertson © Famous Players / Lasky / The Kobal Collection Throne of Blood (aka Kumonosu Jo), showing Toshiro Mifune, 1957, dir. Akira Kurosawa © Courtesy Everett Collection / REX Pride and Prejudice showing Brenda Blethyn and Keira Knightley, 2005, dir. Joe Wright © Working Title / The Kobal Collection / Alex BaileySkyfall showing Daniel Craig, 2012, dir. Sam Mendes © EON Productions / The Kobal Collection Series: The History of World Literatures on Film Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

This book is dedicated to Greg Semenza (Sr.) and Wayne and Nancy Hasenfratz

Contents List of Figures viii Acknowledgments

Introduction

xiii

1

1

Attractions, tricks, and fairy tales: Visual and theatrical culture in the Brit-Lit film, 1896–1907 27

2

“Crude, Vicious, and Lascivious Entertainments”: The rise of the Brit-Lit feature film, 1907–20 71

3

Internationalizing the Brit-Lit film: Hollywood and the world film market, 1920–27 115

4

Sound, studios, and censorship: The Brit-Lit film, 1927–39

5

The empire strikes back: Britain’s reclamation of Brit-Lit, 1939–57 207

6

Traditions and revolutions: The Brit-Lit film, 1957–79

7

The Brit-Lit film after film, 1979–2015

Notes 379 Bibliography 419 Flim Index 437 General Index 449

319

267

155

List of figures Figure 1

True Lovers in A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Figure 2

The American Prosecutor in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) 3

Figure 3

Percy, Mary, and Byron in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 24

Figure 4

The True Face of Frankenstein’s Creature in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 25

Figure 1.1

Theatrical Advertisement, 1890

Figure 1.2

1880 Poster for a Production of Oliver Twist

Figure 1.3

Still Images from Death of Nancy Sykes (1897)

Figure 1.4

The Last Days of Pompeii (1898)

Figure 1.5

Mr Bumble and Mrs Corney Taking Tea (Cruikshank)

Figure 1.6

Illustration for H. Rider Haggard’s She: History of an Adventure 52

Figure 1.7

Scene (1) from Haggard’s She: The Pillar of Fire (1899)

54

Figure 1.8

Scene (2) from Haggard’s She: The Pillar of Fire (1899)

54

Figure 1.9

Scene from Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost (1901)

Figure 1.10

Scene (1) from Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk (1902)

59

Figure 1.11

Scene (2) from Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk (1902)

59

Figure 1.12

Scene (1) from Gulliver’s Travels (1902)

63

Figure 1.13

Scene (2) from Gulliver’s Travels (1902)

63

Figure 1.14

Contrasting Scenes: Tenniel’s White Rabbit

Figure 1.15

Contrasting Scenes: Stow-Hepworth’s White Rabbit

Figure 2.1

Dante’s First Swoon in Milano’s L’Inferno (1911)

2

33 35 38

46 49

57

66

87

66

ix

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.2

Dante and Virgil Wind Their Way through the Circle of Gluttons (L’Inferno, 1911) 87

Figure 2.3

Alma (Seena Owen) Subjected to Ricardo’s Gaze in Tourneur’s Victory (1919) 88

Figure 2.4

Annie and Her Children on the Lookout for Enoch Arden (1911) 92

Figure 2.5

Enoch Looks Westward for Annie (Enoch Arden, 1911)

Figures 2.6–2.7

The Sun Lights Enoch’s Death and Annie’s Rebirth (Enoch Arden, 1911) 93

Figures 2.8–2.9

The Millworker’s Crowded Home and the Mill Owner’s Mansion in Thanhouser’s The Cry of the Children (1912) 100

Figure 2.10

The Millworkers Relieved by their Daughter’s Newfound Peace in Thanhouser’s The Cry of the Children (1912) 101

Figure 2.11

Victorian London in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) 105

92

Figures 2.12–2.13 Minimal Effects In Hyde’s ( John Barrymore) First “Reveal” in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1920) 106

Figure 2.14

Hyde’s (Barrymore) Increasingly Monstrous Appearance in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) 107

Figure 2.15

Hyde’s Elongated, Spider-Like Skull in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) 107

Figure 2.16

The Tempting Miss Gina in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) 109

Figure 2.17

Hyde Flirts with Gina and a Prostitute in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) 110

Figure 2.18

The Opium Den in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) 110

Figure 2.19

Hyde (Sheldon Lewis) Coiled for an Attack in Haydon’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) 112

Figure 2.20

An Insane Hyde (Lewis) Strapped into the Electric Chair in Haydon’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) 112

Figure 3.1

Griffith’s “Soft Focus” in Broken Blossoms (1919)

124

x

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.2

“Old-school” Camerawork in the “Asta Nielsen Hamlet” (1920) 125

Figure 3.3

Claudius’s Writhing Snakes in Hamlet (1920)

Figure 3.4

Private Chambers in Hamlet (1920)

Figure 3.5

Asta Nielen’s “Expressionist” Body (1920)

130

Figure 3.6

Murnau’s Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922)

131

Figure 3.7

Shakespeare in China: A Spray of Plum Blossoms (1931)

Figure 3.8

Stan Laurel as the Terrifying “Mr. Pride” (1925)

Figure 3.9

Alice Meets Walt Disney (1923)

Figure 3.10

George Ali as Nana (Peter Pan, 1924)

Figure 3.11

Tinkerbell in Brenon’s Peter Pan (1924)

Figure 3.12

Willis O’Brien’s Stop-Motion Dinosaurs in The Lost World (1925) 153

Figure 4.1

The Letter (1929)

Figure 4.2

Writing Credits, Frankenstein (1931)

Figure 4.3

Writing Credits, Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Figure 4.4

Poster, Dracula (1931)

Figure 4.5

Poster, David Copperfield (1935)

Figure 4.6

Penistone Crag, Wuthering Heights (1939)

Figure 4.7

Poster, The Old Dark House (1932)

Figure 4.8

Poster, Wuthering Heights (1939)

Figure 4.9

Poster, Cumbres Borrascosas (1939)

Figure 4.10

Poster, Wuthering Heights (1939)

Figure 4.11

Credits, Things to Come (1936)

Figure 4.12

Everytown, Things to Come (1936)

Figure 4.13

Robert Donat as Mr Chipping, Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Figure 4.14

Kipling Looks on as his Poem is Read: Gunga Din (1939)

Figure 5.1

Watson and Holmes’s Shakespearean Vision of England. From Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942) 209

128

129

134

146

147 151 152

164 170 170

171 180 186

187 187 188

189

193 194 199

204

xi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 5.2

Chaucer’s General Prologue in A Canterbury Tale (1944) 216

Figure 5.3

Chaucer’s Pilgrims in A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Figure 5.4

New York Echoes of Canterbury in the American Version of A Canterbury Tale (1944) 218

Figure 5.5

Model of Renaissance London in Henry V (1944)

Figure 5.6

A Maniacal Paul in The Rocking Horse Winner (1949)

Figure 5.7

Harsh Realities in Jane Eyre (1943)

Figure 5.8

The Shocking Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

Figure 5.9

Cinematography by J. Roy Hunt in I Walked with a Zombie (1943) 240

Figure 5.10

“King Gino” in House of Strangers (1949)

Figure 5.11

Morbius’s Ariel, Robby, in Forbidden Planet (1956)

Figure 5.12

Friz Freleng’s “Hyde and Hare” (1955)

Figure 5.13

An Audience Adapts Shakespeare in Paradise in Harlem (1939) 250

Figure 5.14

The Weird Sisters of Welles’s Macbeth (1948)

Figure 5.15

Nature Overwhelms Washizu in Throne of Blood (1957)

Figure 6.1

Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Desertscape

Figure 6.2

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967): Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene 274

Figure 6.3

Mary Poppins (1964): Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke

Figure 6.4

Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Figure 6.5

William Marshall in Blacula (1972)

Figure 6.6

Jo and Geoffrey in A Taste of Honey (1961)

Figure 6.7

Polanski’s Tess (1979): Nastassja Kinski as Tess

Figure 6.8

Albert Finney in Tom Jones (1963)

Figure 6.9

Pasolini as Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (1972)

Figure 6.10

Tavern Scene from Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Figure 6.11

Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

217

221 225

237 238

242 244

248

261 264

272

283

285 293 302

303

311

305

308

278

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 6.12

The Ludovico Technique: A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Figure 6.13

Kurtz reads Eliot in Apocalypse Now (1979)

Figure 7.1

Hamlet gets the Disney Treatment in The Lion King (1996) 327

Figure 7.2

Amy Heckerling’s Influential Austen Appropriation, Clueless (1995) 329

Figure 7.3

Ursula Andress’s Iconic Turn in Dr. No (1962)

Figure 7.4

Daniel Craig in Casino Royale (2006)

Figure 7.5

The Memorable “Great Hall” of Hogwarts (Harry Potter, 2001–11) 336

Figure 7.6

Ian McKellen’s Fascist Richard III (1995)

Figure 7.7

The Play within Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980)

Figure 7.8

The Overlaying Technique of Prospero’s Books (1991)

Figure 7.9

Andy Serkis as Gollum in The Return of the King (2003)

Figure 7.10

Close-up on the Lovers of Whedon’s Much Ado about Nothing (2012) 352

Figure 7.11

Amateur Actors of the Antandroy Tribe in Makibefo (1999) 363

Figure 7.12

The Unworthy Scaffold in Branagh’s Henry V (1989)

367

Figure 7.13

Shakespearean “Body Film” (Tromeo and Juliet, 1996)

371

Figure 7.14

James Howson as Heathcliff in Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) 375

Figure 7.15

The Shallow-Focus Close-ups of Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) 376

313

315

333

334

340 346 348 350

Acknowledgments W

riting this book has been both an immense joy and a most humbling experience. In spite of all the work, we’re well aware how much remains to be done. For everything that’s good in these pages, however, we owe our thanks to many friends and colleagues, whose support and ideas helped to power us through: Marco Abel, Tommy Anderson, Richard Bleiler, Margaret Breen, Keith Champagne, Chris Clark, Charlie Eaton, Sean Grass, Sherry Harris, Mary Isbell, Brendan Kane, Eric Lorentzen, Charles Mahoney, Ryan Netzley, Penelope Pellizon, Karen Renner, Iris Rivero, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Garrett Sullivan, Cassie Thomas, Chris Vials, Reggie Wilburn, and Simon Yarrow. Within the adaptation studies and wider scholarly communities, numerous colleagues have kindly offered us some combination of their time, advice, and exemplary scholarship. Special thanks to Eric Brown, Mark Thornton Burnett, Richard Burt, Maurizio Calbi, Tom Cartelli, Deborah Cartmell, Timothy Corrigan, Melissa Croteau, Craig Dionne, Stanley Fish, Michael Friedman, David Gillespie, Michael Gardiner, Kate Griffiths, Alexander Huang, Laura Knoppers, Doug Lanier, Courtney Lehmann, Tom Leitch, David Mayer, Penny Marcus, Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Gino Moliterno, Scott Newstock, Niamh O’Leary, Jonathan Olson, Laurie Osborne, Amy Rodgers, Katherine Rowe, Christiane Schonfeld, Lauren Shohet, Carlo Testa, Ayanna Thompson, Richard Vela, Andrew Watts, Viv Westbrook, Kevin Wetmore, and Ramona Wray. Our Bloomsbury editor Katie Gallof has been most supportive of our work both on this book and The History of World Literatures on Film series; she is a true partner in this endeavor. Mary Al-Sayed has been equally delightful to work with. The staff members of several institutions helped to make this book possible: the British Film Institute (BFI), the British Library, the Deutsche Kinemathek, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the George Eastman House (especially Jared Case), the US Library of Congress, the Tokyo National Film Center, and the Yale Film Study Center. Closer to home, UConn’s Homer Babbidge Library staff performed their usual magic. Both time and money were generously provided by UConn’s Humanities Institute and Research Foundation. Two of our undergraduate students, Kyle Piscioniere and John Mango, provided invaluable research assistance at various stages of this project.

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many of our graduate students—current and former—have influenced our thinking about adaptation, whether through seminars, independent studies, or sometimes even their own publications: Sarah Berry, Chris Bertucci, Jeremy DeAngelo, Jon Kotchian, Pamela Longo, George Moore, Kate Ormsby, Asia Rowe, Amanda Ruud, Christiana Salah, Patricia Taylor, and Kate Tomkie. On a more personal note, Greg would like to thank his mother, Marti, and Suzy Kight for all that she does; Bob and Terri Colón, who’ve made it possible to function in recent years; his sons Alex and Ben, who were thrilled to help out with “work” whenever James Bond, Harry Potter, or Gandalf were on screen (teaching them about the history of film has been one of his great pleasures in recent years); and Cristina, who manages to amaze even after all this time—most recently, for her brave decision to start studying again. He dedicates this book to his father, who first taught him the necessity of learning to argue about the movies. Bob is grateful to Cathy Schlund-Vials for her friendship, scholarship, and advice; he thanks Penelope “Noir” Pelizzon for the impromptu dinners, trail walks with the dogs, and movie talk. Sally and Anne cheered him up with phone calls from home. By doing absolutely nothing to contribute to this book, Cookie Hasenfratz did much to contribute to this book. He dedicates the volume to his parents, Wayne and Nancy, who used to hold hands on their movie dates in Perry over sixty years ago.

Introduction

I

n A Matter of Life and Death (1946), one of several Powell-Pressburger masterpieces of the 1940s, the history of canonical British literature figures centrally as evidence of Great Britain’s continuing and future relevance on the world stage. It’s the surreal tale of a Royal Air Force pilot and poet named Peter Carter (David Niven) who jumps from a doomed bomber without a parachute yet fails to die. He washes up on a Devon beach the next morning and soon after meets June (Kim Hunter), an American radio operator and the last person he’d spoken to before the plane went down. Immediately in love, they soon learn from a visiting angel that Peter must be escorted to heaven; he is alive only because this angel lost track of him in the thick fog and flames which had enveloped the falling plane. Peter and June appeal his case on the grounds that he was not responsible for the mistake and should therefore be allowed to live a full life with his beloved (see Figure 1). The second part of the film takes place in heaven itself (prompting a retitling for American release: Stairway to Heaven), where Peter is defended by a British neuroscientist and friend (Roger Livesey) and accused by an American (cheekily played by Canadian actor Raymond Massey) who hates the British for having killed him during the Revolutionary War. June and Peter prove to a celestial American jury that “nothing is stronger than love,” and so Peter is granted his reprieve from death. The only thing more bizarre than this plot is the fact that it works so wonderfully. The film’s success is all the more surprising given that it bombards the audience with extended references to British poetry. As Peter banters with June prior to jumping from the plane, he recites lines from “His Pilgrimage,” remarking that “Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that. I’d rather have written that than flown through Hitler’s legs.” When June asks moments later whether he still can hear her, he quotes Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” quipping, “Andy Marvell, what a marvel.”1 As many readers will know, regular allusions to British literature and history were a staple of both American and British Second World War films, serving strategically to remind audiences of the “glorious past” for which they then were fighting.2 A Matter of Life and Death carries this trend over into the immediate postwar period as part of its attempt to alleviate lingering British and American tensions3; much of the tension had to do with British resentment over the romantic

2

THE HISTORY OF BRITISH LITERATURE ON FILM, 1895–2015

FIGURE 1 True Lovers in A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

involvement of American soldiers and British women—a “problem” which the film addresses through its neat reversal of the typical American male/ British female dynamic.4 As the trial scene unfolds, however, more serious tensions rise to the surface. The bitter American prosecutor begins by asking not only whether a British man is worthy of an American girl of good “stock,” but also whether Britain is worthy of America in any sense (see Figure 2). At the heart of the debate which follows is an uneasy reflection on America’s emergence as a superpower and on Britain’s declining position in world politics. “I’ve been watching you English from upstairs,” Massey’s character says. “Your wars, your politics, your business.” England’s past is then reduced by its accuser to a history of military aggression and imperialism in France, South Africa, Russia, China, India, and Ireland, among other lands—a not-so-subtle critique of the government for having failed to deliver on its wartime oaths to end imperial rule in India and other colonies. At this point, the defense attorney chooses to shift the topic, and it is again to literature that he turns: “But for England, I am ready to call John Donne, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson, Bridges ….” Peter himself is implied to stand somewhere in this line of great poets: his old-world credentials are suggested by the defense speaking admiringly of him as a poet, while disparaging most poetry of the modern era. The British literary tradition lives on in Carter, it is suggested, one more reason he can’t be allowed to die. To the threat of having to face such formidable witnesses, the American decides it’s better to add a few additional literary giants to the list and confess that he is beaten: “And Milton and Shakespeare. I concede your point.” This particular conversation

INTRODUCTION

3

FIGURE 2 The American Prosecutor in A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

about poetry winds up being the first step toward reconciliation, then, the marriage of an old-world ideal characterized by past cultural achievements and a maturity born of experience (Britain), and a new-world one characterized by industrial might and a naive, though contagious, idealism (America). A practical way of stating the matter: the film presents the union of Peter and June, of Britain and America, as a marriage of past and future greatness, promising a more peaceful and productive present. In a certain (limited but important) way of thinking, this book also is about a love-hate affair between Great Britain and America. Though The History of British Literature on Film will take us to six of the planet’s seven continents and nearly all of its major film-producing nations, the relationship between the former empire and its former colony is the most significant, sustained one this book explores—due in large part to Hollywood’s century-old domination of the global movie industry and the two countries’ shared primary language and closely intertwined histories. In spite of the fact that British literature has played so crucial a role in the story of world cinema, and that of Hollywood more specifically, we share film historian Thomas Schatz’s surprise at “how little serious study has been devoted to these interrelated phenomena—that is, the cine-symbiosis between the US and Britain, and Hollywood’s profound investment in British literature for source material.”5 As the references to British literature in A Matter of Life and Death suggest, however, the nature of this “cine-symbiotic” relationship between the United States and Britain has been more complex—more, well, symbiotic—than any unidirectional history of Hollywood appropriation might suggest.

4

THE HISTORY OF BRITISH LITERATURE ON FILM, 1895–2015

For one, the highly calculated appropriations of British literature we’ve been describing here were written into a British film, not an American one, though A Matter of Life and Death does meditate rather deeply on the sort of “Britishness” which tended to appeal to both contemporary UK and US audiences. Thoroughly grounded in its particular place and moment, this unusual production is best read, we would argue, within its several historical contexts—by which we mean especially its political and cinematic contexts. These contexts in turn directly impact the way we understand the ideological functions and dimensions of the film’s appropriations. On the surface at least, A Matter of Life and Death is undeniably conservative in its nostalgic treatment of British history and “high culture” more generally. The film thereby signals both its generic connections to Hollywood and British Second World War films and its participation in the wider cultural initiatives sponsored by such government agencies as the Films Division of the Ministry of Information (MoI), which urged filmmakers during the war years to trumpet “the heroic achievements of the British past.”6 Without question, the particular tradition of achievement lauded by the film is one marked by its appeal to the “good taste” of a decidedly middle-class, white audience. The list of literary titans the film references, all of whom are English, consists almost entirely of lyric poets, includes no women at all, and—with the exception of Peter himself—excludes all modern poets other than Robert Bridges, Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1913–30, who is now all but forgotten outside of academic circles. In a sense, the sort of audience the film imagines this literary tradition appealing to is strikingly similar to the one often described by scholars of the so-called “heritage cinema” of the post-Thatcher period, epitomized by MerchantIvory’s numerous transatlantic hits in the 1980s and early 1990s. On the surface, at least, A Matter of Life and Death would appear to operate rather conservatively, a perception enhanced by its undeniably sentimental yet characteristically mid-1940s tone. Yet in offering its repeated allusions to British literature as appeals of different sorts for the American audiences within the film—first June and, later, the prosecutor and jury members—A Matter of Life and Death also reveals a level of self-reflexiveness that complicates simplistic evaluative binaries like “conservative” and “radical” or “nostalgic” and “progressive.” Perhaps in partial response to Columbia’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), it acknowledges its own position as a British film in relation to Hollywood films, and it playfully announces its willingness to marshal even the most seemingly conservative strategies for the most liberal of causes: international peace, decolonization, et cetera. In such a way, Powell and Pressburger may have been nodding to the sociological functions and production context of their own

INTRODUCTION

5

earlier wartime work such as A Canterbury Tale (1944), which appropriated Chaucer in very distinct ways in separate American and British versions (see below, pp. 215–19). Without question, they also were commenting on the fact that a separate war had been raging in the 1930s and 1940s—this one between America and Britain—for the right to represent Britain on screen. Thus by 1946, at almost the midpoint of the historical period our book covers, the cinematic appropriation of British literature is more than a historical curiosity, artistic preference, or frozen habit; it is a phenomenon of political as well as aesthetic significance, which filmmakers pondered systematically and self-consciously. For this reason, it is also the general subject of this book, The History of British Literature on Film, which studies the varied uses of British literature in world cinema between 1895, the first year of projected motion pictures, and the current year of 2015. At the heart of it is a diachronic account of adaptations and appropriations of British literature across all national and regional cinemas, especially those of Britain and the United States, the major producers and consumers of such films. However, the book seeks to understand and contextualize adaptations and appropriations of British literature in nonAnglophone cinemas as well, tending constantly to questions about the ways in which British literary texts are transmitted in diverse cultural, political, and linguistic codes. From the one-shot silent film, Death of Nancy Sykes (1897), to the most recent installment of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster trilogy, The Hobbit (2014), and beyond, cinematic adaptations and appropriations of British literature participate in a complex and fascinating history, one which, until now, never has been narrated. In spite of major recent advances in adaptation studies, the literary text too often continues to dominate the conception and structure of most booklength studies of British literature on film, which usually focus on cinematic adaptations of a particular canonical literary author (e.g., Austen, Shakespeare), a particular literary period (e.g., medieval, Renaissance, Victorian), or a particular literary genre (e.g., the novel, drama). Such approaches cannot avoid privileging literature over film. In contrast, our book—and its forthcoming companions in the “History of World Literatures on Film” series—explores how adaptations evolved within movie history itself. Our book goes beyond case studies of prominent adaptations and attempts to write the history of text-to-film adaptation not only with chronological sweep but with analytical depth, tracing the cultural and political forces at work in various eras of film history from the beginning until the present. Our book seeks to show, in other words, how adaptations and appropriations of British literature emerged from and continue to shape the social, artistic, and commercial aspects of film history.

6

THE HISTORY OF BRITISH LITERATURE ON FILM, 1895–2015

1 Toward a historical turn in adaptation studies Although the volume of adaptation may be calculated as relatively constant in the history of cinema, its particular function at any moment is far from constant. The choices of the mode of adaptation and of prototypes suggest a great deal about the cinema’s sense of its role and aspirations from decade to decade. DUDLEY ANDREW, “Adaptation” 7

Not quite literary studies, not quite film studies, adaptation studies has traditionally been influenced by both disciplines yet embraced by neither.8 One result of the field’s institutional identity crisis has been a certain long-standing disciplinary self-reflexivity—some might even say neurosis—unusual even in academic discourse. Scholars of literature and film adaptation have been engaged for decades now in attempting to define what the field has been, has not been, and should become, to the point where its most agreed-upon tenets have hardened into standard methodological tropes. For example, nearly all adaptation studies since George Bluestone’s seminal 1957 Novels into Film have begun by denouncing the notion of filmic fidelity to the literary text.9 Imagine if evolutionary biologists felt constantly compelled to explain natural selection by beginning with a ritual refutation of creationism. We believe that adaptation theory has come far enough over the past fifty years or so as to warrant our dispensing with such gestures. Moreover, since about 2000, the field has undergone so thorough a revision by its best practitioners that Simone Murray has coined the term “‘new wave’ Adaptation Studies” to describe the revisionist scholarship.10 The introduction to her 2012 book, The Adaptation Industry, provides a useful survey of the field’s history, breaking it down into three basic phases and implying that a fourth may be beginning. In the first phase initiated by Bluestone, the goal of scholars was simply to articulate key differences between the source text and the filmic one, largely as an attempt to legitimize a new field by “rejecting the idea of film adaptation as a necessarily inferior imitation of literary fiction’s allegedly singular artistic achievement.”11 In the second “structuralist” or “narratological” phase that began in the late 1970s, the “principles of narratology from the traditions of Russian formalist literary theory, structuralism and Continental semiotics” were marshaled by adaptation scholars to identify and “isolate the signifying ‘codes’ underpinning both literature and film.”12 In the third, still dominant phase, that associated with such twenty-first-century “new wave” theorists

INTRODUCTION

7

as Kamilla Elliott, Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, Julie Sanders, and Robert Stam, among others,13 the influence of post-structuralism, postcolonialism, feminism, and cultural studies helped redefine adaptations as sites of a limitlessly complex cultural and intertextual dialogism. These developments in turn served to highlight the importance for adaptation scholars of investigating audiences as well as the texts they consume. Though Murray praises the “new wave” interest in audience consumption over textual analysis, she laments a continuing scholarly neglect of those production contexts in which adaptations are conceived and created. Implying that her own “sociological approach to adaptation” will participate in forwarding the newest phase of scholarship, Murray articulates her commitment to “foregrounding those issues usually pushed to the margins of adaptation studies work: the industrial structures, interdependent networks of agents, commercial contexts, and legal and policy regimes in which adaptations come to be.”14 Murray’s introduction offers a brilliantly cogent account of the field’s longer history, and the “sociological approach” she employs in subsequent chapters is undeniably productive.15 Like her, we are excited by recent materialist developments in the rapidly expanding field of adaptation studies. One particular limitation of even the most cutting-edge approaches to adaptation studies, however, is their striking transhistoricity. Too often, scholars have insisted on defining the terms according to which adaptations should be evaluated without equal insistence on the contingent and constantly changing nature of historical events, let alone of literary and filmmaking practices and priorities. Even when scholars acknowledge in some way the importance of historical change and contingency, they just as often seem comfortable culling their definitions of adaptation from the narrower contexts on which they almost inevitably choose to focus. Murray, for example, admits that “any mapping of the contemporary adaptation industry … needs to take account of aspects of the book trade which have become pervasive only in recent decades”—choosing to italicize “contemporary” as a way of signaling her awareness of the historical specificity of such cultural phenomena.16 In spite of her reasonable decision to limit her subject matter to the cultural economy of adaptation since 1980, she nevertheless feels confident arguing for the applicability of her approach even to “studies of ‘classic’ text adaptations occurring in earlier eras of the book, radio, film and television industries.”17 Conclusions drawn from a synchronic approach to adaptation are in this case assumed to apply to all periods in the history of film and even various other media. The scholarly fantasy of arriving at a grand theory or methodology tends to trump real, sustained attention to the stubborn realities of historical specificity. Indeed, a relentless drive toward a grand theory of adaptation seems to us one of the most problematic consequences of the field’s self-conscious

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insistence on its own inadequacy. In the quest to discover something like a unified field theory—in the hope, that is, of fixing the thing we’ve always insisted is broken—scholars often project a greater homogeneity onto the material at the expense of the incredible “range of topics invited by the multi-dimensionality of the discipline itself.”18 When Linda Hutcheon poses “A Theory of Adaptation,” for example, as “a bold rethinking of how adaptation works across all media and genres,” she risks reducing the complexity and diversity of the amazingly protean and constantly evolving art form of adaptation to a transhistorical, but more or less inert, formal structure.19 Methodologically speaking, this book eschews grand theories and begins instead with a rather simple, and hopefully uncontroversial, claim, which is that history matters. It matters not merely in the sense that cultural, economic, artistic, and political contexts (to mention a few) will influence and even determine the ways in which adaptations are produced, consumed, and theorized, but also in the sense that a greater understanding of how adaptations have changed over time will directly influence the ways we define them and how they are to be evaluated. If we are bold enough to keep asking questions such as “how do adaptations work,” we will of course need to consider additional ones which recognize the primacy of historical specificity in all cultural productions: Adaptations when? Adaptations where? Adaptations by and for whom, and in what medium? Unsurprisingly and to her credit, Hutcheon herself recognizes and seeks to address the potential problems of historical specificity in one of the later chapters of her book, even raising two of these very questions, “where” and “when,” quite explicitly. To demonstrate the importance of local contexts for adaptation, she then takes up an extended case study of Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen and the surprising number of adaptations it has inspired across various media. This is valuable work in its own right, especially for textual scholars interested in mid-nineteenth-century French literature or any of the particular operas, dance productions, or films Hutcheon covers. However, the limitations of the approach are similar to the limitations of most case studies, analysis begins with the text rather than the context in which it was produced. An attempt is then made to define what matters to a given period based on what the selected text happens to be doing, or looks like, at a specific moment in time. What we call “history” or even “context” in such scenarios really are narrow inductive constructions that can’t be relied on as generalizable. Since a massive amount of published work in adaptation studies might reasonably be classified as case studies, and since much of it is excellent, we do not wish to condemn the approach so much as highlight some of its limitations. The fact is that case studies often allow for deep readings of texts which prove useful to scholars who research and teach those particular texts.

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A case study of multiple filmed versions of Hamlet isn’t likely to be of much use to film scholars, though, or even to literature and film scholars who work on the nineteenth-century Russian novel. The case study approach has resulted not only in too much un-generalizable data, but also so much data that we have no way of analyzing it all, no way of using it to speak to one another, especially across disciplinary boundaries. Jennifer Jeffers’s Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature (2006), for example, is a book that yields many useful insights but also demonstrates the limitations of the case study approach. Jeffers emphasizes how a small group of films made between 1990 and 2005—including Possession (2002) and High Fidelity (2000)—“reterritorialize” and “Americanize” British literature. Beginning from the position that American film is merely the product of a crass, commercial enterprise rather than a complex art form within a larger commercial industry, she chooses a handful of films—many of them, like Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996), not American, let alone Hollywood—to illustrate the commodification of British literature. The book thereby manages to reproduce the traditional binary between the relatively pure host literature and all those parasitic film adaptations. Does it make clear in any way, however, that the few films she chooses to analyze are hardly representative of wider trends in Hollywood adaptation? An alternative approach would involve a deliberate, primary interest in the historical contexts in which adaptations are produced and consumed. Such approaches might pursue history in a synchronic sense; the best studies of this sort in the field of adaptation studies often are conducted by more film-oriented scholars, including Judith Buchanan, Guerric DeBona, Thomas Leitch, Christine Geraghty, and of course Murray, to mention a few.20 In order to better understand the priorities and contours of specific historical contexts, though, we will of course benefit from greater understanding of how they compare and relate to other historical contexts—which becomes one of the strongest arguments for the importance of diachronic adaptation histories. Hopefully, the field of adaptation studies will see a greater commitment in the future to both focused synchronic and diachronic historical analysis; and work committed primarily to one or the other approach will be more conscious of their ideally complementary relationship and distinctive advantages. In The History of British Literature on Film, as in all of the forthcoming books in this series, the primary methodological commitment is to film history specifically—though there is of course great overlap between the history of the cinema and the wider economic, political, cultural, and national histories of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Following this point, the potential power of our historical approach to adaptation might be said to lie in its capaciousness—its ability to draw out the usefulness of various methodologies

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and to marshal them coherently around a relatively clear set of goals. The best film historians—scholars such as David Bordwell, Thomas Elsaesser, John Hill, Charles Musser, Thomas Schatz, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, to mention a few—share a virtuosic ability to combine formalist, narratological, aesthetic, and sociological methods, among others, when they deem those methods appropriate for particular situations. Furthermore, because literary studies and other humanities fields including film studies contain such deep historical components, a greater commitment to history has the potential to erode the various disciplinary boundaries which have traditionally hampered adaptation studies. A greater understanding of the history of film adaptation will hopefully clarify additional reasons why adaptation studies should matter to both literature and film departments. Indeed, one of our goals in writing this book and editing this series is to strengthen ties between adaptation scholars, literature scholars, and film scholars. For literary scholars who study film adaptations, we hope that these volumes will clarify how adaptations and appropriations of literature have affirmed, enhanced, and challenged our very ideas about what literature is and how it works. We hope film scholars will come to recognize the remarkable influence of adaptations in the history of world cinema. In short, we believe that a dedicated historical approach to adaptation has the power to unify disparate institutional and methodological practices and priorities while doing justice to the heterogeneity and richness of world literatures and cinemas. *** To date, scholars have neglected the longer history of adaptation almost entirely. The only notable exception is Timothy Corrigan’s 1999 Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, whose first section is titled the “Crosscurrents of History.” Composed of eight brief chapters (about forty pages total), the essay focuses on some of the highlights of cinematic adaptation over the course of the twentieth century. A later essay by Corrigan in the Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen does similar work in a much more condensed space of about fourteen pages. Though immensely valuable in initiating scholarly thinking about how “Commercial and historical circumstances” have always impacted adaptation practices and theories, the two essays are also hindered by their necessarily introductory nature.21 In the space of just a few pages, Corrigan attempts to cover the entire history of world literature’s relationship to world cinema. While his overviews begin the crucial work of charting a diachronic history of adaptation, they obviously cannot do justice to the complexity of the major developments influencing film adaptation over time. Partly to avoid the problems of scope with which Corrigan was forced to contend, all books in the “History of World Literatures on Film series” will be

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focused on the history of a specific national literature on film. Considering that the very concepts of the nation-state and especially of national cinemas are under extreme duress as a result of globalization, our decision to recognize so prominently the significance of the “national” must be justified philosophically, not only practically. Since the nation-state has long been a primary organizing category for world literature, and since literature has continued well into the age of globalization to influence the ways in which national identities are defined, the notion of a “national literature” remains a considerably more stable category than the notion of a “national cinema.” Nonetheless, the concept of national cinema has dominated film history until quite recently and continues to be relevant in various ways even today, making its evolution one of the most important subjects traced by these volumes. Though we turn now to some of the problems with attempting to define both “national” and “literature” as stable conceptual categories, we believe that focused volumes on the history of national literatures on film make possible precisely the sort of complementary deep-synchronic and diachronic research we wish to promote.

2 Defining British literature Why have we chosen, then, to write specifically the history of British literature on film? Why not the history of cinematic adaptation in general? Or Anglophone literature on film? Or Spanish or Indian literatures on film? First of all, taking on all national literatures adapted in all national cinemas seemed to us a terrifyingly vast and unmanageable prospect. In fact, A History of British Literature on Film is the inaugural volume in a series entitled The Bloomsbury History of World Literatures on Film, a multivolume series on how national literatures of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been adapted for the screen. As one contribution to this much larger project, our book’s focus on British literature may seem less problematic. A more practical motivation is that we are both scholars who work on British literature. More importantly, though, it seems to us that British literature, especially the way it was deployed in the empire of the nineteenth century, contributed greatly to what we imagine a national literature per se to be, and formed a model for the political and cultural uses of literature in the United States and other nation-states with imperial ambitions. British literature had special cultural capital for early US filmmakers, who influenced greatly the course of cinematic history. The “special relationship” between British literature and American cinema,22 though it has had its ups and downs, has continued for

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more than a century. Given the economic and cultural grip of the American film industry on world cinema, it stands to reason that adaptations of British literature have had an outsized influence on adaptations even of other literatures. The argument can also be made that Shakespeare’s plays, and certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, have dual citizenship as both British literature and world literature, making them more widely available to filmmakers across the globe. Throughout this study we typically use the term “Brit-Lit” as shorthand for British literature: we do this for reasons more than mere economy. “BritLit” has a slightly flippant tone that has the admirable effect of deflating the pretensions and cultural claims of “British literature,” while at the same time preserving the affection of a student nickname for the classic works of British literature that we, and the movies, seem always to return to: Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and so forth. In addition Brit-Lit seems potentially a more porous term, which allows us to take up popular literature not usually admitted into the formal canon. Our study, however, does put the lion’s share of its focus on adaptations of “canonical” British literature for the simple reason that we believe such films have the most to reveal about the larger historical development of literary adaptations. Cinematic versions of iconic works of literature bank on cultural prestige as well as a complex interplay of authority and intertextuality which we examine critically throughout this volume. But if we linger on adaptations of classic texts, we do so with the biting awareness that significant political and ideological processes are involved in the forming of a canon of national literature. Most commentators today recognize that the classic canon of British literature had a strong tendency to marginalize women, people of color, the working classes, and colonized subjects, both from authorship and even representation itself. Our aim is certainly not to reinscribe these exclusions or celebrate nationalist or imperialistic aspirations in our account of film history, but instead to call attention to how the canon of British literature, as it appears in film history, shifts under the pressure of various historical conditions and politics. A contest of cultural authority lies at the center of both film and literary history. As one of the leading theorists of film adaptation, Timothy Corrigan, puts it, Because of the canonical status and the historical longevity of a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel, cinematic adaptations usually have little chance of usurping their authority and so the cinematic adaptation will normally appear “unfaithful” to some extent. … With the adaptation of literary works less celebrated or less culturally privileged, such as minor novels or pulp fiction, it is far less common to hear arguments about specificity

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and fidelity, and so the remarkable cinematic achievements of Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo are lauded in terms of filmic specificity, while its fidelity to Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau’s From Among the Dead (1954) is rarely raised as a concern. In this and so many other cases, specificity and fidelity become more clearly about the authority of both literature and film than about faith in textual specificity.23 As Corrigan makes clear, adaptation of novels, plays, and short stories usually rises to the level of critical notice only when the source text has “cultural privilege” of some sort; it is just such moments of cultural negotiation, translation, and adaptation that we consider crucial for our study. Our focus on classic texts is calculated to shine a light on self-conscious and self-reflexive adaptations. Since approximately 70 percent of all films are based on novels, plays, or other freestanding texts, adaptation is a quotidian process. We are most interested in adaptations that call direct attention to themselves. Our study allows readers to trace the development of the literary canon as it evolved within the history of Brit-Lit adaptation. In the earliest era of film history, for example, Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Walter Scott, and Conan Doyle were in vogue, perhaps because their works appeared on the popular stage, from which early film took its inspiration. Later, at the beginning of the sound era, filmmakers turned to contemporary playwrights like Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, J. M. Barrie, and George Bernard Shaw to meet the new demand for dialogue. In the 1960s a new group of contemporary writers like Graham Greene, John Fowles, and Shelagh Delaney spoke more directly to the political concerns of the era. Some authors, on the other hand, like Shakespeare and the Brontë sisters have been adapted in all periods of film history. Given the violent forces that forged the British union since the Middle Ages, ideas of Britishness have always had an intensely constructed, political quality which certain powerful interests wished to portray as permanent and consensual. King James had called himself the king of “Great Britain” in 1603, declaring that he and his successors would rule both England and Scotland. However, the Acts of Union that disbanded the Scottish Parliament and joined Scotland to England were passed much later, in 1706 and 1707. The literary canon played a role in the formation of a fractious Britishness, with England (and English literature) in the dominant position. But from the vantage point of 2015, the artificial nature of this project is much more apparent and seems on the verge of flying apart. The vote for Scottish independence which took place in September 2014, was the logical extension of the politics of devolution dating back at least to 1920, when Home Rule in Northern Ireland was implemented and a parliament was established a year later (though a majority voted “no” in 2014, the closeness of the vote surely indicates the likelihood of a speedy

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devolution process in coming years). The Blair government was elected in 1997 partly on its promises to support devolution, and the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales both were approved by referendum that same year (Wales had merged into a single state with England in the Laws of Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542). The politics of devolution are at this moment putting English identity under extreme pressure. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner have been charting what a postdevolution variety of “Englishness” might look like: Historically, Englishness and English nationalism found expression both in discrete English and conflated Anglo-British multinational and imperial terms. England’s political and cultural borders were and continue to be porous and extend beyond its territorial borders. In this, England differs little from other nations of the union and many parts of its former empire that are also attempting to come to terms with the multiple and layered dynamics of a once-communal ethno-civic Britishness.24 The future of English literature, let alone British literature, is uncertain, but Gardiner detects a return to a smaller, local England rooted in an emerging new English literature.25 Steve Blandford, on the other hand, thinks that minority artists in film and theater have been able to use the dissolution of the union to participate much more centrally in the exploration of “complex questions of identity that arise from Britain’s changing ethnic mix.”26 Though our book is entitled The History of British Literature on Film, it is fair to ask whether “British literature” will have any stable meaning in the future as a cultural institution. Of course, the artificial construct of “British literature” can be traced from the moment of its first deployments in the cultural politics of the British Empire. By the 1820s the Empire had, for example, enshrined English literature in the curriculum of India. T. B. Macaulay, in an essay on education in India, strongly endorsed this strategy, mainly on the basis of the assumed superiority of English language and literature. His rationale is worth quoting at some length: The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us—with models of every species of eloquence … and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equaled—with just and lively representations of human life and human nature. … What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature

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of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors.27 Macaulay’s bombastic claims of cultural superiority underlie the notion that English literature can act as a vehicle for “ethical and political instruction.” Gauri Viswanathan goes so far as to suggest that the academic study of British literature itself may have been invented for the purposes of maintaining order in the burgeoning empire.28 Summarizing her work, M. Keith Booker writes that “For Viswanathan, in fact, India served as a kind of experimental station in which the discipline of English literature and the English literary canon were developed as tools of social control.”29 Even if Viswanathan’s sweeping claim is only partly right, the moral and social models provided by literary texts could transmit the values of Britain and make citizens out of Indian and other colonized subjects—or out of working-class Britons themselves. The cultural politics of literary education shared many goals and points of contact with other educational institutions like museums, which were being invented about the same time. Both institutions had far more than a mere policing goal in mind. As Tony Bennett writes of museums and their invention of a certain kind of looking, “The exhibitionary complex was … a response to the problem of order, but one which worked differently in seeking to transform that problem into one of culture—a question of winning hearts and minds as well as the disciplining and training of bodies. … [It] sought to allow the people, and en masse rather than individually, to know rather than be known, to become the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge.” The museum, like literary education, was “concerned to organize a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry.”30 Bennett traces here the effects of Matthew Arnold’s cultural politics on public institutions. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold famously advocated a public culture comprised of the best literature, art, and thought, to be shared by all classes. Scholars like Bennett show, however, that underneath Arnold’s “sweetness and light” lay a real fear that the discontent and poverty resulting from industrialization and colonization could destroy the state. Cultural institutions like literature, enshrined in the educational system, served the contradictory political purposes of control and invitation, discipline and pleasure.

3 Organization and contents Since we have committed to writing the history of Brit-Lit adaptation from the point of view of film studies, our chapters are structured around significant events, trends, and changes in cinematic history, like the development of

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the feature film, the coming of sound, and the advent of digital technologies. While a few of the chronological divisions we employ may appear arbitrary, we are confident that our chapter structure will provide a useful frame for thinking about adaptation diachronically. In writing such a sweeping history of adaptation from the beginning of film history to the present, we have been both invigorated and challenged by the fact that scholarship on each of the separate eras of film history tends to have a unique set of central issues, debates, methodologies, and even personalities. For example, historians of the first few decades of film history rely on trade and popular periodicals far more than film scholars in later periods, while after the auteur era, biographies of actors and directors become much more useful as sources. Each of our chapters attempts to immerse readers in the history of adaptation from the point of view of these unique scholarly narratives, with the effect that our approach and methods can vary, sometimes significantly, from chapter to chapter. We believe that this way of proceeding is true to our basic scholarly contribution: viewing literary adaptation through the lens of film history. Such a structure should help literary scholars place adaptations more securely within the overall trends of film production and suggest to film scholars how and when adaptations have been an innovative force in film history. Chapter 1, “Attractions, tricks, and fairy tales: Visual and theatrical culture in the Brit-Lit film, 1896–1907,” places early Brit-Lit adaptations squarely within what film scholars have dubbed the “Cinema of Attractions,” movies that sought not so much to tell stories but to astound, amaze, and entertain. The earliest of these films had direct connections to popular theatrical performances and/ or book illustrations, while the more complicated multi-shot adaptations after 1903 can best be understood as trick films, which take much of their source material from well-known British children’s literature. Chapter 2, “‘Crude, Vicious, and Lascivious Entertainments’: The rise of the Brit-Lit feature film, 1907–20,” witnesses the birth of the feature film and charts how literary adaptations formed part of a defensive cultural “uplift” movement in which the film industry, particularly in the United States and Britain, used such films to respond to charges that movies were morally degrading. Additionally, it focuses on how these first “quality” films incorporated or resisted those innovations in montage and “classical” narration sharpened by D. W. Griffith and other pioneers. Chapter 3, “Internationalizing the Brit-Lit film: Hollywood and the world film market, 1920–27,” considers the role of the Brit-Lit film in the national cinemas of Denmark, Germany, India, and Japan, among other countries. To compete with America after the First World War, companies such as Nordisk, Pathé, UFA, and Makino committed resources to adapting “universal” literary works—a majority of which were from Britain—in distinctive, non-Hollywood styles. These Brit-Lit films thus tended to register the companies’ strikingly

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contradictory goal to differentiate a national product that could compete with Hollywood in the international market. Chapter 4, “Sound, studios, and censorship: The Brit-Lit film, 1927–39,” traces the effects of the sound revolution on the Brit-Lit film, arguing that it spurred a return to theatrical source material. It then considers the impact of the mandatory Production Code (1934), which started another industry-wide rush to produce wholesome literary films. The major American studios showed a particular interest in making “British” films based on literary sources, while in Britain the trade war with Hollywood led to the implementation of the Cinematograph Films Acts of 1928 and 1938, and the often maligned “quota quickies.” Chapter 5, “The empire strikes back: Britain’s reclamation of Brit-Lit, 1939–57,” begins with the American and British Second World War films’ appropriation of literature as a propaganda tool. It then shows how Britain’s film and television industries reclaimed its literary culture in this era, taking it back from Hollywood and building what we refer to as a “proto-heritage” cinema. We trace these changes through the late 1950s, the period in which we see the emergence of the international auteur cinema and a large-scale turn to independent production. Chapter 6, “Traditions and revolutions: The Brit-Lit film, 1957–79,” argues that new wide-screen technologies encouraged a reinvention of the prestige Brit-Lit film, which we call “Panavision adaptations.” It traces some significant developments involving Brit-Lit genre fiction, particularly as approached by the Hammer horror franchises, before seeking to contextualize Brit-Lit adaptations in relation to the decline of the studio system. The chapter concludes by weighing the impact of various New Wave cinemas on Brit-Lit films around the globe— especially the great art-house and auteur adaptations of the late 1960s and 1970s. The seventh and final chapter, “The Brit-Lit film after film, 1979–2015,” explores the continuing development of the Brit-Lit adaptation in light of several recent major developments in film history, including, but not limited to, the legacy of 1980s conglomeration and merger mania; the incorporation of new technologies such as VHS, cable television, on-demand, and especially digital recording and computer generated imagery (CGI) on both production and consumption; and, finally, the impact of globalization and postmodern theory in the 1990s, 2000s, and beyond.

4 Conclusions and speculations for future study To remain true to the methodological principles outlined above, especially our insistence on the historical specificity of adaptation concepts and dynamics,

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the last thing we wish to do is suggest conclusions which might be mistaken as transhistorical claims about Brit-Lit on film. The real conclusions of this book belong to the individual chapters and their multiple subsections. Still, in transitioning into these chapters, we wish to call attention to four basic subjects, or problems, which have dominated our attention throughout this study—and not by any deliberate design on our part. Rather, they have emerged in the course of writing this book. Briefly stated, they are adaptation and (1) the question of fidelity; (2) the question of mutation; (3) the question of genre; and (4) the question of innovation. 1) Fidelity: Even the most cherished clichés of the field will experience extreme tension, we believe, when analyzed against the larger currents of history. To take the most obvious example, fidelity has managed to remain a central preoccupation of adaptation criticism and audience reception from as early as the 1910s, when the fidelity debate and discourse truly began to emerge, mainly from within the industry itself. In spite of the frequent production of adaptations in the first decade or so following the invention of cinema, fidelity is a strikingly irrelevant concept to most filmmakers, as well as their audiences, during that initial phase of film history. This observation suggests the degree to which fidelity needs to be studied as a discursive and analytical category as subject to the influences of history as any other. Where we trace the rise of the fidelity discourse in Chapter 2, we also ask the following questions: why does fidelity emerge as a particular concern of filmmakers, critics, and popular audiences at this specific moment in time? What different meanings does the concept of fidelity bear in different historical contexts? What functions has fidelity served at different historical moments and in different locations—and for whom? Rather than positioning fidelity as a transhistorical concept and then viewing its demise as the natural end of a certain teleological trajectory, we must be vigilant about subjecting the concept to historical analysis. 2) Mutation: One of the more productive recent ideas explored by theorists— inspired largely by Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), with its screenplay by Charlie Kaufman—is that adaptations might be regarded as evolutionary organisms which—like biological species or even individual cells—either replicate and successfully reproduce themselves or simply die off. According to this line of thinking, processes of “adaptation” should be considered in light of the term’s Darwinian meanings. Robert Stam was perhaps the first scholar to consider the revolutionary side of this analogy by pointing out that in order to survive, adaptations must mutate across time and space.31 Linda Hutcheon elaborates by introducing into adaptation studies Richard Dawkins’s concept of the “meme,” first explored in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, in which the evolutionary biologist argues that “cultural transmission is analogous to genetic

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transmission in that … it can give rise to a form of evolution.”32 Dawkins’s idea seems especially to have influenced Hutcheon’s notion that the appeal of adaptations consists in the “repetition with variation” dynamic they enact, their offer of “the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise.”33 We believe that the relationship between adaptations and Dawkins’s memes, however, can be pushed much further and will prove especially fruitful for future researchers willing to study mutations diachronically—which is really the only way they can be observed. 3) Genre: Our attempt to show the importance of diachronic analysis for adaptation studies throws light on some recent attempts to define adaptation as a genre. Leitch was one of the first scholars to suggest seriously that adaptation might constitute a film genre in its own right, just like the western, romance, or costume drama—though a hugely elastic one populated with “thousands of avatars,”34 a definition which may explain why this genre has remained more or less invisible in film history. Leitch set out to identify the generic markers that would make it likely an audience would identify a film as an adaptation—without their necessarily having read the original book or seen the attribution in the credits. Using adaptations of Alexander Dumas (father and son) as a test case, he identifies the following markers of the adaptation genre: (1) period settings, (2) period music, (3) a fetishizing of words, books, and authors, and (4) the use of intertitles to provide historical context. More recently Deborah Cartmell has taken up Leitch’s proposal, and added some conventions to his four, using adaptations of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from 1940 to the present as her test case. She borrows a convention suggested by Geraghty: the idea that self-conscious adaptations “foreground media,” by which she means film, television, the written word (letters, books, newspapers, typewriters, et cetera.). Cartmell then adds three further conventions: an obsession with “pictures and other art forms”—that is, “paintings, sculpture and architecture, appealing to the collective unconscious understanding that what we are watching is based on art”35; inclusion of the author in the film, often under the guise of one of its characters (in many recent Pride and Prejudice adaptations, “Jane Austen is made over as Elizabeth Bennet”); and finally, an appeal to female audiences in particular.36 This attempt to define literary adaptation of a particularly Brit-Lit sort as a genre is very tempting, and some of the conventions do get wide play in the literary adaptations covered by this history. But there are some problems with the argument as well. The first is that these conventions are not at all exclusive to adaptations: some films which aren’t adaptations, especially period pieces or biopics like Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) or maybe even contemporary popular shows like Downton Abbey

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(2010–present), can display a number of them. By the same token, many truly self-conscious adaptations fail to invoke the conventions laid out here. Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011), for example, though it features a period setting and some period music, has no intertitles, expresses no obsession with books or authors, and includes no avatar of Emily Brontë. It very arguably does cite other adaptations (particularly William Wyler’s 1939 version) and might appeal to a female audience, though this latter judgment certainly rests on a certain amount of gender stereotyping rather than demographic data. The more that adaptations stray away from the heritage or costume drama tradition (A Clockwork Orange [1971] or Apocalypse Now [1979], for example), the less applicable these conventions tend to be. Another problem, and one more fundamental from our point of view, is that attempts to define the literary adaptation as a film genre tend to be more or less transhistorical claims. But from everything we have been able to observe in the course of writing this book, styles of Brit-Lit adaptation show strong signs of historical contingency. We think it possible that certain subgroups of the Brit-Lit film may actually function like movie genres, but these subgroups generally have distinct historical trajectories. Their origins can be traced to the output of certain studios and directors, or at least calculated imitators of them. The 1930s prestige Brit-Lit film, for example, was largely created by David O. Selznick at MGM, though it was rapidly copied by even small studios like Monogram.37 One convention of the Hollywood prestige adaptation was the trope of the book in the opening credits. The point, though, is that conventions tend to have life spans, and though 1930s and 1940s adaptations might have often included a book opening in their credit sequences, or included authors’ signatures, letters, or introductions, these forms began to date badly by the 1970s. Directors like Amy Heckerling, James Ivory, or Joe Wright may attempt or manage to create new genres of Brit-Lit adaptation one film at a time, operating within, but also gradually changing, prevailing conventions and styles in order to react to new cultural conditions, new audiences, or new literary and filmic genres. Other subgroups of Brit-Lit adaptation which could be seen as forming genres in their own right are the quality films of the 1910s and 1920s, the New Wave films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, what we call the “Panavision” adaptations of the 1970s, the Merchant-Ivory heritage films of the 1980s, and teen Shakespeare adaptations of the 1990s and beyond. Following genre theorists like Rick Altman, our view is that each of these adaptation “genres” is finally a dynamic and unstable construction likely to be altered by each new entry or perhaps eventually killed off by the birth of new “genres.” Furthermore, such “genres” crucially look different when viewed from the producer’s, viewer’s, or critic’s point of view.

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At a more macro level, the historical understanding of Brit-Lit adaptation might benefit from David Bordwell’s study of film style and its evolution; that is, instead of conceptualizing the self-conscious literary or Brit-Lit adaptation as a full-fledged film genre, it may be more helpful to think of historical styles of adaptation linked to developments in various eras of film history. For Bordwell, film style consists of what some might call formalistic elements and their development in time: storytelling conventions, styles of editing and montage, developments in photography and cinematography, trends in art and sound design. In tracking the life cycle of historical styles of adaptation, we will need to broaden Bordwell’s menu of items to include features of most interest to adaptation scholars. Cartmell, for example, notes how producers focused heavily on costuming in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice since budgets did not allow for grand sets. This sort of stylistic development is clearly connected to the material conditions of film history but has an impact on adaptation history as well. Taking adaptation styles seriously would mean asking some or all of the following questions: which authors are preferred for adaptation in particular eras of film history and why? Is fidelity itself an element of adaptation style? Is it more highly valued or claimed at certain moments than in others? What ways do particular adaptation styles signal, invoke, or even erase the author’s “presence”? To what extent are adaptations subordinate to the dominant genres of their time? 4) Innovation: One of the inevitable questions to emerge from our analysis of adaptations in the context of film history is whether or not they are fundamentally conservative. The question is especially complicated because such terms as “conservative” and “progressive” apply as well to a film’s ideological orientation as to formal characteristics such as its style, level of technical sophistication, or method of adaptation. We consider all of these factors in our analyses, weighing as carefully as possible the specific historical factors influencing the production and consumption of Brit-Lit films. So what about the common assumption that adaptations of literature tend to be conservative? Because at different moments in history, adaptations have been called on, by cinema insiders and outsiders alike, to legitimize or “class up” the younger art form of film, they have often suffered from a stylistic retardation that we discuss in several chapters below. On one general point we wish to be clear, however, which is that adaptations of literature have been on the cutting edge of film history nearly as consistently as they’ve been on the dull one. When they have been more historically innovative, they have tended to display what we might anachronistically refer to as certain “postmodern” qualities: (1) an unusual degree of self-reflexivity; (2) a playful or ironic pastiche of various styles and generic conventions; (3) a manipulation of traditional narrative and formal structures; and (4) a subversion of traditional artistic and cultural hierarchies.

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We believe there are several interrelated reasons why many film adaptations tend to anticipate or, in later periods, absorb and reflect postmodern ideas. First is the fact that the films are sometimes themselves adaptations of challenging and experimental works of literature and so tend to channel those progressive elements that make the source material so attractive and revered in the first place. Second, writers whose job is to adapt preexisting stories— especially those with decades or even centuries of cultural and historical baggage attached to them—to a new medium, often for a much broader audience, will be especially conscious of the tonal, narrative, and structural particularities of both the literary and filmic texts. In addition, the fact that audiences usually bring to their viewings of adaptations a certain knowledge of (and perhaps strong feelings about) the source, and/or expectations for how the film should treat that source, suggests that audiences will often view adaptations in an unusually critical mode, as opposed to a more intuitive or less judgmental one. Generally speaking, then, both adaptors of literature and their audiences tend to be exceptionally conscious of form, medium, even hermeneutics. Finally, unlike original stories, adaptations of commonly adapted texts like Hamlet must bear signs of a certain historical progress. As the adapting organism accumulates more of its precursors’ strong qualities and rejects their less useful ones, it theoretically becomes more complex—or at least a part of an ever more complex community of related organisms. If individual adaptors choose greater complexity and innovation, rather than slavish imitation, they and their creative offspring will have a better chance of thriving and surviving. In this regard, adaptations and genre films have much in common. The basic dynamics of film innovation apply not just to Brit-Lit adaptations, of course, but to those of other national literatures as well. Brit-Lit adaptations are unique only insofar as the canonical works have traditionally carried a high-culture burden that makes the typical processes of adapting and consuming them more fraught and, therefore, more self-conscious; and which also renders it easier for the source material to be subverted by intrepid filmmakers. Without question, this burden has diminished over time as more playful and subversive adaptations of Brit-Lit have been produced and found success among filmgoers and critics. Self-reflexive adaptations have played an equally important role in film’s more general contemplation of its own relationship to literature. As often as the film world has genuflected to the literary one—as in the “quality films” Truffaut so hated—it has just as often argued passionately for film’s superiority. Though filmmakers and scholars have long celebrated metacinema, or filmic self-reflexivity in non-adaptations, as a radical and artistically sophisticated

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mode of cinema capable of rupturing the bourgeois “realism” of the mainstream or “Hollywood” film, a curious double standard is sometimes applied to self-reflexive adaptations of literary texts.38 In discussing the self-reflexivity of such non-adaptations as Godard’s Weekend (1967) or Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003), commentators focus on the creators’ edgy and knowing playfulness: “By seeing themselves not as nature’s slaves but as fiction’s masters, reflexive artists cast doubt on the central assumption of mimetic art—the notion of an antecedent reality on which the artistic text is supposedly modeled.”39 By casting doubt on the elemental assumptions upon which mimesis is based, in other words, these anti-foundationalist films shed their secondariness—their derivativeness. Self-reflexive adaptations of literature, however, are often said to be secondary to a different category of antecedent “reality,” which is the source text, along with its own superior self-reflexivity—whether we mean by this a particular play’s metatheatricality, a novel’s or poem’s narrative reflexivity, or any source text’s explicit recognition of its own constructedness. In a brief chapter on cinematic adaptations of reflexive literature, for example, Stam concludes rather reductively that while films often “incorporate certain reflexive devices, they do not metalinguistically dissect their own practice or include critical discourse within the text itself.”40 Moreover, reflexivity, when it occurs in cinematic adaptations of literature, is typically said to merely accommodate, or provide a visual parallel for, the more sophisticated reflexivity of the adapted text. In one of the first and most influential essays on metacinema in Shakespeare films, Kenneth Rothwell argues that “in making the means of representation a subject of representation, film-makers have only mimicked their stage forebears.”41 We believe this book has helped to uncover an alternative dynamic in the history of cinematic adaptation according to which the creative self-reflexivity of certain pivotal films has the effect not of forging connections between source texts and adaptations but rather of severing them through metaphoric displacement and substitution. However, not all instances of self-reflexivity operate according to the same principles or terms. Self-reflexivity, like fidelity, is a concept whose meanings are entirely contingent on historical processes and developments. The first scene of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) offers an example of a radically self-reflexive moment in adaptation history. In this wonderfully campy opening, the viewer is introduced to the characters of Mary and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron who, sheltered from a raging storm outside, are praising Mary’s (Elsa Lanchester) recently penned manuscript, Frankenstein (see Figure 3). Ever modest about her achievements and

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FIGURE 3 Percy, Mary, and Byron in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

in response to Byron’s amazement, Mary explains that the novel simply responds to an “audience [that] needs something stronger than a pretty little love story,” collapsing the early nineteenth-century reading public with the massive audience of horror fans who in the 1930s began seeking out Universal films for the sole reason that they wished to be terrified. She explains that her ultimate purpose was to “write a moral lesson.” Still, Byron wishes to describe “the great relish” he takes in “savoring each separate horror,” and as he begins to name each one, the scene temporarily dissolves into a voice-over-narrated “flashback” of such moments in the “novel” as the rifling of the corpses and the creation of a “human monster.” It is a remarkable moment for two reasons: first, because the “original” textual moments Byron describes are erased and systematically replaced by film images, as The Bride of Frankenstein puts not itself or the novel forward as the primary text, but Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein: that is, during Byron’s summary of the great novel, the viewer is treated to scenes from Whale’s earlier film. Second, the fact that Whale chooses to present scenes that do not occur in Mary Shelley’s novel at all—such as “Henry Frankenstein himself” (our italics) being thrown from the burning windmill by the angry villagers—suggests the very real possibility that the film of four years earlier has already emerged by 1935 as the new “primary” text for the twentieth-century moviegoing audience. So who is the author of the “real” Frankenstein, Mary Shelley or James Whale? In a sense, the film’s bold self-reflexivity is directly encouraged by its historical position—namely, its massive box office success and even the public outcries that it provoked.

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In what must be a tongue-in-check acknowledgment of the directorial sleight of hand Whale performs here, the flashback sequence is followed by Percy’s declaration, “I do think it a shame, Mary, to end your story so suddenly,” which prompts Mary to confess “That wasn’t the end at all.” Eager to tell them what really happened, Mary sits the two men down and begins a new voice-over narration that then dissolves into the film proper. Now the modern audience, like Byron and Shelley, will get the whole story, the truth, through a sequel that also adapts English history by rewriting the famous fireside conversation that led to the creation of the novel Frankenstein. That true story, the real ending, will not involve Mary explaining what really happened in her novel (as opposed to in Whale’s Frankenstein), as the scene suggests; it instead involves Whale’s having taken over the narration from Mary Shelley and presented the audience with The Bride of Frankenstein, only minor parts of which were actually influenced by the novel. Almost presciently, then, the film anticipates the replacement in popular culture of Shelley’s novel with the film[s] of Frankenstein—the triumph of the cinema, so to speak, over the literary world (see Figure 4). In its bold and irreverent musings on the ever-changing historical relationship between literature and film, The Bride of Frankenstein reminds us how often the cinema has been ahead of its critics. Sometimes, in their very best moments, self-reflexive adaptations have even been able to do the critical

FIGURE 4 The True Face of Frankenstein’s Creature in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

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work for us, prompting us to sit back, watch, and learn. Of course, not all adaptations and appropriations of Brit-Lit are as sophisticated as films like The Bride of Frankenstein and A Matter of Life and Death. Throughout the 120-year-old history of British literature on film, the production, consumption, and politics of adaptation have in fact been as complex and varied as the thousands of films that have participated in its making.

1 Attractions, tricks, and fairy tales: Visual and theatrical culture in the Brit-Lit film, 1896–1907

I

n 1897, The Phonoscope, a trade magazine “devoted to Scientific and Amusement Inventions Appertaining to Sight and Sound,” took a breathless moment to imagine the future of motion pictures in an interview with its hero, Thomas A. Edison.1 In a flight of science fiction fancy, Edison thinks of future motion pictures as a kind of titanic simulcast: “The Wizard Says we Will Sit in a New York Theatre and Enjoy a London Play.” Though the longest films in 1897 lasted considerably less than five minutes, Edison was able to envision a technology “capable of transferring an entire play to a big screen of a city theatre,” combining the kinetoscope with the phonograph: The stage of the New York theatre is entirely cleared, even the scenery being removed. A huge white sheet is stretched from the flies to the stage. It covers the stage completely, like an immense white curtain. The regular drop curtain rolls down over it. Behind the white curtain are placed a number of phonographs, with immense vibrating horns, capable of multiplying sound one hundred times. One of these phonographs is for each actor. If there be ten players in the cast, then ten phonographs are arranged behind the curtain. Each is loaded with the dialogue of that particular player. In the gallery, out of sight of the audience, is a huge kinetoscope, containing hundreds of yards of film, upon which is the whole play, actors, costumes, scenery, and everything. The theatre is then darkened. Suddenly there is a flash of electric light and the curtain goes up on the first act. There it is, as perfect as life. You don’t realize you are looking at a white curtain. You see what looks like a real stage. It is the picture of a stage of a London theatre.

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There are the scenery, the houses, the trees and pathways. The chairs look so real that you would almost dare to sit in them, and even natural colors are reproduced.2 The thought of representing a “real stage” seems at first bizarre since film’s capacity to capture reality and to frighten early audiences with onrushing trains or amaze it with lapping ocean waves or street scenes was so often touted. Oddly, in Edison’s imagination, film’s documentary realism makes it ideal to capture staged facsimiles of reality: “the scenery, the houses, the trees, the pathways.” What a strange desire to reproduce reproduction. Looked at another way, though, Edison’s fantasy reveals that early film looked to the theater as the medium it aspired to imitate. In fact, Edison’s futuristic fantasy suggests that at this early point in the development of film, it was really the representational and narrative techniques of the stage rather than the novel or short story that provided immediate models and aspirations for filmmakers. Adding another layer of complication, though, the nineteenth-century stage itself turned to the literary novel, short story, and poem as sources for its theatrical adaptations. In fact, two of the most common assumptions about literary adaptations on film are flatly wrong for the first decade of moviemaking. First, probably because of the short format of early films and the initial absence of intertitles, filmmakers seemed to have almost no concern at all with fidelity to the literary text. Instead, the earliest adaptors tended to choose the most melodramatic moments from literary classics that had wide currency on the stage or in popular culture and weaved them together with great creative freedom. Second, the notion that early filmmakers turned to literature as a way of gaining cultural legitimacy for their art is—with one exception that we know of—an extremely misleading assumption until the middle years of the nickelodeon era—well past 1905. Instead of comparing early films like Death of Nancy Sykes (1897) or King John (1899) to products of the “uplift” movement in the following decade (see below, pp. 72–94), it actually makes more sense to compare them to boxing movies like the Leonard-Cushing Fight (1894) that reconstructed in a studio key moments from the biggest matches. Like them, the earliest Brit-Lit adaptations were restagings of memorable events and thus participated in a documentary impulse as much as a literary one. These adaptations are partly “actualities,” in other words, films of live, newsworthy, or “actual” events. Adaptations from literary sources in the earliest period of motion-picture history represent a minority of subjects that ranged from actualities, factory scenes, images of speeding locomotives, short comedies, dancing women, strong men, boxing matches, travel clips, and war reports, among others.3 It is possible, in fact, that these adaptations weren’t adaptations in the conventional sense at all in that they didn’t make it to celluloid because of a conscious desire

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on the part of producers to render literature in a visual form. In the late 1890s, popular theater and films were at their closest points of contact: not only did many early literary films record performances from the popular stage, but early films were often shown on vaudeville and music hall stages as one of a series of acts. One of the leading historians of early film, Charles Musser, writes that “the Edison films from this period [1894–95] provide a remarkable record of New York–based popular performances: circus performers, boxers, strongmen, dancers, scenes from musical comedies, revues and farces, as well as members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.” He goes on to say categorically that “the relationship between motion pictures and performance culture was profound and the two practices overlapped, interpenetrated and even merged on almost every level.”4 A great many early films are so directly connected to prior stage adaptations of literary sources that they might be best thought of as adaptations of adaptations and, in some cases, adaptations of adaptations of adaptations, in short, as cinematic palimpsests. As will emerge in what follows, these earliest representations of subjects from British literature can almost always be thought of as actualities or even advertisements: they documented and promoted popular stage shows of the late 1890s mainly in New York and London, often starring prominent performers from the popular or legitimate stage.5 Ever since Eisenstein suggested that film pioneer D. W. Griffith invented montage on the model of Dickens’s fiction,6 most students of literary adaptation have looked to the novel as the master narrative form in direct dialogue with movies.7 But in an important article from the late 1980s, Rick Altman pointedly calls out scholars for their seemingly willful denial of the theatrical origins of early film adaptations: By and large, critics have ignored the influence of theatrical adaptations. Eisenstein provides information on the stage source of Griffith’s Cricket on the Hearth, yet he never attributes any importance to the existence of a theatrical intermediary. Many other critics follow precisely the same logic; they identify the dramatic version from which the film author directly borrowed, but assume that little is to be gained by comparing the film to an ephemeral and undistinguished stage adaptation. More often, critics blithely postulate a direct connection between a film and the novel from which it is ostensibly drawn, when even minimal research clearly identifies a dramatic adaptation as an important direct source for the film. … It is easy enough to demonstrate the debt that early cinema owes to theatrical adaptations.8 We wish we could report that Altman’s call inspired a wave of new research, but on the whole adaptation studies has remained doggedly dedicated to the

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text-to-film case study (see above, pp. 8–9). As recently as 1997, theater historian David Mayer descried the way that film historians view the nineteenth-century stage as an exhausted and feeble institution which passed on its cultural energy to film in a kind of tag team pass over. He argues that we should complicate simplistic teleologies that ignore the demonstrable influence of theater history on early film.9 Fortunately, several film historians like Musser, Elaine Bowser, Tom Gunning, and Andre Gaudreault have effectively situated early film in the rich ecosystem of late Victorian popular entertainment. Nonetheless, Altman and Mayer’s calls to take theatrical culture seriously and trace specific adaptations through their stage intermediaries, regardless of how “ephemeral and undistinguished,” have not been taken up very seriously. *** This chapter will trace the emergence of the Brit-Lit film, beginning with the earliest one-shot adaptations, which depict the most spectacular or melodramatic moments from larger literary narratives. After situating the first Brit-Lit adaptation, Death of Nancy Sykes (1897), in a rich context of spectacular adaptation, we will consider a number of other early one-shot films. Next, we will examine the emerging multi-shot narrative films that began to be produced around 1902. Directors like Cecil Hepworth, Robert W. Booth, George Albert Smith, and George Méliès turned to literary sources to construct more complicated, multi-shot films like Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost (UK, Booth, 1902), Gulliver’s Travels (France/US, Méliès, 1902), A Trip to the Moon (France/ US, Méliès, 1903), and Alice in Wonderland (UK, Hepworth, 1903)—not for the prestige of their source texts or any cultural or educational uplift they might provide, but as fit subjects for “trick films,” which could exploit the magic of special effects: the double exposure, substitution shot, and so forth. The majority of these films adapted children’s texts which already enjoyed a rich history of visual interpretation, whether in theatrical adaptations or in book illustrations. Finally, we consider briefly the vogue for adapting more classic Brit-Lit texts at the close of the period. Throughout, we argue that early adaptors turned to narrative sources belonging to late nineteenth-century visual culture, more than literary or narrative culture.

1 Early cinema: Focus on spectacle or storytelling? Since the pivotal Brighton Conference on early film in 1978,10 historians of what used to be called “Primitive Cinema” have argued forcefully against

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defining early cinema as a mere preparation for the narrative feature films that emerged decisively around 1915,11 challenging researchers to investigate the diverse films of this period on their own terms. Two scholars in particular, Gunning and Gaudreault,12 have championed a different view of movies in their first two decades, which form what they call the “cinema of attractions.” Though films from 1896 through to the rise of multi-reel films are not necessarily antinarrative, Gunning and Gaudreault argue, they share with other popular entertainments of the time (including fairground shows, vaudeville, and magic acts—that is, “attractions”) a desire to produce a sense of wonder and amazement through dramatic visual spectacle. Thus such films aim for a different effect than the classic narrative film, which relies on conventions of shooting and editing that signal narrative cohesion and progress. In fact, Gaudreault and Gunning use the phrase “monstrative attraction” to stress that the basic component of the cinema of attractions has to do with visual, not necessarily narrative power. In a coauthored essay, they show how the cinema of attractions functioned on the level of the individual shot: Each shot is implicitly understood as an autonomous and autarkic unity and the potential connection between shots, when there is more than one, is restricted to a minimum. Where there is pluri-punctuality [films with more than one shot], the film resembles an “aggregate of shots,” where each in its turn sets off the system of monstration [display], without setting off the process of narration. If the film is uni-punctual [only one scene], all of the action is congregated around the same segment which has obvious monstrative qualities.13 Though they go on to suggest that after 1908 one can trace a period of “narrative integration” in which storytelling becomes much more central to a number of films, part of the argument they make is that roughly before that time, in Gunning’s words, “theatrical display dominates over narrative absorption, emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe.”14 Their account of the first decade plus of film history has proven very influential in the last thirty years, and in a moment we will get the chance to test its premises on a special subset of films made in the period—Brit-Lit adaptations. Not all scholars of early cinema, though, agree that the shock of visual spectacle dominated the storytelling impulse. Musser has recently opposed Gunning and Gaudreault’s concept of the cinema of attractions, at least in its purest form, suggesting that after the novelty year of 1896–97, film producers showed a healthy interest in fictional story films. Pointing

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out an “intimate interrelationship between attraction and narrative action,” he believes that especially in the case of Edwin S. Porter’s films, “we miss something essential if we do not explore his methods of storytelling, the way these narratives were articulated in early cinema’s changing, never completely stable system of representation.”15 Besides rehearsing and rejecting Gunning’s reading of three Porter films as essentially nonnarrative (The Gay Shoe Clerk [1903], The Great Train Robbery [1903], and The Kleptomaniac [1905]), Musser thinks that, by 1904, storytelling in a multi-shot format became the dominant mode of film production, though he sees this kind of narrative film as something more than a mere precursor to the later classical Hollywood style in that it used “its own distinctive temporality and continuity which involved overlapping action and narrative repetition as well as ellipsis and occasional match cuts.”16 On the whole, Musser’s objections to the usual way of articulating the cinema of attractions seems reasonable, especially since he does not deny the importance of attraction, being interested in the ways it interacts with narration. On the other hand, a number of early adaptations from literary sources show signs of distinct narrative fragmentation and radical decontextualization. Finding some soft middle between these two scholarly positions would probably just bore everyone, even us. The history of literary adaptations in this period, however, may be able to contribute to the debate among film historians. Death of Nancy Sykes (1897) is a one-shot film from cinema’s novelty year, and though it forms a fragment of a much longer narrative played out in the novel Oliver Twist and its many nineteenth-century stage adaptations, both Gunning and Musser would probably agree that the appeal of the film was in its iconic acts of violence. Since it is a one-shot film of a domestic interior, the chain of narrative causation that builds up to Syke’s murder of Nancy is completely missing from the film, which is a tableau of the murder itself, sheered away from its narrative context. In the case of this kind of adaptation, it seems, the narrative context actually exists outside the film in the minds of the spectators, who are likely to know such a popular story. One thing is clear however: the makers of Death of Nancy Sykes and a number of other pre1902 appropriations of British literature chose the most thrilling or memorable scene from a much larger narrative (in this case a novel that had appeared many times on the stage). Perhaps a better name for this kind of filmmaking would be “scenic” or “spectacular” appropriation, two terms that pop up again and again in advertisements for stage adaptations in the 1890s. Take, for example, The New York Herald’s ad for a play entitled Fabio Romani from 1890 (see Figure 1.1).17 The “startling scenic surprises” the theater offers are reminiscent of the cinema of attractions, but interestingly the ad offers the prospect of

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FIGURE 1.1 Theatrical Advertisement, 1890. “magnificent spectacular tableaux.” Of course “spectacular” can function as a meaningless sparkle in advertising language, but here it probably hints at the visual splendor of the production’s individual scenes. Another ad for Land of the Midnight Sun in The Worcester Daily Spy of 1893, refers to the production as a “Masterpiece of Human Interest and Scenic Splendor,” going on to single out particular tableaux: “See the Wreck on the Coast of Iceland; the Sulphur Mines and their Explosion; The Meeting of the Althing; The Eruption of Mount Hecla.”18 Clearly the kind of theater that most influenced early cinema was one laden not only with special effects (here called “mechanical”) but one that dwelt on the most visually attractive parts of a narrative—touted as a series of tableaux or spectacular scenes. The word “sensational” appears fairly frequently in such promotional material and, as with “spectacular,” seems to carry along with its hyperbolic meaning a significant appeal to the senses. The Springfield Republican, announcing a stage production of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, calls attention to its “Magnificent Scenic and Spectacular Effects” accompanied by “Elaborate and Perfected Properties,”19 while the Philadelphia Inquirer touts the “Grand and Glorious Spectacle” of The Destruction of Herculaneum with its “Colossal Scenery of Great Beauty” and the “sensational eruption of VESUVIUS … accompanied by Earthquakes and

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Explosions.”20 Though these examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely, it may be helpful to look in depth at one last ad, for an 1890 adaptation of Rider Haggard’s She: Webster & Brady’s Big Spectacular Production of H. Rider Haggard’s ‘SHE’ WEIRD, MYSTICAL, BARBARIC Gorgeous in Scenic Effects. Great Dramatic Cast. THE ELECTRICAL STORM AND WRECK OF THE “SLAVE DHOW” HEAD OF THE ETHIOPIAN, THE HOT POT SCENE, “SHE’S” CAVERN PALACE, THE RUINS OF KOR, THE BOTTOMLESS CHASM, The most realistic scene ever attempted, THE FIRE OF LIFE. Words are inadequate to convey even a faint description of this weirdly mysterious and awe-inspiring scene.21 The same double-edged words “scenic” and “spectacular” appear prominently here as does a list of particularly thrilling moments from the novel around which the production organizes itself. In fact, this list tracks fairly closely the moments selected by book illustrators Hookway Cowles and Will Nickless to appear in a deluxe illustrated version of the novel itself. Indeed, iconic book illustrations seem to have played a role in the way that theatrical productions imagined narratives visually. A US production of Oliver Twist from the 1880s specifically attempted to reproduce the costumes, settings, and “scenes” of George Cruikshank’s famous illustrations for Dickens’s novel. The poster for the production stresses this intent dramatically by reproducing every single one of Cruikshank’s illustrations (see Figure 1.2). The theatrical culture from which movies emerged was itself obsessed with spectacular, scenic, and visually stunning tableaux. Early film catalogs employ much of the same language and structure to promote their products to exhibitors. Méliès’s Star Films catalog of 1905, for example, describes his Cinderella as “A grand spectacular production, illustrating every scene of

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FIGURE 1.2 1880 Poster for a Production of Oliver Twist.

the fairy tale. Supplemented by marvelous tricks, dissolving scenic effects, ballets, marches, et cetera in which over thirty-five people take part. In twenty tableaux.”22 A numbered list of scenes follows. When multi-shot films were still something of a novelty, such lists were common in promotional film catalogs, but they had clear precedents in the language of theatrical advertisements. Lust for the spectacular also fueled the craze for tableaux vivants or “living pictures,” a bizarre fad that stretched from the eighteenth well through the beginning of the twentieth century. The aim of the tableaux vivants was to reproduce famous paintings, historical events, or literary scenes with living actors, costumes, and props—sometimes presented in giant, faux picture frames. During the performances, the actors would take their places after careful posing and freeze in place, completely immobile, typically for twenty or thirty seconds, until the curtain was drawn again. In the United States, tableaux vivants became fashionable in the 1830s as amateur theatricals in high society homes, but as the century wore on, the practice spread to smaller towns and middle-class society.23 Though it was meant to ennoble its viewers with high art, many tableaux called for scantily clad or seminude figures that stirred up local controversy and calls for censorship. By the 1890s the tableaux had been sanitized somewhat and carried over onto the New York stage,24 enjoying a particularly intense popularity in the 1896–97 theatrical season, which coincided with cinema’s so-called “novelty year” (when motion

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pictures became an intensely popular curiosity on the vaudeville and music hall stages). The Biograph Company catalog describes several such tableaux filmed in 1896–97 as “a series of admirable living pictures posed by competent artists and faithfully representing well-known art masterpieces. At the opening of each picture, curtains are thrown aside by two pages, the picture remains for a short interval in complete repose, and the curtains are drawn. In other words, these living pictures are shown exactly as in first-class vaudeville theatres.”25 Though the catalog is at pains to stress the cultural prestige of such films, the descriptions show that the spectacular eroticism of the earlier tableaux was still very much alive. See, for example, the entry for The Slave Market: “Taken after Gerome’s celebrated painting, showing the exposure of three beautiful slave girls in fleshings and scanty drapery in the slave mart.”26 The concession to morality is that the three women performed in “fleshings” or skin colored garments made of silk, but nevertheless this tableau invites precisely the kind of voyeuristic male gaze traditionally associated with classic Hollywood film.27 In fact, Mary Chapman draws several fascinating parallels between the tableaux and early motion pictures: Like film, the tableau vivant employs a visual discourse dependent on observation and interpretation of gestures, especially those of women. Its aesthetic and technical codes, like those of the cinema, reflect and constitute an ideology. Tableaux vivants are also similar to film in the sense that they are collectively rather than individually produced and shown. Like the film shot, the tableau depicts a single instant yet implies a complete narrative. Although this unusual form of entertainment anticipates cinema in several ways, no scholars have yet adequately explored this fruitful area.28 Though Chapman is careful not to claim tableaux vivants as the source of cinematic modes of display, it is undeniable that the cultural forces that brought about the tableaux became active principles of the cinema. Early Brit-Lit films, then, draw from a rich, late Victorian visual culture that tended to isolate the “spectacular” moments in narratives for the thrilling effects they could produce. This dynamic has important implications for film history as well. While the term “cinema of attractions” does honor the sensational aspects of popular entertainments from which films emerge, it perhaps does not lay great enough stress on the visual element of this theater. Another advantage of the term “spectacular cinema” is that it allows for a clearer recognition of the narrative impulse, since almost any story can have spectacular or scenic moments that cry out for visualization on stage

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or through book illustration. One final advantage of “spectacular cinema” is that a spectacle can have social or even moral implications that a mere attraction usually lacks. The “cinema of attractions” lays stress on the thrill of sensation for its own sake as pure entertainment, while a spectacle could potentially have political and ethical implications. For example, in Griffith’s Brutality (1912), seeing the murder of Nancy on stage leads the protagonist to stop his own cruel treatment of his wife and reform for good. One of the earliest self-reflexive Brit-Lit adaptations, the film doesn’t just numb the viewers with spectacular violence, but actually meditates on the politics of representation. In the following sections, we trace how the visual culture we have been examining was woven into a series of spectacular one-shot adaptations and appropriations: Death of Nancy Sykes (US, American Mutoscope, 1897), first of all, and then films including Mr. Bumble’s Courtship (UK, Robert W. Paul, 1898), The Last Days of Pompeii (UK, Robert W. Paul, 1898), King John, or Beerbohm Tree, the Great English Actor (UK, British Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 1898), The Pillar of Fire or La Colonne de feu (France/USA, George Méliès, 1899), Sherlock Holmes Baffled (US, American Mutoscope, 1900), The Haunted Curiosity Shop (UK, Robert W. Paul, 1901), and Mr. Pickwick’s Christmas at Wardles (UK, Robert W. Paul, 1901).

2 Death of Nancy Sykes The very first adaptation of British literature that we can document is Death of Nancy Sykes (1897), depicting the brutal murder of Nancy from Dickens’s Oliver Twist. It followed close on the heels of what may have been the first adaptation of any literary source, Rip Van Winkle (1896, American Mutoscope), based ultimately on the story by Washington Irving. Both films had immediate connections to popular theatrical performances rather than direct relationships to their literary sources.29 At only 37 feet, Death of Nancy Sykes almost certainly ran less than a minute and consisted of a single scene. This film is embedded in its cultural moment in such a way, however, that renders it emblematic for the history of early literary adaptation. Though the film does not survive, three frames of it appear in the Biograph Photo Catalog of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. (see Figure 1.3), offering us a good sense of the blurry and frantic action of the scene as well as its theatrical look: the unmoving camera frame imitates the proscenium space of the theater, and the set resembles many late Victorian domestic interiors designed for the stage, starkly simple in its basic architecture with a

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FIGURE 1.3 Still Images from Death of Nancy Sykes (1897). window and door, and furnished with a simple bed, table, and stool, each of which appears to have played a functional role in the violent action. One of the murder weapons, a club, may be visible in the middle frame. The death of Nancy had a long history in popular nineteenth-century theatrical performances. In his 1895 autobiography, John Hollingshead (1827–1904),

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a London theater manager and journalist known now mainly for bringing Gilbert and Sullivan together, wrote scathingly of the power of certain actors to stir up the lowest and crudest elements of the audience. He recounts how one such actor, E. F. Saville, was able to “maliciously torture” the “unregenerate playgoer” in the “mass of skulking humanity,” “the swinish multitude of ours,” which was waiting to erupt “like a slumbering volcano,” by playing Bill’s murder of Nancy: The “murder of Nancy” was the great scene. Nancy was always dragged around the stage by her hair, and after this effort Sikes always looked up defiantly at the gallery, as he was doubtless told to do in the marked prompt copy. He was always answered by one loud and fearful curse, yelled by the whole mass like a Handel festival chorus. The curse was answered by Sikes dragging Nancy twice round the stage, and then, like Ajax, defying the lightening. The simultaneous yell then become louder and more blasphemous. Finally when Sikes worked up to a well rehearsed climax, smeared Nancy with red-ochre, and taking her by the hair (a most powerful wig) seemed to dash her brains out on the stage, no explosion of dynamite invented by the modern anarchist, no language ever dreamt of in Bedlam could equal the outburst. A thousand enraged voices, which sounded like ten thousand, with the roar of a dozen escaped menageries, filled the theatre and deafened the audience.30 Like Saville, Hollingshead himself knows a thing or two about how to create a tempest with words. The anarchic power of the melodrama he describes in Saville’s version of Oliver Twist may explain why subsequent versions of the play were banned from the London stage for a time by the Lord Chamberlain.31 Tracing the history of adaptations of Oliver Twist for the stage, Richard Fulkerson observes much more calmly than Hollingshead that “early Victorian melodrama was a participatory experience of a sort virtually unknown to a modern audience.”32 Dickens himself prepared the ground for the spectacular melodrama that later adaptors found in the scene: the death of Nancy was his favorite showstopper on the lecture circuit. So harrowing was his own performance of the scene that he often had to take time to recover due to a dangerously accelerated heart rate. In the case of Death of Nancy Sykes, we clearly are dealing with a popular adaptation with a checkered past: the murder of Nancy does not belong to the lofty regions of Victorian theater history but instead to a dangerously alive popular theater. The extent to which this scene had become a moment of sensationalized violence comes through in a newspaper account of a performance of Oliver Twist in 1895 in which the actress playing Nancy

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accidentally swallowed stage blood and became violently ill: “Elisa Proctor Otis, who plays Nancy Sykes in the play of ‘Oliver Twist,’ now at the Columbus Theatre, was taken violently ill upon the stage last night from swallowing a red liquid used to imitate the blood which is supposed to flow from her mouth when she is killed by Bill Sykes.” She lay passed out on the stage and had to be carried out while suffering convulsions. The headline reads “Gushing the Wrong Way.” Very tellingly, the makers of Death of Nancy Sykes did not think of their film as an adaptation of Dickens’s novel but, rather, as a performance: the catalog lists the picture in a section entitled simply “Vaudeville”: VAUDEVILLE artists, leaders in their line, in both this country and abroad, have from time to time been employed by us to present the most attractive features of their acts. The list is very complete, as a perusal of the names will indicate; Marshall P. Wilder, Sandow, Ross & Fenton, Saharet, Cruikshank, Amann, the Agoust Family, the Great Layfayette, Mlle. Cathrina Bartho, Grapewin & Chance, Rice & Cohen, Jos. Hart & Carrie DeMar, Fougere, and others equally famous.33 In thinking about their product, then, the company considered Death of Nancy Sykes not as a narrative but as the climactic moment of a stage act by two stars of the vaudeville theater. Though it would take the film industry at least another decade to build its own star system,34 early exhibitors seem to have banked regularly on the celebrity of nationally and internationally reputed stage actors. In describing the film itself, the catalog puts just as much emphasis on the stature of the performers as the literary provenance of the piece: “Death of Nancy Sikes—N.Y. Studio.—37 feet. Charles Ross and Mabel Fenton, who are very prominent in vaudeville and burlesque, in their thrilling sketch taken from Dickens’s novel ‘Oliver Twist.’”35 As will become clear in a moment, the murder of Nancy was actually the climactic, most “thrilling,” melodramatic moment of a longer series of scenes performed on stage by Fenton and Ross, and thus could be described as the pivotal excerpt from a set of semiindependent sketches condensed from a full play, itself adapted from the novel. Charles Ross (1859–1918), a former jockey who got his break in a Barnum production, and Mabel Fenton (1865–1931), born Ada Toune, were in fact a well-known acting team who were billed simply as “Ross and Fenton.” A married couple famous for their popular farces and parodies, they sometimes crossed over into “serious” theater, as was the case with their sketches from

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Oliver Twist, which led to the filming of Death of Nancy Sykes. Mabel Fenton was a big enough star in her own right that she appeared as herself in How Molly Malone Made Good (1915), in which a cub reporter is given the task of speed-interviewing ten celebrities, played by themselves in a series of cameos. Newspaper reports about their sketch from Oliver Twist suggest that such tragic material was something of a novelty for the comedy team. The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, stressed the dramatic nature of the production: Charles J. Ross and Mabel Fenton at The Bijou this week will present an act entirely new to the vaudeville stage. It will be a series of scenes from Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” introducing Mr. Ross as Fagin the Jew and Bill Sykes, Miss Fenton playing Nancy Sykes. The sketch will close with the thrilling murder scene, in which these two artists will show their excellent qualities as melo-dramatic actors.36 The film clearly records the final scene only, and just as in the catalog copy, the murder on stage is described as “thrilling” for the sensation it was engineered to produce. The Daily Inter Ocean, a Chicago newspaper, signals even more clearly that this performance represented a new direction for Ross and Fenton: Manager Harry Earl last evening gave a “Ross and Fenton night” at the Masonic Temple Roof Garden, the feature of the occasion being the appearance of Charles Ross and Mabel Fenton in a melo-dramatic sketch from Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.” This clever couple have long held a position of prominence among vaudeville entertainers and their breezy burlesquing of scenes from standard dramas needs no commendation at this time. It is quite natural that they should desire to ultimately show their abilities in work removed from burlesque, and they could hardly have chosen a vehicle calling for more realistic exposition than this sketch.37 The reviewer shows that even audiences of popular theatrical entertainments had good memories and discriminating tastes: he thought Ross and Fenton’s condensed Oliver Twist inferior on the whole to the famous production of the previous year starring Elisa Proctor Otis and Charles Barron. (Proctor Otis in fact later starred as Nancy in the 1909 Vitagraph film version of Oliver Twist.) The review goes on to give limited credit to “this petit melo-drama”: “but if it was somewhat crude it was forceful, hideously realistic, and gives evidence of

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unlooked for promise of Miss Fenton and Mr. Ross in legitimate lines.”38 This account lays significant stress on the realism of the performance, mentioning it twice. In many ways this emphasis challenges the usual assumptions about the transition from theater to film—that film takes a stylized and melodramatic theater and pushes it toward greater realism.39 As David Mayer puts it, “Because the processes of filming are frequently undertaken out-ofdoors, there is the often-expressed claim that early cinema tends towards the realistic and the Naturalistic, that it is more ‘real’ in its depiction of surface and tangible life than ever the Naturalistic stage might be,” but he dismisses this assumption as “teleological Lamarckian-Darwinian historiography.”40 Instead he argues for a more permeable, two-way relationship between theater and cinema. In an intriguing article on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatrical and cinematic versions of “Death of Nancy ‘Sikes,’” Sue Zemka considers versions of the scene ranging from Dickens’s own dramatic reading of it on the lecture circuit to D. W. Griffith’s incorporation of it as a play within a movie (Brutality, 1912). She suggests that Griffith was acutely aware of theatrical renditions of the scene but that his version ultimately replaced the melodramatic excesses of the stage with a more naturalistic and characteristically cinematic realism. In Brutality, the murder of Nancy is played as a performance that the main characters experience as audience members: In contrast to the stage actors, who perform in the old melodramatic fashion, Miller and Marsh [the main characters] announce a new, more naturalistic acting style, embodying an everyday kind of domestic abuse, and Griffith’s viewer gets to see the contrasting styles side-by-side. … Griffith’s use of Nancy’s murder creates a bridge between Victorian theater and early cinema—a one-way bridge, that is, on which we see the extravagance of the murder scene disappearing into obsolescence, even as it inspires new developments stylistically and affectively.41 For Zemka this shift relates to the vital issue of screen violence and how early film theorists like Eisenstein and Walter Benjamin as well as filmmakers themselves were wary of reproducing Victorian stage violence in this powerful new medium. According to Zemka, the death of Nancy was engineered for an intimate, sentimental theatrical experience that was destroyed by mechanistic reproduction for mere shock value.42 This proposed history of the murder of Nancy, tracing the rise of its melodrama in the theater to its problematic transfer to the effects-laden art of the late nineteenth-century stage and film itself seems to display the kind of teleological thinking criticized by Mayer. The

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actual direction of Fenton and Ross’s performances is from comic realism to melodrama—the opposite of what Zemka claims. On the other hand, Zemka does not necessarily argue for an exhausted and irrelevant melodrama: she traces the history of an authentic theater where melodramatic violence is mediated by real, human bodies and suggests that mechanical reproduction became a distinct problem. In fact, her approach suggests a plausible reason why the early cinema teetered on the knife-edge between sensationalism and parody. Might it also suggest a rationale for why it’s nearly impossible for contemporary audiences, even ones well schooled in film history, not to laugh in the wrong places at the melodramas of the silent era? Ross and Fenton were burlesque performers who crossed over to serious melodrama with their scenes from Oliver Twist. Ironically, though, a sense of the burlesque has followed Oliver Twist on the stage from the very beginning. George Almar’s 1839 adaptation of Dickens’s novel was subtitled a “seriocomic burletta,”43 and although a burletta generally refers to a “comic opera” or a “musical farce,”44 it suggests that even in early stage adaptations of Dickens’s novel something other than reverent transmission of a literary sensation was on offer. Late nineteenth-century burlesque often depended on travesties of prestigious plays from the “legitimate” stage, ones with considerable cultural capital. It would be tempting to posit a kind of a laughterfueled class critique here—that popular theater mocked and satirized elite art, but another and probably more satisfying way of seeing the cultural work of burlesque in this period is that, more than just mocking, it actually transmitted high theatrical culture into the popular arena; through its travesties, audiences unlikely to know very much about the legitimate theater could find out about its contents and values, while laughing at its pretentions. Burlesque/ Vaudeville and legitimate theater were engaged in a complex dialogue with each other.45 To understand what these travesties might have been like and how they affected early adaptations like Death of Nancy Sykes, we can turn to newspaper reviews of Ross and Fenton’s stage act. A theater critic of the Boston Daily Journal in 1895 notes how comic and serious dramatic tones could intermingle on the burlesque stage: One of the strongest acts in the bill yesterday was that of Charles J. Ross, leading comedian of “The Passing Show” company, and Mabel Fenton, in a forceful and dramatic travesty on “Fedora” and “Virginius.” Mr Ross is a sightly figure as Virginius, and, although the lines thoroughly parodied Sheridan Knowles’s tragedy, he gave them with considerable tragic fervor.46

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The seemingly paradoxical phrase “forceful and dramatic travesty” suggests the full range of styles that could enter into such popular performances and which call forth similarly mixed reactions from modern viewers. Understanding this strange mixed tone, a combination of mockery and dramatic power, is crucial to reading early Brit-Lit adaptations. In Driftwood of the Stage, his memoir about a life spent among stage folk, William Ellis Horton tells an anecdote about Charles Ross that may speak to precisely this issue. He remembers Fenton and Ross in their burlesque of Virginius,47 and how a “serious” version of the play was given some weeks later. A member of the audience, perhaps not the most seasoned playgoer, watched enraptured as Virginia sank to the ground waiting for her father Virginius to kill her rather than submit to the sexual designs of the evil judge. At this point the spectator began to show signs of disapprobation. The curtain fell and the star and leading lady responded to a hearty curtain call. This is where our lady friend thought proper to impress on those who were near her how much she knew of things theatrical, for in loud tones she called out to a gentleman who sat some distance away: “Those people should be prosecuted. The whole thing is a steal from Charley Ross!” How naive was this spectator? On the one hand she seems to have confounded a travesty with the real thing, but on the other, she seemingly responded to the “forceful and dramatic” side of Fenton and Ross’s earlier performance. Though old theatrical hands like Horton might laugh at her ignorance of the legitimate stage, she shows herself well-trained in the interactive irreverence of the burlesque that must have informed early cinema. This history of Death of Nancy Sykes and its genesis on the vaudeville stage make it abundantly clear that its producers did not bank on the cultural capital of their literary source in anything like the way film adaptors of literature tended to do after 1908, when the perceived seediness of the nickelodeons forced calls for reform (see below, pp. 72–81).48 Travesty may be the sincerest form of flattery in some way—the surest sign that adapted canonical literature and drama possessed true cultural power—but, at the same time, the popular theater clearly did not tend to express awe or reverence for adaptations of high art. Nor do early films like Death of Nancy Sykes turn to literary sources for their outright narrative power, since most of them represent shocking, fantastic, or funny moments wrenched out of larger narratives. Instead, they turn to literary sources because of their proven ability to thrill, entrance, or entertain an audience.

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3 Early adaptation in action: One-shot films, 1898–1900 Here we consider other one-shot Brit-Lit adaptations and appropriations, which operated under the same set of historical conditions as Death of Nancy Sykes. Though British producers made a number of these films perhaps for obvious reasons, national cinematic practices had not yet emerged. Given the intense international competition in the first decade of film history, we consider the Brit-Lit films of British, US, and French producers side by side.

The Last Days of Pompeii The Last Days of Pompeii is a lost one-shot 1898 film adaptation of two scenes from Bulwer-Lytton’s novel of the same title (see Figure 1.4). The catalog of the Robert W. Paul company describes the movie in the “Sensation Films” section alongside what seem like early disaster movies, A Railway Collision and Plucked from the Burning: This scene is taken from “The Last Days of Pompeii.” It represents the interior of a Greek house, in which Ione is seated with Nydia, the blind girl. Her lover Glaucus, enters, and presents a Greek dancer, who executes some graceful movements. While the dance is in progress, Vesuvius is seen in eruption; the slaves rush forward in alarm, and Nydia leads out her companions. The entire house is shaken to its foundations; the volcano throws out lava, which rushes over the house, of which the pillars and walls fall in, making a complete wreck. Code word—Pompeii Length 65 feet Price 49s. This description clearly refers to the main characters in the novel, all three members of its scorching love triangle: Glaucus, the Greek aesthete living in Pompeii, Ione a high-born object of his affection, and Nydia, a blind slave girl desperately in love with Glaucus. But strangely, nothing like this scene occurs in the novel. In fact, when Vesuvius erupts, Glaucus, condemned to death on a false charge of murder, is being stalked by a ferocious lion in the arena, when at the last moment, help arrives. Through Nydia, an eyewitness reveals that it was the villain of the novel and Glaucus’s deadly antagonist, the sinister Egyptian priest Arbaces, who murdered his own apprentice priest (Ione’s brother) and framed Glaucus for the crime. The crowd turns on Arbaces and, at

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FIGURE 1.4 The Last Days of Pompeii (1898).

the moment when mob justice is about to be meted out, Vesuvius erupts, and chaos breaks out. In the confusion, Glaucus and Ione escape and flee to Rome where they become Christians. In fact it is hard to see why this film invokes Bulwer-Lytton’s characters at all in what is essentially an effects-laden film of disaster and destruction. The production, aiming at a cinema of spectacle, combines two of the most sensational scenes from the novel into one shot—the eruption of Vesuvius and an earlier eye-popping scene in which the villain Arbaces attempts to get power over Ione’s brother by drawing him into the pagan philosophy of pleasure. In the novel, Arbaces lures Ione’s brother to his house and has a trio of erotic dancers perform for him. The scene is framed by descriptions of beautifully decadent music and the poetry of Eros: As the song ended, a group of three maidens, entwined with a chain of starred flowers, and who, while they imitated, might have shamed the Graces, advanced towards him in the gliding measures of the Ionian dance: such as the Nereids wreathed in moonlight on the yellow sands of the AEgean wave—such as Cytherea taught her handmaids in the marriagefeast of Psyche and her son. Now approaching, they wreathed their chaplet round his head; now kneeling, the youngest of the three proffered him the bowl, from which the wine of Lesbos foamed and sparkled. The youth resisted no more, he grasped the intoxicating cup, the blood mantled fiercely through his veins.49

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It is a very memorable moment. To put the seduction scene together with the eruption itself, the adaptors had to rewrite the plot of the novel, since in the film it is Glaucus who hosts this dance for his beloved, putting him in the role of the seducer. Paul’s film version of The Last Days of Pompeii, then, follows the goals of spectacular appropriation in choosing two of the most sensational scenes in the novel and mashing them together for maximum spectacle, a goal which trumps the storytelling impulse rather decisively and shows no interest in fidelity to literary sources. Paul probably sought to echo fantastic public reenactments of the eruption of Vesuvius that had a long history in London. Nicholas Daly has recently studied the many pyrotechnic reenactments of the destruction of Pompeii from the late eighteenth century through the twentieth in a series of popular entertainments. By the late nineteenth century, these displays had achieved monumental proportions: The Last Days appeared in the 1880s as one of the spectacular pyrodramas or pyrotheatrics pioneered by the Pain family, firework manufacturers since before the time of Guy Fawkes. These lavish shows appeared in London and New York before touring to provincial cities, and they combined grand-scale open-air theater with dance and other entertainments, always culminating in spectacular fireworks, generally to represent some scene of death and destruction.50 These events became multimedia events that incorporated gigantic reproductions of historical paintings along with music, fireworks, and other effects. The size of Pain’s operation can be glimpsed from a newspaper report from 1889: Fireworks at Coney Island. Beginning next Saturday night, “The Last Days of Pompeii” will be presented nightly by Mr. Pain at Manhattan Beach, on a scale never before attempted. It is not to be a revival of his pyrotechnic display which he gave under the same name in 1885, but a much more elaborate and magnificent affair. There will be 400 people on the stage, a ballet of 36 dancers, trained by Batiste Cherotte, a male chorus from the same place, soldiers, acrobats, jugglers, tumblers, wire-walkers, and others to assist in making the picture of a fete day. The display is to culminate in the destruction of the city by the fires of Vesuvius.51 This performance clearly welded several high and popular forms of entertainment together: opera, circus, ballet, and museum display. It also aimed at overwhelming the senses of the audience with the gargantuan nature of its

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effects and the dizzying variety of acts. Judging from the reports, Pain’s The Last Days of Pompeii extravaganza had seemingly little to do with the novel of the same name, though it perhaps invoked this once very popular book as a way of promoting the event. Paul’s film follows this tradition closely, showing that early filmmakers might invoke or appropriate popular literature freely to drum up interest in their films.

Mr. Bumble’s Courtship The same year of 1898, Paul’s studio also produced a Brit-Lit adaptation variously titled Mr. Bumble’s Courtship or Mr. Bumble the Beadle, another short narrative taken from Oliver Twist. The catalog, which includes no still photograph, describes the picture mainly in terms of its effect, probably with the expectation that most exhibitors and members of the audience would know who Bumble was: “Mr. Bumble’s courtship of the workhouse matron. Extremely funny and natural actions, which causes roars of laughter.”52 Though the film is lost, we can get some sense of its tone from an R. W. Paul advertisement in The Era, the leading theater journal for London. It lists the film in a program of subjects “Specially Recommended for the Christmas Season,” listing the length of the movie as 60 feet (approximately two minutes). Given this length, it was almost certainly a one-shot tableau of the famous scene of the portly Bumble, with his distinctive parochial uniform, wooing Mrs Corney, the widow and workhouse matron. The playwright Frank E. Emson had turned the scene into a one-act interlude53 which was performed a number of times in the 1890s, usually as part of an evening of amateur theatricals meant to raise money for worthy causes.54 The play, which follows Dickens’s text closely, has a kiss at the center: Bumble shocks Mrs Corney with a kiss, and the play’s stage business adds some humor not present in Dickens: “[BUMBLE drains his cup, crams into his mouth an enormous piece of toast, wipes his lips, and cooly kisses Mrs. Corney]. Mrs. C. [in feigned surprise, and in a hard whisper] Mr. Bumble, Mr. Bumble, I shall scream [Bumble in slow and dignified manner proceeds to put his arm round Mrs. Corney’s waist].”55 But beyond its clear visual and physical comedy, the play does not at all soften the satire against the hard-hearted and selfserving treatment of the poor by local parishes, and perhaps this quality specifically recommended itself to groups like the Women’s Home Mission Association or the St Rule Ladies’ Club. There are some other indications that Bumble had escaped the confines of the novel to become a figure in popular culture,56 and he sometimes appears in newspaper editorials as the representative of a heartless approach to poverty and the poor. Though

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FIGURE 1.5 Mr Bumble and Mrs Corney Taking Tea (Cruikshank).

Bumble’s Courtship is connected with amateur theatricals, its appearance on celluloid shows again how potent the connection was between the stage and early film. In addition, Cruikshank’s famous 1839 illustration of Bumble courting Mrs Corney may have suggested the scenario and contributed to its widespread appeal in the popular Victorian imagination (see Figure 1.5).

King John, or Beerbohm Tree, the Great English Actor If Death of Nancy Sykes, The Last Days of Pompeii, and Mr. Bumble’s Courtship come to their literary sources via popular theater and with no particular reverence for their ultimate literary sources, King John (UK, British Biograph, 1899) would seem to represent a big exception to the rule. However, closer scrutiny of the film’s history suggests that it was less a self-conscious

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adaptation of Shakespeare and more a promotional tool for its star. It records Herbert Beerbohm Tree, a prominent Shakespearean actor and theater manager, restaging the pivotal scene of King John’s death by poisoning from Shakespeare’s play. When filming proceeded at the Biograph’s open-air studio on the Embankment, his lavish production of King John was in the middle of its theatrical run at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. In her account of the film, Judith Buchanan suggests that British Biograph turned to a noted stage actor and to the cultural respectability of Shakespeare because of the furor surrounding a risqué film released earlier that year, Studio Troubles or, Wicked Willie (UK, British Mutoscope and Biograph Co., 1899), which depicted an artist’s model in the nude.57 The film shows King John in his death throes, after having been poisoned by a monk. According to a report in The Sketch,58 at least two other scenes from the production were filmed but do not survive. Almost immediately after filming in September of 1899, King John was shown in a variety program at one of the most respectable music halls in London, The Palace, and Buchanan argues that “given the Palace’s claims to respectability and Her Majesty’s to popularity, the two venues might … have assumed some potential crossover of clientele.”59 In fact, one reviewer suggested gingerly that Tree had participated in the venture mainly as a way of marketing his production at Her Majesty’s, a notion supported by the publicity materials for the film. Tree issued a souvenir program with two photographs of tableaux from his stage production. Unlike the scene as preserved on film which Buchanan describes flatly as “unremarkable” in “technical and artistic terms,”60 the tableaux depict painterly scenes of “The Fight Near Angiers,” showing the battle with horses and at least fifty actors in full armor, and “The Granting of Magna Carta.”61 More than the surviving film itself, these tableaux give a sense of the spectacular nature of Tree’s production of King John, though the lavish attention given to costumes is certainly striking. At first glance, King John seems to be an adaptation of a wholly different sort—a fragment of high art that banks directly on the cultural prestige of its literary source. When considered more carefully, however, Tree’s production and film of King John have a number of significant points of contact with the kind of spectacular theater that created pyrotechnic reenactments of Vesuvius and The Last Days of Pompeii. In an address to the Oxford Union on May 28, 1900, Tree argued passionately against a conservative style of Shakespeare performance: “We are assured that we are not to apply to Shakespearean productions the same care …, the same regard for stage illusion, for mounting, scenery and costume, which we devote to authors of lesser degree; that we should not, in fact, avail ourselves of those adjuncts which in these days science and art place at the manager’s right hand.”62 Instead of minimalist,

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respectful production values, he insists, Shakespeare should be presented with all the effects, illusions, and technologies known to the modern popular stage, a set of technical arts he calls “scenic embellishment.”63 Tree firmly believed that presenting sensational visual spectacles was not a capitulation to vulgar popular taste but an invitation to study the plays of Shakespeare in more detail. King John probably didn’t represent an early form of high literary adaptation so much as a film following closely the aesthetics of sensational appropriation we have been tracing in other early Brit-Lit adaptations.

Haggard’s She: The Pillar of Fire Finally, we turn to a last representative of the one-shot adaptation, one that offers a clearer sense of the future of the Brit-Lit film. In 1899, Méliès produced a wonderfully curious Brit-Lit appropriation, the La Colonne de feu [The Column of Fire] or Haggard’s She: The Pillar of Fire, that was suggested by just such popular visualizations and adaptations as those mentioned above. H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novel, saturated as it is with imperial racism, remains one of the most popular novels of all time in terms of sales (eightythree million copies). She: History of an Adventure appeared in serial form in the Graphic magazine in 1886 and 1887, was staged several times in the 1890s and 1900s, and adapted in almost every era of film history from 1899 to 2008. The Pillar of Fire makes an almost airtight case for the antinarrative strain in the spectacular cinema. The film depicts the climactic scene in which Ayesha, 2000-year-old woman of radiant beauty and sexuality bathes in a stream of fire that emanates from the core of the world. Whoever bathes in this flame obtains a kind of immortality with everlasting youth, intelligence, and beauty. In the novel, Ayesha finds her long-lost lover, whom she had murdered 2000 years before in a fit of jealous rage, reincarnated in the person of Leo Vincey, a Cambridge undergraduate who found his way to east Africa in search of her legend, accompanied by his adopted father, Professor John Holley. In the final scene, Ayesha, “she who must be obeyed,” invites Leo to bathe in the flame and join her in conquering the British Empire and ruling over it firmly but benignly for thousands of years into the future. To show that the flame won’t burn him, Ayesha bathes in it again herself, but she begins to age almost imperceptibly. Then in a horrific writhing transformation every one of her 2000 years is rapidly written on her body: True enough—I faint even as I write it in the living presence of that terrible recollection—Ayesha was shrivelling up. … Smaller and smaller she grew;

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her skin changed colour, and in place of the perfect whiteness of its lustre it turned dirty brown and yellow, like to an old piece of withered parchment. She felt at her head: the delicate hand was nothing but a claw now, a human talon resembling that of a badly preserved Egyptian mummy. Then she seemed to understand what kind of change was passing over her, and she shrieked—ah, she shrieked!—Ayesha rolled upon the floor and shrieked.64 The 1888 illustrations for the novel by Maurice Greiffenhagen and Charles H. M. Kerr certainly take every opportunity to visualize the lurid and spectacular moments in the novel. Their illustration of this particular scene (see Figure 1.6) fixes the intensely male gaze of Professor Holley on the form of Ayesha as she bathes in the fire. Though it’s hard to be sure, Méliès probably took the inspiration for his short film from this illustration or at the very least from the climactic scene of the novel that inspired it. But as with The Last Days of Pompeii, The Pillar of Fire wrenches the scene free of the

FIGURE 1.6 Illustration for H. Rider Haggard’s She: History of an Adventure.

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original narrative. Perhaps picking up on several of Haggard’s suggestions of Ayesha’s demon-like powers to tempt, Méliès begins the film in a kind of devil’s kitchen or fireplace, flanked by two enormous gargoyles, where he himself as Satan causes Ayesha to rise up from a large pot by working an enormous pair of bellows. She dances in flames (simulated by flowing cloth) and finally disappears entirely as the flame/cloth ascends out of the upper frame (this trick effect involved stop-motion filming) (see Figures 1.7 and 1.8). For all the world, though, this would-be appropriation resembles much more powerfully early films of so-called serpentine dances: see, for example, Annabelle—The Serpentine Dance (US, Edison, 1894) and The Serpentine Dance (France, Lumière Brothers, 1899), both of which, like The Pillar of Fire, depict a woman in a flowing dress dancing in such a way as to make spiral, wave-like shapes with her clothing. This subject (seductive dancing acts) and others like them (boxing matches, cock fights) were in general banned from the popular stage of the 1890s, though Musser points out that after Edison brought them to the screen they crept back into the theatrical repertoire as well.65 That Méliès adapted this scene from She in order to titillate his audience fits with his use of scantily clad dancing girls in a number of his films, including A Trip to the Moon. In a key but almost invisible way, though, The Pillar of Fire differs radically from the preceding adaptations we have been examining. True, it seems to feature a single climactic scene from a literary source, framed like a theatrical performance in a proscenium space with an unmoving camera. However, the film actually consists of two shots. To make Ayesha disappear in a puff of smoke, Méliès stopped cranking his camera, removed the actress from the frame, and substituted a cloth on a wire along with a smoke effect and continued filming. Later he spliced these two scenes together. Gunning rejects the notion that such trick films are simple or “primitive” one-shot movies. He points out that Méliès’s complex use of stop motion amounts to editing, since he did not merely stop the camera, make substitutions and restart it. In other words, Méliès and other producers of trick films were practising an early form of montage, which is usually credited to a much later period. Gaudreault puts it this way: “Fundamentally, Méliès’ films are montage films except that—and the exception is essential—many of his cuts juxtapose two ‘shots’ with the same framing: Before and after a stop-motion substitution, the framing remains the same.”66 Therefore it’s more accurate, in Gunning’s words, to say that such films “now demand description as a film made up of multiple shots.” The single frame is a “seamless illusion,” and there is great care for continuity (something often denied to early cinema).67 Except for The Pillar of Fire, the films we’ve been investigating depend for

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their illusions on traditional stagecraft: special props, costumes, or moving sets—that is, the technology of the Victorian theater of marvels. Were Brit-Lit properties adapted more frequently than literary works from other national literatures? Perhaps by a nose, but the evidence suggests that, on the whole, the stature and popularity of intermediate theatrical productions, not the status of the literary texts themselves, determined their adaptability for early film. Other such one-shot films like The Death of Poor Joe (UK, G. A. Smith, 1901), once thought to have been lost but recently discovered in the archive of the

FIGURE 1.7 Scene (1) from Haggard’s She: The Pillar of Fire (1899).

FIGURE 1.8 Scene (2) from Haggard’s She: The Pillar of Fire (1899).

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BFI, show similar signs of having been modeled on theatrical adaptations rather than on literary sources.

4 Experiments in spectacular adaptation: The Brit-Lit trick film 1901–3 Méliès’s The Pillar of Fire pointed forward to the next major development in the history of literary appropriation: the use of literary plots as vehicles for trick films. As filmmakers discovered optical illusions and photographic tricks, they became less content with depicting disasters and magic through set design alone, but instead began searching for a cinematic language capable of communicating such marvels. A “trick film” uses the technology of filming or editing (split-screen, stop-motion, double-exposure, substitution shots) to produce various surprising, uncanny, surreal, or magical effects, achieving a transformation or moment of surprise through techniques native to the medium. As Matthew Solomon has recently highlighted, some of the pioneers of the trick film like Méliès, Walter Booth, and J. Stuart Blackton were actual stage magicians before they turned to filmmaking, and he reframes the trick film in terms of the dynamics and practices of stage magic at the turn of the twentieth century.68 Gaudreault, on the other hand, focuses on the moment of transformation in the trick film and suggests that an emphasis on spectacle trumps any narrative impulse in Méliès’s filmic visions in particular: the “narrative element, however, was seen as entirely secondary to the magical effects. … [Méliès] sees narrativity as a pretext rather than a text, and it is not determinant in his cinematic imagination and production.”69 Since he believes “narrativity” is only of secondary concern in Méliès’s film aesthetic, Gaudreault suggests the word and concept of “trickality” to account for the effects achieved by trick photography and to balance the power of the term “narrativity.” Of course, this argument is part of Gaudreault and Gunning’s way of conceiving the cinema of attractions, but not all scholars have agreed with them about the secondary nature of narrative in the trick film genre.70 In the following pages we consider the habit of certain filmmakers to turn to Brit-Lit sources for their trick films. Compared to the adaptations of the late 1890s, literary trick films are considerably longer and consist of multiple scenes. In an era of heady experimentation, it stands to reason that different producers combined the elements of spectacle and narrative in different ways and proportions and for different goals.

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Considering the disagreement about narrative cohesion in the films of the early 1900s, we turn now to a series of specific adaptations with an eye on their inter-scenic transitions.

Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost Let’s begin with another Dickens adaptation, Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost, directed by Walter R. Booth for Paul’s Animatograph Works in 1901. Though it doesn’t rely very directly on John Leech’s original illustrations of Dickens’s novella,71 Scrooge is a trick film of the first order in that it uses filmic effects to represent the ghostly world of the narrative, mainly with the aid of split screens and double exposures. At over 600 feet long (about five minutes), Scrooge, as Michael Pointer notes, is one of the longest and most ambitious films Paul had produced up to that time.72 The catalog description, reprinted by Pointer, describes the film as a series of tableaux, but in fact, connected tableaux: the entry runs as follows: “‘Scrooge; or Marley’s Ghost’ founded on Dickens’ ‘Christmas Carol,’ in twelve tableaux, dissolving and otherwise, changing from one to another to form consecutive series, and introducing about thirty actors, with special scenery and novel effects.”73 As early as 1896, American Mutoscope issued an adaptation of Rip van Winkle in a series of originally separate films with different titles that were assembled together around 1902 to produce a continuous picture. The catalog copy seems aware of Scrooge’s innovation in presenting a series of scenes together in one film. The idea of a full-blown narrative film in multiple scenes appears to have been so new that the only way of describing it was as a progression of linked tableaux that change, in the words of the catalog, “from one to another to form a consecutive series.” Given the very mixed language of this entry, which stresses both the independence of shots and the transitions between them, we might well ask if Scrooge is focused more on narrative cohesion or spectacle. It should be said that both have a real presence. Though each of the scenes has an iconic feel to it, there are subtle links between scenes that drive the storytelling. For example, the first shot, showing Scrooge and Bob Cratchet at work on Christmas day at the office leads to a shot of Scrooge before his own door, where the knocker (though not shaped like a lion’s head as in the original novella) transforms into Marley’s face. The main link is through costuming: after Cratchet leaves, Scrooge blows out the candle and dons a distinctive hat before exiting the office. In the knocker scene that follows, he’s wearing this hat, though now he has a heavy coat on, which he did not put on in the previous scene. Clearly, continuity methods were just emerging at this moment in film

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FIGURE 1.9 Scene from Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost (1901).

history. The third shot, showing Scrooge after he’s entered his house, links to the knocker scene by having Scrooge look offscreen, presumably at the entryway door, and give a gesture of horror; the gesture establishes both spatial and causal connections to the previous scene (see Figure 1.9). When the visions of Christmas past, present, and future begin, however, the film turns to intertitles74 to announce the scenes that follow, and narrative integration begins to be far less central to the way the film works. These visionary scenes function like independent tableaux, since they are dominated by divided frames: Marley’s ghost—who substitutes for the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future—and Scrooge fade into the shots usually at the extreme left or right through double exposure, while Marley points to the scene to prompt Scrooge’s reaction. These scenes function as melodramatic spectacles, though of course they are arranged in a kind of chronological order, ending with Scrooge before his tombstone and the death of Tiny Tim (mostly lost). In the case of Scrooge, then, the spectacular and narrative impulses compete with each other. One can say that, although the film’s opening setup relies on narrative links, its main trunk is spectacular.

Jack and the Beanstalk Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk (US, 1902, Edison Manufacturing) combines spectacle and narrative in a distinctly different way. Clearly this adaptation of the classic English fairy tale is a trick film that depends on photographic

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effects to achieve a sense of wonder. The Edison Catalogue of 1902 marketed the movie to exhibitors as such: “A grand spectacular performance in nine scenes and one tableau, illustrating the most popular fairy story ever written. … From this very simple and popular fairy tale we have produced a most pleasing, interesting and mirth producing play in motion pictures, including therein many surprising new tricks and dissolving effects.”75 The entry, much like the promotional material discussed above, goes on to provide a numbered list of each of the nine scenes as well as the final tableau. On the other hand, Jack and the Beanstalk has a fascinating way of linking its scenes into a very readable and comprehensible narrative, and in some ways it may very well have a better claim than The Great Train Robbery to being considered one of the first truly narrative films. The publicity department at Edison Manufacturing clearly had the unique linking of scenes in mind: NOTE. In this beautiful production, in changing from one scene to another, transformations are made by beautiful dissolving and fading effects. There are no sudden jumps whatever, and the entire effect is at once pleasing, gratifying and comprehensive, and the audience finds itself following with ease the thread of this most wonderful of fairy tales.76 This description establishes narrative and spectacle as parts of a whole, suggesting that our way of pitting the two impulses against each other may be artificial: according to the note, precisely the trick effects of dissolves and fades render the picture easier to follow in a narrative sense. To be fair, though, the interlinking of scenes depends on much more than dissolves and fades alone, as Musser’s persuasive account of the film illustrates: Intimately tied to the development of a more elaborate narrative was the creation of a fictional world with spatial and temporal relations between scenes. With scenes 3, 4, and 5, Porter cuts freely from the cottage exterior to the interior of Jack’s room and back to the exterior. Scenes 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 are carefully constructed with entrances and exits, glances, set cues, and narrative continuities that give spectators information from which to deduce the approximate spatial relationships between the various shots.77 Though he doesn’t necessarily make this point, it may be worth noting that these linking techniques are not particularly exclusive to cinema, but in fact probably derive from stage practice. Musser is less sure about the temporal continuity in the film, though. For example, scene four (Jack’s Dream) links to scene five (Climbing the Beanstalk) through set design and blocking: after dreaming a fantastic trick vision of the beanstalk with dancing bags of money,

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the goose (really a chicken) that lays the golden egg, and the self-playing harp, Jack gets up and goes in his nightgown to the window of his bedroom (see Figures 1.10–1.11). In scene five, we see the house from the outside again, but the upper window is open, and we can see Jack looking out, but this time he is fully clothed. Musser says that in this scene Porter might have “intended a temporal match cut on action while simply ignoring the element of continuity (clothing); or, he may have intended something we might call a temporal abridgement.”78 Whichever was the case, we have here a definite temporal linking of scenes. The beanstalk itself unifies the central scenes more than

FIGURE 1.10 Scene (1) from Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk (1902).

FIGURE 1.11 Scene (2) from Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk (1902).

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just spatially in that we literally seem to follow Jack in his upward climb and then descent. Even though the scenes are linked spatially and temporally in innovative ways, the catalog entry seems to doubt that the film can work as a selfcontained narrative fully comprehensible on its own terms, appealing instead to the widespread familiarity of this classic British fairy tale: When selecting a special film as a headline attraction to your entertainment REMEMBER that this fairy story is known to every child throughout the civilized world. It has been printed in every language, read in every nursery and appeals to every boy and girl, because they have recently read it and dreamed of it. It appeals to every man and woman because they remember it as one of the most pleasant illusions of their childhood. The subject was carefully studied, and every scene posed with a view to following as closely as possible the accepted version of JACK AND THE BEANSTALK. This fascinating claim suggests why so many trick films of the early 1900s turned to fairy tales: in an age when narrative continuity was evolving, they provided instantly known, presumably unthreatening stories. Viewers could fill in the missing narrative gaps with their knowledge of the plot. The fairy tale genre also offered great opportunities for representing magic with the technical tricks of the emerging cinematic medium. Of all filmmakers in the period, Méliès embraced this opportunity most dramatically in a visually stunning series of filmed fairy tales, based on the tradition of the fairy (feerie) play on the French stage: Cinderella (1899), Little Red Riding Hood (1901), Bluebeard (1901), Fairyland or Kingdom of the Fairies (1903),79 and the success of these films prompted filmmakers like Paul, G. A. Smith, and Porter to follow suit. The technical innovations of the trick film, and how they drove storytelling toward the fantastic, foreshadowed the return to fantasy encouraged by the development of digital effects or CGI in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s (see below, pp. 350–3). Brit-Lit adaptations of this period were heavily influenced by the feerie films: they tended to take their inspiration from texts which had been adapted or edited—if not originally written—for children: Gulliver’s Travels among the Lilliputians and the Giants (1902), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1903), The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1903, 1907), Robinson Crusoe (1902, 1903), Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (1903), et cetera. The Edison catalog suggests that films based on such texts would appeal to a universal audience because of their status as beloved classics. The preference for children’s literature in these early Brit-Lit adaptations has two important implications: first, as a group, these films value a communal literary culture rather than assuming that high art is a means of lifting up the

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masses. The Polyscope film catalog reveals a similar attitude toward a BritLit text in its description of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1903), based on the Browning poem: In one of Browning’s poems with which all the world is content. Even those who fancy the great poet to be as intelligible to read backward as forward, are constrained to make exception in favor of this charming ballad which sets forth, in fantastic fashion, the danger of leaving one’s debt unpaid. One hundred children take part in this production, representing Rats, Village Children, Peasants, Market Women, Mayor and Corporation, Et cetera.80 The sardonic attitude toward “difficult” literature in this passage may mask the rather backhanded compliment that the “Pied Piper,” unlike Browning’s more challenging poems, is universally approved. A distinctly non-elite sense of British literature lies beneath this statement. Commercial self-interest on the part of filmmakers may well have contributed, of course, to their privileging of a populist literary culture. Second, producers were probably responding to the needs and nature of early film audiences, a high proportion of which included, up until around 1903, members of the urban working class, immigrants, and new arrivals,81 though we would be wise to consider carefully how the popular theaters and audiences varied sometimes radically from country to country, and even city to city. Need we imagine that early filmmakers had little confidence in the tastes of their audiences and thus relied on literature written or adapted for children, in effect infantilizing their audiences? The answer is probably no. Audiences were far from mere passive recipients of these films, having had a distinct hand in influencing trends and production through what they chose to view. We would suggest further that the Brit-Lit films of the early 1900s turned to children’s literature not merely for its narrative simplicity or widespread popularity but also at least partly because it had already been fully imagined, adapted, and pictured in late nineteenth-century visual culture: with very few exceptions, all of the ultimate source texts for these films had been visualized intensely through cycles of book illustration and theatrical performances in the late nineteenth century.

Gulliver’s Travels among the Lilliputians and the Giants (1902) This gorgeous film remains very watchable due to its sheer imaginative and visual invention, and the hand-tinting certainly adds to the effect. It consists

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of five scenes that represent in a highly condensed form Gulliver’s travels to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. In the first scene, which contains no cinematic tricks, a giant Gulliver tiptoes with a lantern through the Lilliputian city represented by a painted set, which reveals surprising depth. After he exits stage right, the shot dissolves to scene two, showing Gulliver tied to the ground by threads and with his Lilliputian captors above him with weapons; the frame design has a complex and deceptive structure of three tiers: Gulliver’s level, a platform for the Lilliputians, and then the cityscape above and around him. The double exposure seems rather simple at first: the central frame that the characters inhabit looks very much like a split screen, and the Lilliputians seem to be confined to it. It’s surprising then that one of them shoots an arrow, followed by two more, which appear to travel out of the mini-frame and stick into Gulliver’s rump. One of the Lilliputians then jumps completely out of this Lilliputian frame onto Gulliver’s torso, at which point the design is revealed to be rather more complex than it first appears (see Figures 1.12–1.13). After another dissolve, the third scene shows Gulliver at a table on the left, eating his dinner while Lilliputian servants to the right bring food by means of a ladder to his table in the open air of the city. Again, the effect here seems quite simple: it looks at first like a split screen with a clear boundary between the two parts of the scene, but Méliès has worked the double exposure deceptively so that after climbing the ladder, the Lilliputian cooks actually seem to cross the border of the faux split screen and walk right up to Gulliver’s plate. It’s an ingenious deception that surprises—reminiscent of the magician’s trick of misdirection. Though the frame doesn’t change for the rest of the scene, two more incidents from the voyage to Lilliput are woven seamlessly together. In the second, a lavish procession arrives with the queen in a sedan chair. Méliès again manages a surprising effect in which Gulliver reaches from his quadrant of the screen and picks up the sedan chair and transfers it to the table (this move seems to involve a stop-motion substitution on top of the double exposure, a very tricky business); clearly Méliès is attempting to go beyond the simple effects of the double exposure and make the entire frame into a fluid space of action. Again without a change of scenery or framing, a fire breaks out in the city, and Gulliver quells it by shaking a bottle of seltzer water and spraying it on the fire. The streams of water pass over the boundary of the faked split screen and seemingly douse the fire. The final two scenes skip to Brobdingnag: in the first, three fantastically dressed men play cards. The close medium shot makes them quite large in the frame and indeed they turn out to be giants from Gulliver’s perspective. A woman in royal dress brings a small bundle in a handkerchief and places it on the table, and again the black table mat seems to represent the area in which viewers are to expect a double exposure effect. A stop-motion substitution

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FIGURE 1.12 Scene (1) from Gulliver’s Travels (1902).

FIGURE 1.13 Scene (2) from Gulliver’s Travels (1902). turns the little bundle into Gulliver in a sheet, he shakes his fist at one of the giants, who blows smoke in his face, and remarkably the smoke crosses the boundary of the table mat to waft around Gulliver. This shot dissolves to the final scene, showing Gulliver “courting” the princess that brought him in the handkerchief. She apparently can’t hear him so he sets up a ladder to get closer. Her wild gestures are superimposed over the black mat and

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appear to knock Gulliver off his ladder, and he falls comically into a teacup. This mischievous use of the double exposure contrasts dramatically with the way Porter uses a split screen in his wonderful trick film, Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1903): when the glutton drunk on beer and overfed on rarebit, goes to bed, we see a split screen with little demons emerging with pitchforks and pickaxes from a tureen of rarebit sauce and attacking his head. Though Porter cleverly makes these weapons white and so it almost appears that they’re striking the dreamer’s head on its white sheet background, the two halves of the split screen are quite separate realms of action. In another split screen sequence in the same film, the dreamer’s bed flies over a cityscape, but the line between the black background of the “flying” bed above and the city portion below (filmed in daylight) can apparently not be crossed. R. W. Paul had faced a similar challenge in miniaturization in his film The Cheese Mites, or Lilliputians in a London Restaurant (1901), which also employed a split screen. As the portly diner drinks from his mug of beer tiny children emerge from a block of cheese and cavort over the table while he laughs at their antics. The two parts of the frame are decisively sealed off from one another. Clearly Méliès was focused on producing novel effects in this film, a goal made very clear by the catalog description: “From the various travels of Gulliver the author picked out those among the Giants and the Lilliputians because he was more anxious to accomplish a most difficult undertaking than to give an ordinary photographic exhibition.”82 Since the various scenes of Gulliver ’s Travels are strung together with none of the hints toward continuity we tracked in Scrooge and Jack and the Beanstalk, it seems that Méliès was far more interested in exhibition or spectacle than in narrative power. Curiously, however, the catalog description gives a summary of the narrative that actually adds in causal and spatial links absent from the film itself. For example, though in the movie a simple dissolve marks the transition between the scene showing Gulliver tied down and shot and the one with him at his meal, the catalog provides a narrative link: “On waking up, he is taken to the King, who makes him free and orders a munificent meal for him.”83 Other causal and narrative links between scenes are explained in a way that they aren’t in the film, and in this sense the description acts much like a lecture that exhibitors could arrange to accompany films in the betterappointed theaters.84 Interestingly, the recent DVD release of Méliès’s films often runs the catalog description as a voice-over to the film to provide the narrative clarity that is either absent from or only hinted at in the films. Since many early films were accompanied by lectures and other oral commentary, the lack of narrative cohesion in these literary films themselves may not have struck contemporary audiences as quite as stark as it does film scholars today.

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True to the period’s lack of interest in fidelity to literary sources, Méliès almost certainly took his inspiration from stage versions of the novel rather than from Swift’s text itself, condensing the narrative to the most memorable scenes.85 In fact, in Swift’s version, Gulliver does not tiptoe carefully through the Lilliputian capital with a lantern but falls asleep in an uninhabited meadow after washing up on the shores of the island. In the novel, the king “and his royal consort, with the young princes of blood of both sexes” dined with Gulliver: “They came accordingly, and I placed them in chairs of state, upon my table, just over against me, with their guards about them.”86 Most notably, he puts out the fire in the king’s apartments by urinating on it.87 The Brobdingnagian scenes are even more distant from the novel: a servant carries Gulliver to a “substantial farmer” in the lap of his coat88 rather than his being fetched to court in a maiden’s handkerchief. And Gulliver is revolted by the coarse skin and unlovely stench of the “maids of honour” who think him so cute and inconsequential that they dress and undress while he is in their boudoir: thus, he certainly does not declare his love for a gigantic princess in the novel—quite the opposite. Of course, creative departures from the ultimate source are part of the culture of adaptation that lies beneath both late nineteenth-century literature and early film adaptation. The fact, though, that the first Brit-Lit adaptations show next to no interest in fidelity reveals how shortsighted adaptation studies has often been in its neurosis about fidelity. Finally, much like contemporary animated films by Pixar or Dreamworks, Méliès’s film on the whole addresses dual audiences. It has some distinct adult elements while still catering to children. True, it does bowdlerize the dousing of the fire in the king’s apartments with vichy water, not pee, but no nineteenth-century children’s version of Gulliver’s Travels we have been able to find even depicts this scene as an illustration. Thomas Balliet’s edition of the text for children, published in 1900, is typical in omitting the method by which Gulliver extinguishes the fire. In representing the fire scene at all, Méliès seems to wink at a decisively adult audience and departs from traditions of book illustration. The incidents from Brobdingnag include gambling and a rather unlikely romance, and it is possible that in having Gulliver mount a ladder to be closer to the lady, Méliès is reflecting the scene from the novel in which one of the maids of honor, a “frolicksome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride her nipples, with many other tricks.”89 Perhaps the atmosphere of this film isn’t far removed from the sanitized eroticism of the vaudeville tableaux. On the whole, then, Gulliver’s Travels comes as close to any of the trick films we’ve looked at so far to the pure cinema of spectacle: its scenes are stitched together with almost no sense of continuity or causation. Instead, Méliès exploits an intense and ingenious set of illusions to serve up a feast for the eye.90

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Alice in Wonderland In a very different kind of experiment in adaptation, Cecil Hepworth produced a Percy Stow–directed film of Alice in Wonderland (UK, 1903),91 attempting to bring to life John Tenniel’s famous illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s novel (1865). Though not every scene is based on one of Tenniel’s illustrations, the filmmakers go to great lengths to realize the most iconic ones. Compare, for example, the tardy White Rabbit checking his watch with the Rabbit

FIGURE 1.14 Contrasting Scenes: Tenniel’s White Rabbit.

FIGURE 1.15 Contrasting Scenes: Stow-Hepworth’s White Rabbit.

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of the film (see Figures 1.14–1.15),92 or the scene of the Mad Tea Party.93 This effort to reproduce iconic scenes so exactly is very much in the spirit of the “living pictures” and reveals much about the pictorial imagination of the late Victorian era. The central scenes of Alice show a mastery of the filmic “trick”: Stow and Hepworth very clearly chose to adapt Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an opportunity to create various illusions through trick photography: transformations in size (Alice shrinking and growing, her encounter with a gigantic dog and the outsized Cheshire cat), dematerialization (Alice’s escape from the Rabbit’s cottage, the fading and reappearing of the Cheshire cat), and transformation (the Duchess’s baby changing into a piglet). Curiously, though, the last two lengthy scenes contain no tricks at all: the Mad Tea Party and the procession of the Queen of Hearts and her court are created through theatrical means of sets, locations, and costumes. By 1903, Cecil Hepworth was already one of the premiere filmmakers in Britain, and both the trick effects of Alice in Wonderland and the overall visual impact and shooting style are truly remarkable for a film from 1903.94 Hepworth’s studio marketed the film in two forms: as separate scenes available to be shown individually in a variety program or as a continuous narrative film.95 This fact of production and distribution speaks directly to the question of narrative cohesion between scenes or shots. In the same year, in fact, a musical version of Alice in Wonderland appeared on a number of stages in Britain,96 and the book itself had been adapted for performance in tableaux form—for example in a charity performance at St. Edward’s Orphanage, West Malvern in 1900.97 Given its marketing, one might expect the film to be choppy and disjointed, but several effects work against fragmentation into isolated scenes. First, the intertitles are reasonably complex. Instead of announcing the plot of only the next scene, as was common practice at the time, many of Hepworth and Stow’s intertitles weave together several scenes, providing the narrative continuity between them. The very first intertitle, for example, folds the first three shots together into a simple narrative that follows Alice’s movements through space: “Alice dreams that she sees the White Rabbit and follows him down the Rabbit-hole into the Hall of Many Doors.” None of the other Brit-Lit films reviewed in this chapter employ intertitles with anything like this level of sophistication. Though Thomas Leitch singles out a heavy use of intertitles as a key convention of the adaptation genre (see above, pp. 19–21), the historical trajectory of intertitles clearly complicates this claim. These first three shots lead from one to the next by a simple and effective narrative continuity: we see the White Rabbit and Alice entering the hole in the first shot, follow them down the tunnel in the second, and see them arrive in the Hall of Many Doors. In the second shot, the light at one end of the hole and the downward tilt of the set design makes the spatial orientation clear,

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though the direction of movement in this shot contradicts the first.98 The third shot shows nothing of the tunnel, but we see the White Rabbit exhibiting signs of exertion, glancing back toward where the tunnel is supposed to be, and then see Alice entering some time after. These scenes are linked closely together spatially and logically—in contrast to the more or less independent tableaux of Méliès’s Gulliver’s Travels, for example. On the other hand, rather than using fully realized match cuts, Stow and Hepworth rely on theatrical devices to achieve the links. One other sequence deserves attention for the way it structures the narrative in a form unique to early cinema. Alice, trapped in the Rabbit’s cottage, suddenly realizes that her magic fan can save her. Once she fans herself with it, she begins to dissolve (in the book she shrinks back to a miniature size) to be transported out of the house. After she has fully disappeared from the frame, Stow and Hepworth cut to an external shot from outside the house, showing Alice’s hand groping about until it begins to fade away. In other words, these two shots show what Musser calls “temporal overlap”:99 it’s as if filmic time rewinds, and we see an already completed action happen again from another point of view. In classic Hollywood style, a quick external shot of the fading arm would probably be cut quickly into the main interior scene. In early cinema, though, such intercutting had not yet been invented. Musser notes that such temporal overlaps effectively heighten “the impact of the narrative. At the same time, the repeated actions clearly establish spatial, temporal, and narrative relationships between shots. It is … a kind of continuity, but one radically different from the continuity associated with classical cinema.”100 This rewinding effect perhaps gave audiences not used to the evolving conventions of cinematic narrative a moment to reorient themselves in the sequence of events. On the other hand, a bit earlier in the film, when the bottle labeled “Drink Me” appears as if by magic on the table, Stow and Hepworth use a device that will become standard in the classic cinema: the point-of-view shot. That is, they insert a medium shot of the bottle with its label clearly legible, before cutting back to the fuller view of Alice at the table, suggesting to the viewers that they have just experienced Alice’s own view of the object. Despite the careful attention Stow and Hepworth pay to transitions between scenes, the narrative is likely to confuse viewers unfamiliar with the story. For example, in the Hall of Many Doors, it’s really quite impossible to see that Alice finds a tiny key on the three-legged table: an insert (the term used for the early close-up) of the key might have helped to make this plot point clear, but such shots were extremely rare in 1903. Most uninformed viewers will have great trouble understanding Alice’s dilemma after she shrinks and finds she can’t reach the key on the table. Viewers may also find it difficult to recognize that in the Rabbit’s cottage Alice has grown so large, after taking

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liquid from another “Drink Me” bottle (not depicted in the film), that she is trapped in the room.101 All in all, then, as an adaptation, Alice doesn’t always succeed in becoming a work of art independent from its original, though to be fair, neither does Scrooge or Gulliver’s Travels. Jack in the Beanstalk might come the closest to full readability, but whether filmmakers were aiming at this goal is difficult to determine. What all four films have in common is their confidence trading in popular culture. In creating a more sustained and satisfying Brit-Lit film, British filmmakers like Paul, Smith, Hepworth, and Stow played a pivotal role along with French producers such as Méliès’s Star Films and Gaumont.102 Other multi-shot BritLit films not discussed here included two attempts to adapt Robinson Crusoe: George Albert Smith’s Robinson Crusoe (1902) and Méliès’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1903). The former appears to be a pantomime version of the story with a number of dance sequences,103 while the latter, of which only a small fragment survives, depicts the arc of the novel in twenty-five scenes.104 There were sporadic attempts to adapt popular novels like East Lynne (US, 1903) as well. US Brit-Lit adaptations in this period are by comparison to their British and French counterparts more simple, irreverent, and comical, betraying their connection with the vaudeville and burlesque theaters: see, for example, Sherlock Holmes Baffled (US, 1900),105 Burlesque on Romeo and Juliet (US, 1902), Kiss in the Dark106 (US, 1904), and Actor’s Troubles107 (US, 1903). Some British productions of this period also seem like throwbacks to the simple music hall sketch and the one-shot film: see, for example, Nicholas Nickleby (UK, 1903, Alf Collins, Gaumont), which depicts a beating and its comic consequences in Dotheboy’s Hall.108

5 Post-1905 Brit-Lit adaptations For reasons that aren’t altogether clear, the vast majority of Brit-Lit adaptations made between 1905 and 1907 have not survived. The causes of this near-total loss are probably accidental, but judging from the titles and known contents of these films, we believe that producers at the height of the nickelodeon era were beginning to adapt more and more films on the basis of their being literary classics that offered some cultural capital. A partial list of such movies from this period may give a sense of the trend: Hamlet (UK, Will Barker, 1904), The Duel Scene from Macbeth (US, G. W. Bitzer, 1905), The Tempest (UK, Charles Urban, 1905), Dolly Varden (UK, Alf Collins, 1906),109 Little Nell (UK, Arthur Gilbert, 1906), The Lord High Executioner (UK, Arthur Gilbert, 1906),110 All’s Well that Ends Well (US, 1907), Hamlet (France/US, Georges Méliès, 1907),

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A Tale of Two Cities (US, 1907), and The Pied Piper of Hamelin (UK, Percy Stow, 1907). The next chapter considers the impact on the Brit-Lit adaptation of the 1908 closure of the nickelodeons (see pp. 72–81),111 but it appears that some producers, wary of the growing outcry against the nickelodeons, began to hedge their bets even earlier by adapting more Shakespeare and Dickens.

6 Conclusion This chapter argues that we can understand early Brit-Lit adaptations only in the context of popular theater and the lust for visual spectacle incubated in nineteenth-century visual culture (tableaux vivants, book illustration, et cetera). It’s a bold statement, but we believe that no film adaptation of a literary source in the first decade of cinema history appeared without its having been seen before, either on the stage or in book illustrations or in both. Filmmakers knew these prior adaptations thoroughly and exploited the rich visual culture from which they emerged. Though Chapter 2 focuses on a different set of dynamics for adaptation in the feature-film era, it would be a terrible mistake to imagine that cinema’s electric connection to either of these contexts simply fizzled out around 1907 or even after 1915. A number of scholars have demonstrated the potent influence of theater on the cinema from the 1910s through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Even today, many individual literary adaptations on film continue to depend on intermediate theatrical performances.112 And it goes without saying that filmmakers continued to take direct inspiration from illustrators and painters as well. For example, in his Enoch Arden (1911), D. W. Griffith leaned heavily on illustrated editions of Tennyson’s much-loved poem.113 Finally, some historians claim that the trick film as a progressive force in cinematic history began to decline around 1905, but in truth its legacy is clearly written on many pivotal visual effects in later foundational horror and science fiction films like John S. Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (USA, Robertson, 1920), Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and even King Kong (1933), which in Germany appeared with the subtitle, “Ein amerikanischer Trick- und Sensationsfilm.”114 If the trick film as a genre died out rather rapidly, the technical achievements of trick effects have clearly survived well into the twenty-first century. One of the most important conclusions of this chapter for the larger history of Brit-Lit adaptation, however, is the stunning fact that early filmmakers showed practically no interest at all in faithfully adapting literary sources, even the loftiest of Brit-Lit classics. They seemed to have learned to appropriate freely and creatively from generations of theatrical adaptors. This account disrupts the teleology of much adaptation theory, which assumes that a preoccupation with fidelity is a transhistorical phenomenon.

2 “Crude, Vicious, and Lascivious Entertainments”: The rise of the Brit-Lit feature film, 1907–20

T

his chapter covers the Brit-Lit film from 1907, in the early days of the nickelodeon era, to about 1920, in the midst of the silent feature film era. In doing so, it relies on and seeks to expand influential arguments about the development of narrative cinema in the “transitional” period covered so meticulously by scholars such as Richard Abel, Eileen Bowser, Charles Kiel, Richard Koszarski, Shelley Stamp, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson.1 Previous scholarship focuses on how such developments as inter- and intra-scenic continuity editing, camera movement and positioning, and industry-wide investments in “story” films and uplift, set the stage for what is often referred to today as the “classical Hollywood cinema.”2 Though big-budget Italian spectacles such as Quo Vadis (1913) and Cabiria (1914) receive appropriate recognition for their influence on such developments, the most oft-repeated critical claims about their origins center on D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, whose ambitious scope, advanced editing techniques, inflammatory subject matter, and complex reception history are said to mark the beginnings of the modern cinema. We are particularly interested in discovering when Brit-Lit adaptations catch up with these wider developments in world cinema—especially because we believe the typical literary film of the period to be marred by what Keil has termed, in reference to contemporaneous religious films, a deliberate “stylistic retardation.”3 The answers to our question will not have to do, of course, with any one film but, rather, with certain patterns established by dozens of films produced internationally over a period longer than a decade. We conclude with

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an extended analysis of a film event we will refer to, for the time being, as the “1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Only around 1920, we would argue, does the Brit-Lit film truly come into its own. As discussed in Chapter 1, the earliest films based on British literature were not easy to distinguish from adaptations of other national literatures, as their most recognizable features were yet to be defined. In its consideration of the historical developments mentioned above, therefore, this chapter will occasionally consider certain non–Brit-Lit films such as the monumentally important L’Inferno produced by the Milano Films Company in 1911. We will look to Brit-Lit films in the vast majority of cases, however, showing how even at this early date, certain of their features, including their relatively systematic claims for an unusual scenic and period “authenticity,” began to characterize a distinctive cinematic subfield of adaptation. Curiously, these and other claims of authenticity only became possible through the emergence in the 1910s of a full-blown fidelity criticism. For the first time, fidelity emerges as a key criterion for judging, marketing, and evaluating adaptations.

1 The literary turn The very impulse that would wind up impeding the literary film’s development in the years 1913–20 was responsible for its success in the latter part of the previous decade: that is, the desire on the part of the early film companies to improve the cinema’s reputation. A mere decade after motion pictures first were projected onto screens before mesmerized audiences in Paris, the film novelty had metamorphosed into a massive, increasingly corporatized industry touching the lives of millions of patrons across the globe. In January, 1909, The New York Times argued that the motion pictures “represented a growth hardly paralleled in the history of amusements,” estimating that in the United States alone, exhibitors raked in at least $3,000,000 per week from the 45,000,000 customers entering the various nickel and dime theaters which had sprung up everywhere around the country.4 However, the successes of this fledgling industry employing more than 100,000 workers were regarded ambivalently by city authorities and the conservative middle-class establishment. Critics such as Robert C. Allen have persuasively challenged traditional scholarly canards about film-going as an almost “exclusive activity of the poor or the immigrant.”5 Partly because the theaters were often located in urban working-class neighborhoods, they had reputations as dingy and overcrowded dens of iniquity, pandering a debased product to an impressionable and potentially dangerous mob. As William Urrichio and Rebecca Pearson summarize the problem, “The spectre of immigrants and laborers liberated from the

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regimentation of the workplace and congregating freely to revel in ‘crude,’ ‘vicious,’ and ‘lascivious’ entertainments struck fear into the hearts of many ‘respectable’ Americans.”6 A writer for The Moving Picture World intent on defending the industry claimed in 1909 that “the motion pictures have made little headway with the intelligent classes. … remain[ing] the cheap amusement of the uncultured classes.”7 Rhetoric in Britain echoed these sentiments, as Rachael Low has demonstrated: “Whatever the number of the picture-loving millions [in Britain], it was a constant thorn in the exhibitor’s flesh that they seemed to lack class”8; The Bioscope reported as late as 1911 one man’s complaint to his local council that “when the riff-raff of the surrounding neighbourhoods are drawn into a quiet residential locality nothing but wholesale depreciation can result.”9 It seems safe to argue that the traditional scholarly ideas about the realities of the pre-palace silent film theater grew directly out of this contemporary rhetoric. More nuanced assessments of the cinema, and especially of the product the major film companies were producing, reveal such rhetoric to be overblown as well as classist. Indeed, the film industry’s systematic response to arguments about the immorality and dangers of the cinema had begun almost three years earlier, in 1908, with the infamous closing of the New York theaters by Mayor George B. McClellan. Though the event occurred in a lone city in only one of the major film-producing countries, McClellan’s action triggered a series of local events that would culminate in the wholesale reformation of international film production practices. As the center of the American film industry, the symbolic and actual “Immigrant City sui generis,” and home to more than 500 different theatrical venues, New York City was a logical point of origin for such a significant transformation to occur.10 Since the story has been told before, we will summarize it as briefly as possible: in the fall of 1907, in response to mounting pressure from reformers, New York City authorities sought to enforce local statutes against Sunday entertainments other than the following: “Sacred or educational, vocal or instrumental concerts, lectures, addresses, recitations, and singing, provided that such above-mentioned entertainments shall be given in such a manner as not to disturb the public peace, or amount to a serious interruption of the repose and religious liberty of the community.”11 In January of 1908, however, the state Supreme Court upheld the owners’ rights to stay open on Sundays. Almost a year of continuing court wrangles followed until December 23, when McClellan held a hearing attended by religious leaders concerned about the immoral influence of the movies. Robert A. Armour describes the immediate aftermath: The mayor knew political pressure when he felt it and took immediate action. … He issued a statement revoking the licenses of every five-cent

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movie theater in the city … and he directed the chief of the bureau of licenses to inspect every theater personally (at 25 a day, this would take 20 working days and keep the theaters out of operation about a month). … The mayor used fire—a documentable concern—as his excuse to close the theaters, but then admitted that they could reopen only when they complied with the ministers’ moral objections. The next day the theater owners organized.12 In addition to filing immediate injunctions against the city order, members of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) joined in March with theater owners to create what eventually would be called the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, a self-regulated de facto censorship organization that held sway over American film production until the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934. Though confusion would reign in the courts for years, the owners eventually succeeded in protecting their self-interests and improving the industry’s reputation by agreeing to a form of voluntary censorship. The stated purpose of the Board would be to ensure that films were “Moral, educational, and Cleanly Amusing.”13 One immediate result of Board oversight was a new commitment by filmmakers to produce higher quality films, as Frank Dyer, the vice president of the MPPC in 1910 openly acknowledged: The producing men … realize [the potential for] the ultimate development of the art to a position of dignity and importance. When the works of Dickens and Victor Hugo, the poems of Browning, the plays of Shakespeare and stories from the Bible are used as a basis for moving pictures, no fair-minded man can deny that the art is being developed along the right lines.14 The “right lines” here would seem to mean something more like “morally appropriate” rather than “progressive” or “artistically advantageous,” but Dyer was quite savvy in declaring the necessity of a conservative course of action. The key, it must have seemed to these men, was survival. Uricchio and Pearson have conducted a book-length study of one particular company, Vitagraph, and its “quality films,” a label that describes literary films, historical films such as The Life Drama of Napoleon Bonaparte (1909), and biblical films such as The Life of Moses (1909). The authors show how the production of such films “represented one of the most visible markers of the film industry’s desire to improve its cultural status, explicitly invoking ‘high’ culture referents but offering them in a ‘low’ culture venue, the moving picture shows.”15 As such, the Vitagraph Company’s output just after 1908 should be understood as a specific response to the New York City fiasco. In the years between 1908 and 1913, Vitagraph released eight Shakespeare films, the

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most by any company ever in a five-year period, as well as numerous other literary and historical films. This strategy soon would be copied by other major American companies, culminating in 1912 with Adolph Zuckor’s formation of “Famous Players in Famous Plays,” which he began distributing through Paramount two years later. More important, shifts in production priorities toward quality films were not limited to the MPPC companies or even to American ones. The independent American companies benefited from less legal protection than the “licensed” ones, so mimicry of mainstream production values and self-regulation practices was a far more logical strategy than entrepreneurial boldness; indeed, at least one independent company, the Thanhouser Film Corporation of New Rochelle, New Jersey, built its once considerable and well-deserved reputation on the near-exclusive production of quality films. European producers also had little incentive to strike out in a different direction than the MPPC companies. Generally speaking, the silent cinema was a thoroughly international phenomenon, as Kristin Thompson and others have demonstrated,16 and because the United States was the world’s largest importer of international films, European film companies would have been committing financial suicide by cutting off the American market or ignoring its trends. The largest filmproducing company in the world at the time, the French Pathé Company, was successfully incorporated by the MPPC in 1907 as American Pathé, in part because the United States already constituted its largest market. According to Bowser, “French producers reported in October 1909 that for 5 prints [of a typical film] reserved for France and 40 for Europe, 150 would be ordered for the United States.”17 Pathé was so large a producer and sold so much of the world’s film equipment that other European film companies regarded it in a manner similar to the way American independents regarded the MPPC. In France the tradition of spotlighting literary and heritage films preceded the New York controversy and remained a preoccupation long after it. Gaumont had in fact been spotlighting literary films since the early 1900s through its “Novels in a Nutshell” series. In 1908, however, an important new company called La Société Film d’Art formed, whose “intention was to bring together the most important playwrights, directors, actors, composers and painters of the period and introduce the classical qualities of the theater into film.”18 In 1909, Pathé introduced an Italian sister company called Film d’Arte Italiana, which, according to Judith Buchanan, “shared Film d’Art’s aim of nurturing literary and theatrical cinema as a prestigious alternative to a more populist film agenda.”19 In Germany around 1913 emerged the Autorenfilm or “authors’ film.” As Bordwell and Thompson point out, “The term author did not mean then what auteur means today—the director of the film. Rather, the Autorenfilm was publicized largely on the basis of a famous writer who had written the

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script or the original literary work from which the film was adapted. … The Autorenfilm was, in effect, Germany’s equivalent of the Film d’Art in France.”20 In Britain, where film production had slowed greatly around the time of the New York affair, the cinema depended even more than in America on classical literature and history for its prestige. As Low comments, the literary films in many ways were the engine driving the British cinema: Even borrowed dignity can bring a new sense of self-respect, and the film adaptations of well-known literature which abounded during this period encouraged in the film industry a naïve consciousness of its own artistic mission. … Their prestige awed and dazzled a still largely undiscerning public into granting the cinema an artistic status which it may not yet have deserved, but which nevertheless gave it an ideal whose open recognition influenced every branch of film making.21 The most notable British producer of literary films was the Hepworth Company, which had turned out numerous noteworthy adaptations long before 1907, beginning with the famous 1903 Alice in Wonderland one-reeler (see above, pp. 66–9), and continued to do so with such post-1908 films as Hamlet and David Copperfield (both 1913). To conclude, in the five years or so following the New York City theater closings, licensed and independent companies throughout the world turned increasingly to the production of so-called “quality” films. The trend was so pronounced by 1910 that The New York Times speculated tongue in cheek about where things might be heading. In a review of Griffith’s 1909 adaptation of Robert Browning’s “Pippa Passes,” a Times reviewer commented that Browning is being presented to the average motion picture audience, which has received it with applause and is asking for more. … There seems to be no reason why one may not expect to see soon the intellectual aristocracy of the nickelodeons demanding Kault’s [sic.] ‘Prolegomena to Metaphysic’ with Kritek [sic.] of Pure Reason for a curtain riser.22 Fortunately, no attempts were made to film Kant, but the reviewer’s sarcasm speaks volumes about the way certain individuals perceived the mounting ambition, or pretentiousness, of contemporary filmmakers. The importance of this literary turn for the history of British literature on film, in particular, would be difficult to overstate. Based on our survey of Brit-Lit films produced between 1896 and 1920, the year 1908 sees more than a 500 percent spike in their production, from less than ten such films in 1907 to about forty in 1908. The production of Brit-Lit films remains extremely high through

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1913, peaking at around seventy in 1911, and then drops off precipitously to around fifteen films by 1916. These dramatic numbers reveal the fact that any insiders with even a modicum of interest in the well-being of the cinema—from the trade journalists to the producers to the exhibitors—found ample reason to promote the literary film after the New York affair. No other period in international cinema history would witness such an industry-wide investment in the literary film. However, we also note a marked preference among producers for British literature specifically. “English literature was popular not in Britain alone but in all film-making countries,” Low accurately notes. “Foreign producers drew from time to time on Zola, Daudet, Tolstoy, Dumas, Victor Hugo, or Mark Twain but above all it was the work of the English Victorian novelists which was dredged for plots and characters.”23 Of course, Shakespeare should be added to this list. Since production of the literary film eventually dropped off disproportionately in comparison to overall film production, the end of the spike around 1915 reflects more than the impact of the First World War.24 It also reflects, we believe, the arrival of the cinema as an independent art form and/or entertainment industry. It is no coincidence that decline in the production of literary films followed the successes of The Birth of a Nation (adapted itself from a popular American novel, though a contemporary one) and other feature films, for it is a historical moment when a film’s value need not be derived from its relation to a revered source text. This point is worth lingering on for a moment, since at its heart is one of the great paradoxes characterizing the early literary film, captured brilliantly by James B. Crippen in a 1911 Motography essay: The only films which can be depended on to win anything like universal admiration are those which bear evidence of great cost, those which have a patriotic or religious tendency, those which portray a famous classic. … In other words the film must enjoy a prestige that is extrinsic. It is admired largely for a merit that comes from without.25 Crippen’s analysis is worth repeating: in order for a film to earn “universal admiration,” it must bank largely on an “extrinsic prestige.” Dependence on external prestige, however, would hinder the literary film’s development as an independent work of art admirable for its intrinsic qualities. Such a paradox may reveal why with only a few exceptions, the literary film often seems retrograde, technically and stylistically speaking, even well into the late teens. The years 1908–13 undoubtedly represent the great period of the literary film, if we mean by this something entirely quantitative; if we mean by it something qualitative, however, we will have to assign the “rise” of the literary film to a later period. We should be careful, then, not to mistake the often-passionate

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contemporary rhetoric about the literary film as having much to do with the actual quality of the individual films. Contemporary reviews of these films, especially American ones, are marked by a hyperbole which, over time, hardens into conventionality. Certain trade journals and even certain reviewers, such as Stephen Bush of The Moving Picture World, didn’t bother to hide their belief that the films were great because of their great sources. A February 1910 review of Lux’s Hamlet, for example, criticized the film for its weak performances and general incomprehensibility, but ended with the following claim: “Pictures that urge actors and producers forward by the necessity of producing something out of the ordinary unquestionably exert a beneficial influence and assist materially in both dramatic and photographic development.”26 More often, reviewers found reasons to focus on the positive elements of the adaptations so as to lend more credence to their endorsements of the cultural service the films performed. Thanhouser’s 1910 Jane Eyre was described as “an excellent dramatization of the main points of Charlotte Brontë’s famous story. … [Thanhouser’s] reproductions of novels have been more than ordinarily successful and one can’t help believing that apart from the amusement thus afforded the company is performing a distinct literary service for its patrons in so graphically and forcefully reproducing these excellent novels.”27 Here the service is described as a literary one precisely, as opposed to a filmic or even an entertainment one. The sentiment is the same in The Moving Picture World’s review of Milano’s three-reel version of Homer’s Odyssey (1912), a film said to mark a new epoch in the history of the motion picture as a factor in education. … If the work of the Milano Films Company should only please readers and students of Homer, if its superb art were entirely lost upon the masses, I could say but little for the genuine educational value of these reels. Unless these reels shall please, delight, entertain and instruct the average moving picture audience, they fail in the highest mission and destiny of the cinematograph, i.e., to bring the great treasures of art and literature within the reach of the general public.28 By 1912, most reviews went far beyond advocating adaptations that could “bring … the business into higher repute,”29 as the April 27 review of Éclair’s The Raven did; instead, as The Odyssey review makes clear, in some minds the very purpose of the cinema itself had become the “translation” or “reproduction” of great art for the largely illiterate masses. Another fascinating article in The Moving Picture World captured quite nicely the gap, however, between the patronizing assumptions of the educated critics and the actual impact of the films on their presumably illiterate sponges

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of an audience. In a February 1910 piece entitled “The Motion Picture Story Considered as a New Literary Form,” Walter M. Fitch sought to define the very place of the cinema among the traditional arts: The keynote of all literature is sympathy. The novel brought its note of sympathy first to the few and widely scattered men of modern culture. The motion picture brings its note of sympathy alike to the cultured and to the uncultured; to the children of opportunity and to the sons of toil. It is literature for the illiterate, for the man of limited opportunity, or of alien tongue. It knows no boundary lines of race or nation. … This moving picture story is a new literary form.30 Fitch’s claims were directly undercut, though, by a brief note immediately following on the same page, urging exhibitors to remove “film stories,” or written descriptions of the films, from their lobbies and related theatrical spaces: It is becoming customary to paste up these film stories in the lobby or display them on an easel or board on the street in front of the theater. There they are read from beginning to end, by men and boys, but we have observed that the reader seldom enters the theater. It occurred to us that some people might be more interested in the stories than in the pictures. An interviewed man is then quoted saying, “I have read all the story; what do I want to pay to see it for?”31 While the critics regularly argued that the cinema should function as a translator of written texts, many viewers seem to have wanted more from their movies—a reason to spend their money on moving pictures rather than printed words. Although the man quoted above could read and therefore was not the illiterate audience member Fitch pictured attending the movies, his question exposes one of the most practical limitations of defining the cinema as a “translator” of the novel, poem, or other written text—including, apparently, even an original “film story.” Considerable evidence suggests that, try as they might, producers and exhibitors failed to convince patrons that their own literary education was a good reason to sit through tedious adaptations of Browning and Dickens. In fact, attempting to sell literary films seems to have proven a risky endeavor for most exhibitors, who needed to be creative about how they marketed their quality films: In one of the Eastern States several enterprising exhibitors occasionally introduce what they call serial weeks. Once every two or three months they set aside one week for pictures based upon the works of certain well-known

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writers. For instance, they advertise “A Week with Dickens” and get their exchange to reserve all the pictures they can secure in that line. Another week there is a spectacular series and another “Past and Present Novels,” “A Few Nights with Shakespeare,” … [etc]. Judgment is required in such undertakings, or there may be a falling off of business.32 It should be noted that a theater’s “few nights with Shakespeare” meant no more than one short Shakespeare film each night; the rest of the night’s entertainment would have been given over to the usual variety of nonliterary films, so it’s possible that the business risk articulated here would simply have been in mentioning Shakespeare’s name and thereby turning off customers who preferred comedies or westerns. According to Bowser, “The educational film, like the high-culture film, created an air of respectability and gave a satisfying feeling of improvement. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the audiences enjoyed them, and finally, they rejected them. … The owners were unanimous in saying that these films were not wanted by the theater audiences.”33 Though Bowser refers somewhat generally here to educational or high-culture films, literary films also were repeatedly said to be unpopular with audiences. Fred Jeffreys, an exhibitor, described the following situation in 1913: In lower Jersey City, there is a class of people there who like things that are, well, savoring of great excitement and action. They like cowboy pictures, and hold-ups, and bandits, and things of that kind. … They have heard of someone named Napoleon. … They know he was a Frenchman, but they would not want to know anything more about him. Then, there are people who like things classy, so to speak. They like to see the Fall of Troy, or Romeo and Juliet, or Richard the Third. … [But] not these pikers where I am now. They want something of everyday life, something not too deep for them.34 Another exhibitor admitted the previous year that the “fact of the matter is, folks in this town don’t care for the big educationals and classics. They want short snappy stuff, a live Essanay or Edison comedy, a spirited Kalem railroad or adventure film, but let me advertise a religious piece or Shakespeare and it means an off day in the box office.”35 An exchange man trying to procure films appropriate for his Mexican audience claimed that whereas Othello would fill a theater at only about 30 percent of its capacity, bullfights and murder stories would fill it completely.36 In 1909, an East Side manager said in the Film Index that “none of his patrons liked Shakespeare”: “We have the same people day after day, and we find out what they want and give it

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to them. The most elaborately produced Shakespearean plays don’t appeal much to them; they don’t understand them.”37 And even as late as 1915, The New York Times reported that “in a questionnaire conducted recently by one of the large film companies to determine the advisability of producing the dramas of Shakespeare in the movies many of the exhibitors said the modern society dramas were more popular than the costume plays.”38 In spite of the industry’s deliberate turn to literary films after 1908, then, and in spite of the somewhat undeserved acclaim such films garnered from the trade journal reviewers, the films remained a questionable business proposition. The question is why? Why did the literary film tend to lag so far behind certain other genres in winning over larger audiences, and how would the problems it faced be addressed?

2 The challenge of the literary film: Incomprehensibility, moralism, stylistic retardation A significant problem during this crucial period was the sheer incomprehensibility of many films, and levels of comprehensibility differed, of course, according to how much knowledge of a source text audiences possessed. While this dynamic continues to play itself out even today, with literary films speaking differently to outsider and insider audiences, the gap between the two audience experiences was more profound in this transitional period. Charles Musser has argued that in the first days of cinema, “the film’s subject or narrative was often already known by the spectators. Especially with the aid of a brief cue (such as a main title) to identify the well-known story or event, viewers brought this special knowledge to bear on the film.”39 Buchanan seconds this idea: “Literary subjects cinematically exhibited in this period [1895–1906] … typically made little attempt at autonomous, internal coherence. Instead they were ‘read’ partly through the process of recognition and supplementation, deriving their narrative character, in as much as they did so at all, from extracinematic data (principally knowledge of the source) imported by spectators into the moving picture theatre.”40 Finally, Uricchio and Pearson have focused especially on the earlier period’s “reduced” classics, made familiar by school curricula, theatrical precedents, burlesques, and so forth.41 In response to the popular idea, then, that film audiences were illiterate and could not have understood or enjoyed the earliest literary films, such scholars have sought to demonstrate that the audiences either were not in fact so illiterate as we might assume, or were uniquely literate, knowing enough about Dickens or

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Shakespeare or Brontë to comprehend the literary films on at least a basic level. While we find the evidence generally persuasive, we’re not so sure these subtle forms of knowledge would actually have helped audiences all that much in the case of the narrative literary films. Even for literature experts, familiarity with the source texts serves only to render many of these films basically comprehensible. Indeed, contemporary complaints about their incomprehensibility were legion. One 1906 commentator went so far as to suggest that incomprehensibility was a problem for most story films, let alone the more complex literary ones: Regardless of the fact that there are a number of good motion pictures brought out, it is true that there are some which, although photographically good, are poor because the manufacturer, being familiar with the picture and the plot, does not take into consideration that the film was not made for him but for the audience. A subject recently seen was very good photographically, and the plot also seemed to be good, but could not be understood by the audience.42 We can only imagine how much worse this problem must have been for audience members with no prior knowledge of the stories. Indeed, Marion Blackton, daughter of Vitagraph founder J. Stuart Blackton, confessed long after the quality film craze was over that “the deeper implications of the plot [of Vitagraph’s quality films] baffled the moviegoers.”43 Several trade journal reviews from the period appear to corroborate her view. One Nickelodeon writer in 1909 “admitted that some of the moving picture reproductions of the old masters of literature would be better understood by the unread public if they were carefully explained. … Obviously, if we cannot get pictures that are perfectly comprehensible to the average patron, we will have to explain them to him or lose his interest.”44 An April 1912 review of Ambrosio’s Paradise and Purgatory (1911), or Purgatorio, advanced the same concern: “By way of criticism we might say that the subtitles [intertitles] were not of sufficient number to be fully explanatory, and if the picture is to make any great success with the public it will be quite necessary to have a lecturer to carry along the story.”45 The final suggestion raises some critical questions. On the one hand, the reviewer recommends without hesitation or embarrassment an extra-filmic solution—the lecture—to address the incomprehensibility of a film. Lectures were, of course, common accompaniments of the silent film and, as Bowser reminds us, their popularity in the period seemed to work in the cinema’s favor: “There was a long-standing tradition of attending lectures on all kind of subjects: literary, historical, philosophical, and most popular of all, travel

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topics. … Thus Herr Professor in the Lower East Side nickelodeon in New York City lecturing on Shakespeare was to be praised for his efforts.”46 On the other hand, “The poorer nickelodeons could not afford to hire a lecturer, either for the purpose of educating the audience or to speak along with the film to explain what was going on”47; it seems likely, therefore, that the same audience whose edification served as the justification for the (largely incomprehensible) literary films promoted by culture critics would not have benefited from the single extra-filmic aid that could have rendered the films understandable and educational! Further and more obviously, the special reliance of early literary films on such aids as the lecture—where they were available, anyway—speaks to another cause of the films’ relative stylistic and narrative retardation. Of course, what it means in the first place to “comprehend” a silent literary film will differ drastically according to which decade the film is from, the particular genre in question, and whether or not it is a one- or multi-reel film, among other factors. As Chapter 1 makes clear, the earliest literary films often eschewed narrative continuity in favor of a more theatrical presentation of spectacular tableaux. This early theatrical tradition persisted in some ways even after 1910 in the form of the increasingly old-fashioned one-reel films, which were only begrudgingly giving way to the multi-reel or “feature” films. As Thomas M. Leitch demonstrates, “The goal of these [one-reel] adaptations is not to provide a faithful transcription of their original sources but to use those sources as inspiration or pretext for a digest, reminiscence, hybrid, or inflation—at any rate, for something new and different.”48 What makes such films more or less comprehensible, however, is the degree to which the adaptation is inspired by or otherwise engages its source text. We would argue that an audience with little or no knowledge of the source text would very likely be just as baffled or bored by a digest or reminiscence as by a faithful transcription of that text. The multi-reel films, on the other hand, often are incomprehensible precisely because of the fantasy they inspired in filmmakers and audiences alike that a “faithful transcription” of the literary text actually was possible. Many viewers seem to have felt that the very purpose of the new multi-reel film was to capture on celluloid all the great classics of the Western literary tradition—as a 1911 review of Vitagraph’s Vanity Fair reveals: If the Vitagraph Company can be considered as a public servant, let us say, “Well done thou good and faithful servant.” In producing “Vanity Fair” this company has performed a service not only to the public but to the trade. … Surely a new day seems to be dawning when the moving picture is to be considered reliable. Historical subjects of literary classics have been handled

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so freely in their translation into moving pictures that they are divested of well-known facts or incidents, which makes them unauthoritative for any other than purely amusement purposes. But in “Vanity Fair” the Vitagraph Company may be said to have “arrived.” They have reproduced a wellknown work of fiction that has lost none of its individual qualities during the transition.49 This new criterion of fidelity for judging the literary film is made possible in part by the greater length of the feature films, a fact cited often as the primary reason for doing away with the one-reelers. A reviewer of Edison’s 1912 Treasure Island remarks that “in transferring this subject to the film, the Edison Company has given a series of scenes which illustrate that story as well as is possible in a thousand feet of film, but which emphasize the insufficiency of that thousand feet to properly portray the story.”50 A year earlier, the makers of Thanhouser’s Romeo and Juliet were praised for choosing to film the play in two reels, not one, as the Vitagraph producers did in 1908: “The film of the Vitagraph Company possesses rare merit, but the present production has a great advantage—it has more space for the telling of the story, two thousand feet instead of only one thousand. Nothing could better illustrate the advantage of the two-reel over the one-reel film than a comparison between the productions of the two companies.”51 Such arguments were supported by an October 1911 article entitled “Do Longer Films Make for Better Show?” a question Stephen Bush answered with an emphatic “yes.”52 Greater length meant more characters, more plot threads, and more explanatory intertitles, of course, and these additions created more challenges for comprehending the films—especially for those viewers with little prior knowledge of the stories. Further, the dream of faithful transcriptions, of a complete archive of filmed literature, perpetuated the idea that the value of literary films had only to do with the extrinsic prestige of extra-filmic source material. To summarize the comprehensibility problem, then, both one- and multi-reel literary films faced unique obstacles in keeping clear their artistic goals, especially for viewers lacking prior knowledge or adequate memory of the adapted text. One noteworthy exception dates to 1912 and the release of the Edison Company’s now-lost three-reel version of Martin Chuzzlewit, which The Bioscope called “a masterpiece.”53 According to The Moving Picture World reviewer, who begins with a complaint about the novel’s convolution, its multiple confusing strands, The Edison photoplay enabled me to concentrate upon the main issue, and I perceived the author’s big purpose while watching the dramatic version on the screen, as I might never have done in re-reading the

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novel. … The photoplay is satisfactory in settings and types, bearing evidences throughout of the pains taken to subjugate this wandering novel to dramatic tractability.54 In this remarkable case, the film is said to render the novel more comprehensible, reminding us that even in an age when the cinema’s storytelling grammar was still being formulated, film’s ability to reduce, condense, and amplify key elements of literature was also beginning to be understood. A second problem hindering the development of the literary film was the moralism or “uplift” sentiment attached to the genre, certainly the result of its having been promoted to counter assertions about the cinema’s crudeness and immorality. Because literary films were designed as evidence of the cinema’s cultural aspirations and cleanliness, it took many years for them to shed their aura of worthiness. We would argue that the films’ consistent elimination or downplaying of their sources’ darker elements partly explains the audiences’ supposed frustration and boredom with the films. In spite of this chapter’s title, most of the films from the period were not crude, vicious, or lascivious enough. If earlier audiences were interested in at least a little bit of sex, laughter, and violence, they were much more likely to find it in Shakespeare or Dickens than in the numerous film versions of their works. This irony was best realized in cases where a film’s morality was advertised specifically in relation to a company’s bowdlerization of a source text. In the infamous case of Vitagraph’s 1908 Julius Caesar, the Chicago Police Board demanded that the assassination scene be cut so that the audience would not be exposed to the film’s representation of murder. As several historians have noted, the film actually was released several weeks prior to the McClellan hearings and was condemned roundly at the hearings as an example of film’s lewdness, in part because the male actors wore togas exposing their legs. J. Stuart Blackton complained afterward that “the sweeping assertion that lewd, lascivious and immodest pictures were shown seems to simmer down … to the fact that poor old Julius Caesar wore a skirt that was a little too short, but if I am not mistaken, skirts were worn quite short in Julius Caesar’s day.”55 Perhaps in response to the Julius Caesar controversy, subsequent advertisements of literary films often focused as much on what the films excluded as on what they chose to portray. A reviewer of Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein boasts that “all the repulsive and disagreeable situations are eliminated” from the film.56 Thanhouser’s Thelma of the same year is said to have done an admirable job in reproducing the 400-page Corelli novel; audiences could rest assured that “only the objectionable and tedious has been ‘cut.’”57 The Thanhouser Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of 1912 is said to be praiseworthy because it “is not [a film] that is calculated to inspire horror or dread in the spectator.”58 In an

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intriguing open letter that same year to film producers, entitled “Gauging the Public Taste,” Stephen Bush argued that the “clean and classic subjects have been uniformly successful. … The three great features,” he says, “which by common consent are considered the most notable and successful are based on two great and one minor classic of literature.” He goes on to cite the Milano company’s L’Inferno as “greatest of them all” because “it is clean and moral to the point of austerity. Nowhere is there even the faintest trace of an appeal to the morbid or sensational.”59 This is merely a handful of examples of the double standard haunting literary films; because one of their original justifications for existence was to rectify the lewdness and low-class reputation of the nonliterary cinema, such films suffered from pressure to exclude the very cinematic features most audiences craved. The legacy of this dynamic has been long-lasting, especially for mainstream cinema, and even in much later periods: consider the frequent condemnations of Roman Polanski’s 1971 Macbeth, for example, which was said to feature “too much blood”60; the antiseptic and sexless tedium of the BBC Television Shakespeare series (1978–85); and more recently, the deafening cries of critics that Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) simply was “too dark” a film.61 The only difference between then and now is that, today, such puritanical complaints are countered by the availability of alternatives for filmgoers; in fact, they are sometimes openly mocked and dissected by B films such as Troma’s 1996 Tromeo and Juliet, which presents Shakespeare through exactly the sort of ultraviolent, sex-saturated movie experience many filmgoers actively seek out.62 Generally speaking, silent film audiences would have to wait until the 1920s to see the beginnings of this iconoclastic tradition of literary adaptation. That said, we should like to argue that the Milano company’s L’Inferno offered filmmakers a successful, early example of how to tell a moral tale without boring an audience to death. When Bush argued that “nowhere is there even the faintest trace of an appeal to the morbid or sensational” in this particular film, he was protesting too much. In fact, L’Inferno is filled with the most sensational and morbid images, and much of the film’s appeal relies on the particular way it depicts such images through special effects. The film’s imagery ranges from the fascinatingly gorgeous (see Figure 2.1), where the spirits of the damned swirl above Dante and Virgil’s heads; to the potentially erotic (see Figure 2.2), where hundreds of naked bodies writhe in agony on the fiery lake; to the spectacular, such as where the filmmakers mimicked the awesome compositions of Doré’s 1890 illustrations of the poem.63 Surely if Dante’s pilgrim himself can fall prey to the dangerous allure of spectacle in The Inferno—earning Virgil’s stern rebuke for gaping in fascination at the tussle between Master Adam and Sinon64—then so too could the average filmgoers in the face of these almost unprecedented spectacular images. L’Inferno is

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FIGURE 2.1 Dante’s First Swoon in Milano’s L’Inferno (1911).

FIGURE 2.2 Dante and Virgil Wind Their Way through the Circle of Gluttons (L’Inferno, 1911). at once the culmination of an earlier cinematic tradition that relied heavily on famous illustrations of literary texts in order to assert its own artistic merits, and the Méliès-inspired tradition of building the cinema precisely on what paintings, woodcuts, and written texts could not achieve (see pp. 55–65). Its major appeal is relentlessly cinematic. By showing audiences what they ultimately were urged to fear and reject, adventurous filmmakers could pass the censorship standards of the day and titillate their customers. Another useful example of this dynamic is the 1910

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Film d’Arte Italiana adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé—especially at the moment Salomè is given John the Baptist’s head as her prize. The audience witnesses her kissing and then picking up the gory head in something like a state of ecstasy, her body continuing the gyrations first seen in her Dance of the Seven Veils just moments earlier. The screen then fades to black. In this particular case the audience, placed directly in the position of the seduced King Herod, must confront a particularly gruesome yet erotic series of images, with nothing but their presumed knowledge of the biblical tale or, less likely, the Wilde play, to diminish the power of the “immoral” spectacle. By the late teens, such strategies for entertaining adult audiences were far more common. One of the most complex erotic scenes in pre-1920s literary cinema is Ricardo’s attempted rape of Alma in Maurice Tourneur’s 1919 adaptation of Conrad’s Victory. In spite of the film’s drastically altered and moralized ending, in which Alma and Heyst wind up alive and happy together, early scenes exploit the dangerous sexual undertones of the novel. When Ricardo (played by Lon Chaney), for example, sneaks into Alma’s dressing room, the viewer is forced to share the rapist’s perspective, viewing the vulnerable girl from behind in a shot from an adjoining room that epitomizes what Laura Mulvey has famously dubbed the “male gaze”65 (see Figure 2.3). When he attacks, a frantic Alma fights back, and the two figures move in and out of the picture while the camera remains static, the audience’s view further obstructed by a string curtain dividing the two rooms. The audience can see that Alma’s clothing has been torn away from her body but is forced to wait for an alternative shot perspective to see if she has escaped Ricardo’s fury. As an early example of the moral crisis promoted by filmic voyeurism, the sequence is exemplary.

FIGURE 2.3 Alma (Seena Owen) Subjected to Ricardo’s Gaze in Tourneur’s Victory (1919).

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Tourneur’s Victory, then, like the Italian films Salomè and L’Inferno, successfully complicated the period’s strict moral system while continuing to perform the supposedly valuable cultural service of the typical literary film. A third challenge confronting the literary film in this transitional decade was a certain stylistic conservatism and, arguably, a stylistic retardation that impeded the narrative continuity, comprehensibility, and entertainment value of the works. Bowser has shown that films “began to undergo a series of changes in 1908–09 that would be as radical as those at any time in film history, marking as they did a major shift in the perception of the nature and function of the motion picture.”66 She is of course alluding to a range of important developments, including the “emergence of the story film” discussed by Musser, but primarily the feature film and the development of what we now commonly refer to as the “classical Hollywood style.”67 Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Thompson, who together coined the term, argue that telling a story is the basic formal concern; … that unity is a basic attribute of film form; that the Hollywood film purports to be “realistic” in both an Aristotelian sense (truth to the probable) and a naturalistic one (truth to historical fact); that the Hollywood film strives to conceal its artifice through techniques of continuity and “invisible” storytelling; that the film should be comprehensible and unambiguous; and that it possesses a fundamental emotional appeal that transcends class and nation.68 More technically speaking, a number of developing trends allowed for the emergence of this cinematic style: explanatory intertitles, dialogue titles, intra-scenic editing (vs. static long shots), and inter-scenic editing (especially parallel montage), greater lens and camera mobility and, as we have seen, the greater length of the films. The trendsetters here were the shorter feature films of Biograph, often made by its most esteemed director Griffith, and the great Italian multi-reel epics that adopted these techniques for their more ambitious projects. Before The Birth of a Nation, Cabiria, perhaps more than any other particular film, represented the dream of a pure narrative cinema. In a 1914 New York Times editorial entitled “Why I Stayed Out and Why I Went to the Movies,” playwright David Belasco seemed nothing shy of amazed by the artistic possibilities raised by Cabiria’s editing: The day of unnecessary titles and explanations is passed, and the day of bigger and better things in the picture world is coming. And, within our generation, movie fans will see 10,000 feet of film without one explanatory caption, so comprehensively perfect will be the action of the piece, so suggestive the surroundings, and so capable the minor players in support of the stars.69

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The purest cinema, the perfect cinema Belasco envisions would be one in which a complex and immense story could be told without any recourse to nonphotographic explanatory aids such as lobby posters, lectures, or even intertitles. Such dreams of a purely visual cinema did not immediately influence the literary film genre, however; in fact, by the end of the silent era, such movies had more intertitles than ever. Praise for literary films usually was based, especially early in the 1910s, on the notion that such films performed an important cultural service, simultaneously preserving the cultural heritage in a modern medium and rendering it accessible to the uncultured classes. This fact, coupled with the literary film’s moral associations, helps to explain why the genre lagged behind others that mimicked the formulas of Cabiria and The Birth of a Nation. Uricchio and Pearson, among others, have noted that “the editing patterns of the quality films seem somewhat retrograde in comparison to the period’s overall movement toward the conventions of spatial-temporal continuity that characterized classical Hollywood cinema’s construction of a transparent reality.”70 Judith Buchanan agrees but suggests that these retrograde editing patterns seem to have been the result of a deliberate choice on the part of filmmakers: “The [Shakespeare film] industry had not yet quite dared to break from some cinematised theatrical conventions to which it felt a cultural allegiance,” she says, and she goes on to describe “their attempts to inhibit their use of the specifically cinematic resources.”71 Charles Keil discusses the phenomenon of deliberate retrograde editing in reference to biblical films produced in the transitional era, arguing the possibility that in addition to sometimes exploiting its own potential for shock value, cinema could function as a reassurance of its own lack of threat. It does so through the depiction of “episodes [that], in their collective form … operate as a reminder of the value of the text from which they derive. Less than reconstruction and certainly nothing like a restructuring, such films are reminders, iconographically cued remembrances from a source text whose purpose is social unification.”72 We would add that especially as audiences continued to be exposed to the emerging classical Hollywood style, the type of cultural service performed by the literary films eventually hobbled their development, making them seem old-fashioned, even silly. The problem was increasingly noted at the time, as a Wid’s Film Daily review of the 1916 Thanhouser King Lear reveals: Time after time, we found characters walking or running down to the foreground, to stop and then go ahead in the approved “movie” manner

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of many years ago. This should be very funny to those of your fans who know something of Shakespeare and realize what can be done in the films by intelligent handling. … The director evidently had little knowledge of the value of different camera angles, and the photography was all straight, hard, old-school camera work.73 By 1916, then, the immobile camera, the static long shot—basically all the elements of the pre-Hollywood style—were openly described as passé. In concluding this section on the challenges facing the transitional-era literary film, it seems worth pointing out the tremendous irony of the idea of an “old-fashioned” literary film form. We say “ironic” because contemporary filmmakers acknowledged the influence of classic literature on the very editing techniques these films eschewed. The most famous example of such an acknowledgment would be Eisenstein’s claim that D. W. Griffith “arrived at montage through the method of parallel action, and he was led to the idea of parallel action by—Dickens!”74 Considering Dickens’s characteristic “‘break[s]’ in the narrative, a shifting of the story from one group of characters to another group,” Eisenstein persuasively traces Griffith’s innovations back to Dickens and novelists he influenced, including Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Meredith, and Hardy.75 We might reasonably extend such logic to other aspects of the classical Hollywood style. Tom Gunning, for instance, has discussed “the approach to characterization in the narrator-system,” which “asserts its hold on story through an expression of psychology, by which I mean the portrayal of interior states, such as memories or strong emotions, which are then seen as motivation for the action of the characters.”76 Such a filmic approach to characterization, we argue, is only made possible by the new editing techniques, but it comes before them too, from the Victorian novel, in fact. The transitional literary film, then, can be said to repress cinematic developments largely inspired by the written texts it sought to adapt. One remarkable literary film that exploited, even advanced, the full potential of the emerging Hollywood style was Griffith’s Enoch Arden of 1911, an adaptation of the famous and often-adapted Tennyson narrative poem (including four film versions before 1916). The story follows the tragic life of Enoch, who, in order to improve the lot of his impoverished children and wife Annie, sets sail for China to find his fortune but is shipwrecked and stranded on a desert island for ten years before being rescued. While he is away, Annie keeps putting off marrying Enoch’s noble rival Philip, who nonetheless pays for her children’s upbringing and schooling, because she hopes Enoch may still be alive. At almost the exact moment Enoch is finally rescued, she accepts that her husband is lost forever and agrees to marry Philip. When Enoch returns to East Anglia, he learns of his wife’s recent marriage and understands that he is too late. He swears that he will never reveal himself to her and, knowing she is happy, he dies alone a few days later.

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If Griffith’s most famous narrative technique was the rapid crosscutting characterized by the climactic finale of The Birth of a Nation, his earlier films offer similarly impressive demonstrations—none better, in fact, than Enoch Arden. One of the true Brit-Lit masterpieces of the period, the film is structured from the time of Enoch’s departure for China on alternating shot sequences of the separated husband and wife. At the central moment in the narrative where a storm wracks Enoch’s ship and we see him cast into the breakers, Annie stands on the eastern coast of England, peering out into the ocean for any sign of her husband (see Figure 2.4). Whereas the majority of shots of Enoch are from an objective perspective which makes him a part of the ocean and beach scenery (see Figure 2.5), shots of Annie typically

FIGURE 2.4 Annie and Her Children on the Lookout for Enoch Arden (1911).

FIGURE 2.5 Enoch Looks Westward for Annie (Enoch Arden, 1911).

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are filmed, or at least introduced, from above her back shoulder, allowing the viewer a clear sense of her perspective. The camerawork forwards the idea that Enoch is off somewhere to the east, that Annie is westward, and that the lovers are separated by the vast seas. In later scenes, the two characters look out over the ocean as if in spiritual communion, the shots communicating an interior focus on one another. In the film’s striking finale, Griffith uses the same parallel montage effect, now contrasting the sunlight shining in through a window on the dying Enoch, evocative of heaven’s light, with the sunlight pouring through Annie and Philip’s window, a light evocative of their happiness together (see Figures 2.6 and 2.7). Through its beautiful compositions and

FIGURES 2.6–2.7 The Sun Lights Enoch’s Death and Annie’s Rebirth (Enoch Arden, 1911).

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masterful editing, Enoch Arden tells a perfectly comprehensible and moving story, and one’s prior knowledge of the poem is by no means a necessity for enjoying it. Thus the film marks a major advance in the translation of written and verbal narrative devices into visual ones.

3 The growing concern with fidelity As mentioned in the introduction (see p. 18), for at least thirty years “fidelity” has been the single most discussed term in adaptation studies. Dudley Andrew’s famous critique of fidelity analysis as unproductive and “tiresome” helped to free adaptations from their status as secondary works of art, and it also pushed adaptation scholars to focus on the more complex textual, intertextual, and cultural work performed by adaptations.77 We agree with Andrew, of course, that judging an adaptation by how faithful it is to an adapted text is a tiresome, even intellectually deadening, scholarly activity. Recent work has productively raised the question whether the obsession in adaptation studies really is fidelity or is infidelity: as Simone Murray says, In reading over several decades of adaptation criticism, the suspicion grows that, while fidelity models may remain prevalent in film and television reviewing, in broader journalistic discourse, and in everyday evaluations by the film-going public, in academic circles the ritual slaying of fidelity criticism at the outset of a work has ossified into a habitual gesture, devoid of any real intellectual challenge.”78 We agree with this sentiment as well, but we also feel that “fidelity” is, somewhat bizarrely, among the most under-theorized—because under-historicized— terms in adaptation studies. The defensive, ritualistic slaying of fidelity seems to have become a trope before models of fidelity could be adequately studied. Fidelity models need to be evaluated, however, not only in terms of who is doing the analyzing (scholars, journalists, reviewers, students, the filmgoing public, and so forth), but also in terms of when, where, and how such analyses are being undertaken. It shouldn’t require much argument for us to accept that a French film reviewer in 1921 might have meant something very different by “fidelity” than an American scholar deriding the term in 1985, yet we continue to discuss fidelity as if it is, and always has been, a simple concept unaffected by history, geography, and more local factors such as class and gender. Especially for this early period, we think it worth delineating different modes of fidelity analysis and, more importantly, we wish to argue that in certain ways

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the emergence of a fidelity discourse in the transitional period—arising largely in journalistic film criticism—may have been beneficial to the development of the literary film genre, especially in terms of its ability to effectively engage an audience.79 Chapter 1 revealed the essential irrelevance of “fidelity” in the cinema’s first decade. Fidelity seemed not to have concerned filmmakers or reviewers at all then, both because the cinematic goals of adapting literary texts were different than in later periods and, crucially, because the limited storytelling abilities of early film made it impossible for the cinema to compete with literature as a narrative art form. In the transitional period, however, film discovers its own storytelling language, and a rival narrative art form is born— hence the increasing centrality of the term “fidelity,” as well as its variants, in contemporary advertisements, production notes, and reviews of literary films. We note five general models of fidelity practiced by critics of these transition-era films. The first and most basic one pertained of course to a film’s inclusion of essential plot details and characters—the basic ingredients of the “story.” The Reverend Elias Boudinet Stockton captured the prevailing view of the Milano’s L’Inferno, the smash-hit of 1911: “The distinguishing mark of this film, from an educational point of view, is not the beauty of the photography, nor the excellence of the acting, nor the magnificence and delicacy of treatment, great and worthy of all praise as these are, but the absolute fidelity to the poem in all its details.”80 Stockton goes on to discuss two instances where fidelity is impaired, such as when “the angel who opened the gates to the city of Dis (Canto 9:73–105) is a woman instead of a man,” but he insists that “the first impression is that literally the whole poem has been reproduced; and although a detailed comparison of the pictures and the film reveals that there are omissions, these have been so carefully selected and are of so unimportant a nature that the impression grows on one.”81 The link between a film’s “completeness” and its success became firmly entrenched, a commonplace in the reviews of literary films well beyond the transitional period. A filmmaker’s decision to exclude too much or veer too freely away from the source text could be devastating. The New York Times reviewer of Maurice Tourneur’s 1920 Treasure Island, for example, claimed that “those least familiar with Stevenson’s story will enjoy it most because, while it has many excellent scenes and some good acting, it falls so far short of its original that any comparison of the two must emphasize its defects.” He admits that “some recasting of the story was, of course, necessary for purposes of condensation and adaptation to the screen, but Mr. Fox seems to have been inspired with a desire to write his own movie rather than translate ‘Treasure Island’ into moving pictures.”82 The review expresses the common

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notion in the period that the purpose of the literary film is to translate the adapted text to the screen. On the other hand, in spite of the dream of a total adaptation, the reviewer evinces a clear, unambivalent belief that condensing plots is necessary for film adaptations. Several reviewers from the period go further than merely tolerating cuts, however, suggesting that the original stories can be improved through a film’s condensation and omission of unnecessary material. The 1910 Vitagraph Twelfth Night, which eliminates whole sections of the play, is said “in some degree, perhaps, [to be] an improvement, since it eliminates many of those portions which illuminate the main story, though they are not essential to its development, nor to an understanding of it.”83 While fidelity to the plot is commonly argued to be a sign of a particular film’s merits, balanced reviews from the period recognize the difference between essential plot details and inessential ones; thus, no Kenneth Branagh–like filmmaker—pursuing the dream of filming every single detail—emerges until about 1925 when Erich von Stroheim adapted Frank Norris’s McTeague for his originally-ten-hour-plus film Greed. The second variant was fidelity to an author’s perceived intentions. As Stephen Bush claimed in reference to L’Inferno, “I know of no higher commendation of the work than mention of the fact that the filmmakers have been exceedingly faithful to the words of the poet.”84 Of all the categories of fidelity evoked in the period, this one may be the most vague and is usually the most reactionary, suggesting constantly the inappropriateness of a director striking too far out on his own or trying to rework a classic author’s presumed original vision. The New York Times complained in 1915, for example, that The “Don Quixote” revealed yesterday in the Knickerbocker Theatre … proved to be about 95 per cent. movie and five per cent. Cervantes. Not that the movie makers did not adhere fairly closely to the classic, borrowing most of their material from the text, but that the nature of the cinema precludes the transmission of anything so subtle as satire, which is the essence of the book. … If [Cervantes] could but know what the moderns were doing to his greatest work he would probably break out of the Spanish ossuary in which his bones were interred just 300 years ago and demand some such justice.85 Although the reviewer may very well be offering a legitimate critique of the film (it seems easy to imagine the satire being lost in transmission), the final image of Cervantes rolling in his grave establishes the authorial intentions behind the original work as a key criterion for judging adaptations. The same magazine also breathed a sigh of relief that “Mr. Taylor [in his 1920 version of Huckleberry Finn] did not seek to use Mark Twain’s book as material for

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a conventional movie of his own, and so escaped being shot. He did seek, with care and intelligence, to translate as much as possible of the book into moving pictures.”86 As such reviews make clear, attempts at translation were more often than not preferred to creative appropriation, though more intrepid reviewers occasionally resisted this notion: the reviewer of Fox’s 1916 Romeo and Juliet, for example, felt that “it is a pity William Shakespeare did not live to see the movies, for he might have learned about play writing from them. If he had witnessed the first showing of a motion picture called ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the Academy of Music yesterday, for instance, he might have liked the ending better than the one he wrote for the play.” The reviewer goes on to marvel at the director ’s handling of the double-suicide scene: It will be recalled that Mr. Shakespeare’s Romeo came to the tomb and when he saw his Juliet on her bier, dead as he thought, he drank the deadly poison the apothecary had given him and died instantly. … Look on this picture from the studio William Shakespeare Fox. Upon awaking from her coma Juliet discovers Romeo and is overjoyed when he tells her he has come to take her away to Mantua. But her joy is shortlived, for she learns in a moment that he has taken the poison and death is upon him. … The result is the same, of course, but the brief colloquy between the lovers shrouds the play in still deeper gloom when the happy ending that seemed imminent fades away.87 One recognizes in this remarkable description a plot alteration successfully used in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo ⫹ Juliet. The third type of fidelity emerging in this period was to the setting of the adapted text. As filmmakers broke with increasing regularity out of their cramped studios to on-location sites, the expectations for faithfulness to place also increased. The point is well corroborated by two Italian productions of Shakespeare’s Othello. The first 1909 version was praised primarily for this very feature: “Many have seen Othello but never in such a setting. The stage has been noted for wonders of scenic fidelity but to enact this marvelous tragedy along the very waters and in the very gardens and palaces as the immortal Shakespeare pictures them with his versatile pen is to add an interest which could not be obtained in any other way.”88 In 1914 Ambrosio advertised in capital letters that its own version was “MADE AT VENICE, ITALY! That’s a Tremendous Advertising Feature in itself! … The waterways of Historic Venice with its tales ten centuries old, of Passionate Lovers and Fierce Vendettas. … In Othello, we offer a real masterpiece. It is the first of Shakespeare’s stories filmed in its proper environment, as the Master would

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have wished.”89 Of course, approximating a particular story’s setting could be just as praiseworthy as filming at the actual location in which the actions occur; The Moving Picture World praised in 1910 a Danish (Great Northern) Robinson Crusoe for this very reason: “There must be wonderfully enterprising and conscientious producers out in Denmark, for as we sat and watched this film, we were amazed at its verisimilitude. Denmark is not a tropical country, and yet when Robinson Crusoe arrived on his desert isle, there were all the indications and appearances of tropicals, vegetation and the like.”90 While setting fidelity is important for all filmed literary and historical subjects, it seems to have been a special concern of filmmakers producing works based on British literature, perhaps because of the great scenic details associated with the Victorian novel. We view this quality as one of the early distinguishing features of the Brit-Lit film, as opposed to those based on, say, American or French literature. In the transitional period, many of the larger international companies opened branches in Great Britain, which allowed them to film their subjects with greater attention to setting and location, and non-British companies were no less obsessed than native ones. Rachael Low has argued that “both American and French companies filming in England were anxious to make them as obviously British in character as possible, and in their search for typically English scenery, and their use of English history and classics, were even more acutely sensitive to English atmosphere than many of the native companies.”91 Indeed, in many of the Brit-Lit films of the decade, one sees the type of meticulousness that will become a basic staple of the literary costume drama that is so closely associated today with British literature on film (see below, pp. 342–7). Even as early as 1909, Brit-Lit films violating the high expectations for scenic (and other forms of) fidelity could be severely ridiculed for their lapses, as in the case of Selig’s The Moonstone: “The details seem to have been worked out with quite as close fidelity to facts as has been shown in other dramas,” however, “one is disposed to think that the details of the London scene are less faithfully rendered. There is no such place as Hampton Heath in London, Mr. Selig. There is a Hampton, … and there is a Hampton Court, but no Hampton Heath as you would have us believe in your splendid film.”92 The most important British producer in regard to setting was Cecil Hepworth, whose literary films are marked by a respect for detail almost unprecedented in previous productions.93 The Hepworth studio’s 1913 David Copperfield, directed by Thomas Bentley, for example, is a wonderful example of how setting and costuming could contribute to a mise-en-scène capable of holding an audience’s attention. Rachael Low, who has written extensively on it, admitted the temptation to “regard the film as retrograde,” but she rightly viewed Bentley’s handling of both “settings and players” as

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an advance in British filmmaking.94 In their extensive attention to detail, the Hepworth studio’s films are in some ways the most obvious root of the BritLit costume drama tradition. The power of these productions lies in their compositional richness, encompassing both the warm interior medium shots of the characters and the deeper and more expansive exterior spaces they move through. David Copperfield’s intra-scenic editing also showed Bentley’s skillfulness in breaking up the static shot through impressive pans and camera repositionings. While somewhat retrograde in terms of temporal and interscenic continuity editing, the Hepworth films tended to feature extraordinarily impressive compositions, intelligent interior lighting techniques (especially for communicating the time of day), and an attention to architectural spaces and scenic locations, all of which lent them what contemporaries might have called a sense of “authenticity.” Andrew Higson, a key historian of the British heritage film, has argued that “one of the key terms in the discourse which validates these films is authenticity—the desire to establish the adaptation of the heritage property (whether conceived as historical period, novel, play, building, personage, décor, or fashion) as an authentic reproduction of the original.”95 It is no mistake that Higson has written of Hepworth as a precursor to the major directors of the heritage tradition epitomized by the MerchantIvory films of the 1980s and 1990s (see below, pp. 342–7).96 Hepworth’s American counterpart at this time was the independent Thanhouser studio. An East Coast company that filmed most of its exteriors in New Jersey and therefore could not easily reproduce, say, London street scenes, Thanhouser invested most of its energy in the creation of stunningly ornate interior settings and amazingly detailed costumes. Most Thanhouser films, like the Hepworth ones, were stylistically limited, especially after 1915, when they began to fall out of favor with their early, adoring critics.97 However, one particular Thanhouser production stands out even in relation to the best films of the later period, the 1912 adaptation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s reform poem “The Cry of the Children.” Focusing on a family’s brutal life toiling in the factories, the story follows one little girl’s physical and spiritual demise after she is forced to replace her sick mother in the factory in order to help her starving family. Early in the film when little Alice is still untouched by the grime and misery of the factory, she charms the wife of the factory owner, who wishes to adopt her. Shortly after the child announces her wish to stay with her birth mother, she is forced to work and is so severely altered by the experience that the owner ’s wife is no longer willing to take the child in. The woman coldly rejects her, and Alice dies a few days later. The film’s alternating shots between the crowded, filthy interior of the poor family’s home and the deep, lavish spaces of the owner’s home establish

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FIGURES 2.8–2.9 The Millworker’s Crowded Home and the Mill Owner’s Mansion in Thanhouser’s The Cry of the Children (1912). well the use of mise-en-scène for narrative purposes (see Figures 2.8–2.9). Unlike Bentley’s David Copperfield and even most other Thanhouser productions, however, The Cry of the Children employed far more advanced editing techniques than most contemporary literary films. The final shot sequence, following the rejection of Alice by the owner’s wife, is a tour de force of early cinematic narrative storytelling. It begins with the poor family huddled in near darkness around their dining table. They are weeping. The audience assumes that Alice may be dead, a suspicion the film refuses to confirm through explanatory intertitles. Instead, the fact is gradually revealed through

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FIGURE 2.10 The Millworkers Relieved by their Daughter’s Newfound Peace in Thanhouser’s The Cry of the Children (1912). special effects and editing, first the appearance of Alice’s ghost before her family (touchingly, her parents show relief upon seeing her angelic ghost [see Figure 2.10]), and second, through a flashback montage shown mainly from the perspective of the remorseful owner’s wife. The montage features rapid shot alterations joined by dissolves, from close-ups inside the owner’s home to a long shot of the factory (intercut twice) to a medium shot of Alice collapsing in the factory, to a brief shot of the funeral, and a final return to the rich woman’s guilty face. Both in terms of scenic fidelity and editing, The Cry of the Children rivals Enoch Arden as perhaps the most accomplished prefeature Brit-Lit film. Though Thanhouser is a company that tended to bank on “authenticity” of setting, the film’s achievement is notable due to its stylistic sophistication. A fourth variant of fidelity analysis that emerged in this period—closely related to and sometimes indistinguishable from fidelity of setting—is fidelity to the historical period in which the adapted story is set. This is not to say that all transitional-era filmmakers were slavishly insistent on period adaptations of literature. In fact, the decade sees dozens of modernizations and clever offshoots of classic works, as is revealed by such titles as Romeo and Juliet in Town (Selig, 1910), Sherlock Holmes Jr. (Rex, 1911), and A Modern Portia (Lubin, 1912), among others. The crucial issue had to do with whether particular adaptations were openly announcing themselves as modernizations of the adapted texts and, unless they were doing so, period authenticity was increasingly viewed as mandatory. Certainly, the demand for accuracy resulted in some of the most persnickety reviews to be found in the trade journals, even

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when the films were otherwise deemed praiseworthy, either for their general excellence or for their service to the cinema. The 1911 Vitagraph Vanity Fair was said to come nearer to being a flawless adaptation than anything that has appeared in moving pictures. Aside from one slight incongruity there is nothing to criticise and everything to praise. We were not aware that well-shaped cigars were much in use one hundred years ago, nor were gentlemen accustomed to lighting their cigars with the present-day parlor match, as did Lord Steyne in the scene with Becky Sharpe. … Aside from this there is no flaw except perhaps the pernicious habit the Vitagraph Company has of cutting the characters off at the knees.98 It’s hard not to find humorous the reviewer’s near-equal dismay at both those anachronistic cigars and the film’s use of the so-called “nine-foot line,” which emerged around 1909–10 and fundamentally altered the viewer’s entire relationship to filmed objects.99 Reviewers more commonly limited their comments on the period details to a kind of staple validation of literary films so long as they showed proper respect for historical accuracy. The reviewer of a 1912 two-reel Lady Audley’s Secret, for example, congratulates “the Imp Company on having produced a period play that is practically perfect in the matter of detail.”100 The final variant we wish to highlight is thematic fidelity, which was less commonly noted in the period’s production notes and reviews, but appears to have become an increasingly central concern of the filmmakers themselves. We agree with Leitch that the model in this period for effective thematic engagement of an adapted text was represented by Griffith’s one- and tworeel literary films, which effectively “reduce those originals to their thematic essence or create a thematic nexus that implies something of the scale or prestige of a literary original.”101 Again, Enoch Arden seems an ideal example, especially in its use of cross cutting to capture the tragic “too-lateness” of Enoch’s rescue. We discuss thematic fidelity in greater detail in this chapter’s concluding section on the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. All five types of fidelity analysis were crucial to the development of the literary film because they came to constitute the basic, original criteria for early qualitative analysis of adaptations. The period’s obsessions with fidelity served in most cases to privilege the authority and/or originality of the written texts, it is true; but they also expanded the ways in which viewers might think about a film’s specific methods of engagement with those texts. Whereas one reviewer might scoff, for example, at a director ’s decision to awaken Juliet before Romeo’s death, another may view such a

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departure from the text as a clarifying gesture or, paradoxically, a faithful one, in that her early awakening better advances the intended pathos of the double suicide. Colin MacCabe has recently lamented the manner in which adaptation critics condemn too simplistically the typical evaluative criteria used to discuss films and books in the nonacademic realm: “These colloquial forms,” he argues, “are highly evaluative not least because they are often directed at immediate questions of choice: ‘Do you recommend that I go and see this movie or that?’ ‘In your opinion is this book worth buying?’”102 Certainly, fidelity analysis is the most popular such colloquial form of analysis, one whose usefulness in certain contexts is admirably reconsidered in MacCabe’s recently published collection of essays, True to the Spirit. In the book, Dudley Andrew himself is quoted as saying that popular discussions of fidelity amount to “a vernacular version of comparative media semiotics.”103 Such important qualifications of the academic anti-fidelity discourse suggest that whereas judging an adaptation according to how faithful it is to its source tends to be exceedingly reductivist, a viewer ’s ability to assess the myriad ways in which adaptations are faithful or unfaithful to their sources actually can enhance the pleasure and/or intellectual experience of encountering an adaptation.104 We of course endorse Robert Stam’s influential call for a shift away from essentialist fidelity models to those which prioritize the “dialogics of adaptation.”105 We also believe that there is no contradiction in remaining open to the important roles that fidelity models have played in the history of adaptation production and reception. In the transitional period, the development of a complex fidelity discourse was vital since it put forward a series of complex evaluative terms for describing and analyzing contemporary film adaptations of literature.

4 The “1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” Mention the 1920 Jekyll and Hyde to any film buff, and they will think rather immediately of John S. Robertson’s Paramount/Artcraft feature starring John Barrymore. Interestingly, though, the Robertson film was just one of three versions of Stevenson’s novella released that year; the American Pioneer Film Corporation made a low-budget version starring Sheldon Lewis, and F. W. Murnau directed an artful “unauthorized” version entitled Der Januskopf, or The Head of Janus, which is now lost. At least six previous versions were made dating back to 1908, though none commanded as much attention or became as influential as the Robertson film. As one of the most revered Shakespearean actors of his day, Barrymore gave immediate credibility to the film. The New York Times called his performance “flawless.”106

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Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of several films that might be said to mark the “arrival” of the Brit-Lit feature film because it successfully incorporates four qualities lacking in most literary films of the era: first, like the Milano company’s L’Inferno, it successfully balances contemporary calls for morality in the literary film and awareness of audience desires for sexuality and violence; second, like Biograph’s Enoch Arden, it advances much of its story through an exclusively cinematic language and, more specifically, through the language of the classical Hollywood style; third, like the Hepworth films in England or the Thanhouser films in America, it demonstrates fidelity to time and place that meets the era’s increasingly high standards for detail; finally, as much as any major literary film before it, Jekyll and Hyde presents itself unapologetically as a creative appropriation, rather than translation, of its source material. The film grows out of a long tradition dating back to the 1880s of stage adaptations of the novella—most notably Thomas Russell Sullivan’s Boston production of 1887. Nearly all stage and film productions followed Sullivan’s lead in introducing a love interest for Henry Jekyll, usually Sir George Carew’s virtuous daughter, Millicent, as in the Robertson film; and a second seductress figure, often a prostitute, which Miss Gina is implied to be in this film. If Jekyll struggles between his virtuous and baser natures, his simultaneous love for Millicent and desire for Gina help the audience to visualize that struggle. Barrymore’s performance is indeed memorable, at times incredible, but the success of this adaptation has to do with more than the quality of the acting. One might assume based on the theatrical roots of the scenario that it would fall into the category of filmed theater, but the movie is thoroughly cinematic from the opening scene until the last. From the wonderfully detailed Victorian costumes and London street sets (see Figure 2.11)—whose architecture and fog seem especially intended to evoke popular images associated with the Whitechapel murders of the previous century—to the elaborate special effects used in the transformation and Hyde scenes, Robertson’s film revels in its ability to show, not merely tell. Rather than focusing here on the specifics of mise-en-scène or even the director’s technical style, we wish to highlight the central filmic quality of the text: that is, its particular use of special effects. If the triumph of the literary cinema over its textual and theatrical antecedents hinges largely on its realization of a technical and narrative uniqueness, then we will hardly be surprised at the centrality of the early horror and fantasy films in the development of the genre. Just as the films of Mèliés or the trick films of R. W. Paul tested in an earlier period the magic the cinema could perform, the increasingly impressive special effects of the mature feature films boasted loudly of the cinema’s ability to surpass in certain ways poetry, prose, drama, painting, and still photography—an

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FIGURE 2.11 Victorian London in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). ability which spoke directly to the artistic merits of the new art form and thereby authorized its meddling with the older ones. Early reviewers too, not yet blinded by the post-Cahiers critical privileging of an auteur cinema over a genre one, understood perfectly well the degree to which the cinema’s evolution and growing prestige were being advanced by emergent conventions such as special effects. Consider two brief examples, both from 1910 reviews in The Moving Picture World. In September, the weekly journal ran the following review of the Edison Company’s Alice in Wonderland: “Not only is it a remarkably good bit of mechanical work, but the dramatic features are developed so they seem even more surprising than they do in the book. It is one thing to read a story of wonderful adventures. It is quite another to have these same adventures re-enacted.”107 Even as far back as 1903 when Hepworth had filmed Carroll’s fantasy tale, the advantages of the cinema were apparent, but by 1910 the reviewer is confident enough to praise aspects of the film version over its source. The Edison Company’s Frankenstein is similarly praised for its visual effects: “The formation of the monster in that cauldron of blazing chemicals is a piece of photographic work which will rank with the best of its kind. The entire film is one that will create a new impression of the possibilities of the motion picture as a means of expressing dramatic scenes.”108 As such reviews suggest, the genre films offered special opportunities to filmmakers both to exceed the limitations of the written text and to stretch the possibilities of the new medium.109 A decade later, the cinema’s survival was no longer in question, and filmmakers were exploiting more systematically the possibilities of special effects as narrative devices—as opposed to vehicles for the creation of

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spectacle in a cinema of tableaux. The Robertson Jekyll and Hyde offers a useful example of narrative special effects because it begins with relatively minimal effects in the early stages of Jekyll’s transformation and builds up to more advanced ones as the virtuous Jekyll becomes more and more subsumed by the increasingly monstrous Hyde. The first transformation scene, in fact, employs surprisingly few effects, choosing to rely primarily on Barrymore’s virtuoso performance, especially his extreme facial and bodily contortions (see Figure 2.12). Only after he becomes Hyde does the camera dwell on his hands for a few seconds, a lap dissolve effect depicting the lengthening of his fingers until his hands come to resemble spiders (see Figure 2.13).

FIGURES 2.12–2.13 Minimal effects in Hyde’s (John Barrymore) First “reveal” in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).

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Over the course of the film, Hyde’s features become ever more spiderlike as he resorts to more degenerate crimes. When Jekyll transforms before an astonished Henry Carew, whom he will murder seconds later, a subtle lap dissolve reveals not only more grotesque features, such as his filthy, mangled teeth (see Figure 2.14), but also an elongated skull which renders more explicit the arachnid associations (see Figure 2.15). The pointed head is especially pronounced after Hyde chases Carew into the street and, vampire

FIGURE 2.14 Hyde’s (Barrymore) Increasingly Monstrous Appearance in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).

FIGURE 2.15 Hyde’s Elongated, Spider-Like Skull in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).

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like, sinks his teeth into his victim’s neck while the camera hovers above him. This narrative use of special effects culminates in a later scene where what remains of Jekyll finally is overwhelmed by his monstrous alter ego. Robertson uses a complex double exposure procedure to create a massive spider—a barely visible Hyde attached to its underbelly—which slowly crawls onto Jekyll’s bed and then, presumably, into the sick man’s soul. We would describe these highly cinematic effects as narrative rather than spectacular precisely because they serve throughout the film as a sort of visual shorthand for the gradual deterioration of Jekyll’s mind and soul. Unlike special effects that serve mainly to enhance the realism of a particular event or to surprise or otherwise arouse an audience through movie magic, Robertson’s systematically selective and relatively minimalist effects serve mainly to facilitate the audience’s understanding of the protagonist’s moral and spiritual deterioration; they serve, in other words, as a specifically filmic tool for conveying information that novels are only capable of suggesting through words. Thus Jekyll and Hyde not only avoids the stylistic retardation of an earlier literary cinema; it embraces the cinema’s unique storytelling capabilities. The film also eschews the moralism often demanded of literary films in the period. Especially by pronouncing the Frankenstein-like perspectives of the character Lanyon, who accuses Jekyll even in the opening scene of tampering with supernatural forces, Robertson’s film does read as something of a cautionary tale. However, we disagree with Abigail Bloom who claims that the film is reductive in comparison with the morally ambiguous novella. Bloom effectively points out that because Jekyll is, at the film’s beginning, a superhuman philanthropist who spends most of his time attempting to cure the illnesses of the poor, his everyman qualities are lost; he has become so virtuous a character that Hyde can be understood only as a monster born of the potion’s influence rather than an essential part of Jekyll’s personality. Though she may overstate the case, her claims call useful attention to one of the film’s meaningful plot deviations from the source. However, when she argues that Jekyll’s suicide in the final scene is implied to “save” him because an intertitle explains that he “has taken his own life in atonement,”110 she misreads Jekyll’s guilt and desire to make amends as the film’s official statement about the status of the dead Jekyll’s soul. In showing regret for his crimes, this Jekyll is no different than the Jekyll of Stevenson’s novella. The film offers no indication that he will actually be “saved” as a result of his guilt or suicide. Instead of condemning the film for its “unfaithfulness,” we might ask why the filmmakers played up Jekyll’s virtues. Several likely reasons suggest

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themselves. For one, the demonstration of Jekyll’s virtue has the simultaneous effect of heightening the tragedy by showing how far he will fall and suggesting the possibility that moral behavior is the result of psychological repression and, therefore, is even less “natural” than vice—a view forwarded explicitly by the film’s Dionysian dandy, George Carew. More pragmatically speaking, the rendering of Jekyll as a hyper-virtuous gentleman speaks to contemporary American moral expectations for cinematic heroes, as we have already seen, and therefore serves an important practical purpose. Finally, Bloom’s argument ignores the complexity of the audience’s position throughout the film; similar to the viewers of those seductive images offered by L’Inferno or Salomè or Victory, the viewer of Jekyll and Hyde—like Jekyll himself—is forced to test his morality in the face of numerous temptations. Not only does Robertson’s film delight in violent spectacles, it revels in the nightmare-fantasy of Victorian London’s seedy underbelly. Though far less erotically charged than Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 sound version, also issued by Paramount, Robertson’s film nonetheless is successful in conveying Jekyll’s sexual repression. The early night scenes featuring the scantily clad Miss Gina (see Figure 2.16), who Carew hires to seduce Jekyll, offer a useful example. The more noteworthy scene, however, involves Hyde’s visit to an opium den midway through the film. As numerous wretched souls lie about the place—one man scratching furiously at the red ants he imagines are crawling all over his body—Hyde begins fondling a prostitute and, a second later, notices Miss Gina, whom he has discarded, standing at the bar next to

FIGURE 2.16 The Tempting Miss Gina in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).

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them. The film then flirts with the idea of a vicious threesome (see Figure 2.17) before Hyde pushes away both women and opts to head upstairs to seek out other pleasures. Drugged men lie strewn across the floor and in bunk beds lining the walls (see Figure 2.18), but Hyde chooses a different woman instead of the drugs, at least for the time being. The scene ends with a Chinese laborer going to fetch a prostitute for him. As Edward Weitzel remarked in his review for The Moving Picture World, “There are incidents of illicit love-making that are startling in their frank realism, and glimpses of horrors that will send a

FIGURE 2.17 Hyde Flirts with Gina and a Prostitute in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).

FIGURE 2.18 The Opium Den in Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).

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shudder through the least sensitive of spectators. … Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both shocks and fascinates.”111 In depicting such “crude” and “lascivious” sights, Robertson not only offers his audience shocking images within the context of a moral tale, but he also announces the manner in which his film will adapt, rather than translate, Stevenson’s text. Much of the challenge, in fact, of filming the novella has to do with what a director is to show an audience when Hyde ventures out at night, a challenge arising from the fact that Stevenson never really tells his reader what Hyde does when he leaves the house. What sort of evil deeds are we to imagine Hyde doing? Whereas the novella allows us to imagine and then insert our worst fears, the movies benefit and suffer from having to decide for us. One of the easy ways to distinguish the various prominent stage and film productions, therefore, has to do with the manner in which a particular director chooses to address this difficult question. As mentioned above, Robertson tends to linger on the sexual vices of Victorian London, but the film also shows Hyde committing nonsexual acts of violence and participating in London’s underground drug culture. In many ways, the film is structured on an internal battle between Apollonian restraint and Dionysian release. Sir George’s theory throughout the film is that repression accomplishes nothing because “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Further, the illustrated intertitle card prefacing Hyde’s first night out features a prominent Bacchus figure in the lower right corner. The Sheldon Lewis knockoff of the same year offers a different interpretation of Hyde’s criminality. In this undeniably original adaptation, too often dismissed for its comparatively low production values and unfortunate dream-sequence finale, the idea that Hyde is sexually repressed is not even raised; instead, Hyde is depicted as a menace to society, a skulking anarchist who commits random acts of violence for pleasure. He crouches behind hedges, waiting for women to pass simply so that he can attack them (see Figure 2.19), and his preferred criminal pastime is arson. In one scene, he tries to set a barn on fire before being apprehended by several men. In a later one, he succeeds in setting a high-rise apartment building on fire. The final scene presents a rather terrifying image of the captured Hyde bound by the straps of an electric chair (see Figure 2.20), about to be executed before the now bloodthirsty viewing audience. Just as the warden is about to “flip the switch,” a dissolve reveals the sleeping Jekyll surrounded by friends who are trying to awaken him from a nightmare. Though the surprise ending is mostly disappointing, director Charles Haydon’s suggestion that a Hyde lurks somewhere in the subconscious minds of all “normal” human beings is quite provocative.

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FIGURE 2.19 Hyde (Sheldon Lewis) Coiled for an Attack in Haydon’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920).

FIGURE 2.20 An Insane Hyde (Lewis) Strapped into the Electric Chair in Haydon’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). Robertson’s film ponders the dangers and ugliness of a hedonistic society, condemning man’s surrender to instinctual pleasures as degrading and monstrous (but also questioning whether repression actually works); Haydon’s film speaks to more general fears of social disorder, to the possibility that lurking inside every human heart is an essential chaos which civilization must constantly keep suppressed. In both cases, the Freudian notion of

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civilization as the repression of natural instincts is writ large. Mamoulian’s great film of 1931 would seek to reverse this narrative, showing instead the dangers of sexual repression specifically; his Jekyll turns into Hyde because his union with Muriel is repeatedly delayed, and his aggression and lust require another outlet. From what we know about Murnau’s Der Januskopf, the film avoided the Freudian narrative altogether, suggesting instead that evil is something outside ourselves, a supernatural force; thus, the film likely sought to bring traditional concepts of good and evil back into the Jekyll and Hyde conversation. What is important here is of course not whether the individual films’ particular choices are right or wrong but, rather, the fact that the filmmakers are making intelligent choices about how to use the novella for their own unique artistic and philosophical purposes. Haydon’s suggestion that Hyde is not real at all but, instead, an aspect of our imaginations, comes close to articulating another idea: that “Jekyll and Hyde” is in our culture a metonym for the divided self, one transcending the specific circumstances of our individual struggles. Not by themselves, but through their intertextual relationship, the 1920 Jekyll and Hyde films, all the Jekyll and Hyde films and even the plays that influenced them, in fact, together clarify the idea that Jekyll and Hyde can no longer refer to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella. It has already become something much larger. Writing in the late 1940s, André Bazin showed uncanny foresight about the direction adaptation studies might take after a century or more of film. He argued that it was possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of the adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed. If the film that was made of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1940; dir. Lewis Milestone) had been successful, … the (literary?) critic of the year 2050 would find not a great novel out of which a play and film had been “made,” but rather a single work reflected through three art forms, an artistic pyramid with three sides, all equal in the eyes of the critic. The “work” would then be only an ideal point at the top of this figure, which itself is an ideal construct. The chronological precedence of one part over another would not be an aesthetic criterion any more than the chronological precedence of one twin over the other is a genealogical one.112 The 1920 Jekyll and Hyde might be viewed speculatively as just the sort of “single work” Bazin envisioned, one reflected through three art forms (literature, drama, cinema) and multiple individual variations on them. By 1920,

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a select few filmmakers had succeeded in solving many of the problems hindering the development of the literary film, the most important of which was the films’ assumed subordinate relationship to the literary texts they adapted. Paradoxically, the emergence of the fidelity discourse may have helped to usher in the “reign of the adaptation,” precisely by giving filmmakers specific guidelines or rules, which they could just as easily manipulate, or even reject, as choose to obey.

3 Internationalizing the Brit-Lit film: Hollywood and the world film market, 1920–27

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arly cinema’s tenuous status dictated to a large degree the nature of the new art form’s relationship to literature. If the cinema needed literature to justify its cultural value, then literary films could hardly have been expected to define the cutting edge of cinema. Indeed, early cinema’s voluntary subordination to literature explains the relative stylistic retardation and commercial struggles of so many adaptations in the 1910s. The following decade tells a rather different story. A helpful list of the most “popular” attractions between the years 1922 and 1927, for example, features forty-two films.1 Of these at least fifteen, or more than one third, are films based on distinguished plays or novels, most from the British Empire; these include: Robin Hood (Allan Dwan, 1922), Oliver Twist (Frank Lloyd, 1922), The Sea Hawk (Frank Lloyd, 1924), The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925), Beau Geste (Herbert Brenon, 1926), and The Son of the Sheik (George Fitzmaurice, 1926). Although The Moving Picture World could claim in 1920 that it was “an accepted fact within the motion picture industry” that “costume pictures have not been entirely successful in recent years,”2 Richard Koszarski assures us that “many of the most popular films of the [1920s] era were costume pictures.”3 Furthermore, adaptations constituted some of the most artistically innovative and influential films of this most important cinematic decade. An impartial list would include Brit-Lit films such as Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Charles Bryant’s Salomé (1923), Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), and Murnau’s Faust (1926; see below, pp. 132–3, for Brit-Lit connections), as well as such important world-lit adaptations as Erich

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von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), The Three Musketeers (Fred Niblo, 1921), and Watson and Webber’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). So how are we to account for the relative popularity and artistic success of 1920s adaptations? By 1920, film no longer needed literature for its survival, a fact which seems to have lessened neither the appeal nor the usefulness of highprofile adaptations in the minds of many producers. In the cinema’s most formative decade, literature’s relationship to film would be redefined in several important ways: by film’s newly achieved supremacy within the entertainment industry and its emergence as perhaps the major art form of the twentieth century; by the refining of sound and camera technologies, culminating in the adoption of the Vitaphone in 1926 and the soundtrack in 1931; by continuing threats to artistic autonomy in the face of state and industry-based censorship movements; and above all, by the rise of Hollywood and the related emergence of various national cinemas. The story we tell in this chapter ultimately focuses on how the emergence of relatively distinct national cinemas in the 1920s impacted the production, theorization, and reception of the Brit-Lit film. National literatures had of course been crucial to the development of national cinemas even in the previous decade, both as models to be imitated and as sources of familiar material. Cinematic “prestige” movements in various countries had aimed at transforming film from a working- and lower-class attraction to an art form similar to and worthy of literature. Thomas Elsaesser notes that, Up until the Autorenfilm [1913], film subjects and genres were quasiuniversal and international, with very little fundamental difference from country to country. … With the Autorenfilm, the notion of “national cinema” became construed in analogy to “national literature”, as well as a certain definition of the popular, in which the rural-völkisch and the nationalromantic played an important role.4 Elsaesser perhaps gives too much credit to Germany; as we saw in Chapter 2, the “author’s film” might best be understood as part of an international uplift movement including such initiatives as the Film d’Art in France, the Film d’Arte Italiana, and the American “quality” films which proliferated after the 1907 nickelodeon closings. Nonetheless, Elsaesser makes a crucial point, which is that the long process according to which filmmaking countries began to achieve more or less distinctive styles may have begun with their adaptation of their own literatures. The “universal” style to which Elsaesser refers, while a fraught concept, nonetheless remains generally applicable throughout the silent era. The dream of film as a universal medium of communication dates back at least

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to the turn of the century, born of that generation’s faith in the universality of photographed images, relative to the estranging effects of specific languages, or even local dialects and idioms. The earliest film producers immediately grasped the economic possibilities of the “universal” art form. Even as early as 1910, major companies such as Pathé and Vitagraph began using second negatives for simultaneous release of their films overseas, in addition, of course, to producing intertitles in multiple languages. By the time of the featurelength film in the middle 1910s, major production companies—many of which were opening subsidiaries in various foreign locations—were targeting export markets as aggressively as they were domestic ones, a fact which sheds much light on the frequent casting of foreign actors, the well-known poaching of foreign directors, and the cultivation of what silent film scholars have dubbed an “international acting style.”5 No single production issue was more important, however, than choosing which subjects to film. For European film-producing countries struggling to reenter the game after the war, and for Asian and South American film-producing countries attempting to solidify their domestic markets, the need to compete with—or simply stave off—Hollywood was paramount. And David Bordwell reminds us that one of the central strategies of the Hollywood machine was the development of story material characterized by “a fundamental emotional appeal that transcend[ed] class and nation.”6 In her study of the international export markets between 1907 and 1934, Kristin Thompson warns, “We should be careful when we formulate film history in terms of ‘national cinemas.’ … Few national cinema industries operate in isolation; through foreign investment, competition and other types of influence, outside factors will almost invariably affect any given national cinema.”7 As we argue at different moments throughout this book, formulating certain periods of film history in transnational or globalist terms may be most productive and accurate. At the same time, undeniable processes of national and regional differentiation were well underway as early as the 1910s, and such processes were critical to the development of the Brit-Lit film. In short, although this chapter weighs carefully the lessons taught by postnational and globalist film theory,8 it also takes as axiomatic for the period in question both the relative “universality” of the silent film and the continuing value of the “national cinema” concept.

1 The rhetoric of “international amity” The importance of the export market suggests the degree to which even censorship was economically rather than morally motivated.9 Films that attempted to respect cultural diversity and highlight so-called “universal”

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themes tended to be privileged in most film-producing countries. In the 1920s especially, when the American Motion Picture Association’s Committee on Public Relations was trumpeting film as “an instrument of international amity,” studios were encouraged to treat foreign nations with the utmost respect. In fact, the Studio Relations Committee stressed that filmmakers should avoid “picturizing in an unfavorable light another country’s religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry.”10 T. P. O’Connor, president of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), preferred the slightly more specific prohibition of film “incidents having a tendency to disparage our Allies,”11 whereas Japanese governmental censorship stipulations warned filmmakers to avoid any pictures that threatened to “injure international relationships.”12 The Film Boards of Berlin and Munich banned any motion pictures that would endanger Germany’s “relationship with foreign states.”13 One could describe similarly worded stipulations in the codes of nearly every film-producing country of the early 1920s. None of the codes prohibited filmmakers from spewing nationalist propaganda, of course. In addition to fostering relatively liberal-minded—if economically and politically driven—international relations policies, the censorship codes did little to prohibit racist, classist, and sexist ideologies, or a troublingly sanitized, apolitical worldview. The more insidious side of “international amity” mandates was revealed in the attitudes of those contemporaries who seem to have believed that American films alone reflected and communicated universal values. Such views sometimes appealed to notions of America as a democratic melting pot, as Will Hays’s retrospective remarks in 1938 reveal: There is a special reason why America should have given birth and prosperous nurture to the motion picture and its world-wide entertainment. America in the very literal sense is truly the world-state. All races, creeds, all men are to be found here—working, sharing, and developing, side by side in more friendship among greater diversities of tribes and men than all the previous history of the world discloses.14 Just as often, such views were reinforced by caricatures of a Jewish Hollywood as the land of the “international race,” both inside and outside the United States. As British MP Joseph Kenworthy claimed in a debate on the proposed British quota system, “The great superfilm from Hollywood is not an American film but an international film. The industry is in the hands of an international race, the Jews.”15 Such views reflect different takes on an idea that became more and more entrenched during the 1920s: whereas the United States made films with international appeal, other filmmaking countries made films that appealed, at best, mainly to their own citizens.

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What, then, could competing countries do except differentiate their product from the Hollywood film or market it as being “international”? Product differentiation was both a welcome artistic development and a threat to American film. Liberal Americans enthusiastically defended the need to keep importing foreign films, often describing cinema as a developing art form rather than a commodity: “The motion picture is an art. Art is international. The work of great masters of the world in music, painting, drama and literature belong to no nation and to no race. Likewise the work of the masters of motion-picture production belongs to the world.”16 Others stressed that variety was essential to the success of the industry, and audience diversity should be a primary consideration. For example, a member of the Inter-Ocean Film Corporation predicted that “German films will be demanded in America because the particular elements of interest in German pictures bring the variation that motion-picture audiences in America demand.”17 While this particular author was stressing variety for variety’s sake, Erich von Stroheim sought to articulate the peculiar strengths of certain non-American cinemas: “Just as foreign literature is different from American literature, so are foreign plays different from American pictures. … Foreign writers go more into the deeper relationships of mankind than do American authors. They depict more motion and less of the frivolities of life.”18 Might this (somewhat ludicrous) comment be understood as an early attempt to define the features of a European cinema characterized by more psychologized characterization than typical Hollywood films?19 The period’s non-Hollywood Brit-Lit films followed two contradictory impulses—to differentiate a national product and to construct an international one. In that they exploited national differences in response to international problems, they both affirmed and complicated the definition of “national cinema.” To what extent might a term like “globalism” apply to 1920s adaptations?20 Bordwell and Thompson suggest that historically “the film industry itself is significantly transnational. At certain periods, circumstances closed off countries from the flow of films, but most often there has been a global film market.”21 Certainly Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake’s definition of the twenty-first-century global cinema describes quite well a similar dynamic in the 1920s: “The space of cultural production and national representation … is simultaneously becoming more globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition and resistance) in everyday texture and composition.”22 Hollywood figures today as the central producer and definer of cinematic “capitalogic,” continuing to take advantage of the position it seized in the late silent era. For this reason and others, we see much usefulness in globalist and transnational film theories for discussing the international dimensions of silent adaptation.

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This in no way denies, of course, that profound historical differences separate silent era and twenty-first-century international filmmaking practices. The 1920s represented a crucial decade in adaptation history when the cinema had matured into something like its modern form, but sound had not yet rendered “authentic” certain countries’ adaptations of their “own” literary works. In other words, the decade represents a singular moment in film history when the ethos of a particular feature-length adaptation had to be earned almost entirely through the manipulation of visual codes more or less shared by all (film-producing) countries, rather than reliance on the intrinsic prestige of original language literature-to-film transposition. A British film adaptation of a British novel had relatively little advantage over a German one until the moment when words could be heard, accents detected, specific poetic lines quoted verbatim, and so forth. It would not be accurate, however, to say that sound changed the game entirely. As Dennis Kennedy argues, although “foreign-language productions necessarily lose an essential element … in the process of linguistic and cultural transfer, … some foreign performances may have a more direct access to the power” of the sources. This is due, he says, to the constraints placed on modern productions by early modern English: “Shakespeare’s poetry may be one of the glories of human life, but the archaism and remoteness of his language create enormous difficulties for audiences” in the twentieth century.23 One reason a modern American audience, say, might find a Japanese film of Hamlet set in Tokyo (such as Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well [see below, pp. 308–11]) more comprehensible than the original English play has to do with the familiarity of the modern world in which the story is set—twentyfirst-century Tokyo being a lot more like twenty-first-century New York than is medieval Denmark. Such an approach to adaptation would have been quite familiar to an author like Shakespeare, since he translated so many tales from foreign sources and often set them, inaccurately and anachronistically, in exotic locations specifically customized for early modern English-speaking Londoners. In his own writing, Shakespeare constantly struggled to give the global subject matter and themes of his predecessors a more local habitation. The plays are distinctly English works through and through, and yet enough of their transnational commonness remains to make them endlessly adaptable in non-Anglophone locales. More systematic analysis of how and why nonHollywood, and especially non-Anglophone, cinemas adapted British literature should enhance our understanding of the art and politics of adaptation at the end of the silent era. In what follows, we turn to some of the more interesting cases, traveling from Scandinavia to Japan, but spending most of our time in interwar Germany.

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2 Studying Brit-Lit abroad Postwar Brit-Lit films made outside the United Kingdom should be understood at least in part as negotiations with Britain. Such films may have constituted diplomatic goodwill gestures, political provocations, or even apolitical celebrations of art’s supposed internationalism. We would argue, however, that such films usually had more to do with America than with Britain. Consider the case of the accomplished Danish director A. W. Sandberg who, in a period of four years, was paid to make no fewer than four Dickens films. Nordisk was one of the most well established and artistically credentialed production companies of the silent era but, by the end of the war, it was crumbling. Paulo Cherchi Usai tells us that “in the early 1920s, in a last-ditch effort to stop the rot, Nordisk offered huge sums of money to the director … to adapt a number of Dickens’ novels.”24 The result was Our Mutual Friend in 1921, Great Expectations and David Copperfield in 1922, and Little Dorrit in 1924, all solid achievements. The expensive productions nonetheless struggled greatly outside of Denmark, and Nordisk considered them costly strategic failures. The Sandberg films constitute an interesting scenario in which a struggling film company tried to salvage its international stature by adapting a British author whose popularity and respectability were almost unparalleled. We should not forget that Dickens’s storytelling structures had supposedly inspired D. W. Griffith to elaborate the technique of crosscutting, which was crucial to the maturation of film editing and became increasingly associated with the Hollywood style. During the war, Nordisk directors struggled to preserve their native “tableau” or long-shot style of editing in the face of Hollywood’s international success. As David Bordwell puts it, “While Nordisk filmmakers were enriching the single shot, they were exploring the possibilities of the alternative tradition, that continuity-editing approach that was beginning to dominate the other side of the Atlantic.”25 By the early 1920s, the pressures on Danish directors were more profound, and it became harder for them to resist adopting crosscutting and other editing techniques. The Nordisk Dickens films, then, must be understood in part as the products of a forced assimilation. David Copperfield begins with anxiety, an opening title declaring that it is “an authentic version dedicated in reverence to the memory of the worldloved author.” The art titles, impressive drawings in the style of Hablot Knight Browne, are said to have been designed “from actual scenes of the book.” The film seeks to establish authenticity, then, through direct associations with Dickens’s novel, rather than theatrical or illustrated intertexts, and it presents Dickens as an international artist. The film itself is a meticulous costume drama reminiscent of Hepworth and Thanhouser. Sandberg is a skillful director

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of medium compositions and naturalistic lighting. A key director in the Danish tableau school, he edits the Dickens films more or less in the Hollywood style, editing scenes composed of many shots and employing fundamental continuity techniques. For example, in a surprisingly graphic scene where Murdstone flogs the young David, Sandberg crosscuts rapidly from the violent abuse to the boy’s mother crying in the next room—which has the simultaneous effect of building pathos and indicting the mother’s weakness. The film is less successful, however, in its attempt to handle the passage of time, essentially jumping in decade-long leaps from the infant David to the ten-year-old David to the adult David with few transitional devices to lessen the episodic feel of the narrative. It ends as it begins, with a tribute to Dickens himself: the happily married David is seen sporting a beard which, with the help of an intertitle, explains that although he “calls himself David Copperfield. … his real name is CHARLES DICKENS.” In the midst of Sandberg’s rapid production of four Dickens films, the most autobiographical of the novelist’s writings is adapted in a manner that makes it as much a biopic as an adaptation. We might surmise that one reason for the film’s limited international success had to do precisely with Nordisk’s decision to assimilate aspects of the American style rather than continue developing the Scandinavian one that had helped them to establish their reputation.26 Variety seems to have captured the general response: “In a word,” the reviewer said, “it is uneven.” Although the sets and the photography were praised, “the adaptation [is] slovenly,” a remark which probably applies to the film’s too-episodic structure.27 For a “foreign” film made in what was essentially the Hollywood style to succeed, it needed to be more than merely solid, a point certain enterprising German producers seem to have understood quite well. German cinema’s postwar international status was precarious, and one could easily imagine the studios pursuing the same strategies as Nordisk. Thomas J. Saunders has traced the frequency in the early 1920s with which German critics and audiences drew comparisons between Hollywood and the Weimar cinema, with Hollywood becoming “a reference point in the debate about the evolution” of German film. Numerous debates in those early years centered on the question of whether Germany should “pursue a national or international motion picture identity.”28 Noting in 1921 that numerous filmmakers were simply copying American films, Paul Meissner implored directors in Film-Kurier to make “good German films,” and Erich Pommer famously declared that German competition “could best be mounted by a distinctive, national approach rather than imitation.”29 Saunders reminds us that UFA “saw itself as the advance guard of German film in postwar competition against the foreign firms which had previously dominated the German and international markets.”30

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One of the main strategies of resistance was the pursuit of internationally appealing subjects filmed in a characteristic German style. Nathan Burkan, a Hollywood lawyer, returned from a European trip in 1920 with news of what he called the German’s “‘Edge on Allies,’” explaining the German strategic plan to film fairy tales and other stories with international appeal: “These fairy tales will not show German life and German customs, in which Americans are not interested, but will have scenes of other countries and be worked out along mythological lines.”31 Burkan’s use of the word “allies” is telling, for division of the world “into American/Anglo-Saxon and Germanic/Latin cinematic spheres which would duel to decide global hegemony demonstrated the persistence of wartime thought.”32 Burkan emphasized too that the films’ cultural nonspecificity would determine Germany’s success in the European market: Especially if German films are to win the favor of British audiences must the films suggest anything but their origin. Both in England and in France there is much propaganda against the products of German industries. In England I saw placards urging the people to ignore German films. … In France … hatred of the Germans is probably more intense … than anywhere else.33 A letter from Paris a month later confirmed the brilliance of what began to be dubbed the “Teutonic strategy”: “The Germans have achieved enormous success within the last year. An instance of the spirit in which they are approaching film production may be seen in their willingness to take plots and scenes from the histories of the countries that have been Germany’s enemies.”34 Though such broad mythologizing and story-poaching differs little from Nordisk’s similar strategy, the best German films looked nothing like American ones. A significant number of Brit-Lit films were made in Germany between 1920 and 1926, and the quality of these films—as a group—was exceptional. Some notable examples include two early Lubitsch films, Romeo und Julia im Schnee [Romeo and Juliet in the Snow] (1920) and Kohlhiesels Töchter [based on The Taming of the Shrew] (1920), as well as Murnau’s masterpieces Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), and his lost version of the Jekyll and Hyde story Der Januskopf (1920). Russian-born Dmitri Buchowetzki directed an excellent Othello in 1922, and Germany also produced versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1920), The Merchant of Venice (1923), Cymbeline (1925), and Tennyson’s poem “Lady Godiva” (1920), among others. The main film we wish to consider here, though, is Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s remarkable 1920 Hamlet (also known as the “Asta Nielsen Hamlet” since the famous actress wrote much of the script and played the title character). Robert Hamilton Ball called this “least Shakespearean Hamlet … the best Hamlet film of the silent era,”35 which is an understatement: Hamlet is perhaps the best Shakespeare film of the silent era.

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Scholars have focused almost exclusively on Asta Nielsen’s memorable cross-dressed performance of the prince, limiting discussion of the film’s style to a few words here and there.36 No attempt has been made to contextualize the film in relation to world cinema around 1920. We wish to argue that Hamlet did more than merely reflect German postwar production values; instead it actively reflected on its own position within the postwar international cinema by systematically deploying German expressionist techniques and expressing a disdain for textual fidelity that bordered on irreverence. This iconoclastic and highly “cinematic” film was a box office hit in Europe and a critical success nearly everywhere. The New York Times rated the film among the “Ten Best” of the year, and the National Board of Review in the top forty. The Board’s 1922 publication Exceptional Photoplays suggested that the film’s strength—as well as its strangeness—had to do specifically with its particular style: “One is led to wonder if the picture’s grim, tragic atmosphere could have been achieved by the soft effect that seems to be the present ideal of the best camera work.”37 The “soft” style made famous by D. W. Griffith (see Figure 3.1) involved an effect by which backgrounds were blurred and the main action highlighted through the use of lens filters.38 The reviewer distinguishes, then, between a particularly American style—soft, perhaps more inclined toward the comedic or idealized—and the darker, grimmer style of the German film. The famous German style often (over-)associated with expressionism grew, interestingly enough, out of political hostilities in the mid-1910s. Concerned by the anti-German content of films during the early war years, the state banned foreign film imports in 1916, and the result was greater investment in

FIGURE 3.1 Griffith’s “Soft Focus” in Broken Blossoms (1919).

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the domestic film industry.39 The ban lasted until 1920, the year of Hamlet’s filming and production and, of course, the year of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Isolationism during and immediately after the war meant that Germany could cultivate its own style during precisely the same years that the Hollywood style began to influence international film production. French impressionism too was coming into prominence closer to home, and represented an alternative direction in which the Germans might have looked. Whereas Hollywood films belonged increasingly to a cinema of realism, the French films experimented with point-of-view abstraction. However, both the Hollywood and impressionist styles were distinguished largely by their experimental camerawork and editing; the German style, on the other hand, was notable primarily for its creative mise-en-scène—especially stylized or surreal sets, costumes, and acting styles. A notable stylistic feature of Hamlet is the way its expressionistic qualities are strategically deployed throughout the film, depending on plot turns and character developments. The film is not unified stylistically, in other words; instead, it shifts dramatically, announcing the transformations, as if highlighting the greater appropriateness of the German style for answering certain baffling questions that Shakespeare’s play raises. The camerawork in the opening scene is so retrograde that viewers might begin to fear an utterly tedious two hours. Essentially static long shots of a hill upon which the armies of Old Hamlet and Old Fortinbras battle, the middle of the frame is gradually crowded by Danish soldiers carrying their wounded king toward the foreground from top right to bottom left (see Figure 3.2). This technique of maximizing the amount of action that could be captured in a single, unedited shot was a

FIGURE 3.2 “Old-school” Camerawork in the “Asta Nielsen Hamlet” (1920).

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staple of most pre-1915 films, but advances in camera work and editing had rendered it old-fashioned by 1920. Even as early as 1916, as we saw in the previous chapter, a reviewer of Thanhouser’s King Lear complained that “time after time, we found characters walking or running down to the foreground, to stop and then go ahead in the approved ‘movie’ manner of many years ago. … The director evidently had little knowledge of the value of different camera angles, and the photography was all straight, hard, old-school camera work.”40 By 1920, then, such static long shots—a key element of the pre-Hollywood style—were regarded as passé. What keeps one interested in spite of this opening are the introductory titles—which are anything but “old-school”: For ages, scholars have been arguing about the meaning of the Hamlet saga. Many eminent writers have hotly debated the life of Hamlet. Voltaire, the French philosopher, called Shakespeare’s play a tasteless mix of whim and nonsense. Herder stated that Hamlet was an affected fop. Even Goethe was damning in his criticism of Hamlet: Hamlet is an ass! Recently, the American literary researcher, Professor Vining, produced a new interpretation of the Hamlet saga. Until now, the character of Hamlet has harboured an astonishing secret: in reality, Hamlet was a woman! Although the editorial exclamation point follows the epiphany that Hamlet was a woman, that point is perhaps only slightly more surprising than the film’s presentation of Shakespeare’s play as an incomprehensible muddle. We are led to believe that an American has been responsible for solving the problem of Hamlet’s meaning, but the caption is misleading. The year 1881, which was when Edward P. Vining’s The Mystery of Hamlet was published, is hardly “recently,” and the “until now” of the following sentence suggests the film’s free elaboration of Vining’s theory. Whereas Vining argued that Hamlet’s personality was essentially feminine, the film will show that Hamlet was literally a woman. And so the plot unfolds: believing her husband has died in battle without an heir, Gertrude announces that her newborn infant-girl is a boy. Old Hamlet lives and, after returning from the war, he agrees the people must never know Gertrude’s lie, and so poor Hamlet is forced her entire life to pretend that she is a boy. The title is yet more deceptive in that it alludes to Shakespeare’s theatrical version of the “Hamlet saga,” acknowledging in only the most subtle manner that Nielsen’s script is at once an appropriation of Shakespeare and the old legend of Hamlet derived from Saxo Grammaticus’s thirteenth-century Gesta Denorum. This fact was acknowledged by Nielsen at the time, and was noted even by American reviewers: “This production is based upon the old legend

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from which Shakespeare drew his first conception of the immortal tragedy. … [It is] often similar to Shakespeare’s version and often quite different.”41 For more conservative reviewers, any links to Shakespeare were to be downplayed, even denied outright: “As to the picture called ‘Hamlet’ and brought to this country by the Asta Films Inc., it is a sacrilege to couple it with the name of Shakespeare.”42 It’s not difficult to see what might have been so threatening to purists, of course. The film begins with criticism of Shakespeare’s play through quotation of its sharpest critics, appropriates a bizarre modern intertext in Vining, and advances a radical new interpretation. In a bold stroke, Hamlet jabs at the heart of British cultural imperialism by Danifying and Germanizing England’s most prized literary work, boldly offering up to audiences the “real” Hamlet story (it is significant that Gade, Nielsen, and other insiders were of Danish descent). Considering the boldness of the enterprise, why are the opening scenes so tedious? Starting with the battle and proceeding through most of the first reel, the camerawork and even the compositions seem entirely uninspired. Consisting mainly of static long and medium shots of exteriors and castle interiors, and relatively clumsy inter-scenic editing, this initial stylistic mode jars heavily with the inventiveness of the adaptation and stylistic complexity of later scenes. Only later in the film can we really see how deliberately retrograde this opening seems to be. The first few scenes present almost exclusively additions to the play, intended as explanatory background for the Hamlet-aswoman plot. However, the film’s opening also establishes a possible comedic trajectory for the story—and in two senses. While Hamlet is in Wittenberg, she meets the dashing Horatio. She is immediately charmed but can’t act on her desires, and several funny scenes present the would-be lover’s predicament. Second and more important, a later scene introduces young Fortinbras, one of Hamlet’s college classmates; after a few tense moments, the two young students decide to shake hands and bury their parents’ strife. Light pours through the window as they toast one another. Appropriate to the politics of expressionism, the scenes at Wittenberg emphasize the potential of a younger generation to overcome the past, to cast off the sins and traditions of their fathers, to form bonds crossing political, personal, and national boundaries; in the majority of shots at Wittenberg, all is light and open, and tragedy seems far away. The first stylistic transition occurs almost twenty minutes in as the focus switches back to the older generation: “In the meantime,” intertitles explain, “Claudius’s greed for the Royal Throne has driven him to decide on a terrible course of action.” He and Gertrude meet in one of the castle’s many secret underground chambers. The cold stone is moonlit by two lancet windows, the sharpness of their arches evocative of a dagger point, which dominate the

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background as the lovers emerge into the foreground. As the pair embraces in the safety of the shadows, Claudius declares that he will “destroy anything” to keep Gertrude. The wonderful chiaroscuro effect, the shot of the couple beneath ground level, the architectural structure itself—all combine to express an interior darkness the film had not yet acknowledged. The scene changes as the diabolical pair trek through tangled brush, their way lit only by torches as they sneak into another of the castle dungeons. Claudius descends the stairwell alone and approaches a covered well, which he opens to reveal a writhing tangle of poisonous snakes. The snakes are shown in stunning closeup, the first abstract image in the film—captured by an iris that centers the pulsating circle of death within a larger frame of blackness (see Figure 3.3). For the final time, the film returns to the light of youth and innocence, a lecture room in Wittenberg, where Hamlet and her friends play before three wide (and less sharply pointed) lancets, which allow the warm sunlight to pour in upon them. Hamlet learns from a messenger that her father has been killed by a venomous snake. Act I ends, and Hamlet returns to Elsinore at night with Horatio, is shocked to discover her mother carousing with the new king at her father’s funeral, and retreats into the solitude of a private chamber—which may be a chapel. The film style shifts again notably at this point, announcing, we would argue, that Hamlet—the melancholy Dane, for whom the world is but an “unweeded garden”—has at last been born. The back story having been presented, the familiar Hamlet story now begins. Gade and Schall convey this alteration through a considerably more expressive mise-en-scène, more rapid intra-scenic editing, and more complex crosscutting—especially in cases where the film wishes to show the audience what Hamlet is imagining.

FIGURE 3.3 Claudius’s Writhing Snakes in Hamlet (1920).

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FIGURE 3.4 Private Chambers in Hamlet (1920). For example, when we first see Hamlet’s dark chamber, we are struck by the imposing quality of the mise-en-scène (see Figure 3.4). The room is moonlit by a large semicircular window whose ornate metal grating seems evocative of serpents or perhaps the human brain. To the far left of the room, rectangular windows allow in counter light, the two light sources clashing and painting the room in a web of shadows. Columns jut from floor to ceiling, partitioning the space and caging Hamlet in. She is often barely visible, buried behind the architecture—overwhelmed by the “tyranny of objects”—shaping her body to conform to them.43 John D. Barlow has usefully explained the different preoccupations of national silent cinemas with inanimate objects: While the malicious power of objects and things created comic situations in American films, they were used in the German films of the 1920s to express the tragic hopelessness of the human predicament. Individuals fight with the objects that challenge them in the American movies, and we laugh; they are overcome by them in the German movies, and we shudder.44 In this scene, Hamlet’s body blends with the shadows and the shapes so that at times she becomes mere background, part of the architecture. At the center of the room is a cabinet, an altar perhaps, whose shape echoes the lancets of the previous scenes, measuring the extremes between Claudius’s violence and the innocence of Hamlet in Wittenberg. The camera affords the viewer a clearer sense of the room through a slow pan left, and then Hamlet’s tormented face is shown in close-up, before the scene cuts back to Gertrude

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and Claudius and the drunken revelers whom Hamlet cannot cast from her mind. Innocence is forever shattered. When Hamlet learns from the gravedigger that her father was stung by one of the snakes from the castle dungeon, she jumps, though her “prophetic soul” seems soothed. A wonderful fish-eye close-up captures precisely her mental turn to Claudius. When she meets him a few moments later, already having announced to Horatio that she will put on an antic disposition, she startles him by revealing in her hands his dagger. He steps backward, horrified that she knows of his foul deeds. What follows is an acting tour de force as Nielsen contorts her slim, angular body into a shape suggestive of a serpent, her head raised, her eyes glued to Claudius’s retreating body (see Figure 3.5). The downward slope of her legs mirrors exactly the downward slope of the stone staircase behind her, and above her head, as if connected to her torso, is a lancet whose sharpness is similar to the windows in the earlier scenes. Claudius is terrified of Hamlet who has become, in his view, a murderous snake. The acting, like the mise-en-scène, bears out what Barlow describes as perhaps the essential characteristic of German expressionist film, wherein “the scenery, the other characters, the lighting, the music, even the audience … is a projection of the central protagonist’s single-minded consciousness.”45 Only after Hamlet’s death in the film’s final scene is the cold third-person perspective of the opening restored. The audience now once again witnesses the action through relatively plain medium and long shots of the castle interiors. Only Hamlet’s unmoving body seizes our attention—linear, jet black, pointed—still like a snake or a dagger on the stairs leading to the throne of Denmark.

FIGURE 3.5 Asta Nielen’s “Expressionist” Body (1920).

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Asta Nielsen and her directors approached Hamlet as a vehicle for German film, a way to bring the nation back into the international fold after a long period of isolation. The film is gritty as hell; when Hamlet returns from her banishment to Norway (not Britain, as in Grammaticus and Shakespeare), she sets fire to the castle (as in Grammaticus, but not in Shakespeare), burning Claudius and his fellow revelers alive. Most obviously, the film is extraordinarily playful and irreverent, an emblematic case of expressionism’s general rejection of all things traditional. Hamlet stands as a paragon of creative adaptation in the first thirty years of cinema, one whose power derives specifically from its rejection of British (cultural) and American (cinematic) hegemony—even while nodding to both on surface levels. Two other films demand special consideration in any discussion of 1920s German Brit-Lit adaptation—Murnau’s Nosferatu and Faust. Both are acknowledged masterpieces of world cinema, so we won’t analyze them in any detail. Suffice it to say that Nosferatu is a radically original reworking of Stoker’s Dracula, introducing such key features into the popular lexicon as the myth of vampires dying from exposure to the sun and the metaphor of vampirism as a type of plague. The latter idea was especially grounded in the postwar moment, depicting “a culture drained, from within and without, of all vitality,”46 one which also may have lost more citizens to the Spanish flu epidemic and famine of 1918–19 than to the war itself.47 There is also Count Orlok (see Figure 3.6), who so many commentators have aptly described as part man, part rat; he is a terrifying yet sympathetic monster who opens up entirely new possibilities for Dracula as redemption story, as love story, and as tragedy. As in the case of Murnau’s Der Januskopf, his Nosferatu was a decidedly unauthorized version of the novel. Permission to adapt was never obtained from the Stoker estate, and predictably Stoker’s widow sued the filmmakers upon the film’s release and won, driving the brand-new Prana Film Company out of business. Although English copies of the film acknowledged in an

FIGURE 3.6 Murnau’s Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922).

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introductory title that Nosferatu was made “after the Novel by Bram Stoker,” the director and scriptwriters went out of their way to avoid parallels, altering the plot, changing character names, omitting certain major figures such as Van Helsing, backdating the story from the 1890s to the 1830s, and moving the non-Transylvania scenes out of England into Germany. In addition to downplaying the English settings, the film also took stylistic cues from earlier Brit-Lit adaptations such as Hamlet, incorporating not only elements of the expressionist cinema but alluding rather extensively to German Romantic paintings, particularly those of the Die Brücke group.48 We must wonder, nonetheless, to what degree the striking originality of Nosferatu—its provocative and influential anti-fidelity mode—might have been the result of the filmmakers’ failed attempts to avoid being sued. Murnau’s Faust is relevant to this study not only because Goethe’s epic was in part an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s great play, but also because the film sought in various ways to free itself from Goethe’s plot and influence, even as UFA marketed it as an adaptation of perhaps the greatest German literary masterpiece of all time. The opening titles fail to mention Goethe at all, and since most descriptions of Murnau’s sources include Marlowe and Gounod, as well as Goethe, the director approached the Faust myth in a manner similar to how Nielsen approached the Hamlet myth: as a world masterpiece belonging to no one country but relevant to all of them. Film historian Jan Christopher Horak claims that “the film’s subtitle, ‘a German Folk Saga,’ indicates Murnau’s desire to enlarge his canvas into the mythic, incorporating motifs from the folk legend, as well as Christopher Marlowe’s rendition of the story.”49 Though the subtitle proclaims the Germanic origins of the story, it also then introduces the film as timeless and placeless. This gorgeous adaptation is indeed a deeply mystical film trading in so-called “universal” themes, especially Murnau’s frequent emphasis on the epic, redemptive power of love, and it marked the end of Murnau’s German career, prompting Hollywood to hire him the following year. Since it was the penultimate silent German studio film of the era, it demonstrates well the continuing influence of the industry’s postwar strategy of reintegration into the international market through stylistically Germanic adaptations—or, at least, part-adaptations—of British literature. We have lingered on Germany because its Brit-Lit films present an ideal example of the simultaneously globalizing and localizing impulses of various national cinemas after the war, struggling to adjust to the pressures exerted by Hollywood. Whereas numerous filmmakers attempted through their adaptations of British literature to join those they couldn’t beat, others were able to create internationally compelling films that managed to resist the Hollywood style and work around the crippling “aura” of British literature.50 British cinema itself struggled greatly in the 1920s because, although it

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occupied the most obvious intrinsic position of authority over the source material, the state’s failure to support film allowed American pictures to flood the domestic market, and mediocre domestic ones had no chance to compete with these more lavish and technically mature productions. Italy and France continued to adapt Brit-Lit that focused on a kind of geographical noplace, just as claimable by those countries as England; for example, France turned out Les Aventures de Robinson Crusoé in 1921, Italy Avventure di Robinson Crusoe in 1923. While France’s cinema continued to prosper, French producers were nonetheless paranoid about an American takeover. Charles Pathé remarked in 1922 that “Americans will accept nothing from Europe but costume films, historical films,”51 an attitude which led to a French craze for historical reconstruction films in the mid-twenties, one of the most popular and successful of which was Alexandre Volkoff’s Kean (1924), a biopic of the great Shakespeare actor.52 Audiences raved about the authenticity of the period sets, especially those based on the Drury Lane Theatre. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished French films of the decade, Kean made very little noise outside of France. Italy’s story is similar to Denmark’s. When the Unione Cinematographica Italiana—a consortium of major Italian studios, formed in 1919 to challenge Hollywood’s takeover of the domestic market—went bankrupt in 1926 in the midst of a recession, a last-ditch effort was made to save Italian film. The industry invested huge amounts of money into Carmine Gallone’s adaptation of Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, an extravagant, spectacular epic in the style of Italy’s great productions from the early 1910s. In spite of its amazing architectural and period details, and the voyeuristic pleasures it offered, this three-hour-plus film—one of the most expensive ever made in Italy—failed to achieve international box office success.53 We’re struck, nonetheless, by the filmmakers’ attempt to adapt a British literary classic with an Italian setting. Like both the “Danish Hamlet” and the “German Faustus,” the urge to internationalize the literary classic often is contradicted or offset by the desire to assert some kind of national ownership over it. The contradictory impulse of such films to globalize and localize the story material speaks to the unique predicament of 1920s filmmakers outside of Hollywood. Finally, what shall we say about the burgeoning Asian cinema’s early Brit-Lit films? Though belonging to a slightly later part of the decade, these films—most of which are lost—reflect their creators’ awareness of the similar conundrum they faced in attempting to compete in the international film market. Shakespeare predictably dominated these productions, being Britain’s greatest cultural export and—in some cases—imperial instrument. India adapted numerous Shakespeare plays, including a 1927 Merchant of Venice

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FIGURE 3.7 Shakespeare in China: A Spray of Plum Blossoms (1931). (Dil Farosh), a 1928 silent Hamlet (Khoon-e-Nahak or Murder Most Foul), a 1930 silent Cymbeline, and a 1932 silent The Taming of the Shrew (Hathili Dulhan). China produced its first internationally successful Shakespeare film in 1931 with A Spray of Plum Blossoms (The Two Gentlemen of Verona [see Figure 3.7]), but this followed several 1920s adaptations of Brit-Lit including: The Woman Lawyer (1927; based on The Merchant of Venice); The Young Mistress’s Fan (1928; based on Lady Windermere’s Fan); and Lu Binhua (1928; based on Robin Hood). Japan’s long history of powerful Brit-Lit films began in the late teens, but a particularly important film was KisaburoKurihara’s 1921 Sanji Goto: The Story of Japanese Enoch Arden (also known as Narikin). The film is loosely based on Tennyson’s often-adapted narrative poem, though it’s essentially a crime comedy focused on a poor bank janitor who learns he’s inherited millions of dollars from an uncle in America. The villain Kaneko knows that Sanji is too poor to travel to America so he offers to take him, stages a shipwreck in which Sanji becomes stranded on a desert island, and then assumes his identity so that he can inherit the money. At the last moment, Sanji returns, the villain is arrested, and the money goes to its rightful owner. Tennyson is invoked in the shipwreck and island plot, and also

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when Kaneko tries to marry Sanji’s wife, who believes Sanji is dead. Director Kurihara chose to play up the Tennyson links as part of a deliberate Japanese industrial strategy to create films for the international export market. Kurihara had enrolled in an American actor’s school in 1912 and then began working shortly after graduation in Thomas Ince’s Oriental Production company, founded specifically for Asian actors. Known as Thomas Kurihara in the West, he became famous in 1914 as Takeo from The Wrath of the Gods and later returned to Japan to make films. While the choice of material makes sense on a number of levels, especially as Sanji Goto involves scenes in both Japan and America, Kurihara likely chose Enoch Arden as a result of his familiarity with the two American versions associated with D. W. Griffith, Ince’s business partner, and the Tennyson tie-in increased the film’s marketability in Britain as well. Sanji Goto, then, successfully combined American editing, Japanese dramatic conventions, and British story material. Another contemporary Japanese adaptation, Nakagawa Shiro’s Rakujo no Uta or Song of the Fallen Castle (1924), sets the story of Macbeth in the Sengoku period (1477–1573) of Japanese history. Though no one has considered the link, perhaps due to the fact that the film is lost, it seems an obvious likely influence on Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece Throne of Blood, also an adaptation of Macbeth set in the Sengoku period (see below, pp. 262–4). Shiro’s film was pitched in the years just after the Great Recession of 1920–21 as one of the most lavish and expensive productions in Japanese cinematic history, one into which all of the available resources of the contemporary industry would be concentrated. The film was hailed domestically as a major success, drawing praise for its cinematography, direction, and adaptation approach to the Shakespeare play. Though too few details exist about the film’s fate outside of Japan, we might compare its domestic success to that achieved by the better German adaptations, which, like this film, were not hesitant to localize the source material through radical adaptation techniques rather than trying to compete with the British and American costume dramatype adaptations. The final film we wish to consider in this section is Dil Farosh, an Indian adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. Directed by Udvadia for the Excelsior film company, the film was based, Rajiva Verma tells us, on a popular theatrical intertext rooted in the traditions of Parsi theater,54 which blended “realism and fantasy, music and dance, narrative and spectacle, earthy dialogue and ingenuity of stage presentation, integrating them into a dramatic discourse of melodrama.”55 According to Sisir Kumar Das, “The Parsi theater followed a method of ‘translation’ of its own. It was not the poetry of Shakespeare or the psychological conflicts that interested the Parsi theater, which was

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keen to appropriate the story with its emotional turbulence and violence of action.”56 Das tells us of the commonness of hearing Portia sing songs, of the transformation of Lear into a comedy, and the fusion of King John and Richard III into a single play. We also know of a Hamlet in which “the Prince of Denmark is so thoroughly Indianized that his Elsinore is converted into a medieval Indian court where princesses performed Kathak dance” around him.57 Considering such theatrical origins, what might these lost Indian Shakespeare films have looked like? Would their hybridity have allowed a character like Shylock the ability to “speak” to audiences in ways that were becoming impossible in the West? Which features of the Shakespearean characters would have remained recognizable to an American or a Londoner? How might the “Indianizing” of Shakespeare have changed a Westerner’s understanding of the play? Since these films in most cases do not survive, we are unfortunately often left with more questions than answers. *** Bordwell and Thompson sum up the postwar cinematic moment in admirably succinct fashion: “After the war, differing situations existed in … producing nations, but all faced one common factor: a need to compete with Hollywood.”58 Adaptations of British literature played a key role in this competition for several reasons—the first, and most obvious being the legacy of British imperialism. No other modern literature had so penetrated the furthest reaches of the globe, making it, for better and for worse, something of a vehicle of global communication. For countries trying to stay relevant in the 1920s international film market, British literature constituted a wellspring of potentially exploitable material. We have argued, though, that non-UK adaptations of British literature functioned as useful, if odd, channels of communication between America and the rest of the filmmaking world. This dynamic had to do not merely with the shared language between Britain and the United States but the way both countries’ modern cultural identities were forged in such close relation to one another. British film historian Andrew Higson bluntly summarizes one side of the coin when he states that “American films [have] played a strong role in the construction of cultural identity in the UK.”59 One quotation often attributed to Edward, Prince of Wales suggested his suspicion that what Hollywood and Britain really had in common were their imperialist aspirations: “The film is to America what the flag once was to Britain. By its means Uncle Sam may hope some day … to Americanize the world.”60 On the other side of the coin, America has derived so much of its own artistic ethos by virtue of its association with Britain, through exploitation of the idea of a unique Anglo-American cultural relationship. The concept of a “special relationship” between Britain and

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America is most often linked to Churchill, but David Reynolds convincingly shows that “the use of the special cultural connection” dates back at least to the late nineteenth century.61 Certainly, the story of American filmmaking has always involved systematic exploitation of British literature’s prestige and international reach. To conclude, in the 1920s Brit-Lit adaptations were very logically imagined by non-Anglophone producers as efficient solutions to the economic crises of the postwar years. Filmmaking countries that had fared relatively well in the international cinema market prior to the war were struggling to remain relevant. Of the many strategic decisions employed by companies such as Nordisk, Pathé, UFA, and Makino, the adaptation of “universal” literary works was quite significant.62 Since the British literary canon offered so much useful material, the Brit-Lit film could function as a tool for a certain diplomacy with Britain, yes, but perhaps more important, as a response to the Hollywood style—whether through emulation, differentiation, or reinvention.

3 Hollywood responds In 1920s Hollywood, adaptations underwent significant changes—at the levels of conception, production, and reception. Since one might trace the pervasive binary of European experimentalism and Hollywood conservatism to these years, we wonder whether any qualitative or ideological differences between Hollywood and non-Hollywood adaptations suggest themselves. Were the best Hollywood Brit-Lit films, that is, any less groundbreaking or provocative than films such as the Asta Nielsen Hamlet? To answer this question, we begin at the levels of conception and production, and perhaps no development was more significant in these areas than the period’s newfound confidence about the uniqueness and complexity of script writing. The idea of adaptors as “translators” of written texts by no means disappeared in the 1920s, of course. In fact, the idea of translation informed the emergence of what Robert Stam calls the “standard rhetoric” of adaptation criticism—that is, “an elegiac discourse of loss, lamenting what has been ‘lost’ in the translation from novel to film.”63 We’ve already made clear our belief that Stam and others have overstated the case somewhat, and that the lack of a referent here is problematic (Whose standard rhetoric? Standard rhetoric of which historical moment?). Yet, if we accept the basic gist of Stam’s point, we should also admit that alternative conceptions of adaptation have existed from the first days of cinema; in fact, using pre-feature cinema as our example, we would have to argue that such alternatives predate the “standard rhetoric” by more than a decade.

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We are especially interested in the specific ways film insiders of the 1920s deliberately combated the “standard” rhetoric of adaptation criticism. Even as early as the first year of the new decade, such insiders were explicitly critiquing the notion of supposed “loss” which occurs in the adaptation process: There have been many stories printed about the amazing changes made by scenario writers and directors in the plots of novels and plays and also of original material before the completed product has reached the screen public. The charge brought against producers that their screen versions of well-known works by celebrated authors are often sadly mutilated generally comes from well meaning but poorly informed persons who have not learned that the change of form from printed word to pantomime imposes certain restrictions that make it impossible to retain all of the characters and situations of a story.64 This reporter articulates in clear terms an early version of the medium specificity argument—suggesting the very impossibility of true “translations” of literature into film. His description of fidelity criticism as ignorant reflects his understanding that silent film scripts are unique documents in comparison with novels, poems, and plays. The realization is exceedingly common at the time, and it ushers in a new bravado among movie people, a sense of superiority even. For the first time, “authors,” as opposed to scenarists, are routinely singled out for their ignorance regarding the art of script writing. American playwright Elmer Harris offered the emblematic statement: “Authors, for the most part, have not yet realized that motion pictures are a different form of expression, and individual art, and must be treated as such. An entire novel may be written around one idea. The picture play must have many ideas and must have constant action.”65 In addition, movies required character arcs that could be depicted visually, with minimal intertitles. One common trick of filmmakers for establishing narrative and psychological character consistency was to begin the protagonist’s story prior to events in the source text, often in an imagined childhood.66 Hollywood filmmakers around the year 2000 showed something of an obsession with the psychological and occupational origins of their tormented, too-famous protagonists (e.g., Batman Begins [2005], Charlie and the Chocolate Factory [2005], Shakespeare in Love [1998], Star Wars, episodes 1–3 [1999–2005], Casino Royale [2006], et cetera.), but the roots of this trend date back to the 1920s—in films made both inside and outside of Hollywood. In Brit-Lit films, numerous protagonists show up at earlier stages in their filmic narratives than they do in the sources that inspired them, including Jackie Coogan’s title character in Oliver Twist (1922), John Ridd in Tourneur’s Lorna Doone

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(1922), and, as we saw, the female prince in Hamlet (1920). Morally dubious protagonists especially seem to have inspired use of this technique as a way of explaining, or softening, their evil; for example, see Barrymore’s young philanthropist Jekyll (1920), and D. W. Griffith’s love-struck Geoffrey Tempest in the American version of Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1926). The commonness of the strategy in contemporary adaptations again suggests the degree to which the “script” had emerged as a unique art form. Some commentators like King Vidor claimed more than mere differences between film and literature: The screen … has already attained supremacy in the field of entertainment. … Having attained this supremacy it is now going beyond mere entertainment, and can truthfully be said to have created a new field of expression and education outrivaling the spoken play and even books. … The day has long since been past when the producer feels he must have a well known book or play in order to make a successful picture.67 Vidor’s larger argument is simple: if filmmakers focus on making great films first, they will discover what film can do that literature cannot do. Suddenly, literature was being discussed more in terms of its limitations than superiority. Rupert Hughes, for example, talked about Griffith and Shakespeare in the same breath,68 claiming that motion pictures “are now coming to be recognized as one of the greatest additions to art and beauty. And their appeal is universal. Music, literature, the drama, or other arts are necessarily more or less limited in their influence, but the ‘movie’ has no limitations.”69 If in the 1910s film’s potential was often imagined in relation to its ability to someday rival literature, by 1920 several respectable commentators were openly championing a cleaner break from literature. For non-American film-producing countries, a studio’s ability to exploit its native literature ensured, at least technically, a market niche that Hollywood couldn’t so easily assume. The Moving Picture World somewhat nervously reported in 1921 that Europe’s main line of attack against American commercial films focused on “Highly Specialized Superpictures of Artistic Interest for Home and Especially Adapted Films.”70 In response, Hollywood companies worked systematically to protect themselves however they could. This may be why when Famous Players-Lasky formed London Studios just after the war, the company quickly announced that “the first production to be filmed in the London studio will be Marie Corelli’s ‘The Sorrows of Satan.’”71 A more curious strategy involved the hiring of well-known playwrights and novelists. In 1919, Samuel Goldwyn created the Eminent Authors Incorporated, a subsidiary of the Goldwyn Corporation, which employed American writers such as Gertrude

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Atherton, Elmer Rice, and Basil King.72 Goldwyn’s rationale was clear, if not entirely honest: “In the poverty of the screen drama lay, so I felt, the weakness of our industry, and the one correction which suggested itself was a closer cooperation between author and picture producer.”73 Richard Fine has recorded important details about the company’s publicity: A series of full-page advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post announced that the Eminent Authors project would guarantee the public that “all Goldwyn pictures are built upon a strong foundation of intelligence and refinement.” Another advertisement in The Movie Mirror proclaimed that because of the Eminent Authors “the motion picture will now rank with the drama and novel in importance.”74 There is an undeniable continuity between the previous decade’s banking on literature’s prestige and such language as this. At the same time, Goldwyn was exploiting such traditional rhetoric for business purposes, and his competitors were not blind to this fact. Paramount’s Adolph Zukor soon focused his own campaign around British authors: “By 1921 he counted Sir James Barrie, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, Elinor Glyn, and W. Somerset Maugham among the ‘famous authors actually in the studios writing new plays as they formerly used the pen.’”75 The company’s advertising was strikingly similar to Goldwyn’s: “What is considered one of the most important developments in the history of motion picture productions … is the engagement of a large number of the leading British novelists and dramatists to write directly for the screen through Paramount Pictures.”76 Europe then countered when Pathé spent a good deal of its own advertising dollars publicizing its 1921 acquisition of the works and authorial services of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, the company boasted, not only authorized production of his works, but also oversaw it: “All the research work respecting costumes, scenes, et cetera. having been done by the author, with the result set forth in his text.”77 A similar strategy was used by Douglas Fairbanks in hiring the well-known British playwright Edward Knoblock to adapt Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, employing an advertising campaign that highlighted Knoblock’s role and essentially turned a masterpiece of French literature into one of British literature. In what seems to have been a desperate attempt to compete with all these maneuvers by the various studios, Fox began reissuing “proved successes” such as its 1918 Salomé starring Theda Bara and its 1917 A Tale of Two Cities.78 In short, Goldwyn’s Eminent Authors project, an attempt to differentiate the company’s product, merely served to inspire Hollywood’s latest trend.79 Company alliances with famous authors served a few different purposes: first, in cases where foreign authors were employed, American companies

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were able to cut off some of the resources foreign companies were exploiting to combat Hollywood. Second, in marketing a prestige cinema, they constituted a counterargument to increasingly common complaints, especially abroad, about Hollywood philistinism and provincialism. Next they eased some of the financial burden of acquiring rights to previously published or performed “successes.”80 Indeed, simple economics explains why many of the authors hired by these companies (Barrie, Glyn, Maugham) were such logical choices: their works existed in usable scenarios due to the proliferation of successful stage versions which, in addition, guaranteed eager audiences in much the same way that, say, Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables did in 2012. “Exploitation,” or marketing, department material from these studios reveals further the profitability of adapting a successful play or, for that matter, novel—so long as the latter was a regular part of American educational curricula. Few exploitation campaigns were more aggressive than those centered on popular literature, as a 1922 rerelease of the Robertson Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde makes clear: “Book store hook-ups are required for this. Give the store plenty of stills and get them to devote a window to Stevenson’s works. … Most booksellers will welcome the opportunity to drive on a standard author. … Most teachers will be glad to take their English classes to see the play.”81 Or consider the following reassurance from the advertisers of Tourneur’s Lorna Doone: “Inasmuch as the story is as well, or better, known than any one other novel, a book that has been read by millions of Americans and is still included in most educational curriculums, it possesses all the requirements of an exceptional box office attraction.”82 Nor were such exploitation drives exclusive to classic British literature; Lasky was just as confident, for instance, in the all-but-guaranteed profits about to be reaped by his film version of E. M. Hull’s contemporary best seller The Sheik: “I don’t think we have ever made a production in which we were more constantly confronted with the realization that we simply had to satisfy the public’s expectations. The advance interest in the picture has been amazing.”83 Adaptations not only were produced and marketed in unique ways but also were viewed as more or less safe bets for the studios—at least when executed well. Such an attitude marks a major change from the previous decade, when exploitation strategies were less developed and audiences seemed to view all those worthy literary films with a certain degree of skepticism. In any case, one point seems clear about the author campaigns of the early 1920s: in spite of the producers’ claims about the need for “authors” to improve the quality of cinematic writing, the hiring of well-respected writers had more to do with exploitation. According to Richard Fine, Goldwyn’s reason for wishing to promote authors may have been the result of a “humiliating series of failures in promoting young actresses.”84 More telling are the comments of

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several of the disgruntled authors actually employed, which together reveal a shared belief that the studios were more interested in pandering their associations with prestigious writers than in procuring scenarios or scripts. As Goldwyn historian A. Scott Berg sums it up, “Most serious authors proved unsuccessful in silent films. The language of the book was simply not that of motion pictures.”85 Goldwyn himself later lamented that “when the tradition of the pen ran athwart the tradition of the screen, I am bound to say that I suffered considerably from the impact.”86 Such a comment would certainly have struck his authors as disingenuous. Elinor Glyn, for example, explained what it was actually like to work in Hollywood: No one wanted our advice or assistance, nor did they intend to take it. All they required was the use of our names to act as shields against the critics. Every person connected with the production studios, although few had travelled as far as New York, and many were all but illiterates, was absolutely convinced that he or she knew much better how to depict the manners or morals of whatever society or country they were attempting to show on the screen than any denizen of that country or society, and they were not prepared to amend any detail to meet our criticisms.87 Glyn’s comments support those of Mary Roberts Rinehart, who complained bitterly that “I had only one function in the studio, and only one. That was publicity,”88 but they reveal also the cultural resentment that Hollywood’s exploitation of British authors sometimes provoked. Underlying Glyn’s critique of American provincialism is an illuminating realization that the particular brand of British literature the studios desired had to be filtered through a frustratingly American sieve. Her biographer explains that “in vain she protested that English duchesses did not wear their hair like frizzy golliwogs, that the drawing rooms of English country houses did not contain bamboo tables, aspidistras or the various knick-knacks usually associated with seaside lodging houses.”89 The Hollywood quest for British “authenticity,” then, clearly had its limits. Whether the author campaigns failed because of bad faith on the part of the studios, bad writing on the part of the authors, or both, is unlikely to be settled. The 1920s represented an interesting moment in the history of film adaptations, however, when the Hollywood studios came as close as they ever would again to an industry-wide, systemic engagement with literary culture. *** Glyn forwards a view of adaptations as artworks whose reverence for their authors should trump all else: “All authors, living or dead, shared the same fate. Their stories were re-written and completely altered by the stenographers and continuity girls of the scenario department.”90 Here then is the classic divide

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between the creative artist and the working lackey. Contemporary intellectuals often bought such rhetoric at face value, rather than coming to terms with the fact that the “continuity girls” might already be as skilled as writers as many of their favorite authors. They refused to accept, in other words, what the studios had long come to realize: that strong adaptations require rewriting and alteration because films are not the same as novels and plays. The studios’ realization of this rather simple point, now recognized by most adaptation scholars, implies a relatively liberal attitude toward fidelity, but was it one shared by the average critic or audience member? Did expectations for fidelity hold back American films in the 1920s? Contemporary film advertisements and “reviews” are only partly reliable sources of information. Reviews in The Moving Picture World and similar venues were geared largely toward convincing exhibitors that something about a given picture made it worth purchasing (or avoiding). Because fidelity had become by 1920 one popular criterion for judging adaptations, it seems likely that film companies and reviewers might have been tempted to endorse “faithful” adaptations. Yet numerous other reviewers chose to celebrate more radical or irreverent adaptations, as we saw in the case of several American reviews of Gade and Schall’s Hamlet. Overall we would characterize fidelity evaluations as one of the most common modes of adaptation criticism, but we would reject the idea that audiences necessarily practiced them as readily as did critics. We’ll survey here only a handful of the more interesting examples of strict fidelity criticism. Marketing for Tourneur’s Treasure Island (1920) centered on a quotation from Lloyd Osbourne, the stepson of Robert Louis Stevenson: “The picture has preserved completely the spirit in which Stevenson wrote Treasure Island.”91 One of the earliest announcements of the Jackie Coogan vehicle Oliver Twist (1922) reassured audiences and exhibitors that “no changes of consequence will be made from the book. … Settings true to those so vividly painted by the author will be erected.”92 Such comments comparing the adaptation to the original text tended to be descriptive rather than valueladen, though we see examples of this latter, reductive type of criticism as well, such as in a review of the British film adaptation of Our Mutual Friend (1921): “‘It is Dickens transferred from the pages of the book intact to the screen,’ said Harriette Underhill in the Tribune. How any actors, without the guidance of the author himself, managed to achieve such perfect portraits of the Dickens characters is more than we can understand. Any lover of Dickens need not be afraid to see the picture.”93 Similar was a rather nauseating review of Silas Marner (1922): One of the strongest claims made for the production is that foot by foot the films stand the test of comparison with the original story. … It was possible to picturize the tale exactly as it was written because George Eliot

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placed little dependence upon elaborate word pictures, but relied rather on the action of her characters for the unfolding of the plot. The settings of the picture also are declared to be marvels of artistic accuracy. Rural and village England of the early nineteenth century, with its inns and taprooms, and quaint, picturesque thatched-rood cottages, is reproduced.94 Our favorite review, however, describes a German film’s “unusual faithfulness” to Tennyson’s “Lady Godiva,” especially its most famous plot moment, “the most famous ride in history next to that of Paul Revere, perhaps. Her horseback trip through Coventry, ‘clothed only with chastity,’ … has been delicately handled and is beautifully done. However, it comes to mind again that it was advantageous for Lady Godiva that the current style of bobbed hair was not prevalent in her day.”95 Yes, one can only imagine the historically inaccurate “Pabst version” starring Louise Brooks. Such reviews might reinforce the suspicion that Hollywood adaptations were forced to be artistically and ideologically conservative. The fact is, though, that highly self-reflexive, playful, and even irreverent adaptations continued to thrive in 1920s America as in Europe. And why shouldn’t this have been the case, since the first adaptations everywhere focused on reproducing spectacular literary moments and atmospheres rather than transcribing plot details? Through much of the early silent period, fidelity had remained a meaningless concept, so an alternative tradition of offshoots, modernizations, farces, and even deliberately “unfaithful” period films developed just as naturally as the “high-culture” ones on which we scholars have tended to focus. Especially popular in this period—both in the United States and Europe—were the numerous “Romeo” films, for example, modernizations of the Romeo and Juliet plot played out across various scenarios: there was the Romeo Bosetti short, Romeo Turns Bandit (1909), in which Romeo is forced to kidnap and then rescue his Juliet in order to convince her father of his well-meaning, heroic nature, and many others, including An Indian Romeo and Juliet (1912), A Tugboat Romeo (1916), A Reckless Romeo (1917), and Lubitsch’s aforementioned Romeo und Julia im Schnee, a bizarre little film set in the Alpine countryside. In America this “alternative” tradition continued in the form of shorts, serials, animation, creative modernizations, and parodies of the prestige films—and Romeo was as alive as ever. Romeo and Juliet, a one-reel Star-Universal “burlesque” from 1920, for example, focused on the “scrub lady” employed by a theater company whose Juliet becomes suddenly ill the night before the big performance. Predictably, the scrub lady is called in to play the part, a plot which, in its most basic form, still is exploited today. Doubling for Romeo

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(1921), a Will Rogers two-reeler, places Slim, the cowboy ruffian-turned-movie star, in the role of Romeo, another sign of how much the period seems to have loved the juxtaposition of high art—like Shakespeare’s plays—and workingclass clowns. Importantly, though, the films are as likely to mock high culture, and especially the film industry’s efforts to join it, as those groups excluded by it, a point unmissed by reviewer Edward Weitzel: “Doubling for Romeo is a deliberate and entertaining attempt to poke fun at the movie business, and will be best appreciated by a ‘wise’ audience.”96 In Bromo and Juliet (1926), a Hal Roach one-reeler starring Oliver Hardy and Charley Chase, the working-class clown is replaced by a drunken fool. The Charley character wishes to marry a young woman playing Juliet in a local Shakespeare festival, and she agrees to marry him provided that he play the part of Romeo. When he shows up drunk at the theater, various catastrophes follow, though all to the audience’s delight. After Romeo trips about the stage for a few minutes, tearing down the sets and destroying the performance, the crowd feels compelled to give a standing ovation, chanting “Romeo, Romeo, we want Romeo.” Over the fray, Juliet exclaims: “They all think you were acting. You saved the show,” a pretty telling statement about a typical American theater audience’s entertainment preferences—and perhaps one applicable to the film business itself. What does the average Joe prefer, watching Romeo woo Juliet, or watching him stumble about drunk? The film’s answer seems pretty clear. Audience taste was similarly mocked by Will Rogers in a 1922 Pathécomedy short in which the popular comedian parodied Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood. On the surface, the film is a loving tribute to the famed “athleticism” of the Fairbanks persona, featuring a Robin Hood who runs and leaps and shoots while his adoring band of merry fellows looks on and cheers. A deeper look, though, implies pretty clearly the ridiculousness of that mock persona. The grinning Rogers leaps, for example, from one rock to another one just inches away, throwing his arms up in joy, and his awestruck followers cheer as if they’ve just witnessed a miracle. The cutaways to the cheering fellows, stand-ins for the audiences that went in droves to see Allan Dwan’s Robin Hood (1922), are particularly hilarious and somewhat insulting; like the Roach Romeo and Juliet, the film interrogates audience tastes in a lighthearted manner. Stan Laurel’s hilarious two-reeler Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride (1925) offers some insightful commentary on the 1920s Dr. Jekyll films—meditating on the important question of Hyde’s evildoings (see above, pp. 110–12). Though Laurel’s Hyde is clearly a parody of Barrymore’s Hyde, an impossibly longfingered monster in a ridiculous black wig and top hat (see Figure 3.8), the main happenings of the film more clearly parody the anarchic doings of

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FIGURE 3.8 Stan Laurel as the Terrifying “Mr. Pride” (1925). Sheldon Lewis’s Hyde (see above, pp. 111–13). The worst that Laurel’s Hyde manages is to steal a little boy’s ice cream cone and then bombard another kid, along with his adult protectors, with spitballs. In a later scene, he squirts a woman in the face with a trick flower, and she screams as if she’s been shot by a revolver. Because adaptations of Stevenson’s great novel always run the risk of depicting an evil that falls short of the reader’s imagination, Dr. Pyckle is able to squeeze many laughs out of the scenario. The Roach, Rogers, and Laurel shorts together demonstrated the manner in which such Brit-Lit comedies tended not only to adapt well-known literary texts, but also to reflect back on the history of earlier adaptations of the same texts. Indeed like influential and experimental Brit-Lit films produced in later decades, such as Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) or Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), many 1920s Hollywood films succeeded in raising the complex question, “What is an adaptation?” At what point does a film explicitly evoking, but also steering creatively away from, a high-profile literary text cease to be an adaptation and become something altogether different or new?97 At which point, that is, does a seeming adaptation reveal itself to be an “appropriation,” which Julie Sanders defines as a text that “frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain.”98 Such questions tend to be more than merely “academic” because the films that succeed in raising them constantly redefine the rules and limitations of adaptation, as well as audience expectations. One interesting Brit-Lit appropriation informed Walt Disney’s so-called “Alice Comedies,” the first successful cartoons by a filmmaker who, it could

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be argued, would become the single most successful adaptor of literary stories in the history of cinema. These shorts ran from 1923 to 1927 and, at a rate of about one per month, eventually totaled fifty-seven films. Technically, they were landmark productions in the history of animation. Inspired by the Max Fleischer film series Out of the Inkwell (1918–29), which inserted the animated clown Koko into live-action sequences, Disney’s series basically reversed the process, inserting the live Alice character (originally played by Virginia Davis) into animated sequences. The basic conceit of the series is directly appropriated from Lewis Carroll’s novels Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). In the pilot episode of the series, “Alice’s Wonderland,” an opening title explains how “little Alice, chock full of curiosity, pays her first visit to a cartoon studio.” She is welcomed by none other than the young Disney himself, who draws for her some animated figures in the Fleischer style (see Figure 3.9). Alice is mesmerized and overwhelmed by the magic, and in this and subsequent Alice films, she dreams or fantasizes herself into numerous animated sequences. In “Alice’s Wonderland,” she actually jumps into a rabbit hole to avoid being eaten by a lion, but—other than the little girl’s name—this may be the series’ only explicit reference to Carroll. The films are wonderful examples of the early Disney’s willingness to eschew realism in favor of the irrational, physicsdefying, totemistic experiments that contemporary intellectuals such as Benjamin and Eisenstein so admired.99 They announce their tribute to Carroll in order to establish the dreamlike imaginary world of the series, but the Alice Comedies’ power derives precisely from Disney’s willingness to escape

FIGURE 3.9 Alice Meets Walt Disney (1923).

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the limiting influence of any and all rules, including those laid down by a source text. A similar appropriation of British literature, and one of the landmark films of the decade, was Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). By no means the first film to combine “Sherlock Holmes” and the concept of a “Junior” (see Il Piccolo Sherlock Holmes, [1909], Sherlock Holmes, Jr. [1911], and Baby Sherlock [1912], among others),100 Keaton’s film is easily the best known of the Sherlock Holmes parodies, though it barely touches the Conan Doyle character. Sherlock Jr is a film projectionist, unjustly blamed for a robbery he didn’t commit, who falls asleep during the screening of a film. In one of the most famous sequences in film history, he dreams himself onto the screen, suffering a series of mishaps as the mise-en-scène rapidly changes. Eventually he finds himself inside a detective film in which he is able to solve the real-life mystery of who actually committed the robbery. The film makes no attempt to pull him out of character—no attempt, that is, to associate him with Sherlock Holmes—though his momentary appearance in top hat and suit certainly would have reminded contemporary audiences of John Barrymore’s Holmes from the 1922 Goldwyn film. The titular allusion to “Sherlock” is quite rich, nonetheless, since this film-about-film revels in the mind’s inability to process everyday events free from the intrusion of literary/cinematic images and conventions. In a sense, this appropriation of Sherlock Holmes has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, and yet it would have been a less powerful film without the explicit references to the famous character. How far can films push this mode of appropriation before allusions to the literary text cease to matter?101 Certainly for those audience members who recognize the allusions, the films can never push too far. One of the popular films of the 1922 season was the Mary Pickford vehicle Tess of the Storm Country. Pickford had played the same role in a 1914 version directed by Porter, and she sometimes claimed that Tess was her favorite character.102 In any case, Tess of the Storm Country was based on a successful 1909 novel by American author Grace Miller White. It follows the tribulations of Tess, a seventeen-year-old girl from a family of squatters living in the shadows of a hilltop mansion owned by the wealthy and ruthless Elias Graves. A melodramatic tale of forbidden love, class violence, religious hypocrisy, and the like, Tess never engages directly Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and an audience’s knowledge of the late Victorian novel isn’t necessary to enjoy the film. Yet how many viewers likely were lured into watching it under the assumption that it was an adaptation of the famous novel? The title can be said to dupe the audience, or—like the title Sherlock, Jr.—to work like an establishing shot, communicating a tonal, atmospheric, and

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thematic nexus of ideas that directly conditions, and possibly enriches, the viewing experience. Themes of hypocrisy, classism, misogyny, illegitimacy, and forgiveness are raised to a high level of consciousness in the minds of viewers familiar with Hardy’s work. As a result, the undeniably saccharine tale is likely to be elevated through its associations with Tess of the D’Urbervilles, or exposed through comparisons to Hardy’s brutal realism and tragic sensibility. Films like Tess of the Storm Country raise additional questions about the viability of defining or delimiting national literatures and cinemas, even in a period characterized by the “rise of national cinemas.”103 Can Tess be called a Brit-Lit film? We would argue yes, with certain qualifications, and we would point to one further film as an example of what’s to be gained by the appellation. Albert Parker ’s Sherlock Holmes (1922) actually was based on the now-famous 1899 play by American playwright William Gillette—who also portrayed Holmes in a lost 1916 Essanay film. It announces that it is “adapted from William Gillette’s play based on the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” Indeed, Gillette’s play borrowed not only the characters and settings from Doyle, but even combined plot elements from such sources as “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Final Problem,” and A Study in Scarlet. Further, Gillette collaborated pretty openly with Doyle. In fact Gillette first considered the idea of a Holmes play when he was called in by literary agent A. P. Watt and theatrical producer Charles Frohman to clean up a mangled play written by Doyle himself. The two men corresponded frequently throughout the period during which Gillette essentially rewrote the entire thing, and Gillette even managed to convince Doyle that Holmes should be married off at the end. Gillette’s contributions to the Sherlock Holmes legend should not be underestimated, as his play’s success has in numerous ways impacted our conception of Doyle’s great character. For example, Holmes’s deerstalker cap (also worn by Basil Rathbone),104 the pageboy’s name “Billy,” the development of the Irene Adler character into a love interest of Holmes (most recently appropriated in the wonderful BBC Sherlock [2012]), and that most famous phrase, “elementary, my dear Watson,” all owe their staying power to Gillette’s script and/or performance of the Holmes character. Linda Hutcheon states that “palimpsests make for permanent change,”105 an idea truer of no work than the Gillette-inspired Holmes films of the silent era, which dared to embrace liberal models of adaptation and, in the process, reinvented the texts they engaged. Works such as Tess of the Storm Country and Sherlock Holmes are undoubtedly Brit-Lit films, then, but they are also American-Lit films, and they are both and neither. A lovely, instructive obliteration of hierarchy is caused by the intertextual relationships these films so successfully exploit, deepening

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the endless play that can make the cinematic experience so enjoyable and intellectually rich. These “alternative” Hollywood Brit-Lit appropriations demonstrated well the American industry’s willingness to push beyond fidelity into more experimental modes of adaptation. Comedic shorts, parodies, and adaptations of previous adaptations all belong in this category of film, as do the numerous serials released in these years such as Universal’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1922)—consisting of eighteen two-reel episodes—whose generic status alone announced and perhaps authorized its countless departures from the Defoe novel. Of course, there also were the more well-known feature adaptations such as Oliver Twist, Lorna Doone, and Peter Pan. And what of these films? Would it be accurate to say that these were conservative in comparison with the various shorts, parodies, and comedies just discussed? In the end, we believe that although many Hollywood adaptations exhibit the pressures and negative effects of both fidelity criticism and censorship, as well as a certain formulaic adherence to the increasingly visible Hollywood style, only the most reductive historian would conclude that they were peculiarly “conservative” in comparison with any other group of films.106 Paramount’s 1924 Peter Pan, starring Betty Bronson as Peter, is notable for the way its director Herbert Brenon and screenplay writer Willis Goldbeck managed to create a convincing, live-action universe of absolute play—which, some might say, is necessary to filming the J. M. Barrie fantasy of eternal youthfulness. Like Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) which some twenty years later would wrestle with the problem of adapting a self-reflexive theatrical work in a realistic medium, Peter Pan betrays an anxiety about the degree to which the dominance of the Hollywood style might limit an audience’s endurance for the truly fantastic. As the opening title sequence, the transposition of a “Note” by Barrie himself in his original 1905 version of the play, seeks to clarify, “The difference between a Fairy Play and a realistic one is that in the former all the characters are really children with a child’s outlook on life. … This, then, is the spirit of the play. And it is necessary that all of you … should be children.” Like Shakespeare’s prologue in Henry V, which appeals to the audience’s “imaginary forces,” Barrie’s prologue places the burden of representation on the viewer’s ability and willingness to collaborate in the artistic project. In this case, doing so simply requires memory of a childhood state of innocence where the real and the fantastic mingle rather than collide. The scene opens on a warm, shadow-strewn nursery where the first character we see is Nana the dog, played by the actor George Ali in an expressive but unflinchingly artificial dog suit (see Figure 3.10). In the first

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FIGURE 3.10 George Ali as Nana (Peter Pan, 1924). few seconds, then, Peter Pan announces that although it has at its disposal every kind of special effect the contemporary cinema allows, it also will strive to highlight its theatricality throughout. This is what Bruce K. Hanson misses when he condemns the movie’s “look of a filmed stage play.”107 The reductive claim disregards Brenon’s intentional balancing act between theatricality and realism (or “fairy plays” and realistic ones). Again, the film’s dialectic is not all that different from Olivier’s Henry V, seeking continuities between theater and film rather than setting one medium against the other. Although certain scenes do exploit the choreography, shots, and mise-en-scène of a more theatrical “play,” such scenes by no means dominate a film whose complexity lies largely in its separation of filmic illusionism and fantasy. In numerous ways, Barrie himself urged the production away from the merely theatrical and toward the filmic; after outlining his vision for Peter’s first appearance, he offered that “this incident should show at once that film can do things for Peter Pan which the ordinary stage cannot do. It should strike a note of wonder in the first picture, and whet the appetite for more marvels.”108 Production decisions were guided by a desire to increase the fantastic element of the experience. For example, casting decisions sought to hinder the encroachment of the real world into the fantasy one, as actress Mary Brian (Wendy) clarified: “They had decided to go with unknowns. … They thought if Wendy and the little lost boys were all unknowns to the audience it would seem more like a fairy tale.”109 Therefore, we can say that the Hollywood filmmaking arsenal was considered useful for the film when it highlighted cinema magic, undesirable when it threatened to usher in reality. Because of Brenon’s approach, Nana could be played by a man in a dog suit

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FIGURE 3.11 Tinkerbell in Brenon’s Peter Pan (1924). and, without any contradiction, Tinkerbell could be animated by the most technically advanced special effects (see Figure 3.11). In the end, the film apparently didn’t please Barrie, perhaps because so much of his own scenario was ignored, but audiences and critics loved it.110 Raking in more than two million dollars in a single weekend, it delighted audiences, earned a top-ten spot in The New York Times best films of 1924, and was selected in the year 2000 for preservation in the National Film Registry. A pattern emerges from a general overview of the period’s most successful Hollywood adaptations— one which wouldn’t be broken any time soon—according to which genre-film appropriations of British literature often proved more experimental than the studios’ “quality” films. Horror films such as Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and fantasies like Peter Pan were standouts; so too was Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925), which presented one of the first thorough alternate universes on film (see Figure 3.12), being perhaps the world’s first feature to employ stop-motion animation on a grand scale in bringing its prehistoric creatures to life. (Special-effects wizard Willis H. O’Brien would later bring the same techniques to King Kong, that deservedly famous 1933 “remake” of The Lost World, and another example of the way adaptations have impacted the history of cinema.) While the old binary of “dramatic” films and “genre” flicks continues to tempt us down blind alleys, we should note that it was often the latter films—horror, science fiction, children’s films, and comedy shorts, among others—that succeeded in challenging popular assumptions about the cinema’s proper relationship to literature. In this manner, they played a huge role in shaping adaptation as an “art form of democracy,” to borrow Deborah Cartmell’s phrase.111

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FIGURE 3.12 Willis O’Brien’s Stop-Motion Dinosaurs in The Lost World (1925).

4 Conclusion Paradoxically, the interactions between national cinemas studied in this chapter raise questions about filmmaking as a transnational or global phenomenon. As Higson articulates the problem of theorizing national cinemas, “There is a tendency to focus only on those films that narrate the nation as just this finite, limited space, inhabited by a tightly coherent and unified community, closed off to other identities besides national identity.” Such a concept, he goes on to argue, “is hardly able to do justice to the internal diversity of contemporary cultural formations or to the overlaps and interpenetrations between different formations.”112 Higson is thus in favor of scholarship more tuned in to these local internal and transnational overlaps and interpenetrations. Certainly, cinema of the later 1920s brings home the point that the relatively clear demarcation of national cinemas in the period right around the First World War was extremely short lived. Indeed, the combination of Hollywood’s poaching of talent from other countries, the common practice of establishing subsidiary film companies abroad, and numerous national alliances such as the French-German Ufa-Aubert deal, point to the transnational nature of 1920s filmmaking. How is one to regard Lubitsch’s or Murnau’s great Hollywood work, for example, considering that the styles of films such as Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) are so inextricably tied to the work the directors made famous in Germany? How is one to speak about the nationalism of films produced by Hollywood subsidiaries based in England, say, and employing predominantly British casts and laborers? The

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questions we might be asking about filmmaking in 1925, in other words, are not entirely different from the ones we find ourselves asking in 2015. From the perspective of film professionals around 1925, however, more immediately pressing questions were suddenly requiring answers. The gradual emergence of sound cinema would forever change not only the possibilities— and some might say the “dream”—of a “universal” cinema, but also the role of adaptations in the history of film. In 1929, the first Shakespeare talkie feature, The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Sam Taylor and starring Pickford and Fairbanks, was greeted with “fear and loathing” by critics and reviewers.113 A telling artifact of its time, the film was released in two versions, one silent, one sound. As Deborah Cartmell characterizes the general anxieties defining reception of the production, “The use of sound, words in particular, made an adaptation more ‘literary’ or ‘theatrical,’ and therefore less ‘filmic.’”114 Since the film is remembered today mainly for the iconic Pickford close-up wink that punctuated her delivery of Katherine’s infamous speech, the fact of such anxieties seems quite ironic. Nonetheless, although film had emerged by 1920 as a rival art form to literature, sound threatened to return film, and especially adaptations, back onto the lower rungs of an artistic hierarchy still stubbornly refusing permanent reconfiguration. The thirties would therefore be a period of reconceptualization for the Brit-Lit film, one that would define adaptation’s role for decades to come.

4 Sound, studios, and censorship: The Brit-Lit film, 1927–39

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n the first weekend of December 1929 at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, something unexpected happened at two showings of Fox Follies, a musical review produced by 20th Century Fox—first a near riot and then an organized protest. On Saturday, when it became clear that the film would be sung and spoken exclusively in English, the audience became increasingly restless and began chanting “Donnez-nous des films français … Parleznous français!” [Give us movies in French! We speak French!]. The next day, protesters turned up in huge numbers and interrupted the screening again. Though security was on hand, officers could not force their way into the crowded theater to stop the uproar. In both cases, management was forced to suspend the film and clear the theater.1 Though a minor event in the larger history of cinema, the Moulin Rouge incident was nevertheless a clear sign of things to come. If the 1920s had been characterized largely by international competition for global markets, this episode suggests how the coming of sound would necessarily alter the calculations of those producing and marketing films. Filmmakers of the late silent era had nearly perfected “universal” visual stories, appealing to patrons in a number of countries, with minimal reliance on language, which could be easily translated through exchangeable title cards. But with the implementation of sound technology, both the real and the imagined international audience was fragmented into multiple, detached audiences distinguished by a Babellike profusion of languages. Faced with the potential loss of these audiences, Hollywood in particular responded by attempting to underscore the international, universal character of its films. This included the refinement and greater enforcement of policies designed to suppress jingoistic or overtly nationalistic or racialized sentiments.2

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The notorious self-policing and censorship initiatives of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, or MPPDA, must be understood, therefore, as part of the trade organization’s strategy for preserving the dominance of American films in international markets.3 An unbounded enthusiasm for the supposed international reach of Hollywood was very much a hallmark of Lamar Trotti, an American screenwriter, who while working at the MPPDA in 1928,4 wrote a giddy speech about the universality of Hollywood products, a quality that rested on its exploitation of British writers in particular: The list of English authors whose material has been purchased for the screen would fill columns of space including Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, Ethel M. Dell, William J. Locke, Cosmo Hamilton, Egerton Castle, A. A. Milne, E. M. Hull, J. Hartley Manners, Gilbert Parker, James M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Hall Caine, Philip Gibbs, Jeffrey Farnol, Anthony Hope, Rudyard Kipling, E. Philips Oppenheim, Arthur Wing Pinero, Israel Zangwill, Ouida, A. S. M. Hutchinson, A. M. and C. M. Williamson, E. W. Hornsung, Ian Hay and many others. It is no novel sight in Hollywood to find an Englishman’s novel being turned into film continuity by a German scenarist in order that an American girl may be a heroine before scenery designed by an Italian while an Irishman turns the crank of a camera and a Frenchman directs the scene. It is indeed for this very reason that Hollywood may be truly said to be international and that the motion picture already known as the one universal language is truly world-wide in its production as it is in its distribution.5 In Trotti’s cinematic League of Nations, any European artist could seemingly fill the technical roles related to acting and cinematography, but English novelists, he implies, are especially endowed with the ability to speak to the entire world. A good proportion of the novelists on Trotti’s list, many now obscure, wrote about the far-flung possessions of the British Empire and other European powers or set their novels in various locations “exotic” to Westerners: Conrad, Maugham, and Kipling most famously, but also Edith M. Dell (India and other British possessions in The Way of the Eagle), Edith Maude Hull (North Africa in The Sheik), Anthony Hope (a fictional European principality in The Prisoner of Zenda), E. Philip Oppenheim (German East Africa in The Great Impersonation), Ouida (French North Africa in Under Two Flags), and Alice Muriel and Charles Norris Williamson (Japan in “Man without a Face”). A minority of the rest wrote historical romances, swashbucklers, or murder mysteries set in England (Arnold Bennet, Hall Caine, Jeffrey Farnol, et cetera) that provided material for more conventional costume dramas.

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In the course of the 1930s, Hollywood came to rely on British literary classics in new ways, especially as sources for large budget films aimed at family audiences. At first glance, Trotti’s commercial internationalism may help to explain why Hollywood was attracted so powerfully to Brit-Lit. But other causes, many of them compelling, present themselves. First and foremost, classics from a number of national literatures enjoyed a new vogue in America just before and especially after the Production Code was formally adopted on a voluntary basis in 1931 and then made obligatory in 1934: The Blue Angel (1930, in both German and English, based on the novel of Heinrich Mann), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Anna Christie (1931), Little Women (1933, based on the Louisa May Alcott novel), The Three Musketeers (1933), The Adventures of Don Quixote (1934, France/UK), The Count of Monte Cristo (1933), Les Misérables (1935, US), Anna Karenina (1935, starring Garbo), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), among others. Jeffrey Richards suggests that the US film industry turned to Brit-Lit classics in part for mainstream material unlikely to stir up the wrath of moralists: If censorship made contemporary novels difficult projects to handle, Britain’s rich literary heritage surely provided less controversial cinematic material. … Hollywood’s dominance even in the field of British literary classics was but part of its overall dominance. It was able to supply British culture and British ideology in such good measure that The Times was prompted to remark in 1937: “The Union Jack in the last few years has been vigorously and with no little effect waved by Hollywood.”6 To give a sense of the imbalance in Brit-Lit production in the 1930s: Hollywood produced three Shakespeare adaptations compared to Britain’s one, four Kipling adaptations to Britain’s one, and seven Dickens adaptations to Britain’s two. As Richards sketches out the extent of Hollywood’s commitment to a kind of proxy British cultural production in the 1930s, it becomes clear that something more than the quest for commercial dominance explains the Brit-Lit fetish. The United Kingdom represented not just one of many international consumers of Hollywood’s products, but a very special one. By the late 1920s the United Kingdom had become “America’s biggest foreign market.”7 In fact, with restricted access to European distribution in the 1920s, due to quota legislation, Hollywood’s main profit strategy relied heavily on the British export market.8 While a typical Hollywood studio could recover most production costs in the domestic market, it relied on enthusiastic British audiences9 to put it in the black.10 Thus, we need to expose Trotti’s argument for the universality of Hollywood product to some serious critical dissection. Ultimately, the United States—through its film industry—may have been mimicking, practicing, and

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finally appropriating British imperial mentalities, preparing to assert its own ambitions on the world stage. It’s almost as if we can observe the transfer of empire from the United Kingdom to the United States on movie screens. The British film industry itself struggled financially in the 1930s, but nevertheless enjoyed several notable successes: Alexander Korda’s prestige biopics for London Films and the early thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock at Gainsborough and British International, a clutch of them literary adaptations, spring immediately to mind. After a catastrophic year in 1926, which saw the percentage of British-produced films shown in the country drop to a frightening five percent, Parliament passed the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 which stipulated that 7.5 percent of films shown by renters and exhibitors had to be produced in Britain or the empire.11 Although the legislation began modestly, it allowed for a steady increase of the percentage until it reached twenty percent by 1933. Since many US studios were heavily involved in the distribution and exhibition of films in the United Kingdom, the effect of the act was to funnel profits from the display of American films into the domestic film industry, keeping it afloat but also tasking it with the production of quickly made, cheap films.12 Thus, the act created an entire class of British films, the so-called “quota quickies.” US studios and their distributors paid British studios to crank out films to meet the quota of twenty percent but, according to Rachael Low, they did so mainly as part of a cynical calculation designed to encourage the production of inferior films.13 Recently scholars like H. Mark Glancy and Steve Chibnall have reassessed the once almost universally despised quota quickies and found many successes among the dross, mainly vehicles for music hall stars. They show that future pillars of the British film industry like Michael Balcon and Anthony Asquith also received a rough and ready training in the film mills that sprung up in response to the quota legislation.14 Nonetheless, this legislation was renewed and then tweaked in 1938 to improve the quality of quota films, rewarding distributors who displayed higher-budget British films. One effect of the 1938 legislation was to encourage Hollywood studios to open British subsidiaries rather than allow their quota films to be made by proxy. MGM Britain, for example, produced a curious group of hybrid “British” films in the late 1930s: A Yank at Oxford (1938), The Citadel (1938), and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). As Glancy notes, “These were British films only by virtue of being filmed in Britain. They also bear striking similarities to Hollywood’s own ‘British’ films; films that were made in Hollywood, but set in Britain and usually based on British literature or history.”15 The quota legislation arguably added fuel to Hollywood’s obsessions with Brit-Lit adaptations, especially with regard to the prestige films, which would have been difficult for most British

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studios to produce given the narrow economies under which the majority of them operated. Although this chapter tells the story of these narrowing British markets and focuses on the competing film cultures of Britain and the United States, Brit-Lit adaptations did continue to be made in other national cinemas during the 1930s. Germany had a penchant for adapting the fiction of Edgar Wallace and Conan Doyle as well as plays by Shaw and Wilde. See, for example, Der Squeeker (Karl Forest, 1931, based on Wallace’s The Informer); Liebe, Scherz, und Ernst [The Importance of Being Earnest] (Franz Wenzler, 1932); Lady Windermeres Fächer [Lady Windermere’s Fan] (Heinz Hilpert, 1935); Elisa, das Blümenmädchen [Pygmalion] (Erich Engels, 1935); Eine Frau ohne Bedeutung [A Woman of No Importance] (Hans Steinhoff, 1936); Die graue Dame [Sherlock Holmes] (Erich Engels, 1936); and Der Mann der Sherlock Holmes war [The Man who was Sherlock Holmes] (Karl Hartl,1937). China also produced a significant number of Brit-Lit films in the 1930s, probably in direct imitation of Hollywood:16 Fu-er-mo-si Zhentan An [Casebook of Sherlock Holmes] (Pingqian Li, 1931); Yijian Mei [A Spray of Plum Blossoms] (Bu Wancang, 1931, based on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona); A Woman of No Importance (Pingqian Li, 1935, based on the play by Wilde); Dao Ziran Qu [Go to Nature] (Sun Yu, 1936, based on J. M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton]; Shipotianqing [Shatter and Batter] (Dan Duyu, 1937, based on a story by Conan Doyle); Shao Nainai de Shanzi [The Young Mistress’ Fan] (Pingqian Li, 1939, again based on Wilde). India produced a Hamlet adaptation in Urdu, Khoon Ka Khoon (Sohrab Modi, 1935), and French and Italian producers similarly adapted Brit-Lit sources only sporadically in the 1930s, and for dramatically different reasons. France’s imposition of an import quota led to a golden age of filmmaking under the leadership of directors Abel Gance, Marcel Pagnol, and Jean Renoir,17 among others, while Italy’s film industry fell under the strict control of the fascist government. In the remainder of this chapter, we focus mainly on US and UK Brit-Lit adaptations from the arrival of sound in 1927 to the eve of the Second World War. In doing so, we seek to highlight two themes in particular: the crucial importance of the Brit-Lit film in the cinematic trade wars between America and Britain, and the increasing significance of genre films like horror and romance for the development of adaptations. The chapter will unfold in three stages: the first section considers the influence of new sound technologies on Brit-Lit adaptations, mainly with respect to edgy, contemporary plays and literary horror; the second turns to industry censorship, with the establishment of the Production Code in the United States and the BBFC in the United Kingdom, and its impact on the prestige productions of both

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countries; and the final section examines the growing imperial fervor of late 1930s Brit-Lit adaptations.

1 Sound and its implications for Brit-Lit adaptation Of all the changes ushered in by the sound revolution, the sudden importance of spoken dialogue offered the greatest challenges to makers of literary films. Many early sound films like the notorious Jazz Singer (1927) were in reality hybrid films in that dialogue was still represented by title cards while sound was employed mainly for songs and music. In the buildup to employing sound for dialogue, mainly in years 1928 and 1929, trade magazines like Film Daily started to write of the new films as “dialogue pictures,” more specifically as “Part-Talkers” or “All-Talkers,” depending on how much dialogue was recorded.18 The earliest Brit-Lit adaptations of the sound era, like other productions of the time, showed a pronounced interest in songs and instrumental performances and, given the lack of postproduction sound mixing, most of their music had to be recorded along with the moving image. Thus many of these early adaptations contained high concentrations of diegetic music. The Letter (1929, based on a Somerset Maugham play) and Dangerous Paradise (1930, adapted from Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory), for example, both featured a large number of songs performed by native musicians in Singapore and Indonesia, respectively. Harry Lachman’s 1929 Under the Greenwood Tree was effectively a literary musical featuring hymns, carols, and comic songs performed by the fictional Mellstock Choir, the clumsily provincial but loveable protagonists of Hardy’s novel. Perhaps because of this focus on music in early sound films, sound technology in itself did little to challenge the dream of a “universal” product that could be exported to any country simply by changing the title cards, but spoken language certainly changed the game. Within a short period of time, a new kind of specialized writer came into particular demand: the “dialoguer,” responsible for writing or rewriting words to be spoken by actors. Playwrights and novelists suddenly were being sought out again as dialogue writers, and in the United States, reliance on East Coast theatrical and literary talent surged.19 Typical reviews in Film Daily issues of 1929 give a sense of the division of labor reigning in the US studio system with respect to screenwriting: alongside of “author” or “writer,” many credit lists included a “scenarist,” an “editor,” a “titler” (since title cards hadn’t yet disappeared), “adapter,” as well as “dialoguist.” The account of the Moulin Rouge “riot,” by the way, suggests

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that part of what enraged the Parisian filmgoers was the poor quality of the title cards: “Les rares explications sont écrites dans un français deplorable” [The rare titles are written in a deplorable French]. One immediate effect of the conversion to sound was to tilt adaptations toward theatrical sources rather than novels. Thomas Leitch suggests that the “rush to plays” had to do with speed: plays were “an evening’s entertainment readily amenable to filming, rather than novels that would have to be condensed and reworked.”20 Though usually more an exception than the rule, Hitchcock’s career too shows clearly the shifts in preferred literary sources for films. In the late 1920s, Hitchcock’s studio, British International Pictures, preferred for him to turn plays into movies because the adaptation process was faster and cheaper.21 And though he was deeply fascinated by the theater, Hitchcock came to think disparagingly of many of his theatrical adaptations: he called them “photographed plays” and “breathers” between more serious work, which relied more often on novels. In general, he seems to have thought that the “breathers” were not visual enough and overly theatrical. Some producers resisted the new sound technology precisely because they feared such a return to theatrical filmmaking. Soviet filmmakers in particular argued that sound threatened to introduce into the cinema a creeping naturalism and a regression to non-cinematic styles and techniques. In their statement or manifesto on sound, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Alexandrov, and Vertov warned that, once it became a normal part of cinema, sound technology would usher in an epoch of “‘highly cultured dramas’ and other photographed performances of a theatrical sort.”22 In their view, a return to theatricality would erase the great gains of dialectical montage, the cornerstone of Soviet film art. Instead they argued for sound to be treated just like any other element of montage and for it to be kept out of sync, so that it could function as a contrapuntal, oppositional element to the moving image. Had they seen Widgley Newman’s 1927 The Merchant of Venice, the first Shakespeare film with sound, every anxiety they expressed would have been confirmed: though really an experimental short film, Newman’s Merchant employed no montage at all, using a fixed camera with sound recording technology to document parts of a stage production—in something of an uncanny fulfillment of Edison’s original dreams for filmed plays (see above, pp. 27–8). Filmmakers around the world took some rather fascinating, creative, and, with the hindsight of history, seemingly insane steps to overcome the difficulties that dialogue presented both to producers and exhibitors. In fact, two of the most successful solutions to these difficulties, dubbing and subtitles, established themselves definitively only from 1932 onward.23 Dubbing had presented a particularly challenging problem since multitrack sound recording wasn’t yet common or convenient. Instead, filmmakers

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mixed dialogue, music, and sound effects together on a single track during filming, requiring musicians to play on set for each take. Though dubbing was attempted a few times early on, it proved tremendously expensive and time-consuming to reproduce the sound elements on a soundtrack in another language, and to synchronize dialogue and sonic effects with the action. Only after postproduction sound mixing did the dubbing of films for international viewers become more feasible.24 Until dubbing and subtitles could serve as more economical and effective tools of translation, many producers exploited alternative methods for producing multilingual versions of their films. Such methods had profound effects on how literary films were made. Between 1929 and 1932, for example, producers sometimes filmed the same movie in different language versions using the same sets and technicians but employing different directors and cast members. Actors, who typically were native speakers of the language in question, were often recruited from theaters to star in the films. Another such method was to record different language versions of the same film, one after the other, with actors trained to speak their lines in various languages. In many cases, these actors had little to no understanding of the languages they spoke and were taught simply to pronounce their lines phonetically. For the most part, it seems that this particular technique was used for comedies and popular film series in situations where replacing iconic stars would ruin the studio’s brand or the film’s marketability. Laurel and Hardy, for example, shot multiple versions of certain films in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, using different supporting casts in each separate one.25 Warner Brothers, which famously led the way in the studios’ conversion to sound, went so far as to establish an in-house language school (staffed by Berlitz instructors), which it called the “Vitaphone School.” According to Film Daily, The founding of the Vitaphone School paves the way for a radical departure in policy, Jack Warner says, which will make practical the production of all important Warner and First National talking films in French, German, Spanish and Italian as well as in English, with identical casts in all the languages used. Actual production of this type of picture will not begin until the production heads are satisfied that the various stars and players have become qualified for such assignments, but it is likely that next season will see the release of talking pictures in foreign versions played by casts already familiar with the languages employed.26 Aside from a few early trials, though, Warner’s grand vision was never realized—so universal was the implementation of dubbing and subtitling by 1932. To our knowledge, only a few literary films employed the technique of

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multilingual versions though, in a moment, we’ll investigate a few that were based on British literature. Paramount led the way in such productions mainly through its French branch, located in the Parisian suburb of Joinville, which according to the trade magazines and subsequent historical accounts, was purpose built as a multilingual studio, beginning its operations in April 1930. Shortly thereafter The New York Times ran a story on this new venture with the telling headline, “Paramount to Film Talkies in Europe: Will Solve Language Problem with Casts Composed of Foreign Actors.”27 After an original English-language production, made either in Paramount’s Astoria studios or in Hollywood, became a hit, its script would be sent to Joinville where it would then be translated quickly and fairly literally into a variety of languages and then filmed in multiple versions under the control of separate directors. Robert T. Kraft was the Paramount executive in charge of the Joinville operation responsible for recruiting talented directors from various national cinemas and theaters, though ironically he spoke no French. All in all, Paramount’s Joinville operation was based on a rationalized industrial system intended to pump out a generic product as efficiently as possible. MGM, by contrast, used the technique on more prestigious pictures like Anna Christie, a 1930 production based on a play by Eugene O’Neill, which the studio soon after remade for a German audience. It then invested significant resources into transforming the accomplished German version into a yet darker film more in keeping with other nations’ tastes and cinematic aesthetics.28 Other studios took different approaches to their multilingual productions. Even before the full incorporation of sound technology, Germany’s UFA had partnered with the British Gainsborough studio to expedite international distribution of its silent films, but now the companies began producing films together.29 UFA eventually set up an operation in Paris, similar to Paramount’s, where it intended to produce multilingual versions of its popular operettas recorded with the Tobis-Klangfilm sound process.30 Probably its best known dual-language film was Der blaue Engel, or, The Blue Angel (1930), a languid and lurid tale of seduction and humiliation, based on the Heinrich Mann novel. In a sign, however, that the multilingual film strategy was on the whole a failure, Paramount-Joinville by late 1931 began shifting many of its resources to the production of films made in French for the domestic market, and to providing postproduction dubbing services for Hollywood producers. The previously mentioned Paramount film The Letter (1929), based on the Maugham short story and play, offers a good illustration of the multilingual process’s impact on adaptations. After becoming a hit for the studio, The Letter was shipped off to Joinville for the multilingual treatment in 1930; soon there were versions in French (La lettre, 1930); Spanish (La Carta, 1931);

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Italian (La donna biancha [The White Woman], 1931), and German (Weib im Dschungel [Woman in the Jungle], 1931). Unfortunately, none of them has survived. In the original film, Leslie Crosbie (played by Jeanne Eagels) has been carrying on a long-term affair with a fellow expat named Geoffrey Hammond. Her husband, Robert Crosbie, seems a decent enough but thoroughly conventional man, eking a living out of his rubber plantation and driving his wife mad of boredom. When Robert leaves for a business trip, Leslie urges Hammond to meet her but, when he shows up, he confesses that he has fallen in love with a Chinese woman with whom he now is living—a fact that scandalizes the expat community. After a heated argument, Leslie shoots him. The rest of the film follows her attempts to cover up her crime, and her tense negotiations with the family lawyer, Howard Joyce, who sees through her invented story of Hammond’s attempted rape. Against his moral code but in solidarity with the white expat community, Joyce agrees to help Leslie buy back “the letter” which the Chinese mistress Li-Ti is now threatening to reveal. In a climactic moment (see Figure 4.1), Leslie is forced to retrieve the letter from the hands of the mistress, who humiliates her in an opium den in the presence of a number of prostitutes. After she is acquitted in court, her husband Robert confronts Leslie in the passionate final scene of the film, which softens nothing from the written versions of the story. Taking revenge on Robert for his earlier remoteness, she confesses her affair and promises to make their ruined marriage a permanent and living hell. Maugham’s story dramatizes a collision between the morals and passions of the expat community and the local Singaporean culture. Its snapshot

FIGURE 4.1 The Letter (1929).

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of desperation on a rubber plantation puts the lie to the assumed superior decency of its British protagonists. John MacGuire, one of the few scholars to have written on the film, writes that Maugham juxtaposes “the irony of a supposedly superior culture often being over taken by an indigenous one, and how these cultures remain strange to each other.”31 The film, however, as McGuire points out, suffers from some of the technical problems filmmakers commonly experienced in this era. The single mobile camera is replaced by several stationary ones, presumably sheathed in soundproofed cabinets, and thus the viewer “becomes conscious not only of the actors’ immobility, but of the camera’s hovering presence.”32 In spite of a few impressive “silent” sequences, the monotony forced by the stationary cameras is hard to ignore. Indeed, the film is mainly of interest today because of Eagels’s impassioned performance and the colonial setting and events occurring therein. If the original story and play cast serious doubt on the superiority of the British community in Singapore, however, the film is content to trade more directly in racial stereotyping with its depiction of the lurid opium den and its debased inhabitants;33 both the Asian mistress and her confederate tend to come across as far more sinister and manipulative than their counterparts in the story and play. Significantly, the opium den must be reached by descending a set of dark and sinister stairs. Furthermore, the casting of The Letter reveals how severely limited Hollywood’s internationalism or “universality” really was. The New York Times review of the film revealed the shocking assumptions of contemporary viewers about the ethnicities of actors and extras. It praises Paramount’s casting team for having “succeeded in collecting some of the most diversified Eastern characters to splash their bizarre and colorful personalities over the scene of a Chinese den of vice in Singapore.”34 It then quotes the casting head’s claim that if “one is absolutely baffled to get the desired type and must rely on make-up, the most adaptable features for almost any use are the dark Jewish.” The director, Jean de Limur, chimes in that “those Oriental extras were easy to handle; they were as obliging and helpful as any class I have ever worked with. … We had two or three of them who acted as interpreters and passed along our requests.” Stories like The Letter arguably came to be adapted at this time precisely because of their international settings, which might have made film versions of them more marketable outside of America. Regardless, the films often seem less interested in internationalism than in trading on the dangerous otherness of exotic cultures and locations. Paramount’s The Sacred Flame (1929)—also based on a Maugham play— followed a similar pattern, with German (Die Heilige Flamme) and Spanish (La Llama Sagrada) versions trailing the English one by almost two years. The arc of the same studio’s Dangerous Paradise (1930), based on Conrad’s

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Victory, suggests that the system may have been becoming more efficient since the English version and later ones in German (Tropennächte), Swedish (Farornas Paradis), and Polish (Niebezpieczny Raj) appeared in the same year. These multilingual films follow other adaptation trends in the conversion period in that producers appear to have preferred material from contemporary writers, most of them playwrights prized for their mastery of dialogue. The rare adaptations of canonical literary classics turned out in general to be flops: see, for example, Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew (1929) and John Cromwell’s Rich Man’s Folly (1931, based on Dickens’s Dombey and Son). As a result, literary films in the aggregate were generally much more daring in dealing with themes of adultery, murder, religious hypocrisy, national identity, and the effects of colonialism than other period’s Brit-Lit films. The reliance on such plays may also have contributed to our sense of the daring and boldness of precode filmmaking. Writers like Noel Coward and Maugham were particularly hot commodities in this era, though to be fair, their popularity had its beginnings in the late silent era and continued well into the later 1930s and 1940s. Maugham in particular, though, enjoyed a great run in the 1930s, with Warner Brothers alone making four films based on his work. Generally speaking, the early sound period was not particularly hospitable to literary adaptation, especially of novels. In fact, outside of Under the Greenwood Tree, Rich Man’s Folly, and a handful of Edgar Wallace thrillers, no novels were adapted for the screen that hadn’t already been turned into successful plays. The Brit-Lit films made during the conversion period, then, somewhat oddly echo the very first adaptations in cinematic history (see above, especially pp. 28–30 and 70) in their reliance on prior theatrical productions.

2 The reinvention of Brit-Lit horror A new kind of Brit-Lit horror film emerged directly from the context of the early sound film we have been sketching here. A twenty-two-year-old Carl Laemmle, Jr at Universal Studios almost single-handedly reinvented the horror genre in the early 1930s under the guidance of his father, Carl Laemmle or “Uncle Carl” as he liked to be called, the founder and CEO of Universal. (Junior became head of operations in 1928 at the age of twenty.) Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) has much in common with films like The Letter. Both derived from edgy stage productions; both were produced in more than one language; and both (outside of the opening credit sequence of Dracula) employed only diegetic music. In fact, for years cineastes have championed the Spanish version of Dracula (directed by George Melford and starring Carlos Villarias as Dracula), which was shot at

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night after the English-speaking crew had wrapped for the day. The mythology, explored by David Skal, has it that the Spanish crew watched the dailies from the English version and consciously sought to improve upon them.35 The Spanish version of the scene in which the coffin opens for the first time, for example, exploits a deliciously slow and uncanny movement of the lid lifted by an unseen force, an effect completely absent from the English-language version, which cuts to the already raised coffin lid. As we have argued in several places, throughout the history of Brit-Lit adaptation the horror genre has consistently inspired innovative and reflexive filmmaking (see above, pp. 51–5, 104–14, and 152–3). Interestingly, Brigid Cherry claims that the horror film, because of its need to constantly discover new thrills and terrors, is particularly unstable as a genre, or at least exists perpetually in a hyper-state of flux: The function of horror—to scare, shock, revolt or otherwise horrify the viewer—also means that filmmakers are constantly pushing at the boundaries in order to invent new ways of arousing these emotions in audiences (who over time will naturally learn what to expect from a specific type of horror, a process that may well lead to viewers becoming used to or even bored with the formula) and thus keep the scares coming. In all these ways, notions of what the horror genre might be—or should be—are constantly shifting, creating new conceptual categories.36 The constant lust for reinvention that Cherry describes may explain the power of the genre: horror movies very often are particularly sensitive to the ecosystem of films that constitute the genre, as well as the technologies that can sharpen their effects. Horror plays a pivotal role in the history of Brit-Lit adaptation for much the same reason: it returns often to the same source texts, encouraged by the protean nature of the genre to continue adapting in more and more inventive ways. The filming of both Dracula and Frankenstein, Universal’s second big horror hit of 1931, reveals complex trajectories, though both are based ultimately on the classic literary novels of Stoker and Shelley. Both films can be traced more immediately to the work and career of Hamilton Deane, a British actor, stage manager, and impresario. Although Stoker himself had turned his novel into a play, it was Deane who negotiated with Stoker’s widow for the stage rights just as she was battling Murnau and the producers of Nosferatu in the courts (see above, pp. 131–2). After performing rather radical surgery on the novel,37 Deane opened his theatrical version of Dracula in Derby in 1924 and toured the provinces before taking the play, tacky but wildly popular in the opinion of one scholar,38 to London for an extended run. The play then

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jumped the Atlantic, but not before the American backers and a somewhat reluctant Deane hired John Balderston, a London-based American playwright, to revise the script thoroughly, working mainly on honing the dialogue. The Deane-Balderston play opened on Broadway in 1927, starring Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Deane himself as Van Helsing. The road to the film was a complex affair with Universal undertaking negotiations for almost all the competing versions: Stoker’s novel, Deane’s sole version, and the Deane-Balderston version. Frankenstein shows a similarly complex evolution starting with Peggy Webling’s dramatic version of the novel, which Deane also had staged. Dracula and Frankenstein together established a template of sorts for 1930s horror, especially its tight connection to the Gothic mode directly inspired by Brit-Lit classics. As we discuss at greater length below, Universal’s reliance on literary sources for its horror films was part of a deliberate strategy to appease censors. In its press releases, the studio highlighted the literary provenance of its horror series, stating in a 1932 UK promotion, for instance, that “Authors include Wells, Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mary Shelley. Wide variety of Fare from Plays, Books.”39 For Dracula, Universal announced in a press release that it had signed Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Louis Bromfield to write the screenplay,40 though his contributions are uncredited in the final version. Even quasi-literary horror like Universal’s The Mummy (1932) (as well as its UKproduced rival The Ghoul [1933]) had something of a Brit-Lit aura, being set in British-controlled Egypt as well as in England. In keeping with Universal’s literary marketing strategies, the horror pictures were never conceived of as “B” films to run in the bottom half of a double feature. From the beginning, Universal poured significant resources into its horror franchises, which were listed in the trade magazines as prestige productions, or “Universal Super Productions.”41 The budgets of Universal’s horror films weren’t quite as large, nor was their reliance on stars as striking as in the classic prestige films of the 1930s, but they were by all means “A” pictures. Surprisingly, MGM—at the top of the studio food chain in the 1930s—made its few horror films on much more modest budgets. Universal strategically turned Dracula and Frankenstein into full-fledged franchises that drew more from the original films than from literary sources: Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943) as well as Son of Frankenstein (1939) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Because James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) represents an exceptional case of creative appropriation, we discuss it further below (see also above, pp. 23–6). In its other offerings, Universal’s preference for Brit-Lit horror was similarly unmistakable: Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932, from J. B. Priestley’s novel, Benighted); Doctor Jekyll’s Hyde (1932, a ten-minute short from the Stevenson classic); Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933, from the H. G. Wells novel); and

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The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935, from the Dickens novel of the same name). Besides its Brit-Lit horror films, Universal produced three movies based on Edgar Allen Poe stories: Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934), and The Raven (1935). Other studios’ attempts to compete with Universal’s horror films took a range of different forms, but only Paramount focused on literary horror: two standouts were Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and Eric C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932, from Wells’s novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau). Britain’s response to Hollywood’s horror films, particularly those produced by Universal, showed literary leanings in a string of vehicles for the murderously gleeful actor, Tod Slaughter, whose specialty was playing diabolical villains: see, for example, director George King’s The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936, drawn from the penny dreadful The String of Pearls); The Face at the Window (1939, adapted from F. Brooke Warren’s popular play of 1897); and Crimes at the Dark House (1940, based loosely on Wilkie Collins’s A Woman in White). The Slaughter-King films make up for their ultralow budgets (all used the same music, for example) and lack of visual effects by putting the infectious, handrubbing villainy of Tod Slaugher at their center. For Crimes at the Dark House, for example, Wilkie Collins’s novel is completely restructured to make Slaughter’s character the protagonist. An ambitious criminal, he murders the perfectly upstanding Sir Percival Glyde and takes on his identity, then later murders Count Fosco as well! This radical appropriation of Collins’s literary classic is completely in tune with the emerging horror grammar we have been tracing here.42 One surprising feature of these contemporary horror movies is how seldom they themselves made direct claims on their literary sources and authors. Aside from the company press releases aimed at the censors, Universal’s literary horror films, on the whole, showed relatively little overt concern with fidelity to the original books and, excepting The Bride of Frankenstein, few of the usual markers of self-conscious adaptation. Both Frankenstein and Dracula departed radically from their written sources, perhaps because they had gone through a number of prior theatrical adaptations. Films like Island of Lost Souls remained closer to the source material, though perhaps as much through accident or convenience as through conscious choice. A less reverent attitude to sources may in fact have contributed to the dynamism and energy of the horror genre in the 1930s and suggests that—as in other periods— films based on genre fiction like Gothic, detective, and science fiction, with their looser claims on literary authority, could lead to more innovative and independent films. Universal’s treatment of Frankenstein was typical in that the literary source appeared on the second title card, with Mary Shelley’s name listed after

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John Balderston and in the same-sized typeface as that employed for others with writing credits, notably Peggy Webling (see Figure 4.2). Paramount’s credit sequence for Island of Lost Souls is almost exactly analogous: with H. G. Wells’s name appearing on a second card after the names of the screenwriters, though in a slightly larger font (see Figure 4.3). Robert Stam emphasizes what’s certainly true in this case, that such paratextual features as credits, titles, and subtitles, as well as posters, and other advertising reveal much about the calculations of those scripting, producing, and distributing movies.43 In the studio era, of course, the ways

FIGURE 4.2 Writing Credits, Frankenstein (1931).

FIGURE 4.3 Writing Credits, Island of Lost Souls (1932).

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FIGURE 4.4 Poster, Dracula (1931). a publicity department marketed a film might have been miles away from a director ’s intentions or the studio heads’ calculations. Still, judging by the posters for Dracula and Frankenstein, the explicit literary claims made by these films are dialed down to a very low level. On most of the Dracula posters, for example, the phrase, “from the famous novel and play by Bram Stoker,” appears in the tiniest of italic print below the moderately large list of cast names (see Figure 4.4). The major exception to this rule was Whale’s remarkable The Bride of Frankenstein. Showing a camp self-awareness of even relatively new genre conventions, the movie zooms in on a dark castle in a storm, but the reveal is not of an evil scientist plotting or a monster in chains; instead, we meet the rather unintimidating group of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in a well-lighted sitting room. Percy is busy writing poetry, Mary is at her needlework, and Byron is pacing by the window. Whale’s depiction of the writers is deliciously exaggerated. As pointed out in our introduction, The Bride performs a strikingly self-reflexive filmic usurpation of literary authority. In the end, Whale’s prologue seems more intent on mocking literary pretensions than appealing to them. *** If emphasizing the literary provenance of horror was low on the list of concerns for screenwriters and directors, it played a much bigger role in gaining the

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good will of the censors at the Production Code office. The literary heritage of US horror films also played a role in the forging of the “H” or “Horror” certificate issued by the BBFC. It’s important to remember that because the US Production Code was adopted in 1930, many of the key horror films were definitely not “pre-code.” The Studio Relations Committee (SRC) was in communication with producers at almost every stage of production and distribution: the office commented on preliminary scenarios and scripts, attended test screenings, and passed along comments and demands for cuts from domestic censorship boards in various states and similar boards abroad. In a revealing letter to Paramount Studios head B. P. Shulman, the head of the SRC suggested that the literary origins of horror pictures might act as a shield against censorship. Clearly, Colonel Joy was appealing to the cultural capital of British literature in recommending this strategy: We have seen your picture, “DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.” Because it is based on so well established a literary classic the public and the censors may overlook the horrors which result from the realism of the Hyde makeup, though we are frank to say we cannot estimate what the reaction will be to this, or to other horror pictures. Certainly we hope that the excellence of the production will offset any apprehension that the theme is too harrowing.44 Lamar Trotti mirrored this opinion in his summary and evaluation of the story, which was filed the same day as Joy’s letter: “Comment: The story is a horror story, but the fact that it is based on one of the best known literary subjects in English will probably prevent any considerable opposition. The cameraeffects, make-up, the dissolves and the acting are of superior quality.”45 Judging by a number of documents in the Production Code archive, though, Joy was actually quite concerned with the ill effects of the horror genre. On December 5, 1931, he wrote to Will Hays to ask what the Production Code office’s overall strategy should be in approaching these films: “Paramount has another ‘gruesome’ picture about to be put into production and MetroGoldwyn-Mayer has ‘Freaks’ which is about one-half shot. Is this the beginning of a cycle which ought to be retarded or killed? I am anxious to receive your advice.”46 Though Hays’s reply isn’t preserved, Joy went on to wonder in another letter to Hays whether the financial success of such movies would quash any sense of moral responsibility on the part of the industry. After speculating that the available source material for such pictures was likely to run dry, forcing producers to invent new and more sensational stories, he wrote,

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Talking out here won’t have much effect, with the cycle as successful as it is, although our voices haven’t been stilled. In fact Fred took up the matter with members of the executive committee on December 28th, but because these pictures were then making a lot of money there wasn’t much inclination on the part of the committee to pay attention to the warnings. … I, for one, would hate to have my children see Frankenstein, Jekyll, or others and you probably feel the same way. … Not only is there a future economic consideration, but maybe there is a real moral responsibility involved which I wonder if we as individuals ought to lend our support.47 Nowhere does the real nature of the SRC as the arm of a trade organization come through more clearly than in this line of thinking. Joy suggests that individuals on the committee rather than the committee itself have the responsibility to act on their moral outrage, acknowledging that the large takings of horror films protected them from serious censorship even more than their literary origins did. The huge domestic box office was especially crucial since the films were often banned abroad. Further, the film industry was suffering through a major crisis in the Great Depression, with box office receipts tanking in 1931. Maltby notes that the SRC was willing to look the other way on films like Dracula, which brought in big profits but outraged watchdog groups: The SRC completely misjudged reactions to Universal’s Dracula, which was condemned by the women’s and educational organizations that previewed films under the Association’s auspices. Its commercial success exemplified the Association’s and the industry’s dilemma as the effects of the Depression began to be felt at the box office. Some of the material most likely to produce immediate high returns in first-run theaters, and thus maintain company liquidity, also provoked reform groups to claim the Code was being ignored.48 These forces continued to pull in opposite directions until the Catholic moralist Joseph Breen was brought in to take over publicity for the MPPDA in 1932. The SRC passed along to Universal a list of cuts requested for Frankenstein from various US states and the provinces of Canada. On April 21, 1932, Tod Fithian wrote to Jason Joy about the economic costs of the local protests: “As you know, Frankenstein was banned in Arlington, Mass., and Murders in the Rue Morgue in Woburn, Arlington, Malden, and Cohasset, Mass. We feel these represent a sufficient potential revenue to do whatever we can to have these pictures released in those markets.” In this case as in others, doing “whatever we can” seems to have meant seeking compromises with the studios; in return for key cuts and changes, the SRC would negotiate with local authorities to get controversial pictures released.

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Further evidence suggests that trumpeting a film’s literary connections proved an effective strategy mainly in North America. The SRC also dealt with and passed along the ratings and decisions of national censors from around the world, and these records indicate the risky nature of the horror genre from the point of view of individual studios like Universal and Paramount as well as the challenges it posed to the overall aims of the SRC. For example, censors in the following countries refused to approve Frankenstein for release in their territories: Sweden, Northern Ireland (specifically, the city of Belfast), Italy (“Owing to its character of a terrible history susceptible, therefore, to rouse horror”), Czechoslovakia (“Because of gruesome scenes”), and Australia.49 In Britain, the BBFC was caught somewhat flat-footed by the horror genre, which was stunningly popular but almost universally maligned by critics. After allowing Dracula and Frankenstein “A” (Adult) certificates despite the hails of criticism from local censors,50 the BBFC became increasingly preoccupied with the possible harmful effects of horror pictures on children. Island of Lost Souls in particular, which contained scenes of vivisection, an issue of particular sensitivity in Britain,51 started conversations within the BBFC that led to the eventual adoption of the “H” (Horror) certificate in 1937, banning children from seeing horror films even more stringently than the “A” certificate had done. The BBFC refused to issue a certificate for Island, which was banned in Britain until the 1950s. Ironically by the time the “H” certificate was finally codified, the horror craze began to subside, at least momentarily, except for new films in already established franchises. Though the British film-going public in general seems to have reacted enthusiastically to Hollywood’s literary horror films of the 1930s, local censors, culture critics, and the BBFC were intent on limiting their influence as much as possible. This position left the US studios free to exploit Brit-Lit horror classics with negligible competition from British producers. It was not until the 1950s that Britain would reclaim its title to the literary Gothic, which had its beginnings in British literary history. The United Kingdom’s Hammer Film Productions would reinvent and dominate literary horror starting with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1955.

3 Industry censorship and the literary prestige production From 1931 through 1934 in the United States, the Studio Relations Committee counted on the voluntary participation of the major studios. According to Maltby, some studios were more compliant than others: apparently Paramount and Universal were cooperative but Fox and especially Warner Brothers, which

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in the early 1930s refused to submit scenarios and scripts to the Production Code office, were recalcitrant.52 By 1934, the Catholic Legion of Decency, formed in 1933 specifically to combat immorality in the movies, ramped up various actions including boycotts. Joseph Breen worked with the Legion on one specific goal: “the effective enforcement of the Production Code by the existing machinery.”53 Finally, in July 1934, the MPPDA agreed to eliminate the SRC and replace it with the Production Code Administration (PCA), headed by Breen. From this point forward, the PCA, a sort of SRC with actual teeth, would enforce the Production Code uniformly, and none of the member studios would be permitted to wriggle away from its authority. At this point the “Hays Office,” the unofficial name for the MPPDA’s office of self-censorship, was transformed into the “Breen Office.” Will Hays, however, remained an active force in the MPPDA, attempting to act as an ambassador for the industry and to smooth relations with the moral and educational watchdog groups that Breen openly encouraged. In his 1934 annual report to the MPPDA, Hays strongly suggested that the way forward for the Association was to promote “better pictures” that appealed to a more educated, prosperous class of spectators. More important for our purposes, he strongly recommended films based on literary classics and inspiring historical events and personages.54 In March of 1934, The New York Times summarized Hays’s report with this headline: “Hays Sees an Era of Literary Films.”55 In the report proper, Hays writes that “it is a significant phase of the screen’s upward progress that rival producers should contend, as they have done this year, for priority claims to the production of one of the classic works of Charles Dickens.” He goes on to list the following literary films set to appear in 1934, though many of these productions seem never to have gotten much past the planning stages: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (not made), Dickens’s David Copperfield (1934), Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (not made), Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (released as Becky Sharp in 1935), Sheridan’s School for Scandal and The Rivals (neither was made), Hugo’s Les Misérables (1935), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1934), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (did not appear, though an animated version was released in 1939), Irving’s Rip van Winkle (released as a short, The Headless Horseman, in 1934), Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (not made), and Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (released in 1934).56 Much as Trotti did before him, Hays relies heavily on classics of British literature in defining “quality” material; most of these works populated the accepted literary canon and were regularly taught in schools. More importantly they had cultural capital. The trade magazine Film Weekly published a similar list of classics set for production in 1933–34 which was far less centered on British literature, also including adaptations based on work by Edith Wharton, Booth

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Tarkington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Balzac, and others. Just as in 1908, when producers had relied on literary classics to improve the cinema’s tarnished reputation, filmmakers in the early and middle 1930s turned to Brit-Lit to quiet the moral outrage of Hollywood’s critics and display the quality of its movies. Since one of the main objections to Hollywood products was that they harmed children, Hays certainly foresaw that a new focus on literary classics could pacify the guardians of wholesome culture. Throughout film history, the “quality pictures” approach, with its strong reliance on high literary sources, generally but not always led to the creation of timid and safe cinema. But Hays argued for more than movies based on quality literary sources. He wanted to draw in a better kind of viewer with “classier” material and better production values. As Maltby puts it, “Hays had consistently tried to persuade producers to undertake large-scale productions designed to appeal to the public relations groups and to create ‘a new movie-going public recruited from the higher income earning classes … which better pictures would transform from casual to regular patrons.’”57 This “better pictures” campaign (although it might just as well have been called the “better patrons campaign”) was to have a major effect on the kinds of literary films the big Hollywood studios produced throughout the decade. From 1934 onward the majority of literary adaptations coming out of Hollywood fell into the category of “prestige productions.” In his standard account of 1930s Hollywood, Tino Balio lists the reinvention of the prestige film as one of the most significant production trends of the studio era. He defines it, though, not as a genre in its own right, but as the kind of picture to which the studios devoted more than normal care in both production and promotion. According to Balio, the prestige pictures ●

had larger budgets than normal feature films, “ranging in cost from $1 million on the average to $4.1 million for the most expensive picture of the era, Selznick’s Gone with the Wind.”58

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were based on “presold” literary properties, usually a classic from nineteenth-century literature, Shakespeare, an award-winning contemporary novel or play, or biography of a prominent historical figure.59

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relied on star power: “Industry practices dictated that one or two names were necessary to carry a typical class-A picture,” so one form of the prestige picture like Grand Hotel (1932) featured an ensemble cast of multiple top stars.60 For prestige films, studios routinely “borrowed” stars under contract to other studios.

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were generally shot in black and white because of “the technical difficulties and added expense of using Technicolor.”61

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had longer running times (100 minutes to nearly three hours) than average feature films (70–90 minutes).

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“were given splashy premieres and the roadshow treatment,” that is, were shown much more often than conventional films, with reserved seats, intermissions, and higher ticket prices. In addition, prestige pictures were routinely given much wider releases than normal features, and were shown well beyond the theater chains controlled by any one particular studio.62

Balio credits the rise of the prestige picture to Hays’s better picture campaign and more specifically to the success of Little Women, directed by George Cukor (1933): “The wave of Hollywood adaptations of literary classics and historical biographies [was] designed to appeal to middle-class readers of Parents’ Magazine and Ladies’ Home Journal.”63 By any objective standard, RKO’s Little Women was a raging success: while it cost a modest $400,000 to make (well below the standard budget of later prestige films), it netted $1,000,000 in box office receipts in 1933 alone, and that in only two months. David O. Selznick and George Cukor put together the production as a vehicle for Katharine Hepburn, but Selznick left RKO for MGM before it was very far along. In various memos, Selznick complained that the studio heads were reluctant to adapt classic literary properties, which he tended to describe as “costume films”: For many years, and although today it seems ludicrous, costume pictures were completely taboo, because of exhibitor insistence—foolishly listened to by distributors and producers—that costume pictures were not wanted by the public. When I scheduled the first Little Women for production, the heads of the RKO circuit (then affiliated with the RKO studios) actually suggested that I should modernize it! The gigantic success of Little Women opened up costume pictures, after years of exhibitor-inspired prohibition of them.64 In many ways Little Women set the template for the literary prestige pictures to follow. Three more qualities of such films, not listed by Balio, are important and emerged very clearly in the making of Little Women: ●

The studios spent much time and money whipping up interest in the films through elaborate public relations assaults that were broadcast through the popular press in a steady stream of news stories.

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Great care was poured into historical research on everything from architecture and costuming down to dialect, in order to ensure the authenticity of period detail in historical prestige pictures. The studio’s efforts in researching the sets, costumes, and language for Little Women became another element in its public relations campaign.

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The studios appealed to educators through direct mailings to teachers and the productions of study guides and other materials tailored for schools.

The RKO publicity machine made a great deal out of the amount, depth, and expense of the research done for the film—a practice they would soon employ in promoting their Brit-Lit films as well. According to a typical story in the Hartford Courant, designers and builders were dispatched to Concord, Massachusetts, to study the Alcott home and construct an exact duplicate of it on the RKO lot. Other crew members spent months attempting to locate a period piano, and six writers researched slang of the early nineteenth century along with popular contemporary music. The story claims that over $4,000 in telegraph bills were racked up “before properties used in the picture were authenticated to the satisfaction of the producers.”65 Though there is no reason to doubt the amount of work done by these researchers and technicians, the aura of authenticity their research was designed to create seems paramount. If film versions of great books couldn’t be absolutely faithful to all those long prose novels, they could at least be faithful to period details. In a rather clever game of substitution, the producers managed to trade one kind of fidelity for another, mainly through para-cinematic narratives and advertising. Though this metonymic appeal to historical rather than literary accuracy was a hallmark of 1910s and 1920s BritLit adaptations as well (see above, pp. 101–2), the scale of the appeals seems to have grown enormously by the time of the golden age of the studio system. Even the writing of the Little Women’s scenario, a rather technical internal matter, was turned into a publicity event. RKO hired a British novelist, Gladys B. Stern. Though this sort of move was something of a time-tested technique in the silent era, 1930s studios exploited even more spectacularly the celebrity of writers whose actual contribution to a final film may have been minimal in the end. Stern had no experience in the film industry, and her first experiences in California were made the subject of numerous newspaper stories.66 The studios exploited in particular her status as an English novelist in the alien land of Southern California. Of course, the ultimate profitability of a film like Little Women depended on an array of marketing strategies like this one, organized by the large publicity departments of each studio. Jeanine Basinger paints a colorful picture of the typical publicity department of a 1930s studio as it created and shepherded new stars, made coming attractions and trailers, and exploited

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local and national media.67 No one mythologized the implications of Little Women for the prestige films that immediately followed as much as David O. Selznick himself, though it’s important to remember that he did so in promotion of the prestige pictures he began making shortly after arriving at MGM. Interestingly, Little Women did not give rise to a string of Hollywood adaptations of American literature, a phenomenon of the 1940s and 1950s; instead producers turned mainly to classics of British literature. Film Daily in fact reported in 1934 that RKO was contemplating a “sequel” to Little Women—a version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with the same cast and director.68 Though this film was never made, the plan reveals the ease with which American-Lit period pieces could trade on their assumed associations with the British literary tradition. The MGM production of Cukor’s David Copperfield (1934) shadowed that of Little Women very closely. According to an article in The New York Times, both Cukor and Selznick traveled to England with photographers and cinematographers to capture records of authentic landscapes and places,69 and the men even met with the Dickens Fellowship. The article claims that a mass of research materials, enough to fill a moving van, was shipped from England to Los Angeles. Hugh Walpole, a novice at screenwriting but a wellknown English novelist, was employed to write the scenario,70 which was then turned over to studio screenwriters. Walpole’s press statements offer insight into why he was valuable to the production: his tweedy Englishness stood as a guarantee of authenticity: “I will look over the script of ‘David Copperfield’ as it develops for the camera, primarily to ensure as complete literary and historical accuracy as possible.”71 Here is another sort of proxy fidelity—not necessarily to the text, but to a certain form of Englishness. In typical 1930s studio style, the casting of the film in preproduction became a major part of the publicity windup for the film. Freddie Bartholomew, an unknown English boy, was cast in the part,72 and the studio pulled out the stops to make him a star: Today the name of that little boy—Freddie Bartholomew, now aged 10—is being flung around the world. He is Hollywood’s champion male Cinderella—winner of the role of young “David Copperfield” over 10,000 candidates from all sections of the English-speaking world. Freddie created a living David … and as a reward has been given a seven year M-G-M contract with promise of a dazzling future. Bartholomew went on to star in a string of prestige literary films like Anna Karenina (1935), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), Captains Courageous (1937, based on a Kipling novel), and Kidnapped (1938). After Charles Laughton, courted for the role of Micawber, turned down the part, the studio publicity machine made big news in casting W. C. Fields in the role of Copperfield’s feckless, but upright

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friend. The film’s posters certainly give the impression that David Copperfield was a star vehicle for Fields, despite his relatively minor role in the film: he received top billing above other big MGM players like Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O’Sullivan. The poster’s book motif, though common in movie trailers and in opening credit sequences of literary films themselves, was much less common in film posters. It therefore underscores both an appeal to literary authority and the educational benefits of the film, even though the studio branding and stars’ names stand in for the author’s name (see Figure 4.5). One of the studios’ initiatives in the years that gave birth to the literary prestige movie was to market literary films aggressively to educators, a practice not unknown in the silent era (see above, p. 141), but again exploited here on a much grander scale. Some of this strategy must have evolved haphazardly. Since direct mailings to high school teachers contributed to the smash success of Little Women, the studios, the MPPDA, and exhibitors themselves began

FIGURE 4.5 Poster, David Copperfield (1935).

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to interact much more directly with schools. Steve Wurzler charts the efforts of the MPPDA and the studios in marketing prestige films to the education establishment, a strategy carried out on both the macro and micro levels. At the local end, exhibitors brought in entire classes to see movies like MGM’s David Copperfield at discounted rates. The MPPDA financed lecturers for schools and educational radio programs about the films and the books on which they were based. Beyond these smaller-scale efforts, the MPPDA had the wider-scale ambition to create an entire film appreciation curriculum in US schools. As part of this initiative, the MPPDA partnered with the National Council of the Teachers of English to produce a series of study guides for a number of literary and historical prestige films. The NCTE formed a “Photoplay Appreciation Committee” that vetted these guides and sold them to schools in packets of thirty for $1. The series itself, endorsed by the National Education Association, was called Photoplay Studies, edited by Max J. Herzberg, an educator from Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey. It began production in April of 1935 and continued to 1940. The guides themselves were often written by university professors and show a high level of sophistication. The study guide for David Copperfield, for example, written by Mary Allen Abbott, attempts to educate students about camera technique, lighting, musical scores, backgrounds, and screen continuity.73 The section on “camera technique” introduces the close-up and suggests at least three basic uses for it: to lavish attention on star players, to emphasize a key object in the narrative, and to connect scenes to each other. Apart from providing technical instruction, guides like this one accomplished cultural work, smoothing the way for Hollywood products to enter the curriculum. Decades before adaptation studies developed the idea of trans-media analysis, the David Copperfield guide stresses the fact that film is a distinctly “separate art form”74 and steers viewers away from a naive attention to fidelity by focusing not just on the form of the feature film but even on Dickens’s own habit of writing novels in serial installments: “It was impossible, of course, to show all the characters of the book [in the film]. Writing his story in monthly installments, Dickens was free to introduce a new character or new story-interest whenever he felt inclined. Each character may be said to live in a little world of his own.”75 The guide goes on to suggest that at least some of these characters are unconvincing or extraneous, and puts the student in the shoes of producers, asking them what they would cut, condense, or combine in creating their own version. To make more respectable the sort of condensation necessary for a film, the guide invokes stage drama at length: You may be interested, after seeing the film, to analyze some scene which you noticed particularly (perhaps because you liked it?) and find its original

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in the book. You may discover that you do not find it—not exactly as in the book. The dialogue may be cut, for long speeches are impossible on the screen where the tempo is of course faster than in a novel or even than on the stage (Also more expensive! …) Some bit of added invention you may find. … You may find in some scene a massing of dialogue and action which occurred in different parts of the book. … Perhaps you will learn more about the differences between novel and drama by analyzing a single scene from David Copperfield than by hours of studying abstract principles of dramatic construction.76 As we have been arguing throughout this book, fidelity to sources did not have an overwhelming force in the early history of Brit-Lit adaptation, even though it became enshrined as just such a bugbear in later adaptation studies. In this case, the guide merges film art with that of the stage drama, suggesting that in fact, of the two, films may be superior objects of study. The guide thus expects students to compare a film to its source text but primes them to appreciate the changes rather than see them as violations of a sacrosanct original. The guides theorize the film itself as another original, and its various artists (directors, scenarists, screenwriters, composers, et cetera.) are built up to rival Dickens as artist/author. Between this notion of separate and equal versions and the more recent concept of hypotexts, there’s not much distance. The industry’s efforts to establish a film appreciation curriculum, particularly in English and literature departments of high schools, may go some distance in explaining how and why film adaptation came to be studied not in film programs but in literature departments.77 Some of the Photoplay Studies attempted to analyze the political implications of specific literary adaptations. The first entry in the series, a guide to Les Misérables, for example, devotes a considerable section entitled “Suggestions for the Social Science Class” to showing how the outrages committed by the state against Jean Valjean could not happen in the United States because of its unique constitutional protections. Given the “no-controversy” policy of the MPPDA, it makes sense that the guides have, in general, a quietist tone that steers largely clear of contemporary political struggles. In fact, Dickens adaptations may have been so popular in the 1930s precisely because they invoked the problems of poverty sympathetically but from a distinctly middle-class point of view. David Copperfield himself falls into factory work and then destitution for only a short time in the novel and film before climbing back into relative prosperity and marriage. The truly down-and-out characters like Micawber are shown to be plucky and upbeat, despite their sufferings. A Tale of Two Cities, similarly, suggests that the worst kinds of disorder and suffering arise from revolution itself, a phenomenon not to be found at home

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(in England and its surrogate, the United States) but in foreign lands like France. And of course, Oliver Twist ends his story ensconced in an affluent and respected family. From the hindsight of cinematic history, one might get the impression that the prestige literary film arrived on the scene in 1934 and 1935, fully formed with all its conventions and economies ironed out and ready to conquer the market at a moment of deep crisis in the industry. But as much as the biggest studios like MGM came to produce such films one after the next with great assurance, the formulas for the Brit-Lit prestige picture had to be hammered out under conditions that were far less certain than might at first appear to be the case. Even smaller producers contributed to the shape and conventions of the new Brit-Lit prestige films. Poverty Row studios and some independent producers tried their hands at adapting literary classics well before Little Women hit the screens at the end of 1933. These films are a far cry from the polished “masterpieces” of MGM, but their fairly messy mélanges of genres and tones has much to reveal about the dynamism of literary adaptation in the period. Now viewed mainly as a “pre-code” film, Indecent, or, The Private Life of Becky Sharp (1932) seems to fall into the company of racier films like Dangerous Paradise and The Letter, discussed in the opening section of this chapter. It was released by Screencraft Pictures for Allied Pictures, an independent producer, and is in some ways what one might call a “stealth” adaptation. Rather cagily, it reveals in the opening credits that it is “Adapted from the Story ‘Vanity Fair’ [by] William Thackery [sic],” avoiding the word novel and omitting Thackeray’s distinctive middle name, Makepeace.78 It stars a very young Myrna Loy as Becky. Indecent is no costume picture but sets Thackeray’s great novel in contemporary America, jettisoning all of the language and many of the plot points of the novel. Early on it sounds and looks like a low-budget screwball comedy but, after much scheming and betrayal, ends with Becky Sharp old, abandoned, and staring sorrowfully at her face in a mirror. This film makes practically no appeal to the literary cache of its original but turns out to be a rather dark morality tale. In quite a different vein, Monogram Pictures, a Poverty Row studios founded in 1931, produced literary classics for the screen, entering for a brief time into direct competition with the big studios, before giving up and moving to cheap but profitable B westerns and romances. Monogram’s literary films are well worth analyzing especially for the way they manipulate the book as a material object. Monogram released Black Beauty and Oliver Twist in 1933, following them up with Jane Eyre and The Moonstone in 1934. The first two of these films, unlike Indecent, were probably the truer precursors to Little Women and the prestige films in that they were full-on period costume dramas with

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reasonably elaborate set designs. More than that, all four appealed directly to the high literary authority of their originals by investing some care in crossbreeding the iconography of films and books. All four films envision the credits or perhaps even the movie itself as a book, which in some cases is taken from a shelf, opened, and then leafed through—an old trope, true, but one which they repeat with incredible attention to detail. In the case of Oliver Twist, when full-screen stills of the stars follow the real pages of the book, a vertical wipe between screens maintains the illusion of a page turning. The merging of book and film is most sophisticated in Jane Eyre where the credits are printed in book form, which an invisible hand leafs through. When the page is turned, a portrait of each of the main characters appears set in a frame within the book’s pages, but these portraits are not frozen stills but moving pictures. Further, before beginning the narratives proper in both Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre, the films show viewers the first page of chapter one of the novels for several seconds (a full fifteen in the case of Oliver Twist), encouraging them to read the opening paragraph. In the case of Jane Eyre, chapter one of the book opens to a sentence not in the original: “The cold winter wind had brought with it somber clouds and penetrating rain,” which links to a storm in the first scene. And shortly before the seven-minute mark, the film shows the pages of the book rapidly turning until they open to chapter 10 and the words “I remained an inmate of Lowood’s walls for ten years”;79 this return to the iconography of the book marks the transition between the child and adult Jane Eyre (played by Jean Darling and Virginia Bruce, respectively). All four films, then, invite themselves to be “read” like books in ways which go beyond mere convention. Of the “Big Five” studios, MGM dominated the market in prestige Brit-Lit productions with films like The Painted Veil (1934, based on the Maugham novel of the same name); Victor Fleming’s Treasure Island (1934); Cukor’s David Copperfield (1935) and Romeo and Juliet (1936); A Tale of Two Cities (Conway/Leonard, 1935); Fleming’s Captains Courageous (1937, based on a Kipling novel); and A Christmas Carol (Marin, 1938). Warner Brothers provided the strongest competition to MGM dominance with movies like Old English (1930, based on a story by John Galsworthy); The Narrow Corner (1933, based on a novel by Maugham); the big-budget Max Reinhardt production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), The Right to Live (1935, based on The Sacred Flame, another play by Maugham); Michael Curtiz’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936); Isle of Fury (1936, based on another Maugham novel); Another Dawn (1937, based on a short story by Maugham [uncredited]); the spectacular Keighley/Curtiz Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); and We are not Alone (1939, based on a James Hilton novel).

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The other big studios seem to have had no real plan for producing literary films and their offerings were sporadic and, very often, not true prestige productions. Paramount, for example, produced Rich Man’s Folly (1931, a stealth version of Dickens’s Dombey and Sons); Ebb Tide (1937, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel); The Light that Failed (1939, based on a Kipling novel); and Victory (1940, another version of the Conrad novel). RKO tried its hand at two Maugham films: Our Betters (Cukor, 1933, based on the play of the same title), and John Cromwell’s Of Human Bondage (1934), a clear prestige film starring Leslie Howard and a very young Bette Davis. In spite of the latter film’s critical success, RKO seems to have avoided literary properties for the rest of the decade until coming back in 1939 with a loose literary adaptation of Gunga Din. Finally, 20th Century Fox’s offerings included Sherlock Holmes (1932); Cavalcade (1933, based on a Noel Coward play); John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie (1937, a Shirley Temple vehicle based on Kipling’s children’s story); and Kidnapped (1938, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novel). US independent entries into the Brit-Lit film of the early 1930s included Becky Sharp, Mamoulian’s eye-scalding Technicolor adaptation for Pioneer Pictures of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1935); and A Study in Scarlet (1933), a KBS Productions film based on the Conan Doyle novel. But most prominent of all independent productions, and perhaps the single best example of the mature Brit-Lit prestige film of the 1930s was William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), produced by Samuel Goldwyn and distributed by United Artists. Wuthering Heights is one of the most assured literary films of the decade in the sense that it achieves an effective balance between visual storytelling and literary narration. Legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht’s reengineering of the story is shockingly bold, cutting out more than half the novel simply by eliminating the second generation altogether (Catherine Linton, Hareton Earnshaw, and Linton Heathcliff) to focus fully on the tragic love story between Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw, played by Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. As a result, Hecht and Wyler together manage to transfer the narrative from its original literary genre (Gothic romance) and embed it in a film genre (the Hollywood romance, which would evolve into the so-called “women’s films” of the 1940s).80 To complete this generic shift, Hecht and Wyler needed to remove or tone down elements of the macabre, the novel’s suggestions of necrophilia in chapter 29, and its portrayal of Heathcliff as a kind of Miltonic Satan. Hecht invents a number of romantic scenes on Penistone Crag, which becomes Cathy and Heathcliff’s private “castle” retreat on the moors. There are only the scantest hints at this place in the novel, but it becomes in some ways the central imaginative space of the film. In the book, when Cathy begins to

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FIGURE 4.6 Penistone Crag, Wuthering Heights (1939). go mad she imagines in a rant that her bed is a fairy cave under Penistone Crag, a place of curses. Hecht transforms this nightmarish cave of local superstition into a kind of heaven for the lovers, which prepares the ground for the romantic ending, a vision of Heathcliff and Cathy’s spirits walking hand in hand toward the crag (see Figure 4.6). The novel, by contrast, famously ends with a view of the lovers’ graves, their headstones separated by Linton’s. The generic shifts are sometimes subtle: Wyler confines most of the Gothic elements in the novel to the opening scenes of the film, when Lockwood approaches the “haunted house” of Wuthering Heights in a storm and encounters Cathy’s unseen spirit outside his chamber window. In particular, the opening shots of the film focus on threatening obstructions to progress: first a formidably resistant gate in the fence surrounding the house, then a massive shut door, then finally the oddly obstructed hall in which Heathcliff, Nelly, Joseph, and two unnamed substitutes for Cathy and Hareton sit silently around a fire. The subjective camera follows Lockwood into this space as we experience it from his perspective, blocked by beams, chairs, and other furniture, as well as the ominous, silent stares of the inhabitants. This scene has all the markers of a haunted house horror film like The Old Dark House, whose poster had depicted Boris Karloff’s character in sickly and monstrous shades of green, demonstrating clearly how movie genre conventions had the power to reshape literary adaptations (see Figure 4.7). In fact, some of the promotional posters for Wuthering Heights seem designed to present the film as an amalgam of horror and romance, giving distinctly mixed generic markers: they depict Heathcliff in a ghastly green hue with monstrous, bulging eyes, but Catherine in the bright rosy hues of a love object (see Figure 4.8).

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FIGURE 4.7 Poster, The Old Dark House (1932).

FIGURE 4.8 Poster, Wuthering Heights (1939).

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FIGURE 4.9 Poster, Cumbres Borrascosas (1939). The poster for the Spanish release, Cumbres Borrascosas, takes this conceit even further (see Figure 4.9). As paratextual markers, film posters can also reveal the producers’ assumptions about the genre of a particular film. Arguably these posters for Wuthering Heights play on readers’ knowledge of the book and its original genre more than that of the finished movie, especially since Wyler and Hecht went to such lengths to tone down Gothic elements and refashion Heathcliff into the romantic lead, brooding and violent, but also passionate and sensitive.81 Other posters underscore the romance element of the film exclusively, particularly its classic love triangle. Though Heathcliff glares at Edgar Linton and Cathy in the poster, he does so as a brooding lover, not a monster (see Figure 4.10). *** Beyond being produced in fewer numbers, Brit-Lit prestige films made in Britain operated according to a completely different set of rules than those made in Hollywood. For most of the decade, London Films, under the directorship of expat Hungarian Alexander Korda, was the premiere producer, though

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FIGURE 4.10 Poster, Wuthering Heights (1939). Gainsborough and British International were also major players. A number of smaller studios were constantly forming, dissolving, and reassembling in order to keep churning out quota quickies for domestic consumption. One such studio, Twickenham, for example, specialized in the middle-class quota quickie, especially whodunits of a very rigid type.82 In more ways than one, the plot of the wonderfully cheeky The Ghost Goes West (1935), directed by René Clair and starring Robert Donat as the titular ghost, might stand as an allegory for the decade, at least from the British point of view. A wealthy American grocery magnate buys Glourie castle and has it shipped stone by stone to America, where it is set up among palm trees, canals, and gondolas in Sunnymede Florida. Its crass new owner constantly shows it off, bragging about its authentic Scottish character; when he announces “real Scots music” to his guests, an Afro-Carribean band marches in playing a distinctly inauthentic Latin jazz version of “Scotland the Brave.” In another comic scene, he shows off an ancient suit of armor, which has been fitted with a blaring radio. In this glittering Glourie castle, there’s more than a hint of Disneyland and Hollywood. In fact, the film seems to suggest that although Americans can make British films on British subjects with all of their money, they are bound to get all the essential details wrong. The Ghost Goes West, on the other hand, gets much right about the politics of cultural appropriation, even if it does so in part by basing its comedy on rigid ideas about class and race. Of course the film’s rather jaundiced way of seeing Hollywood’s “British” films does not reflect the entire story, but it’s tremendous fun.

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If Little Women determined the shape of prestige literary films to follow in Hollywood, one could argue that Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) had established a dominant pattern for feature filmmaking in 1930s Britain. Ian Jarvie writes of the “electric effect” the movie had on the British film industry: “The Private Life of Henry VIII seemed to show that Britain could manage the professional standard necessary to please the public and that the right film could then do well both at home and in the United States. The success of the film showed that the US market was not totally closed.”83 On the whole, though, Jarvie believes that the film, which had partial US financing, was a much more limited success in America than is usually believed. Other scholars, like Linda Wood have discussed how the film tempted many producers to repeat its success with mainly disastrous results. She charts how Julius Hagen drove Twickenham Studios into bankruptcy in his efforts to reproduce the success of Private Life in a series of international quality films. Sarah Street’s analysis of the film, on the other hand, stresses how one of the lessons of Private Life was that British films did not have to be homogenized for an international or even US audience. She credits the film’s clever deployment of a certain kind of unofficial Britishness, the comically weak monarch struggling with the demands of power, as a key to its success with American audiences— in part since this portrait of Britain fed into American prejudices about the United Kingdom.84 But the film did more than turn a mere profit: it turned Charles Laughton into an international star and established a template for British costume drama with real lasting power. London Films under Korda went on to produce The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934), The Private Life of Don Juan (1934), Rembrandt (1936), I, Claudius (1937), and Fire over England (1937). Back in the United States, Warner Brothers recognized the popularity of the formula and appropriated Korda’s form of historical biopic for Curtiz’s The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Sue Harper paints a fascinating picture of Korda’s cinema, which enshrined an antirealistic strain indebted to Shakespeare and grand opera, on the one hand, but which had ambitions to bring a kind of therapeutic entertainment to the common people, on the other. Korda championed both British film as well as a distinctive sense of Britishness within his films. Given that he himself was Czech and the British film industry was absorbing waves of émigrés from Europe steadily in the 1930s, it’s ironic that the British identity created on celluloid was truly an international construction.85 Another key way in which British-produced literary films differed from their US rivals was in their relatively rigid representation of class, often through the deployment of accents and Received Pronunciation (RP). Steve Chibnall explains that it is “hard now to appreciate just how important ‘correct’ pronunciation was to many audience members in the early 1930s, and, with

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sudden exposure, how jarring and offensive many found ‘slack’ American speech.”86 In the George King vehicles for Tod Slaughter, for instance, Slaughter’s own performance centered on depicting upper-class monsters, and even middle-class protagonists speak in RP, with Cockney and regional accents functioning mainly for comic relief. One literary film that placed class issues and accent on center stage was Harold Young’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934). As the ridiculously over-the-top aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney, the alter ego of the daring Scarlet Pimpernel, Leslie Howard speaks in a simpering, brittle, and hypercorrect RP. The British film industry chose in general not to go head-to-head with the US studios in the production of high literary prestige films; instead, for a number of reasons, most of the notable British adaptations of the 1930s were of relatively modern and oftentimes still-living authors. The BBFC perhaps played a part in this strategy. As Harper points out, the Board “displayed a fondness for the popular novels of Rider Haggard, BulwerLytton and Baroness Orczy, and dealt leniently with scenarios of them.”87 At the same moment Will Hays was advocating lavish prestige productions of classics, some British producers turned to source material that required no expensive costumes or sets and were likely to be instantly popular with the large cinema-going audience. And if British production was mainly aimed at domestic consumption, it made good sense that the films of the 1930s would rely on more popular material by recent or living authors. The resulting films are almost all what might be called genre films: thrillers, detective and spy stories, science fiction, and so forth. The reliance on popular contemporary literature of this variety also tended to reflect the populist cast of 1930s British filmmaking. Britain did of course produce a few films based on canonical literature in the 1930s. Most were released suspiciously close to big US prestige pictures, but in general were not the work of the premiere studios such as Korda’s London Films. Twickenham’s Scrooge (1935), for example, starring the wonderfully cranky and sentimental Seymour Hicks in the title role, was probably made in response to MGM’s David Copperfield of the same year. Yet, Scrooge has more in common with the Poverty Row adaptations of Monogram Studios— from its use of the book-credits topos to its moderately expensive casting, sets, and costumes. Paul Czinner’s As You Like It (1936) appears to have been Britain’s response to the Reinhardt/Dieterle A Midsummer Night’s Dream of the previous year, a hugely ambitious but costly prestige film. Both trade on capturing the performances of European theatrical legends: in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that of the director, Max Reinhardt, and in the case of As You Like It, the performance of Elisabeth Bergner as Rosalind, “one of the most famous—and idolized—stars of the German speaking theater

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and cinema.”88 Bergner’s heavy Austrian accent in her role as Rosalind both indicated the international flavor of 1930s British cinema and complicated the deployment of Shakespeare as a uniquely British or English property. The time had not yet arrived for a truly cinematic sound Shakespeare, as the decade’s productions tended to draw their authority from famous European and British theatrical performances.89 Though it was ultimately a financial failure, the London Films production, Things to Come (1936), was arguably Britain’s most distinctive answer to Hollywood’s prestige Brit-Lit film. Korda’s bold vision for British cinema was woven into the fabric of the film, even though directorial credits were given to the American art director and production designer William Cameron Menzies. In the film’s source text—H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come—Professor Philip Raven leaves behind a peculiar dream book when he dies in 1930. In it Raven records prognostic dreams in which he travels to the future and, bookish man that he is, reads a world history covering the period from 1930 to 2105. The text is actually a reconstruction, then, of this future history and is, in the words of Jeffrey Richards, “a veritable kaleidoscope of history, theory and pure imagination, part lecture, part manifesto, part satire, part drama, ranging widely over such diverse subjects as scientific research, architecture, fashion, climatology and sexual mores.”90 Beyond Professor Raven, however, the book has no characters or real plot: these had to be invented by Korda’s long-time script editor Lajlos Biró, who was the uncredited scenarist. Though much of the anticapitalist rhetoric of the book is removed, Things to Come deals fairly directly with European fascism (Ralph Richardson’s “Boss” is said to be a satire on Mussolini) and contains an extended meditation, rendered bitingly ironic by subsequent history, on the uses of totalitarianism. John Cabal, leader of a socialist technocracy based in Basra, Iraq, uses overwhelming airpower and scientific superiority to quash the medieval-style chaos that reigns after a devastating world war. He drops “peace gas” on the fascist forces of the Boss, who conveniently is found to have died after being deprived of power. But Cabal’s forces themselves impose a merciless form of totalitarian and technical control, based on long-term 1930s style planning, to build their new utopia. In spite of its obvious political nature, Things to Come managed to pass the censors for two reasons: first because the science-fiction genre distorted and disguised the political references to European fascism, and second and most importantly, because the making of the film was so closely tied with the living authority of H. G. Wells, who was given total control over the fledgling script, originally titled Whither Mankind? This special appeal to literary authority renders Things to Come one of the more potent Brit-Lit films of the decade. As Christopher Frayling points out,

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Wells’s contract with Alexander Korda for writing the script of Whither Mankind? stipulated that not a single word could be altered without the author’s express permission, that the author would be guaranteed a say in all aspects of the property’s translation to the screen, that he would be credited on the title and paid a royalty for each showing of the film. … Considering that Wells had never previously written a full-length-film script, his contract shows just how fascinated with “H. G.” Korda must have been.91 Surrendering creative control to Wells was a strategy that cut in two directions. The iconic Wells’s authorization of the project allowed Things to Come to be made, then. The first frames of the film present the name “H. G. Wells” in a monumental screen-filling font (see Figure 4.11). However, in unleashing Wells on the set, Korda went much further than providing the usual lip service

FIGURE 4.11 Credits, Things to Come (1936).

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paid to writers in Hollywood, where their work, as we saw in the previous chapter (see pp. 139–42), was often rewritten and reshaped by studio story departments, often at the hands of talented and under-acknowledged women. In his autobiography, Raymond Massey, who plays the black-shirted socialist technocrat John Cabal and his grandson Oswald, wrote that “having secured these dictatorial powers, Wells soon found out that he was unable to exercise them. … He discovered that Korda and his production team were masters in their own departments and needed no help from him.”92 Such departments (art design, sound design, and costuming), operating at the height of their powers, managed to produce some memorable effects. Vincent Korda, Alexander’s brother, designed the sleek underground sets of the future utopia, appropriating cutting-edge ideas from contemporary European architectural theory. His conception of 1940s “Everytown,” a compressed, almost allegorical version of London, is brilliant (see Figure 4.12). In some ways the strangely prophetic, newsreel-inspired account of the Second World War, commencing in 1940, is the most striking and powerful sequence in the film. Arthur Bliss’s music, especially the Things to Come March that accompanies the cinematic exposition of the Boss’s fiefdom, deserves credit as one of the best scores of the decade. In short, London Films, Britain’s premier studio, sought with Things to Come to rival the Hollywood prestige films by producing a truly author-driven film. But Things to Come was unique, a one-off, which set few precedents, probably because of its failure at the box office. London Films did produce another Wells film the following year, but it was made on a much more modest scale. The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936) tells the amusing

FIGURE 4.12 Everytown, Things to Come (1936).

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story of gods granting divine powers to an ordinary milquetoast of a man, George Fotheringay, played by Roland Young. Chaos ensues. As with Things to Come, the credits in The Man Who Could Work Miracles highlighted Wells’s authorship: “‘H. G. WELLS’ [largest font] THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES” (first title). “Scenario and Dialogue by H. G. WELLS” (second title). Even if Fotheringay ends up surrendering his powers to reverse an apocalypse, the film does have distinct elements of a class critique, unusual in British film of the 1930s and again probably only possible because of Wells’s authority. Fotheringay speaks in no cut-glass RP but is an ordinary hero who we’re introduced to in an ordinary pub. After his powers are discovered, first a clergyman and then the local aristo—the ridiculously stuffy Colonel Winstanley (played by Ralph Richardson)—attempt to control his powers. Fotheringay denatures the colonel’s whiskey, and converts his swords to plowshares (one to a sickle, which the colonel refers to as “a blinking, Bolshevik thing”). On the whole, despite the way the film places its populism back in a box by the end, The Man Who Could Work Miracles might be thought of as a response to the class politics of films such as The Scarlet Pimpernel. Though Hitchcock is rarely thought of as a maker of adaptations, a number of his late silent and 1930s British films are in fact based on literary properties— both stage plays and novels. Hitchcock’s most successful literary films tend to subordinate their source material to the emerging genre of the thriller, which he was helping to create, as well as other dominant cinematic genres. Like other British filmmakers of the decade, Hitchcock found recent material by living authors more malleable than big canonical classics. The studios often pressed Hitchcock to adapt successful stage plays, thinking them cheaper and easier and more guaranteed to reap profits.93 He did have some notable successes in this line with adaptations of John Galsworthy’s hit play The Skin Game (1931) and Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1938). Leitch suggests that especially with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) Hitchcock turned decisively away from plays and toward novels. Whatever Hitchcock’s increasing reliance on the novel as a form might have signaled for his career, it’s hard to make the argument that he produced a body of self-conscious literary adaptations. Truffaut himself pointed out the popular nature of most of Hitchcock’s sources in his famous interviews with the director, which Leitch summarizes as follows: Hitchcock unfailingly presented himself as unintimidated by his literary sources, partly no doubt because they were so often subliterary. Francois Truffaut, interviewing Hitchcock, observed that “your own works include a great many adaptations, but mostly they are popular or light entertainment

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novels, which are so freely refashioned in your own manner that they ultimately become a Hitchcock creation.” When he suggested that “many of your admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major classic as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment,” Hitchcock tartly responded, “I’ll have no part of that!” and explained that he had no desire to join “Hollywood directors [who] distort literary masterpieces.”94 Hitchcock claims to reject adapting literary classics precisely because he believes that any adaptation would inevitably “distort” the original work. While this statement may seem to show the director’s sense of reverence for the sacrosanct nature of literary texts, another way of reading it is that he values distortion as a key element of his art. In any case, the comment is especially interesting in relation to Hitchcock’s two Brit-Lit films of 1936: his adaptations of Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Maugham’s Ashenden. Charles Barr notes that “the Conrad text, and to a lesser extent the Maugham one had, and retain, a higher status than any of the other novels used by Hitchcock before or after, including the robust ‘popular classics’ by Belloc Lowndes, Buchan and du Maurier.”95 There’s no way of proving that Hitchcock or Gainsborough tried to suppress the literary source in these two cases, but the fact that Conrad’s The Secret Agent became Sabotage, and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden became Secret Agent may be a sign of willful or perhaps playful obfuscation which makes the literary provenance of the stories harder to trace. In the distinctive title sequence for Sabotage, which zooms in on a dictionary definition of the word “sabotage,” the first title card lists the stars and the second one the title of the film, in a very large font. The note, “FROM THE NOVEL ‘THE SECRET AGENT’ BY JOSEPH CONRAD,” appears in tiny letters at the bottom of the frame. For Secret Agent, the notice of sources appears on the third card, which is squeezed into a small internal frame and appears again in a smallish font. In some ways these two films represent exceptions to Hitchcock’s routine methods of adapting popular material. In fact, Barr advances the idea that they failed at the box office precisely because they are not as completely subsumed into the thriller genre as the popular novels Hitchcock generally preferred to adapt: Few commentators now object to the strategy of radical film adaptation, even of classy texts, with which Hitchcock was starting to become identified, provided that the film is coherent and effective in its own terms. If anything, the adaptations of Ashenden and The Secret Agent are not quite radical enough to achieve this; some of the elements of structure and detail retained from the original are not fully assimilated or reworked within a new whole.96

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R. Barton Palmer shows in some detail how Secret Agent systematically departs from the successful formula established by The 39 Steps, especially from its potent blend of humor, adventure, and patriotism. He locates the points of departure in the original novel: Filled with narrative leads that erupt but then go nowhere, and characterized by puzzling anticlimaxes, the Ashenden stories lack the one-directional suspenseful, adventurous action of which Buchan was a rich source. Maugham presents espionage as disagreeable, murkily dangerous, and thoroughly mundane.97 According to Palmer, Hitchcock doesn’t fully reverse Maugham’s darker, pragmatic view of espionage, turning it into a Buchan-style opportunity for adventure, but ramps up the moral dissonance of the material and works against the patriotic foiling of nefarious foreign powers. It’s not so much that Hitchcock was overpowered by intractably complicated literary material or, as Barr suggests, that he didn’t reshape either story radically enough. In these two Brit-Lit thrillers, he may have been exploring the darker side of the shocker genre he inherited from Buchan, and which laid the groundwork for his later masterpieces.

4 The Cinematograph Films Act of 1938 By all accounts 1936 was an annus horriblis for the British film industry, a year which saw profits drop precipitously and many studios go bankrupt. This crisis contributed to the Cinematograph Films Act of 1938, which attempted specifically to encourage higher quality films and steer production away from the cheapest quota quickies.98 The politics surrounding the forging of the 1938 renewal were complex to say the least, but the legislation ended up extending the 1927 Act with some modified provisions rather than turning to the more radical recommendations of the Moyne Committee, which Will Hays and the MPPDA had lobbied against very strongly. The new act specified a minimum cost for each foot of film counted toward the quota and offered double and triple credit for films with larger budgets, while maintaining a fifteen percent quota for distributors.99 Though MGM established its British subsidiary in 1936 well before the renewal of the Act, the string of films that MGM British produced from 1938 through 1940 at Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire were remarkable cross-Atlantic cultural products that responded directly to the new rules governing quotas. In establishing a British subsidiary, MGM was contending for

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the territory of the prestige picture based on British literary or cultural sources which it had staked out in a string of prestige pictures under David O. Selznick. These joint US/UK films included A Yank at Oxford (1938), King Vidor’s The Citadel (1938), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), and Haunted Honeymoon (1940). Three of these films are literary adaptations: The Citadel is based on a “social problem” novel of A. J. Cronin about hospital reform in an impoverished part of Wales; Goodbye, Mr. Chips reshapes James Hilton’s novel, popularized first in the United States, about a mild-mannered schoolmaster in a fictional public school; and Haunted Honeymoon comes from a Peter Wimsey detective novel written by Dorothy Sayers concerning a murder in a stately English home. In considering Hollywood’s obsession with British literature and culture in the 1930s, Mark Glancy proposes to call such adaptations and historical costume dramas “British” films (in inverted commas) rather than simply British ones. He underscores the fact that such films, despite their subject matter are essentially American and not British. For Glancy, a “British” film is one that was (1) filmed by an American studio, most likely in California, but perhaps in Britain; (2) based on the work of a British writer or set in Britain; and (3) featuring a significant number of British personnel, mainly Hollywood-based British actors or actors on loan from British studios while, at the same time, employing American directors and screenwriters.100 Glancy critiques the films’ portrayal of Britain, which, he points out, tends to reflect a distinctly American point of view: Many “British” films dramatized the glories and achievements that were part of a shared Anglo-American heritage. Another aspect of this backward looking view, however, is that the films often focus on the rigidity of the class system, social snobbery, and Anglo-American differences. While Britain is never portrayed in an altogether unfavourable light, and Anglophobia exists only as undercurrent in “British” films, the American perspective on Britain conveyed a grateful awareness of the distance in both time and space. American audiences could revel in images of the old country, and be thankful at the same time that their forefathers had embarked for a new and more egalitarian world.101 Even if “British” films looked at England from so great a distance, Goodbye, Mr. Chips may be the most purely Anglophilic of the four films in that it celebrates the English public school as an institution with only the gentlest satire on the snobbery of the public schools or the class system. As Glancy notes, “The film’s endorsement of the public school ethos is, by extension, an endorsement of the British class system.”102 The film reengineers the history of Brookfield School, moving its founding from the Elizabethan era (in the

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FIGURE 4.13 Robert Donat as Mr Chipping, Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). novel) back to 1492 (in the film), making the school as old as the European discovery of the Americas and suggesting that Britain’s age-old traditions are the source of its strength. Mr Chips himself resists all forms of change, down to the reform in Latin pronunciation, and stands as an avatar of a mild and benevolent vision of paternal tradition (see Figure 4.13). In this sense, the film really does show a backward-looking view of Britain as a place, unlike America, weighed down by its own history. A significant portion of the film is set in Austria, and one might be tempted to find in the novel (written in 1936) and film a commentary on the looming war with Germany. The Munich Conference had taken place in September 1938 and by the end of July 1939, when the film was released, Germany’s invasion of Poland was only a month in the future, as were France and Britain’s subsequent declarations of war. But in the film especially, Austria appears as the pleasantest of tourist destinations, oozing the quaint hospitality of alpine lodges, and Vienna as a romantic city of the waltz. In contrast, the film depicts Brookfield as under German attack, with air raid sirens, black outs, and bombers over head—certainly, realities on the horizon. It’s difficult to know for sure, but it seems likely that the antiwar sentiment expressed in the film may reflect more of the isolationist mood of the United States in 1939 than any contemporary British public opinion about Germany and Austria. When Chips comes out of retirement after 1914 to take over as headmaster, his memorializing of fallen Brookfieldians alongside his friend and former master of the school, Max Staefel, killed on the German side, puzzles the boys who set it down as one of Chip’s odd eccentricities. An alternative explanation for this pacifist sentiment is possible: MGM British may have carefully excised any contemporary references to European politics given the BBFC’s “no

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controversy” policy. That policy was about to change, of course, and the propaganda film would be reborn with a vengeance in the coming months and years. For a brief period in the later 1930s, producers appeared to be abandoning the classical literary film. In the earlier part of the decade, as we’ve seen, Hollywood and Britain turned to the great classics of British literature (Dickens, Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, Thackeray, Mary Shelley, et cetera), often fetishizing the authors and their books, but by the end of the decade, and with war approaching, the trend seemed to have run its course. Instead, both Hollywood and Britain were turning to respected but popular contemporary novelists like James Hilton, A. J. Cronin, and Rudyard Kipling, and the films were becoming much less self-conscious as adaptations. With the beginning of the Second World War, however, British wartime filmmakers would turn once again to canonical British literature—this time with different goals in mind than simply competing with Hollywood (see below, pp. 222–33). Another factor may have contributed to this brief period of cinematic disinterest in the high literature film: at the same moment that such adaptations seemed to be disappearing from the big screen, they were beginning to appear on television. After a testing phase that began in 1929, the BBC began airing regular television broadcasts for a few hours each day in 1936. Between 1936 and 1940, although it also broadcast variety programs derived from popular music hall acts and regularly aired a British Gaumont Movietone newsreel, the BBC focused a good deal of its attention on adapting literary classics, focusing heavily, though not exclusively, on theatrical performances: Alice in Wonderland (1937), Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband (1937), Much Ado About Nothing (1937), The Importance of Being Earnest (1937), The School for Scandal (1937), Twelfth Night (1937), Bardell against Pickwick (1938), Julius Caesar (1938), The Pilgrim’s Progress (1939), The Tempest (1939), Twelfth Night (1939), et cetera. In the following chapter, we consider at greater length the impact on film of the BBC BritLit adaptations (see below, 228–34). The crucial point for the 1930s context is that this was the period when television first became a concern for filmmakers. Is it a coincidence that cinematic adaptations of high canonical literature became less popular at about the same moment they began to appear on television? When the government shut down the television broadcasts in the early war years, filmmakers began appropriating classic Brit-Lit with much greater frequency and a higher level of self-reflexivity than ever before. Furthermore, after the resumption of a much improved television service in 1946, British TV and cinema would become engaged in a head-to-head competition for adaptable literary properties that arguably continues even today.

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5 The imperial film A complete picture of the 1930s Brit-Lit film needs to factor in what might be called “Imperial” films, which were especially popular at the end of the decade. Though not all Hollywood and UK movies celebrating the British Empire were adapted from literary sources, several key imperial films invoked literary originals—poems, surprisingly—like Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” and Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Others were based on novels or memoirs by British writers like A. E. W. Mason who served as colonial or military officials in the empire. The imperial film’s favorite setting was India, but a scattering dealt with colonial rule in northern and sub-Saharan Africa as well: these included Clive of India (US, 1935); The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (US, 1935); Zoltan Korda’s Sanders of the River (UK, 1936, based on a story by Edgar Wallace); Rhodes of Africa (UK, 1936); Robert Flaherty and Zoltan Korda’s Elephant Boy (UK, 1937, based on Kipling’s Toomai of the Elephants); Lost Horizon (US, Frank Capra, 1937, based on a novel by James Hilton); Korda’s The Drum (UK, 1938, based on a novel by A. E. W. Mason); Korda’s The Four Feathers (UK, 1939, based on a novel by Mason); George Stevens’s Gunga Din (US, 1939, based loosely on a Kipling poem); Stanley and Livingstone (US, 1939); and The Sun Never Sets (US, 1939). Ironically, the 1930s imperial film was largely an invention of Hollywood, not Britain. By most accounts The Lives of a Bengal Lancer established the basic format: depicting three wisecracking lieutenants in the Bengal Lancers—with a young Gary Cooper in the lead role—they get themselves into a series of adventures and scrapes. Such vehicles seemed primed to deliver adventure, masculine camaraderie, and a bit of proxy patriotism. They often were filmed in the United States in California locations like the Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, and Death Valley, and sometimes further west in the Sierras or even Monument Valley, Utah. These very locations, of course, were heavily used in shooting westerns, one of the dominant popular movie genres of the 1930s. In fact, the US imperial film not only shared landscapes with the westerns, but a number of generic features as well: Indians, like Native American Indians, were depicted as childlike or bloodthirsty. Massacres played a role in both genres, as did ambushes, chase scenes, and the cavalry coming to the rescue. James Chapman and Nicholas Cull have drawn several direct comparisons between Hollywood’s imperial films and westerns, and have sought to explain the sort of reactionary cultural work the imperial films might have accomplished for certain American audiences: First of all the films took place far away and long ago and thus offered a welcome escape from the Depression. Moreover, they offered welcome

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reassurance at a time of renewed challenges to the old certainties of race, class and gender. The hegemony of the white American male was challenged as never before by the collapse of American industry and agriculture. The post-war years had brought new competitors in the job market—most visibly the wave of African American migrants from the South—and new challenges closer to home, as women rejected their old position of voteless subordination. In such a world it was no wonder that a genre of films in which the common white man consistently triumphed should prosper.103 Such an analysis goes a long way toward explaining the particular blend of masculine camaraderie, disdain for domestic life, and overt racism of many imperial films. This isn’t the complete story, however. Though imperial films were not overtly political on the whole, they did reveal a crude but unmistakable colonial “philosophy” formulated in literature by Kipling’s “Gunga Din” and “The White Man’s Burden.”104 In all of them, from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer to Gunga Din itself, native populations are seen, at best, as incapable of governing or protecting themselves. Invariably the discipline and pageantry of the British army in its structured formations and well-organized military compounds projects a sense of the order and safety provided by the “paternal” colonial powers. On the more disturbing side of this political calculus is the fact that in almost all such films, usually set in India, significant parts of the native populations are portrayed as violent, uncivilized pagans, who are often led by an intelligent but diabolical leader, most often played by a white English, American, or European actor in “brown face.” Both The Charge of the Light Brigade and Gunga Din depict the heartless massacres perpetrated by these villains and their followers: Surat Khan in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the menacing Guru, leader of the Thugee cult, in Gunga Din. The films also depict “good” natives who have submitted themselves to the order of the empire and serve it loyally and tirelessly as soldiers and, in the case of Gunga Din the water carrier, cringingly and abjectly. One reason that British producers on the whole lagged behind Hollywood in producing imperial films is that the BBFC approached the genre with extreme caution, fearing among other things the unrest that such films might provoke in British possessions. The BBFC in fact squashed a number of imperial films at the scenario stage, including two about T. E. Lawrence,105 one proposed by Alexander Korda in 1935, and another by Paramount in 1938.106 Jeffrey Richard’s account of the BBFC’s intervention in the imperial film genre reveals the main points of sensitivity: It is clear that when assessing such Imperial projects the censors had four major considerations in mind. Firstly, did the films reflect adversely on the

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British army or the white race, thus imperiling the prestige that was a vital element in the maintenance of British rule? Secondly, would the films offend foreign countries? Thirdly, was it politically expedient that the film should be shown, or, in other words, would the film’s subject or attitudes inflame the native population? Lastly, did the film deal with miscegenation?107 Richards describes the riots that broke out in Bombay and Madras in 1938 when Korda’s The Drum, depicting a pro-British Indian prince, was shown there. Colonial authorities in India and Malaya banned RKO’s Gunga Din in 1939 fearing similar unrest. Two of Korda’s three colonial films, Sanders of the River and The Drum, feature natives as fiercely loyal servants of the empire and were controversial in their time for their depiction of native populations. Richards stresses that both Alexander Korda and Michael Balcon, the two most important producers of the 1930s, were “intensely patriotic and both were concerned with the favourable promotion of the national image.”108 The proxy patriotism of Hollywood’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, for example, is somewhat harder to understand. Surprisingly the representation of native populations in this film is more nuanced than in most imperial movies. It is precisely the British-backed prince, Surhat Khan, who turns out to be treacherous when his tribute money is discontinued. Further, the massacre perpetrated by the Khan includes both British and Indian victims: we see in particular an Indian loyalist mourning the death of his wife and son, just as a British officer does. But the movie uses music, in particular British Grenediers, in both soft and martial variations. Both The Charge of the Light Brigade and Gunga Din employ sentimental political poetry to gin up audience’s emotional participation in their stories. If narrative poetry had been a fit subject for the shorter films of the aughts and teens in particular, with multiple versions of poems like The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Enoch Arden, it’s curious that the practice should have seen a miniature revival in the imperial film. Tennyson’s poem had already been made into a 1912 US film and a UK one two years later. The 1936 version spends almost an hour and a half preparing for the tableau of the charge itself, but when it arrives to present the battle in panoramic view, it insists on rewriting the poem, especially the lines “Someone had blundered. / Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die” (2.12–15). In the film, Errol Flynn plays Major Vickers, who changes the orders of Sir Humphrey, who had ordered the Lancers not to attack, since such an assault would lead to their certain death. Here and elsewhere The Charge of the Light Brigade relies to a remarkable degree on text, with many title cards filling the audience in on historical events like the origins of the Crimean War, and providing excerpts from the poem as commentary on the final scenes.

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FIGURE 4.14 Kipling Looks on as his Poem is Read: Gunga Din (1939). Gunga Din also inserts Kipling’s eponymous poem into the diegetic world of the film, in this case by having Kipling himself appear as a journalist who witnesses the final battle, reading his recently composed poem over the body of Din (see Figure 4.14). As in Charge there also is a kind of rewriting of the poem, and MacChesney winces visibly when Kipling comes to the line, “Tho’ I’ve belted you an’ flayed you.” Although both films appropriate famous poems, the poems’ origins are represented as coming after the epic events we’ve witnessed, not before. In a bizarre paradox, then, the films would appear to be authorizing the poems rather than deriving their authority from them. We may be witnessing in these films the particular construction of an imperialist imaginary that traces US power back to its roots in a heroic, ordered, and distinctly white Britain. Weirdly, and from the point of view of US producers and audiences, these films are hypothetical and oriented toward future possibilities. By reenacting moments of conquest, depicting them as a benevolent policing of populations unable to control themselves, these films allowed Americans to try on global power for size and imagine what it felt like to wield it. With the coming of the war, the US film industry would lose interest in the imperial film, as well as the forms of proxy patriotism and imperial ambition they enshrined. What was at stake in the 1930s cinematic trade wars comes into starker focus by the end of the decade, especially in the imperial film, but it was evident enough in the literary horror film and the prestige classic as well: the question about who had the right to represent British history, literature, and identity? For most of the 1930s, Hollywood assumed its absolute right to appropriate and seek to represent Britishness before the eyes of the world,

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however inaccurate, backward-looking, and self-interested its constructions may have been. Most of those responsible for shaping cultural policy in Britain had tolerated and even encouraged this remarkable form of proxy representation. This state of affairs, however, was about to change dramatically with the coming of war.

5 The empire strikes back: Britain’s reclamation of Brit-Lit, 1939–57

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hroughout the 1930s, Hollywood continued its Brit-Lit appropriations through its “British” films,1 though their frequently backward view of history and culture was increasingly contested by British politicians and filmmakers, especially as war drew nearer. If the end of the 1930s gave rise to explicit questions about who had the right to represent British history, literature, and identity, the 1940s represented a particular moment when British cinema could finally challenge and sometimes beat Hollywood at its own game. In what follows, we will show how Britain’s film and television industries reclaimed British literary culture in this era, and successfully built what we will refer to as a “proto-heritage cinema.”2 We trace these changes through the late 1950s, the period in which we see the emergence of the international auteur cinema and a large-scale turn to independent production. The shift in focus from producer-based and/or state-sponsored cinemas to auteur and/or independent studio films marks a culmination of sorts for the international contest over the Brit-Lit film, which we began to chart as early as Chapter 2 of this book.

1 A transatlantic alliance? Brit-Lit in a time of war In 1940, Life magazine featured a story on the long, dark nights of the average “home-loving Englishman” in war-torn London: He plays games: darts, chess, halma, draughts, ludo, backgammon or war games like Jutland, Dover Patrol, L’Attaque, Strategy or a new Air Raid

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Precaution of parcheesi called Snakes and Ladders. Life is too uncertain to read detective stories now. Instead, he reads reassuring books by Dickens and Jane Austen.3 The article’s willingness to trade in stereotypes and generalizations is obvious, and one might reasonably question whether the American journalist had access to many London homes, whether mysteries really were “out” and Dickens and Austen really “in.” What seems less questionable is the sincerity of the belief commonly expressed in this period that—as Dana Polan puts it—“for war discourse, there can be few ‘roads of mystery.’”4 The types of narratives preferred and perpetuated during the war, he says, “will try to construct a determined logic of the future by making a distinction between two narrative times: a fleeting, unpredictable narrative that is at the limit of narrativity … and an organized, preordained narrative in which the force of a logic governs events.”5 Like the board games played by Londoners in their darkened homes, where contingency and uncertainty are a source of entertainment without threat, wartime narratives managed to wrap up ugly things as neatly as a Dickens or an Austen novel. Since the classical Hollywood film formula is characterized largely by a “narrational movement toward finality,”6 American films seemed tailor-made to address the needs of wartime audiences. Consider, for example, the 1942 Universal film Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (dir. Roy William Neill), one of several modernized Holmes narratives set during the Second World War. Based loosely on Doyle’s story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” the film is less a mystery than a tale of suspense focused on Holmes’s (Basil Rathbone) struggle to deliver to the Royal Air Force Dr Franz Tobel, inventor of a bombsight that the treasonous Moriarty is attempting to steal away for the Nazis. What interests us most about this wartime un-mystery is the manner in which Holmes himself constructs a “determined logic of the future” precisely by drawing on that most reassuring of all narratives about the British: that their great writers—from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and even Doyle himself—are proofs of a national character capable of weathering all storms. In the film’s opening scene in a Swiss café, the disguised Holmes presents himself to two Gestapo agents as an old bookseller. They believe he is a German spy sent to give them the location of Tobel, whereas in fact he is giving them the location of a decoy. To convince the café crowd they are harmless, the three men pretend to discuss the books for sale while occasionally whispering to one another about Tobel. Holmes begins the ruse by saying in his best German accent, “I have here some rare, old first editions. … Now, here are the complete works of Vil-helm Shakespeare, an old German writer.” Since neither of the Gestapo agents blink, the joke would appear to be about their ignorance, though the

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line is more interesting for the way it introduces the theme of appropriation. Whereas ostensibly it suggests that Shakespeare has been appropriated and will be used by the Germans against the Allies, the audience soon will learn that Shakespeare has in fact been appropriated in order to fool the Germans. In this instance, knowledge of culture, and the ability to use it, become keys to winning the war. The idea is compounded, of course, by the fact that one of England’s great literary heroes, Holmes, has been modernized by the filmmakers—even reclaimed from the Nazi filmmakers of the previous decade (see above, p. 159)—to serve the British state and Allied cause. These themes become more obvious in the film’s next scene, when Holmes meets with Tobel to usher him and his bombsight out of Switzerland. Throwing aside the complete works of Shakespeare, he selects another large book from his pile, opens its cover to reveal a hollow shell, and explains, “The four sections of your bombsight fit inside these ponderous tomes, although I must confess that I shy to the thought of disemboweling a complete set of Charles Dickens.” He places the bombsight neatly into the book so that it can be smuggled back into the United Kingdom. The film’s ending—an unembarrassed celebration of Britain’s greatness—will surprise no one. The case solved, a government representative exclaims, as RAF jets boom overhead, “Germany wanted the Tobel bombsight. We’ll send her thousands of them, in our airplanes.” Tobel graciously responds, “Yes, thanks to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” Cut to Watson (Nigel Bruce) and Holmes, who stare up hopefully into the same skies (see Figure 5.1). “Things are looking up, Holmes,” Watson says. “This little island is still on the map.” The final words, though, are spoken by Holmes, and

FIGURE 5.1 Watson and Holmes’s Shakespearean Vision of England. From Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942).

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they are mainly Shakespeare’s: “Yes. ‘This fortress built by nature for herself. This blessed plot. This earth, this Realm. This England.’” Fade to black. Credits. Still closer to the vision of wartime Britain constructed by the Life magazine article was yet another American film’s depiction of a British family’s trials during the Blitz: the monumental box office success, Mrs. Miniver (dir. William Wyler, 1942). In its most powerful scene, the Minivers are crammed into a bomb shelter beside their home. They’ve just gotten the children to sleep and, to pass the time in the dark, they talk about the bedtime story they’d been reading aloud to them (“and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale. Perhaps even with a dream of Wonderland”), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. As the bombs begin to fall outside and the ground shakes, the couple stares at the book, thinking back to their own childhoods. “It’s a lovely story,” says Mr Miniver, “I wonder if Lewis Carroll ever dreamed it would live forever. You know, it’s the first story I ever read.” Mrs Miniver replies, “Mine too.” He then reads the sentence “How she would keep through all her riper years the simple and loving heart of her childhood.” When he can’t finish, because the bombs are falling too nearby, Mrs Miniver recites from memory the passage: “Perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago. And how she would feel with all her simple sorrows and find a pleasure in all her simple joys, remembering her own child life and the happy summer days.” As the bombs crash down more rapidly, destroying much of their home just outside the safety of their little rabbit burrow, and the children awaken screaming, Carroll’s lines resonate as a testimony to the power of literature, and of the past, to protect the family from grim reality. Mrs Miniver not only appropriates British literature as a shield, but even diagnoses the impulse underlying such appropriations: a longing deep within to return to the warmth and security of the womb. Hollywood’s “British” films were aimed at exploiting the sizable British film audience upon which the industry relied to earn back its production costs and perhaps earn a profit. Just prior to and during the war, “British Empire countries provided over one-half of the gross foreign earnings”7 for American films. As H. Mark Glancy explains, “Hollywood was now dependent upon Britain’s survival for its foreign earnings, and it was thus in the industry’s interests to make films supporting the British war effort.”8 Furthermore, the particular films that did well tapped into popular, non-British notions of Britain’s (i.e., England’s) cultural superiority: “Hence, the highest budgets were allocated to ‘British’ costume dramas, the screen rights for the most recent best-selling British fiction were purchased, and the best British film-making talent was recruited to work at MGM.”9 Should it be all that surprising, then, that the historical importance of British literature and history tended to be touted within these films?

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British wartime filmmakers in no way shunned similarly nostalgic or middle-class appropriations of British culture and history. The critical tendency to dichotomize Hollywood and the British cinema is flawed in numerous ways, especially in light of the eagerness and enthusiasm with which British audiences consumed the American product. Furthermore, the homegrown product wasn’t always that different in tone or focus from the American films, selling a variety of “Britishness” calculated to sway susceptible audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. As Britain’s Washington ambassador, Lord Lothian, remarked in 1940, “Britain, owing to ancestral tombs, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, Shakespeare and Milton and so on, is able to exercise a profound influence over [American] feelings.”10 British wartime films also sought to comply with the MoI’s charge to sway British feelings by celebrating “the heroic achievements of the British past.”11 Sue Harper counts at least twenty-seven historical features produced by British studios between 1939 and 1945, and she explains that the MoI pushed the production of historical documentaries precisely because they believed the films highlighted “what we are fighting for.”12 What the British were said most often to be fighting for—both by UK and US commentators—was their historical and cultural legacy. One might remember in Wordsworth’s “We must be free or die, who speak the tongue/That Shakespeare spake”13 (quoted, tellingly, in the 1943 Hollywood film Forever and a Day) a native tradition of British cultural patriotism dating back centuries. During the war, the same basic sentiment was frequently expressed by artists and men of letters. In 1944 the renowned Shakespeare critic, G. Wilson Knight, for example, voiced his conviction that in English letters resided the very soul of the nation: We have for four years been fighting, alone or in partnership, the reptilian dragon-forces of unregenerate, and therefore unshaped and inhuman instinct, energies breathing fire and slaughter across Europe, because such is our destiny, asserted by our time-honoured national symbol, Saint George, the dragon slayer, whose name our present sovereign bears; and we shall first search out that destiny not in platitudes or half-belief nor any reasonings of our own fabrication, but where alone it rests authentic, in the great heritage we possess of English letters, the greatest accumulation of national prophecy; where the soul of England, which is her essential sovereignty, speaks clearly—in Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy and many more.14 Though Knight refers to “many more,” it is Shakespeare whom he calls the “new Messiah,” the “national prophet,” and the “patron saint of our literature

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and nation.”15 At about the same time, Douglas Bush, the Canadian literary critic teaching at Harvard University, wrote Paradise Lost in our Time (1945), in which he argued that, in Satan’s anticipation of Hitler, Milton’s modern relevance was emphasized in clear terms: “If there be any people who think the rise and fall of Milton’s fame is not of much moment in a war-torn world, we may remember that poetry has outlived many wars and that Milton is one of the great portions of that heritage for which the war has been fought.”16 Such beliefs in the practical and spiritual power of the British literary heritage might seem naive to us now, but they were articulated by influential persons on both sides of the Atlantic, and they held great sway with contemporary filmmakers. While it’s tempting to join Harper and Glancy in focusing exclusively on the ways American and British approaches to historical subjects differed, it seems equally important to stress that in the early 1940s—and especially after Pearl Harbor—the “special relationship” was very strong. Though some British intellectuals and film industry insiders did all they could to attack Hollywood’s Britain, the general public seems to have been more receptive. For all the critiques of films such as Mrs. Miniver, for example, there were the ticket sales, and there were the comments from powerful individuals like Winston Churchill who is quoted as having said the film was the equivalent of “six divisions to the war effort.”17 We know that Hollywood needed Britain, and numerous indicators suggest that Britain wanted Hollywood. Beyond their shared turns to literature and history, the most crucial formal similarity, we think, between British and “British” literary films had to do with their emphases on the source texts’ literary provenance and materiality. In film after film, we see the visual fetishization of the written text and, in nearly as many cases, of their authors and even readers. One of the most often discussed examples of such visual textualization is the Fox production of Jane Eyre (1943) directed by Robert Stevenson, which opens with a close-up shot of a hand opening the cover of the novel onto the following words, which are read in voice-over: “CHAPTER ONE: My name is Jane Eyre. I was born in 1820. …” Predictably, the image eventually dissolves into a scene from Jane’s youth. As Jeffrey Sconce points out, such openings weren’t uncommon in Hollywood, but “what is remarkable about this particular opening … is that the words shown on the screen are a complete invention.”18 More important than what is actually in the book, in other words, is the fact of the material text’s historical and cultural importance, or, as Thomas Leitch puts it, the “displacement of fidelity to a particularly literary text by self-validation through textualized appeals to literary associations—from the physical look of the original text to a testimonial from the author—becomes … an appeal to the canons of literature itself.”19 Films such as the abysmal Warner Brothers biopic about the Brontë siblings, Devotion (1946), took this sort of appeal to

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another level altogether. The question we should ask is why? On the surface, there’s something dramatically counterintuitive about such moves in a decade in which the kinks of the sound film have been resolved, and the differences between scenario writing and more “literary” forms have been so thoroughly sorted out. Within the context of the wartime turn to history, however, the presentation of the literary story as a historical artifact makes much sense, reinforcing adaptation’s role as a celebrant of those continuities between past and present. In this, the American and British cinemas were also in sync. The practice peaked during the war. The decline of it is somewhat measurable in the fact that whereas David Lean opens his 1946 Great Expectations with the turning-page/voice-over motif, his Oliver Twist of 1948 eschews it completely in favor of a breathtaking montage. In several 1950s films, we see different displays of literariness which derive from the convention but also express less fascination for the materiality of the book specifically. Anthony Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), for instance, frames its action with an opening shot of a proscenium arch and rising curtain, and it closes with the curtain going down before the credits. In Encore (1951), one of several Two Cities anthology films based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham, the author himself introduces each separate film-within-the-film, even insisting at one point that he does not “fancy” himself “a film star.” He goes on to announce that “today you are going to see three more of my stories, arranged for the screen by three very clever script writers.” Whereas Maugham’s presence serves to authorize the production, his introduction also establishes the artistic independence of the film, its status as an adaptation of his work rather than a fetishization of it. Such later incarnations of the turning-page motif, then, are related to, but less hemmed in by, the wartime practice we’ve been tracing. Returning to our main point, American and British wartime filmmakers shared a variety of assumptions about the purposes of film, as well as the appropriate tactics for achieving those purposes. With this point established, we can consider the other side of the coin. Contemporary British commentators—especially in the immediate postwar period—also strove to differentiate British and American treatments of the past in two key interrelated ways, both of which influenced the formulaic properties of the British heritage film defined by Andrew Higson: the first difference was the purported superior craftsmanship of the British feature film. Ronald Neame, the great British cinematographer and cofounder of Cineguild, a British production company created in 1943 and focused on literary and art-house material, captured this attitude, or ambition, when he said that “we have never been able to compete with Americans in mass-producing articles. But when it comes to hand-made articles, everyone turns to Britain. … Let our films

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be good hand-made articles, each individual and special in its own way.”20 Higson sums up such ambitions thus: “British film culture in its most serious and intellectual formation has been dominated by a cluster of closely related moral attitudes. … The first of these … is a fear of mass production and what is conceived as a standardized, artistically impoverished, trivial, and escapist mass culture.”21 We see a more marked emphasis on Britain’s “hand-made” films after 1945, validating Paul Swann’s claim that “in the postwar decade, British motion pictures were usually pitched in the United States as oneof-a-kind handcrafted productions, not the products of a factory system.”22 Certainly, the best of Cineguild’s productions, which include the David Lean literary films Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist, all followed the war and were indeed characterized by an extraordinary attention to detail and superior technical craftsmanship. Great Expectations prompted American critic Robert Hatch to declare, “This new film is made with great care and taste—almost lovingly. The English do period movies better than we do.”23 The second oft-claimed—and sometimes inextricably related—difference was the supposed greater historical, cultural, and textual accuracy of the British films. As we’ve seen, there is a much longer history to such claims of “authenticity” (see above, pp. 98–9), dating back at least as far as Hepworth’s literary films of the early 1910s.24 As Hepworth himself later admitted, It was always in the back of my mind from the very beginning that I was to make English pictures, with all the English countryside for background and with English atmosphere and English idiom throughout. … The Americans have their own idiom in picture-making just as they have their own accent in speaking. It is not necessarily better than ours and it cannot successfully be copied. We have our own idiom too which they could not copy if they tried.25 Throughout the teens and 1920s, Hepworth and other British directors continued to seek their own idiom in picture-making, a difficult task due to diminishing resources and Hollywood poaching of British talent. In the 1930s, the defining characteristics of the proto-heritage film became clearer, thanks mainly to the success of Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. The film often had to be defended for violating the axiom that British films were more historically reliable than American ones. In 1936, the year in which general British film production reached its zenith, the House of Lords actually debated the crucial importance of accuracy in historical films. According to Harper, “Viscount Mersey proposed the motion that the government should vet the historical accuracy of films, and should be particularly vigilant about

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cinematic representations of the Tudor period, which could damage the ‘proper understanding’ of the young.”26 Fortunately, others in the assembly were smart enough to voice persuasive arguments against state intervention. After the war began, the state would become much more directly involved in regulating the film industry, of course, as the MoI began actively pushing historical films as part of its propaganda campaign. Cinematic approaches to historical and literary material, therefore, were as concerted during the war as at any time in the twentieth century. As a result, the 1940s arguably were the years when the subcategory known as “British Heritage Film” took on many of its major characteristics. The Brit-Lit films produced during the war and into the 1950s are as a group remarkably good, validating the more general view of the 1940s as British cinema’s “golden age.” Arguably, Britain’s two greatest wartime appropriations of canonical literature were the 1944 films, A Canterbury Tale and Henry V. The Powell-Pressberger film is perhaps more useful as a measure of the “Special Relationship,” on the one hand, and distinctions between American and British treatments of literature, on the other, because considerably different versions were released in the two countries. Powell reluctantly agreed to edit an “American version” after the film underperformed at home. He agreed to cut much of the historical material that makes A Canterbury Tale so wonderful, and added a ridiculous prologue and conclusion that were designed to convince the American audience that English history and culture were relevant to them too. Some attention to their differences is instructive. A Canterbury Tale’s title boldly announces its appropriation of Chaucer, but viewers might be surprised by how central a role The Canterbury Tales plays in the British version. Even as early as the opening captions and shots, Chaucer’s poem is shown to matter in three senses: first, as a historical artifact of Britain’s past; second, as a literary work whose characters and events still connect to viewers’ lives; third, as a narrative structure for the film itself, which follows the intertwined pilgrimages to Canterbury Cathedral of three colorful characters. One of those characters is an American soldier from Oregon, Bob Johnson, the “American abroad” so familiar from Hollywood’s “British” films. Most of the story actually occurs in the fictional country town of Chillingbourne, from whose main hilltop the Cathedral can be seen quite clearly. Metaphorically speaking, the people of Chillingbourne live in the shadows of two monumental historic locales: on the one side, the bustling city of London, whose fame and modernity reduce Chillingbourne by contrast to the status of a quaint country village, a relic of the past; on the other side, Canterbury, with its magisterial Cathedral and continuing power to move and inspire onlookers. Chillingbourne thus becomes a symbolic site in which contemporary questions about the relevance of history, and historical literature, can be played out.

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FIGURE 5.2 Chaucer’s General Prologue in A Canterbury Tale (1944). The film’s first true shot, after a close-up of ringing church bells, is of the perpendicular twin towers of the Cathedral from the much taller Bell Harry Tower. In the blurry background, the countryside is just barely visible. Although the film will make much of the view of the Cathedral afforded by Chillingbourne Hill, its inspirational meanings both for the pilgrims of Chaucer’s day and our own, the film positions the Cathedral as a central subject too, granting the ancient building its own perspective and imbuing it with a protective gaze that takes in seemingly all of England. That shot dissolves into a printed page of the general prologue of The Canterbury Tales (see Figure 5.2), a fingertip in the lower right corner orienting the viewer to the physical position of the voiceover narrator who soon begins reading the opening lines (in largely modernized Middle English). That page then dissolves too, while the voice-over continues, into a pilgrim’s map of England, which slowly zooms into Canterbury until yet another dissolve reveals Chaucer’s twelfth-century pilgrims climbing the hill that will afford them their first well-earned glimpse of the Cathedral (see Figure 5.3). The camera settles in close-up on the face of one noble pilgrim, who releases a falcon into the air and watches it circle above him, then cuts to a medium shot of the bird, which is replaced by an airplane before another cut to the same face in close-up. Now the man wears a modern military helmet, however, stressing both differences and continuities between the past and the present. The next voice-over “poem” then reinforces the point of this transition: 600 years have passed. What would they see, Dan Chaucer and his goodly company today? The hills and valleys are the same. Gone are the forests since the enclosures came. Hedgerows have sprung. The land is under

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FIGURE 5.3 Chaucer’s Pilgrims in A Canterbury Tale (1944). plow and orchards bloom with blossom on the bough. Sussex and Kent are like a garden fair, but sheep still graze upon the ridges there. The pilgrim’s way still winds above the weald, through wood and brake and many a fertile field. But though so little’s changed since Chaucer’s day, another kind of pilgrim walks the way. At this point, noisy military tanks and vehicles cut through the otherwise placid countryside. Alas, when on our pilgrimage we wend, we modern pilgrims see no journey’s end. Gone are the ring of hooves, the creek of wheel. Down in the valley runs our road of steel. No genial host at sinking of the sun welcomes us in. Our journey’s just begun. At this point the narrative proper begins, but what a remarkable opening. On the one hand, the portrait of the past as a relatively uncomplicated time seems like the most unreflective nostalgia—an entire universe of ignorance, disease, class oppression, and religious tyranny simply ignored. On the other hand, the ambition of Powell and Pressburger’s attempt to stress the past’s relevance, through appropriation of Chaucer no less, is striking, and it works well as a framing device for establishing the thematic concerns of the Second World War narrative. Sadly, the entire scene was cut in the American version of the film, which sutures the opening shot from the bell tower to the one of the airplane circling above the soldier’s head.

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For his American audience, Powell replaced the General Prologue scene with another formal Prologue whose voice-over narration seems designed explicitly, and condescendingly, to explain to provincial Americans why they should actually care about people in another country: Statistics show that in World War II there are about ten million men in the United States armed forces and around 100,000 WAC’s. Three million GIs fought in the European field. Two and half million were stationed in England. Half of them liked it. The other half didn’t. From those who did, three quarters of them liked this particular kind of England [sketch of a pub]. Of the rest, four fifths liked the natives [sketch of women], one tenth modern English literature, one hundredth the classics [sketch of books by Shakespeare and Dickens], one thousandth the historic buildings, one ten thousandth the old churches [sketch of Canterbury Cathedral]. The scene then cuts to Bob Johnson, our Oregonian abroad. He is with his fiancé atop Rockerfeller Center, looking down upon the building tops and thinking about Canterbury Cathedral. Bob is filmed through an iron railing whose central motif is evocative of Gothic arches (see Figure 5.4), thus strengthening the suggestion of continuity, not difference, between America and England. When he comments on the height of the Cathedral, his fiancé expresses a certain feeling of boredom. Bob: “Wouldn’t you like to be a pilgrim? Remember the book I gave you?” Girl: “That old stuff? Not me. I started to read that book of yours, but …”

FIGURE 5.4 New York Echoes of Canterbury in the American Version of A Canterbury Tale (1944).

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Bob: “But how did you read it? Did you see the pilgrims?” Girl: “I didn’t see any pictures.” Bob: “I don’t mean pictures. I mean the pilgrims, like it says in the book.” When he asks “Couldn’t you see the Cathedral,” the image dissolves into the tower bells of the original opening. A roughly edited cut to the airplane above follows, and the story proper begins. That story, in both versions, and much like the later film, A Matter of Life and Death (see above, pp. 1–5), is very much focused on probing the value of culture and history in a time of war. As one character later remarks, “Who cares about these things in wartime?” The film turns this question into a paradox by teaching the characters and audience that “these things” are the very things worth fighting for; without them, there’s no reason to fight. In a recent interview, the actress Shelia Sim, who played Alison, claimed that the “government’’ wanted “us” to make this movie, “to bring some kind of certitude to people … that this was a war worth fighting.”27 Graham Fuller adds that A Canterbury Tale intended “to show Americans that they and the British were fighting for the same values.”28 Unfortunately, the weak American version mainly just told its audience what it should believe rather than convincing them through the powerful, original story. Powell and Pressburger took care to focus on working people, rather than the wealthy middle-class families American films so often chose to lionize. Perhaps this is why in writing the script, Pressburger was inclined to turn to Chaucer, rather than Jane Austen or William Thackeray or Oscar Wilde, because the reading of The Canterbury Tales the film offers is one celebrating the diversity of the pilgrims who depart together from the Tabard. While it would be possible, of course, to dwell on the condescending and paternalistic “High Tory” propaganda the film pushes, it seems more generous to highlight the diverse cross section of society the film so lovingly depicts. The eccentric modern pilgrims who walk the countryside in Powell’s film include a likable and not un-intelligent American GI, a snarling but artistic British sergeant, a beautiful, hard-working “landgirl” appropriately named Alison, and a patriotic, perhaps slightly deranged, intellectual. All are characters who grow personally in the film, both through their interactions with one another and their immersion in the historic countryside. It’s a pleasing fact that A Canterbury Tale was being filmed on one Denham soundstage at precisely the same time Henry V was being filmed on another. In fact, the actor John Sweet, who played Bob in the film, recalls his excitement in seeing Olivier during lunchtime and other breaks in shooting. Olivier ’s film is of course one of the most acclaimed adaptations in world cinema. From a Shakespeare-and-film perspective, the film is

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rightly hailed as a watershed. The first Shakespeare film in Technicolor; the first Shakespeare talkie to successfully integrate Shakespearean dialogue and filmic illusionism; the first prestige Shakespeare production to earn a profit; et cetera. From a more historical perspective, it is of particular interest for the ways it responds to contemporary crisis through an appeal to England’s literary tradition. That the film’s staging of the medieval battles at Harfleur and Agincourt were intended allegorically is as obvious now as it was in 1944. Partly funded, and enthusiastically endorsed, by the British government as a morale booster for the troops, Olivier—a member of the Fleet Air Arm—dedicated his film to the “Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture.” Upon simple analysis, the film appears to be unequivocally patriotic, removing all “mystery” from Shakespeare’s text by stifling the internal dissent the soldiers exhibit within the play, and cutting numerous passages which reveal Henry’s brutal side, including his threats at Harfleur to rape the French women and spit their babies on pikes. The film also cuts Henry’s hanging of his friend Bardolph. The majesty, scale, and sometimesbeauty of the battle scenes, in addition to such cuts, certainly made for a relatively uncomplicated Henry. Most audience members at the time did not mind. A few contemporary reviewers critiqued the film for being too jingoistic, but the majority of critics in Britain and in America heaped praise upon it. In America it would go on to earn four Academy Award nominations and an Honorary Academy Award for Olivier, and United Artists earned a profit of more than a million and a half dollars. The film’s most important achievement, from an adaptation studies perspective especially, is its justifiably famous transition from the filmed-theater scenes in the Globe Playhouse to the more realist ones in France. In the memorable opening, a crinkled handbill informs us that on “THIS DAY,” May 1, 1600, Shakespeare’s play of Henry V will be performed at the Globe Playhouse. The handbill represents yet another proof of the genre’s general fetishization of print materials at this time, though Olivier, for reasons we discuss below, did not dwell as long in this domain as other directors did. The next shot shows us an impressive, though obviously artificial, model of Renaissance London (see Figure 5.5). The camera patiently follows our handbill, now fluttering in the winds above the city, in a long tracking shot from the tower, back across the Thames, and then alongside the south bank. The camera stops and hovers on its crane for a moment above the Bear Gardens before turning deliberately and abruptly away, toward the Globe. It approaches slowly and descends right into the mouth of the theater, where a production of Henry V is about to be staged.

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FIGURE 5.5 Model of Renaissance London in Henry V (1944). The theatrical opening performs more than one important function in the film. Practically speaking, it serves to ease the modern audience into the Shakespearean language by presenting it through a historical context. Also, it serves to accommodate the crucial metatheatricality of Shakespeare’s play; just as the Chorus keeps clear the divide between the world of theater (“this unworthy scaffold”) and the “vasty fields of France,” Olivier’s eschewal of filmic realism allows him to keep straight the line between art[ifice] and the brutal realities of Normandy. In this regard, a third, ideological reason for the opening suggests itself: according to Graham Holderness, it works to temper the jingoism, offering the audience a formal surrogate for the inflammatory dramatic material Olivier likely felt pressure to eliminate from the film: “The decision to incorporate into the film devices and aesthetic strategies derived from the dramatic technique of the Chorus provides the film with an ideological tendency which is quite different from—potentially contrary to—its ideology of patriotism, national unity and just war.”29 We agree with Holderness’s reading, but Olivier’s wish to preserve the play’s meta-theatricality also reflects rather clearly the contemporary fetish in cinematic adaptations for the material historicity of literature. Whereas adaptations of novels fetishize the page and the author, however, Olivier’s Henry V fetishizes the stage, allowing it literally to replace the written handbill that announces the film’s place among Second World War adaptations. More important, the theatrical frame provides Olivier the means to reflect within the film on its own allegorical functions and ethics: since the play asks literally, “Can theater depict the realities of warfare?” Olivier’s preservation of the Chorus allows him to ask the same

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questions about film. His decision to keep asking the question, even in the “realist” French scenes which really aren’t realistic at all (with their sparkling clean battles and scenery based on medieval illustrations such as Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry), suggests that Henry V is as much a meditation on art’s power as propaganda as it is un-reflexive propagandistic art.

2 The postwar British adaptations British filmmakers succeeded during the war in crafting superb Brit-Lit films that, in a certain sense, reclaimed native literature from the Hollywood studios. Although numerous precursors to the modern British heritage film date back through the 1930s, 1920s, and even into the 1910s, the 1940s were the years when that peculiar film type became truly identifiable, and marketable, as a specifically British product. During the war, key films like A Canterbury Tale managed to deploy British literature strategically as a “proof” of Britain’s cultural greatness, proof, that is, of all that was worth fighting for. Such films, it is therefore true, also had a great deal in common with Hollywood’s “British” films, but they increasingly revealed a confidence in their ability to tell stories that Americans could not tell. After the war, due in part to the industry’s considerably more liberal view of the proper cinematic uses of history, such differentiation would continue with a special emphasis on the superior social realism of British films. Infamously, the particular brand of British history generally preferred in Hollywood tended to be upper class (or class-less), nostalgically premodern, and specifically English.30 Increasingly, such myopic characterizations of Britain began to attract criticism. C. A. Lejeune, the contemporary highbrow film critic, claimed in 1947 that the thousands of British men and women and boys and girls, who will tell you today that they prefer British films, will tell you just why they prefer them. And the reason is nearly always the same—because they are more “real”; because they deal with the sort of people we know; behaving in a way we understand; against a background of the things we cherish and recognise.31 The unified transatlantic wartime vision of history’s cinematic functions rapidly dissolved near the end of the war, then. At the same time that American films were becoming even more conservative as a result of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the formation of the blacklist, British films were becoming less nostalgic, more critical of state institutions and traditions,

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and stylistically and ideologically more committed to social realism. As Harper notes, even “late MoI and COI [Central Office of Information] films were marked by a pessimism about history.”32 All of these trends reflected the general climates of both countries just after the war. Only weeks after VE Day, Labour won the general election in a landslide, further evidence of Britain’s move to the left, which had begun in the middle years of the war and continued into the reconstruction era. The Beveridge Report of 1942, the wartime ethos of fair rationing, the Butler Education Act of 1944, and the extension of the “welfare state,” including the national insurance system (1946) and the introduction of the National Health Service (1948), all reflected general exasperation with problematic aspects of British history and culture. According to Raymond Durgnat, many of the period’s films, more probingly, tackle the question of class relationship which looms so tacitly yet so massively in this traditionally class-and-caste-conscious island. The need for a reconciliatory readjustment was, by 1945, widely admitted. In general, one may take as left-wing those films which stress the need for concessions to the lower orders, and as right-wing those which stress the need for reconciliation without readjustment.33 While greater social realism has often been detected in the films of the era, it is important to stress that heritage and period films played a huge role in these ongoing developments, as Durgnat himself noted: “Films overtly introducing the idea of class tension usually have a historical setting, so as to avoid picking up over-detailed controversies, and they tend to urge acquiescence in fairer play for the lower orders in future.”34 In what follows, we wish to consider a handful of the best adaptations of the period that reflect in different ways the greater realism and/or leftism Durgnat identified in the British cinema of the reconstruction era. Films such as Lean’s Brief Encounter differed, of course, from films such as the same director’s Dickens masterpieces in that they adapted provocative, critically acclaimed modern literature rather than the sort of “proto-heritage” works preferred by the MoI—and by Hollywood—during the war. The freedom that modern literature granted directors to break from the burdens of history might also explain why so many of these films were so effective. Particularly strong films as John Boulting’s Brighton Rock (1947) and Anthony Pelissier’s The Rocking Horse Winner (1949) manage to communicate the considerably dark themes and tone of their sources through inventive screenwriting, surehanded direction, top-notch casting, and superb cinematography. The Boulting brothers’ adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel is now canonized as one of the finest examples of British noir, and deservedly so. The film’s masterful

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handling of direct and reflective lighting is merely the highlight of a striking, at-times brutal, and ultimately haunting mise-en-scène. A young Richard Attenborough plays Pinkie, the merciless and tormented leader of a ragtag gambling mob trying to assert itself in the seaside town. In order to cover up a murder, he marries the pathetic seventeen-year-old witness, Rose, for whom he feels little more than contempt and loathing. In an early scene, she implores Pinkie to record a message for her on a phonograph record so that she might always be able to hear his voice. Since they don’t own a phonograph, he agrees to do it: “What you want me to say is ‘I love you.’ I hate you, you little slut. Why don’t you go back to Nelson Place and leave me be?” At the end of the novel, with Pinkie already dead, Rose confesses to a priest that she wishes herself dead and damned before finding solace in the belief that at least she was loved by Pinkie. There’s hope in such a belief, and so she leaves to fetch the record of her lover’s voice, which the reader knows will destroy her hope, her faith, and any chance she has of being saved. The novel’s final line reads, “She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.”35 Unfortunately, the first topic usually invoked in discussions of the film involves this final scene, which Greene himself altered for the specific reason of wishing to avoid the censorship it surely would have provoked. Instead of a discussion in a dark confessional, the film presents Rose and a whispering nun in a brightly lit room that is deliberately out of place in this shadowy film. Their conversation echoes that in the novel between Rose and the priest, but at the end Rose plays the scratched record and it skips on “I love you,” repeating it over and over until the end credits appear. Obviously, the scene is less sickening than the one in the novel, but it remains horrifying enough and shouldn’t be dismissed as an unforgivable concession. As Greene himself speculated, “Anybody who had any sense would know that next time Rose would probably push the needle over the scratch and get the full message.” True, but even if the viewer lacks sense enough to draw this conclusion, he/she surely will realize that Rose’s faith in everything is based on a lie. Furthermore, the ending hardly mitigated contemporary reviewers’ sense of the film’s shocking brutality and realism. To quote the Daily Mirror: “No woman will want to see it. No parents will want their children to see it. The razor-slashing scenes are horrific.”36 The Rocking Horse Winner hovers somewhere between fairy tale and a similar hard-edged realism. The fairy tale aspect derives, of course, from D. H. Lawrence’s 1932 short story, in which a boy named Paul magically learns to predict race winners from riding his rocking horse into a sort of trance. Eventually the boy becomes so consumed by his desire to please his unloving, money-obsessed mother that he literally rides himself to death. The

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realist aspect of the film results from Pelissier’s unflinching illustration of the impact of adult stupidity and indifference on Paul, played extremely well by John Howard Davies (who also played Oliver Twist in Lean’s film); few films prior to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) succeed so brilliantly in documenting the confusion and inner torment of a neglected child. Especially in the scenes of Paul on the rocking horse, with alternating low-angle shots that capture Paul’s maniacal absorption (see Figure 5.6) and point-of-view shots that convey his disorientation, and set to William Alwyn’s rousing and appropriately carnivalesque score, the film is closer to horror than almost any horror film of the period. Critics noted its technical sophistication and praised it as a most “faithful adaptation,”37 but seemed uncertain about how to respond to so dark a film. New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther praised Pelissier’s direction and Davies’s performance, which he called “one of the finest portrayals of youthful distress that you are ever likely to witness,” yet couldn’t reconcile his feelings of admiration and discomfort: “But for all its integrity and technical polish, ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’ is not a pleasant picture to watch. It is a heavy, depressing entertainment and even the jocular cynicism of Uncle Oscar is not enough to compensate for the suffocatingly morbid nature of the story.”38 Today the film looks decades ahead of its time, one of the true achievements of the period. Rather than glorifying the lifestyles of the British middle class in the old Hollywood manner, The Rocking Horse Winner stands as a scathing indictment of the entire capitalist mindset and its impact on the human mind, body, and soul. Certainly Lean’s two Dickens films have come to epitomize the classic Brit-Lit period adaptation, but they were no less committed to commenting

FIGURE 5.6 A Maniacal Paul in The Rocking Horse Winner (1949).

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on modern issues than were films based on contemporary Brit-Lit. While they absorbed much of the sentimentality of Dickens, they also embraced the novelist’s critiques of capitalism and his commitment to social justice. As Durgnat has said of the earlier film, Great Expectations “trembles on the brink of being a classic Marxist fable.” What holds it back somewhat from more overt “class-consciousness” is Lean’s tendency to stress “the moral rather than the social angles.”39 The BAFTA Best Film for 1949, Oliver Twist is the more substantial picture, we think, though its anti-Semitic treatment of Fagin and rags-to-riches narrative dulls its more radical edges. Nonetheless, we would argue that a certain “class-consciousness” is evident in the mise-en-scène and Guy Green’s brilliant cinematography. Even in the memorable opening shots of the storm-swept moors, across which Oliver’s mother stumbles toward the workhouse, Lean establishes the cold brutality and violence of existence for the disenfranchised and the poor, themes whose “social angles” will of course be played up in the London scenes involving Fagin and Bill Sykes. These were not quite the Marxist films Durgnat was searching for in the British cinema, but they are excellent examples of how the priorities of adaptation shifted in the reconstruction period toward greater social realism. We discussed in the introduction how Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death engaged directly the transatlantic politics of the postwar period in a decidedly non-realist way, a reminder that not all films tended in the same stylistic direction. Another essential postwar British adaptation of this variety was Olivier’s Hamlet (1948). In fact, the film anticipated a certain side of the auteur cinema (see below, pp. 255–65) by communicating an undeniably “timeless” quality, which has partly to do with its seeming imperviousness to the major concerns of the day. But it also stems from the wonderful, dreamlike atmosphere that Olivier and his crew were able to achieve through multiple strategies: first, the minimalist, often fog-covered castle sets; the stunning black and white deep-focus photography of Desmond Dickinson, as well as his relentlessly mobile camera,40 which keeps the audience disoriented within this labyrinthine space; the almost suffocating adaptation—through bold cuts, condensings, and rearrangements—of the play’s massive, multiple plot structure into the “story of a man who could not make up his mind”; and finally, the appointment of Freud’s archetypal theory of the Oedipal complex as the major source of Hamlet’s pathological indecision.41 These strategies mesh extraordinarily well, so that the film remains today a remarkably efficient Hamlet whose most iconic images have not been supplanted by the myriad adaptations following it. How are we to regard the differences between this film and more socially conscious adaptations like Brighton Rock? What binds the film most

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obviously to its time is its claustrophobic film noir influence, evidence of the war’s looming shadow. Furthermore, the extremely introspective and subjective style serves provocatively to heighten an audience’s awareness of the degree to which everything is being channeled through Hamlet’s own perception. Where the film anticipates auteur theory most obviously is in its successful establishment of an inextricable relationship between Olivier the writer/actor/director and the protagonist. Partly to stave off criticism of his brave transformation of the roughly four-hour-long play into a film—his entire elimination, for example, of the Fortinbras character and plot—Olivier urged interpretation of the film as “an Essay in Hamlet,” strengthening links between his own subjectivity and Hamlet’s.42 The authority of the theater man, Olivier, as a reader of Shakespeare—fresh, as he was, off the successes of Henry V—was enough to persuade most critics of the “essay’s” substance. Hamlet managed to become the first Shakespeare film to win the Best Picture Oscar. In the midst of a Brit-Lit adaptation craze whose propagandistic dimensions often were quite explicit, this bold adaptation of Shakespeare’s most famous play probably benefited from not seeming political at all. In the second half of the 1940s, the British cinema launched itself back onto the international film scene by creating well-crafted, realistic, and edgier films from a number of rising studios. A key defining feature of the shifting domestic industry was the emergence of a more politically aware and even radical strain of moviemaking, represented well by quasi-social-realist films like The Rake’s Progress (1945), and such non-Anglocentric anarchist comedies as Ealing’s Whisky Galore! (1949). Literary adaptations had been a major part of the British heritage film tradition from the beginning, and that larger tradition had often been aligned with conservative political agendas and/or consequences. It is of great consequence, therefore, that so many literary films of the period played so central a role in this movement. Aside from their ideological complexity, the British postwar films stand out for their creativity and superior formal and technical qualities, and we should not fail to mention such other strong 1940s and early 1950s British films as the following: Thorold Dickinson’s masterful suspense thriller Gaslight (1940), based on the play by Patrick Hamilton; Gabriel Pascal’s beautiful historical picture, Caesar and Cleopatra (1946), based on Shaw’s play; Alberto Cavalcanti’s fine period film The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby (1947); several stylish films dedicated to Somerset Maugham’s short stories: Quartet (1948), Trio (1950), and Encore (1951); Asquith’s aforementioned The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), as well as his two adaptations of Terence Rattigan plays, The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951); Noel Langley’s lively The Pickwick Papers (1952); Britain’s first animated feature-length film, Animal Farm (1954), based on the George Orwell allegory; Laurence Olivier’s

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hugely popular and influential Technicolor Richard III (1955); and another Orwell film, Michael Anderson’s 1984 (1956), a remake of a famous BBC production from two years earlier (see below, pp. 232–4). Finally, we’d be remiss in not singling out Brian Desmond-Hurst’s 1951 Scrooge (known as A Christmas Carol in America), starring Alastair Sim in the title role. Perhaps the best of the countless versions of what may be Brit-Lit’s most adapted text, this extremely fast-paced yet somber film continues to epitomize for each generation the sort of care and investment in heritage that is perhaps the primary characteristic of the British adaptation tradition. All in all, the 1940s and 1950s represented a golden age of adaptation for the British cinema, one that ended American cinema’s hitherto dominant grasp on the plays, poetry, and novels of Great Britain.

3 BBC television and the consolidation of British “Heritage Film” The achievements of 1940s British filmmaking might have done little to alter the long-term relationship of world cinema to Brit-Lit had it not been for the concurrent rise of BBC television drama. The bonds in these years between the “small screen” and the historical and contemporary theatrical traditions solidified increasingly clear divisions between “authentic” British adaptations and the more “artificial” Hollywood products. This book’s interest is in the “big screen,” of course, but key developments in British broadcasting between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s played a major role in the larger story this chapter seeks to tell. In this relatively brief section, therefore, we trace some of these developments and stop to reflect on their implications for the international production and reception of Brit-Lit films. The first experimental British television transmissions began in 1929, and within about a year’s time, television “plays” became a major component of the rotation. On July 14, 1930, the state-run BBC aired its first televised play, Pirandello’s The Man with a Flower in His Mouth (1922), a one-act dialogue perfectly suited to the cultural aims of the earliest producers. Of course, dramas had played a huge role in the BBC’s radio broadcasts throughout the 1920s, largely because the company’s first managing director, John Reith, saw the potential of adaptations to elevate the new medium, both morally and artistically; as Roger Sales explains, “He wanted it to take the high cultural road and educate popular taste rather than merely pander to the lowest common denominator. There was thus a heavy stress on the best that had been thought, written, known and heard.”43 This pro-drama policy naturally carried over into

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television broadcasting, which became a regular feature of daily life for about 100,000 Britons in November 1936, when the BBC launched the first regular high definition television service in the world. The government discontinued the service on September 1, 1939, as the war loomed. In that all-too-brief three-year period, however, the fundamental workings of the television service were established, with British drama playing a massive role in the roughly three- to four-hour-a-day broadcasts. Some examples of the sort of fare the BBC offered, whether as “extracts from current theatre productions” or “full-length adaptations,”44 included modern works like The Ascent of F6 (1936), by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, productions of Victorian staples like Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1937 and 1938), and classics like the modernized Julius Caesar of July 1938. According to Jason Jacobs, “A typical week in August 1938 … offered the following drama: a 90-minute play as the main event on Sunday evening, Libel; a 75-minute version of The Importance of Being Earnest shown on Tuesday evening; a repeat of The Rivals on Thursday evening (also 75 minutes), and a Friday afternoon repeat of The End of the Beginning (30 minutes).”45 Such programs were merely part of the close relationship between the BBC and the London theatrical world. The service featured regular interviews with such theatrical heavyweights as George Bernard Shaw, Laurence Olivier, and Ralph Richardson, among others, and many of the televised dramas highlighted their theatrical origins by preserving such features as proscenium arches and even curtains.46 Of course, such a relationship might remind the reader of the dynamic prevalent in the earliest days of cinema, when the new medium’s reliance on the theater was at once a source of inspiration and endless material—and a crutch. Early producers such as Grace Wyndham Goldie viewed television as specifically non-cinematic and far more theatrical in nature, and this led to regular descriptions of television that subordinated it as a prop for the legitimate theater: “Television plays, unlike film, depend on words. So television drama is likely to be a new literary medium. Here, in fact, is a drama of the future for us to see and hear and for writers to write.”47 Goldie couldn’t seem to see at the time any contradiction in the view of TV drama as both “new” and fundamentally “literary.” Why “literary” exactly? The primary distinctive technical characteristic of television drama prior to the 1950s, and the reason why the legitimate theater made such an obvious bedfellow for it, was the fact of live broadcasts and the stylistic features necessitated by them. As opposed to the movies, television dramas featured almost exclusively interior sets, limited movement of actors within those sets, relatively long takes, relatively long transitions in between shots (fades were almost always used prior to the 1950s), and, most famously, a preponderance of close-ups. As has been well documented

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by Jason Jacobs and others, contemporaries focused rather immediately on the unique relationship between the viewer and the subject of the television close-up, and more often than not the adjective they used to describe it was “intimate.” As Jacobs reminds us, the intimate style should be thought of in terms of a unique artistic aesthetic rather than as a sign of television’s inferiority or underdevelopment. Furthermore, it was an aesthetic that impacted nearly every aspect of the programs, including acting styles: “Intimacy” for early television drama was understood by critics and producers in terms of the reception of television in the private “intimate” sphere of the home, something shared by all television programmes. Some critics believed that the delivery of drama to the domestic sphere required a softer vocal register, and restrained performance style—the conversational rather than the declarative.48 The greater intimacy of the small screen program, compounded by the obviousness of associations between live television and the “legitimate” theater, worked simultaneously to dissociate TV and cinema, and to highlight the “literariness” of television. The close-up highlighted not merely the psychological aspects of adapted texts, but also ensured the greater ability of an audience to focus on the words being spoken by the actors. Though it’s a fallacy to say the cinema is a nonverbal medium,49 certainly we can say that early television dramas seemed much more preoccupied with the sounds and meanings of words than did most contemporary films. We might consider further how certain literary films of the era, Olivier’s Hamlet, for example, bear clear signs of television’s influence. In the case of this particular film, whose critics have argued about whether it is more theatrical or filmic,50 the television aesthetic’s negotiation of theatrical and cinematic qualities may offer a partial solution. In spite of the television service shutdown during the war, the BBC increased its stature as a national fixture during this period through its far-reaching radio services: “In a world convulsed by unfamiliar social and intellectual ideas, the BBC remained a basically conservative, reassuring institution, committed to God, the king, and the family, to the continuities of life and the permanence of the national heritage.”51 Little changed at first when television resumed in June 1946, in spite of the changing political mood. The BBC remained a vehicle for British cultural heritage, producing such classics as a new The Importance of Being Earnest (1946), The Time Machine (1949), Wuthering Heights (1953), and, of course, lots of Shakespeare and Dickens. By 1952, more ambitious drama producers such as Rudolph Cartier spoke of this fact in a state of exasperation: “The BBC needed new scripts, a new approach, a whole new

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spirit, rather than endlessly televising classics like Dickens or familiar London stage plays.”52 Aside from the classics, these familiar stage plays included works like Graham Greene’s The Living Room and Patrick Hamilton’s Rope (adapted in both 1947 and 1950). Another trend compounding the televisual use of literary sources and the cultural conservatism of the BBC was children’s programming, the epitome of which was the 1955 143-episode Adventures of Robin Hood starring Richard Greene as the title character. The episodes were written by a strong team including Ring Lardner, Jr and several other Americans who were on the Hollywood blacklist at the time. They tended to focus rather didactically on practical lessons for children, though with a certain undeniable wit and charm. An example would be “The Genius” (April 13, 1958), which sought to make mathematics sexy by demonstrating how it applied to “weaponry and strategy.” In the episode, Robin’s gang fights to keep the arithmetic wizard Nicodemus out of the hands of Prince John, and the fight pays off when Nicodemus devises a plan for a catapult whose amazing precision allows them to rout their enemy. In spite of the cultural conservatism of the BBC throughout this period, things did begin to shake up a little in the late 1940s. For example, one considerable trend emerged for “horror” and Gothic plays, which at least reflected the impact of the war (in fact, horror comic books also peaked in the late 1940s). Occasionally, a television program could beat film to the punch in treating important or controversial social issues. One example was the 1955 Othello directed by Tony Richardson, which is the earliest recorded screen performance by a black actor playing the title role (American Gordon Heath). The changing climate had mainly to do, though, with the emergence of innovators like Cartier and with technological developments that improved the storytelling capabilities of the medium. These included the regular use of a multi-cam system by 1938,53 the increasingly advanced use of telecine after the war, mastery of instant cutting—as opposed to fades—by 1946,54 and of course, the gradual replacement by the mid-1950s of live broadcasts with telerecordings and film.55 Such technological developments, which decreased reliance on live broadcasting, altered the terms of ongoing debates about whether television should remain more theatrical or become more cinematic. One final development worth noting was the regular serialization, by the early 1950s, of literary works such as the six-part Pride and Prejudice (1952) or the first televised Sherlock Holmes series (1951), written by C. A. Lejeune. Serialization revealed some of the things television could do that the theater could not. This does not mean that serialization moved television closer to cinema. In theory, serialization allowed for much more in-depth characterization,

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a greater ability to develop complex plots, and time to develop them at an appropriate pace. Serialization may have contributed to a lessening of ties between television and the theater in favor of a greater relationship with the British novel, especially the serialized classics of the Victorian era. Television drama could still be thought about in “literary” terms, but the associable genres of literature were changing or, at least, becoming more diverse. Even the types of novels that artists and producers chose to adapt said much about their view of the medium. Screenwriter Nigel Kneale’s science fiction adaptations in the early to mid-1950s grew largely out of a desire to avoid the typical interior costume drama based on the classics.56 For his 1954 adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kneale found the right director in the Austrian Rudolph Cartier, a proponent of “a wider canvas of shooting styles, a more integrated mixture of studio and film, larger sets, multi-character productions”—a proponent, in other words, of a more cinematic televisual style. The duo’s adaptation, starring Peter Cushing as Winston, holds up extremely well today, far better, in fact, than the 1956 film based upon it. Jacobs has done extensive work on the remarkable complexity of this program, which used twenty-eight sets, multiple film sequences, and an oftentimes surprisingly mobile camera to keep it both “fast moving and adventurous.” The average shot lengths, at fifteen seconds each, do remain quite a bit longer than average Hollywood ones at the time (about ten seconds each57), interior settings are dominant, and certainly close-ups characteristic of the television style all hold those cinematic features in balance. We would argue, though, that Cartier’s curious hybrid style served Orwell’s material extraordinarily well by heightening the sense of psychological intensity in each sequence. In the dystopian surveillance society Kneale and Cartier recreate, the sense of claustrophobia is heightened by the sometimes cramped interior spaces; furthermore, the viewer is able to read from Winston’s facial expressions (and the voice-over which oftentimes complements them) emotions the character is not permitted to express even within his own home. Cartier himself described the intentionality of this effect in specifically televisual terms: All the skill of Michael Anderson could not recapture the impact of the TV transmission … [because] the subject could only frighten spectators who were “conditioned” to experience fear by sitting alone in the darkness, and unable to find help or comfort by looking around the mass audience in a modern cinema—where they would feel safe from “Big Brother.” It was considerably different in the TV viewer’s own home, where cold eyes stared from the small screen straight at him, casting into the viewer’s heart the same chill that the characters in the play experienced whenever they heard his voice coming from their “watching” TV screens.58

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In other words, Nineteen Eighty-Four worked far better on television because Orwell’s panoptic dystopia, published in the midst of the television age, had been first to imagine the terrors that could be unleashed by the so-called “telescreens.” Kneale and Cartier’s adaptation succeeded because it borrowed enough from film to create an exciting, complex story, and kept enough from television to remain true to its own medium. Nineteen EightyFour is an adaptation of literature that eschews “literariness” by thinking through its source material in visual terms. In this, it sets itself off from all that “talky” drama associated with Shakespeare and Dickens TV. Perhaps the most useful way to understand early BBC television’s legacy for the Brit-Lit film, then, would be to think about how it contributed to two separate adaptation phenomena with significantly different, even opposed, political and cultural associations. The first of these sought to legitimize the new medium through associations with British literary heritage and high culture. As a result of such origins, British television drama has become so linked with Victorian and Edwardian novels that modern series such as ITV’s sourceless Downton Abbey (2010–present) have succeeded precisely by tapping into the literary aura and ethos of the serialized teleplay. On the other hand, in the cinema itself, “literary” companies such as Merchant-Ivory have succeeded by cultivating certain aspects of what we might refer to as a “Masterpiece Theatre” style. In this sense, the entrenched cinematic tradition of Brit-Lit “quality films” dating back to Vitagraph, Thanhouser, and Hepworth, might be said to feed rather directly into the history of British television drama. However, at about the same historical moment that the auteur movement was beginning to define itself in opposition to a so-called “tradition of quality” (see below, p. 257), British television was busy cultivating associations with the theatrical and literary past. The worldwide exportability and success of the mainstream product engineered by the BBC would lead, in turn, to direct associations in the popular imagination of Britishness with concepts such as literary heritage, and moving-image genres such as the costume drama and the “authentic” adaptation. The advantage of this fact for the British film and television industries was that by the 1950s, Britain might be said to have wrested from the hands of Hollywood and the international community control of their own high-cultural traditions. The disadvantage of course was that world cinema appeared to be breaking further and further away from such traditions, so that in spite of the diverse and oftentimes cutting-edge cinematic achievements traced above, British film was vulnerable to charges of stylistic and cultural conservatism. The second of these adaptation tracks, however, emblematized by Nineteen Eighty-Four, led deliberately and directly away from such conservative traditions and stylistic tendencies. Because so little material is left from this early period

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of Britain’s television history, we can only guess how close other adaptations might have come to replicating the program’s success. Nonetheless, in its bold rethinking of source material, its turn to genre fiction, its experimental style, and its restless relationship with the classic ways, Nineteen EightyFour might be seen as precursor of sorts to the iconoclastic Hammer films of the coming decades. We might view these two tracks, then—one looking increasingly to contemporary literature and the other invested deeply in the past—as representing an increasingly diverse range of possibilities for British adaptors in both television and film.

4 American Brit-Lit films in the 1940s and 1950s How did Britain’s numerous, successful forays into Brit-Lit impact the American studios? Before and during the war, as noted in the previous chapter and above, Hollywood’s “British Films” were plentiful and oftentimes remarkably successful. A number of the early 1940s ones were adaptations of Brit-Lit, of course, for example, Robert Z. Leonard’s fine Pride and Prejudice (1940), John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn), which won Best Picture in 1941, and George Cukor’s excellent remake of Gaslight (1944), to mention a few. But shifts were occurring during this time as well, and significant changes would follow VJ Day. For one, American studios throughout this period seemed more eager to focus on American literature for their prestige material, with Gone with the Wind (1939) providing all the proof they needed that such an approach could pay. Indeed, many of the essential American film adaptations of this larger period were entirely homegrown, including The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), The Big Sleep (1946), The Heiress (1949), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953), East of Eden (1955), and Moby Dick (1956). This fact is not surprising, as both the success of the British studios in adapting British properties and the predictable surge of wartime patriotism in America provide partial explanations. Movies based on material by Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder were especially attractive because there was no overseas competition for the properties and, as prestige films, they promised to do well abroad. Especially after the war, the export market was no longer a safe bet for America’s “British films” since Hollywood’s near-exclusive interest in the “Britain of empire and class”59 no longer appealed to many Britons, who

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suddenly had other material to choose from. Adaptations such as Peter Godfrey’s The Woman in White (1948), for example, tried to recapture the luster of the wartime “British films,” but hardly made an impression. Another reason for Hollywood’s relative inability to sell Britain to Britons was the growing conservatism of the industry, marked by the interventions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which formed its blacklist in 1947. Any inclination in liberal, or even moderate, artists to make social realist films of the sort emerging in Britain and Italy would likely have been suppressed for fear of their being labeled communists. As Eric Johnston, head of the Hollywood Motion Picture Association of America, proclaimed in that year, “We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we’ll have no more Tobacco Roads.”60 Thus, by decade’s end, the studios not only couldn’t produce a Dickens film as “authentic” as those being made by Lean in the late 1940s; they even faced obstacles making films as progressive as Great Expectations. In addition to the political and artistic reasons for these shifts, economics played its central role. The Hollywood dream factory reached its zenith in 1946, when it earned its greatest profits ever, but significant declines began only a year later and continued well into the 1950s. Thomas Schatz has thus shrewdly labeled the decade as one defined by a trajectory of “Boom and Bust.” The specter that haunted it was of course the inevitability of a decision in the Paramount antitrust case filed in 1938, which had been continually delayed and postponed throughout the war period. In May 1948, the federal government finally outlawed block booking, the backbone of the studio system, and soon after, all members of the Big Five beginning with RKO began signing their consent decrees. Schatz explains that The major studios in the early 1950s responded to the court-ordered disintegration not only by divesting their theaters but by gradually phasing out feature film production, concentrating instead on movie financing and distribution. … And the independent film production movement that had been taking hold since the early 1940s, after weathering the stormy postwar era, emerged during the 1950s as the dominant form for making features.61 Such changes obviously impacted the cinematic adaptation of literature because one of the key determinants in assessing a film’s potential profitability has to do with the costs of purchasing story material, and these costs further correspond to the reading and theater-going habits of the population at any given moment. As Schatz points out, in the early 1940s, “The market for presold literary and stage properties was booming. In 1939, the number (and cost) of such purchases had increased substantially, and by 1940–41 the studios and major independents were breaking one record

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after another in the amount paid for the screen rights to top novels and plays.”62 Their ability to do so depended on the “boom” period, which in turn had to do with the fact that competing filmmaking nations such as France and England were already in the war. Immediately after the war, however, and especially after the Paramount ruling, “The studios also eschewed high-priced presold story properties—or virtually any presold properties, for that matter—relying more heavily on original screenplays.”63 Ironically, this maneuver, designed to stave off financial disaster, also limited the ability of the studios to recover from the “bust”: “Top hits were rare in the late 1940s owing in large part to the fact that the studios simply stopped making the lavish spectacles and presold ‘event’ pictures which were more likely to become major box-office hits.”64 In spite of the mess, and in spite of Britain’s sudden advantages, certain types of Brit-Lit remained appealing to American producers. Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, filmed by Edmund Goulding in 1946, suggested itself to 20th Century Fox quite naturally since its hero was an American. Other texts like Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (produced by MGM in 1952) made decent American films in part because the resources and financial backing required to produce them meant few other cinemas could do it. In spite of the success of “big” British films such as Henry V, spectacular or epic films were rarely made in the United Kingdom until the late 1950s and 1960s (e.g., The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957], Dr. No [1962], and Lawrence of Arabia [1962]), and, even then, foreign backing was almost always necessary.65 Jane Eyre (1943) was perhaps the last of the great 1940s American studio “prestige” films based on classic British literature. Robert Stevenson was hired to direct by David O. Selznick, who developed the script over a period of several years before deciding to sell it to producer William Goetz at Fox. Employing an impressive group of writers including Stevenson himself, John Houseman, and Aldous Huxley, the film runs at a brisk ninety-seven minutes, playing up the Gothic aspects of the novel, shortening dramatically the periods of Jane’s childhood and schooling at Lowood, and eliminating altogether the St John character and plot. While the notion that Jane and Rochester share a profoundly intimate connection seems less than convincing due to the rapid pace and plot narrowing, excellent performances by Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, along with the expressionistic lighting and mise-en-scène more than compensate. Clearly, the Gothic emphases were part of an attempt to draw male viewers to a film advertised as “one of the greatest love stories of all time,” but also sought to capitalize on the success of Hitchcock’s great 1940 film Rebecca (produced by Selznick), which might reasonably be described as a full-on appropriation of Jane Eyre. One key point worth stressing is that Jane Eyre is far from nostalgic about England’s past, rejecting melodrama

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FIGURE 5.7 Harsh Realities in Jane Eyre (1943). in favor of a more realistic depiction of the harshness of the age. Both the opening voice-over (see above, p. 212) and the Lowood scenes demonstrate the cruelty of the schoolmaster Brockelhurst in a manner far more powerful than the parodic equivalent of the Mr Bumble scenes in Lean’s Oliver Twist (see Figure 5.7). Stevenson’s film stands today as a refreshing exception to the rule that Hollywood’s “British films” tended to be historically naive and ideologically conservative. A handful of later Brit-Lit prestige films, such as Albert Lewin’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), enjoyed their occasional moments of excellence. That film employed one particularly brilliant strategy for adapting Wilde’s 1890 psychological “horror” novel: with each reveal of the locked-up painting, the sharp 35 mm black and white palette is shattered by the insertion of a shockingly grotesque Technicolor painting—created for the film by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright—which manages successfully to externalize the decay and damnation of Dorian’s soul (see Figure 5.8—not in color). It is an astonishing effect in an otherwise forgettable film, which managed to earn cinematographer Harry Stradling, Sr an Academy Award. Not surprisingly, the majority of Hollywood’s memorable and influential Brit-Lit films of the 1940s and early 1950s were genre films, not prestige pictures. Ironically, the British film industry’s success in associating homegrown adaptations with the “authentic” may actually have freed American filmmakers to approach Brit-Lit source material in a more playful manner. In this section, we break down some of the major American genre-film adaptations of the period, highlighting their diversity and richness, before offering some concluding remarks on this period’s tumultuous, non-Hollywood ending.

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FIGURE 5.8 The Shocking Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).

Horror One recurring theme of this book has been importance of horror through the decades in advancing cinematic adaptations’ quality, profitability, and popularity. The period covered by this chapter might be perceived as a valley of sorts for the genre, dipping down in between those two high peaks of Universal horror on the one side and Hammer horror on the other. But a small number of films beg to be analyzed. Jacques Tourneur ’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) was a key film in the Jane Eyre craze sparked by the success of Rebecca. In fact, producer Val Lewton had helped Selznick both to prepare Rebecca and to rework the Jane Eyre production before it was finally sold off. Released only a few months prior to Stevenson’s Fox film adaptation of the Victorian novel, the film focuses on the struggles of a Canadian nurse, Betsy Connell, to cure the zombified wife of Paul Holland, Connell’s dark and mysterious employer/ lover. Lewton was dissatisfied with the original story (by Inez Wallace) and so encouraged screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray to rework it by appropriating key elements of the Brontë novel, which may also have been suggested to him by the West Indies setting. In this scheme the governess is replaced by the nurse, Bertha Mason is replaced by the “mental case,” who actually is a zombie, and Holland’s Rochester-like eccentricities are highlighted. While the ending is deliciously ambiguous, one possibility is that Mrs Holland’s “illness” is somehow a punishment for her sexual looseness (since she carried on an affair with her brother-in-law), and so her eventual

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(final) death leaves the selfless Connell and wronged husband free to love one another. While the film’s interpretation of the Bertha Mason character is hardly self-aware, its handling of the West Indies setting and natives is decidedly more complex and, at times, strikingly sensitive. Slavery is shown to be the real specter haunting these islands. In the first exchange between Connell and Holland, which takes place at night on the boat that is transporting them across the ocean, the young woman finds herself rapt by the sounds and sights of her new environment. Paul notices and warns her that what she thinks is beautiful is “only death and decay”: “Everything seems beautiful because you don’t understand. … That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny, dead bodies, the glitter of putrescence.” Several black men eat their dinner behind them. In the first daylight scene on the island, Connell converses with an older black man who reminds her why the Holland family has thrived on the island: “They brought the colored folks to the island. … And the enormous boat brought the long-ago fathers and the long-ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.” When Connell awkwardly responds that they were brought to a beautiful place, he smiles and says, “If you say, Miss.” The film’s constant reminders that a legacy of death and misery lie just underneath the surface of this tropical island warmed by the sun and dappled with swaying palm trees also become a guide for reading the mise-en-scène. The film’s gorgeous photography would be difficult to overstate; its characteristic frames are defined by stunning black and white compositions whose luminosity is nearly always balanced by encroaching shadows which threaten to engulf it. Here the Rochester character’s dark past is shown to be responsible for his painful present. His Bertha Mason may be part of the problem, but she is a consequence, not a cause, of the horrors which unfold on this haunted island. I Walked with a Zombie is a superb horror film based partly on British literature, merely one of many produced by Hollywood in the period. Other noteworthy films include The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939, Conan Doyle); Victor Fleming’s overrated and derivative Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941; Louis Stevenson); the effective, Lewton-produced The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise (1945, based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson); and the Abbot and Costello “Meet” series, especially Meet Frankenstein (1948), Meet the Invisible Man (1951), and Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953). Though, like MGM’s The Canterville Ghost (1945, based on an Oscar Wilde story), the Abbot and Costello films might be discussed in a separate section on horror comedy, their inspiration, marketing, and their legacy ties them very obviously to the horror genre and, more specifically, to the great Universal horror films of the 1930s. Like many of the 1930s sequels and

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spin-offs to those films, the “Meet” series is a key player in popular culture’s near-complete extraction of major literary characters such as Dracula and Frankenstein from their places in the Victorian novel. At its best, the series is an unusually clever celebration of film’s legacy in recreating such literary characters and stories in strikingly iconic and unforgettable visual terms— and this is not only the Universal films’ legacy. Boris Karloff’s ape-like Mr Hyde, for example, is very clearly a tribute to Fredric March’s great turn as the character in the Paramount film of 1931. The “Meet” films were not only comedic spins on horror, in other words; they were comedic spins on the very genre of the literary horror film.

Film noir Both in the more general sense of noir as a style and the more specific one of noir as a genre, noir’s impact on the 1940s American Brit-Lit film would be difficult to overstate. In terms of the former issue, we’ve already seen a film in Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, whose lighting, occasionally expressionistic mise-en-scène, and voice-over narration link it to noir (see Figure 5.9). We saw similar features being exploited in Jane Eyre, which might accurately be described in terms of the “Gothic Noir,” which Marc Svetov describes as “an interesting variant on the genre: set in the past, usually in Victorian England or America, … The Gothic film noirs bear a great similarity to the modern noirs in lighting, camerawork, … direction, audience, and audience expectations.”66 Since noir’s stylistic influence is so pervasive throughout the 1940s, we’ve thought it prudent to discuss such films as these according to their generic

FIGURE 5.9 Cinematography by J. Roy Hunt in I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

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classifications, and to focus in this section on films whose noir associations are more primary. One curious trend in this period was the popularity of Shakespeare as a source for noir material. The Shakespeare films were adaptations, appropriations, and a mixture of both, engaging more or less deeply Shakespeare’s plots and adapting them to modern settings and themes. Edward G. Ulmer’s Strange Illusion (1945), for instance, borrows only loosely from Hamlet in the tale of a young man who discovers through his surreal, recurring dreams that the man about to marry his mother is the psychopathic rapist-murderer who also killed his father. The gangster noir Joe Macbeth of a decade later (1955) obviously emphasizes more of its literary inspiration. This curious Columbia Pictures film, with a screenplay by Philip Yordan and an American cast, was directed and cowritten by the British Ken Hughes and filmed at Shepperton Studios. In spite of some good shots and clever plot turns, the film sticks awkwardly close to the play (Banquo becomes “Banky,” for example, and out-of-place references to “crowns” merely confuse); the implicit suggestion, however, that Lady Macbeth (here, the sexy “Angel Macbeth”) is the prototype for the femme fatale is especially provocative. A vastly superior film and probably the best of the lot is George Cukor’s stylish A Double Life of 1947. It focuses on the demise of method actor Tony John, played by Ronald Coleman, who so immerses himself in the role of Othello during a 300-performance theatrical run that he winds up killing one innocent woman and nearly killing his ex-wife, Brita (Signe Hasso), whom he still jealously loves and wishes to remarry. Both an adaptation of the play, then, and a play on the relevance (and dangers!) of adaptation, A Double Life is one of the more self-reflexive of the contemporary American Brit-Lit films. Arguably the most interesting of the Shakespeare noir films for our purposes, though, is Joseph Mankiewicz’s House of Strangers (1949), which appropriates King Lear. From a novel by Jerome Weidman and another Shakespeare-influenced screenplay by Philip Yordan, the film hinges on the same fundamental plot alteration exploited in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran some thirty years later, in which the Lear character’s vexed relationship with his sons—four in this case—forms the main subject. In spite of a sometimes painful Italian American accent, Edward G. Robinson gives an excellent turn as Gino Monetti, the charismatic but overbearing and hot-tempered father who makes his fortune decades earlier as an East Side banker (see Figure 5.10). Like Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer prize–winning novel A Thousand Acres (1991), which would use Goneril and Regan’s perspectives to explore the abusive and violent personality of the Lear character, House of Strangers manipulates perspective to restructure Shakespeare’s tragedy as viewed through the experiences of all Lear ’s children—calling attention to aspects

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FIGURE 5.10 “King Gino” in House of Strangers (1949).

of the text generally ignored by traditional literary criticism. With its characteristic use of the flashback structure, noir proved a perfect vehicle for such a creative rereading of a literary classic. (Interestingly, the film was remade only five years later as a western, Broken Lance [1954], and Yordan was awarded the Best Story Oscar for essentially the same scenario he’d written in 1949). Finally, one American Graham Greene movie of this period might be regarded as a significant noir entry: Greene’s 1936 novel A Gun for Sale, set in a fictional northern English town, was adapted by Frank Tuttle in 1942 as This Gun for Hire (starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, in a key performance).

Science fiction Of all popular cinematic genres associated with the 1950s, science fiction is perhaps the best theorized. If Peter Lev is correct that “overall the films of the early 1950s are curiously detached from the issues of their time,” then one reason for the genre’s prominence in historiography is that it was such an obvious exception to this general rule.67 As Joyce A. Evans notes, the science fiction films of the 1950s bore a “direct relationship to the increasing public concern about communism and the fear of a nuclear disaster.”68 Indeed, most of the great films of the period tend to break down into one of two overlapping categories, invasion films such as The Thing from Another World (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and The Blob (1958), and global annihilation films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951),

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Red Planet Mars (1952), The War of the Worlds (1953), and On the Beach (1959). Of these, only The War of the Worlds was based on British literature, but Wells’s importance for the 1950s would be hard to overstate. One might argue of course that H. G. Wells is as central a figure in film history as any author; from the very beginning of the cinema, his novels and stories have been regularly adapted, inspiring not only individual filmmakers from Méliès to Spielberg and beyond, but challenging film itself to develop new techniques for realizing his visions of the future. Nora Sayre, author of Films of the Cold War suggests how Wells’s vision could remain relevant in this period of topically allegorical science fiction: The Fifties films pilfered the plots of turn-of-the-century novels of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, who had faith in science and in progressive possibilities for the future—a viewpoint that was moribund in the cinematic visions of the Fifties. However, despite Wells’s commitment to science, he was skeptical about our ability to cope with an intergalactic crisis, as was evident from The War of the Worlds; the tone of that novella, which emphasizes our helplessness in the face of the Martians’ assault, was reproduced in Hollywood’s science fiction.69 Sayre is shrewd to recognize how out of sorts Wells’s view of science was in relation to the period’s cynical views (see The Thing or Them! [1954]). She is also correct to note Wells’s willingness to explore science’s limitations, though we should be careful not to confuse the relative conservatism of director Byron Haskin and screenplay writer Barré Lyndon with the more secular beliefs of Wells. Wells may have been skeptical about our ability to handle any number of things, but it didn’t much impact his overall faith in science. Looking at the issue from one perspective, it’s Earth’s bacteria in The War of the Worlds, fire in The Thing, and ice in The Blob that defeat the aliens; from another perspective, it’s human immunity to germs in The War of the Worlds, electricity in The Thing, and Co2 fire extinguishers in The Blob that save us from the aliens. What makes The War of the Worlds feel so antiscientific is screenwriter Lyndon’s emphasis throughout the film on God as the real answer to the invading aliens. Not only does the final scene take place in a church, but after Dr Clayton Forrester declares the Martians dead, he remarks, “We’ve all been praying for a miracle,” just before all of the characters look up into the heavens and church bells start ringing; a voice-over conclusion reassures us that “after all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things, which God in his wisdom, had put upon this earth.” This line has no equivalent in Wells, and though in the

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novel church bells ring out over London after the Martians fall, it is actually Darwin, not God, to whom the narrator turns for an explanation of humanity’s miraculous survival: “These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; … But there are no bacteria in Mars.”70 As Julian Cornell sums up the alteration, “Rather than resisting apocalypse, the film embraces it; a ‘savior’ appears at the end to deliver the elect, to rescue the chosen people, the Americans, from their tormentors.”71 The film’s undeniable strengths have less to do with nuanced writing than with set design, special effects, and the wonderful tripods which loom up above trees and buildings alike—not to mention its ability to speak to the fears and anxieties of Cold War audiences. The film was a huge success for Paramount, earning two million dollars in America alone and three Academy Award nominations. Another major Brit-Lit science fiction film was Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), which shifted the setting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Altair IV, a twenty-third-century planet sixteen light years away from the Earth. The story follows the crew of United Planets Commander, John Adams (appropriately named, considering that everyone apparently speaks “American” in the future), in search of an expedition sent to the planet two decades earlier. They learn that all members of that expedition have been murdered by some invisible force, except for the brilliant Prospero figure, Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), and his beautiful daughter Altaira. Somehow Morbius has managed to survive and even thrive on Altair IV, thanks in part to the amazing abilities of his self-made robot, Robby, who functions a bit like Ariel in the film—performing such “magic” tricks as the creation of sixty gallons of bourbon for the crew (see Figure 5.11). Now, shortly after the arrival of the earthlings, the monsters have returned. Morbius explains to Adams that Altair IV had once been home to an ancient race of beings, the Krell, who—in spite of their superiority over humans—had managed to destroy themselves

FIGURE 5.11 Morbius’s Ariel, Robby, in Forbidden Planet (1956).

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200,000 years earlier. The Krell, it turns out, had discovered how to project material incarnations of their imaginations anywhere on the planet, but they’d forgotten one thing: “Monsters from the id!” Forbidden Planet is a genre masterpiece, a massively influential film whose dependence on The Tempest should not be overstated; and yet how much pleasure there is in exploring their parallels. While the Miranda and Ariel subplots are nicely developed, the film’s emphasis on Morbius’s id as a Caliban of sorts, that “thing of darkness” which Morbius must eventually own, surely stands as one of the earliest cinematic treatments of the “problematic Prospero” figure now recognized so universally in Shakespeare studies. Here’s that dynamic again: whereas any contemporary prestige film adaptation of The Tempest would have been bogged down by conservative expectations, the most seemingly unlikely genre appropriations of classic texts wind up promoting a more cutting-edge hermeneutics. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that Forbidden Planet, as a genre film, was exceptional for the size of its budget. MGM was a studio with almost no history in science fiction film production but, recognizing the quality of the script, it marshaled all of its resources, especially in creating the massive sets used to build the visually impressive Krell underworld. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Visual Effects but lost to The Ten Commandments. In 2013, however, it was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry as one of America’s most “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films.

Animation and children’s film Animation film and children’s film are not the same, of course, but it makes sense to discuss them together due to Disney’s move into live-action filmmaking in this period. Largely as a result of this fact, the category of the “Children’s Film” took on many of its defining features, and of course British literature was a central component of the genre. In 1950, Disney made his first live-action film, Treasure Island, directed by Byron Haskin, and filmed at Denham Studios and in numerous locations throughout England. A big Technicolor action film perfectly pitched to Stevenson’s intended audience of young boys, Treasure Island, built on an iconic performance by Robert Newton as Long John Silver, was another enormously successful movie, coming in fifth at the box office that year and enjoying a rich afterlife through television airings, theatrical rereleases, and multiple sequels and spin-offs, including Long John Silver (Disney, 1954), Return to Treasure Island (dir. Ewald André Dupont, 1954), and the Australian television series The Adventures of Long

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John Silver (1954), also directed by Haskin and starring Robert Newton, and made in an effort to develop the country’s fledgling television industry. The original Disney film succeeded in solidifying the viability of a children’s film market separate from animation. One likely model for the film would have been Alexander Korda’s 1942 production of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, directed by his brother Zoltan. During the war, Korda made his most notable films in America under the moniker Alexander Korda Films, Inc., in this case with United Artists shelling out $300,000 and handling distribution. The film starred Sabu as Mowgli, already a sensation due to his performances in three previous Korda films, most notably The Thief of Baghdad (1940). In spite of its title, the film built somewhat loosely off of Kipling’s famous stories. Interestingly, the Kordas passed up the opportunity to highlight their child audience by introducing Mowgli’s tale through a frame in which a British memsahib pays an old man to tell her the story. Though the specific audience-within-the-film is an adult one—albeit an annoyingly naive one—the movie was intended as a spectacular fantasy, whose talking beasts, simple morality, and massive action sequences all targeted young male viewers. Jungle Book was nominated for multiple Academy Awards, including best cinematography and visual effects. Like so many films based on British literature, it had the further distinction of being a “first” in movie history, as the first film for which an original (as opposed to rerecorded) soundtrack recording was released. In the field of animation, the 1940s and 1950s were of course key decades, and certainly projects such as Jungle Book and Treasure Island were only conceivable because of the recent successes of Disney and its competitors in the animated feature-film genre. As we saw in Chapter 3, Disney’s fascination with British literature goes back to his first projects (see above, pp. 146–8). After the successes of Snow White (1937) and the great early 1940s films, the studio produced several Brit-Lit films in rapid succession, beginning with Treasure Island and continuing with the animated Alice in Wonderland (1951), the live-action The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men (1952), the animated Peter Pan (1953), and the live-action Rob Roy (1954). Another half dozen Brit-Lit films followed in the 1960s (see below, p. 277). Both Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, however, stand today as key films from Disney’s classical period, though reception of the former was disappointing at the time. A lifetime labor of love, Disney’s interest in Carroll goes back to the Alice films of the 1920s, and he had intended to make Alice his first feature film until, feeling scooped by the 1933 Paramount Alice in Wonderland, he scrapped the plan and made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs instead.72 The screenplay was worked over through the next decade, most notably by Aldous Huxley, whose contributions did not make it into the film. Production was continually

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postponed, due in part to the war. Upon its release, possibly as a result of so massive a buildup, Alice seemed like a disappointment, just barely earning back its three million dollar cost and drawing the ire of critics, especially in Britain, who lamented the “Americanization” of the classic novel.73 The film’s amazing, surreal imagery would find its true audience in the 1960s. Peter Pan fared better, earning back almost two million dollars on its US first-day release alone, as well as the praise of most critics, though Bosley Crowther predictably objected that the film “does not hold precisely to the pristine spirit of the J. M. Barrie play.”74 Dave Fleischer’s 1939 Gulliver’s Travels (Paramount) was the first non-Disney animated feature film, the second such film ever made, as well as the first based on British literature. Disney is said to have scoffed at it, saying that “we can do better than that with our second-string animators,” and many critics agreed, especially Frank Nugent of The New York Times, who proclaimed that “the film is so far beneath the level of Mr Disney’s famous fantasy that, out of charity, we wish we did not have to make the comparisons demanded by professional responsibility.”75 At least these comparisons to other Disney films spared readers from the inevitable comparisons to Jonathan Swift. The film is actually quite amusing—especially considering how quickly it was made— employing the Fleischer-developed animation technique of tracing and coloring live-action frames and featuring some memorable songs. Those familiar with Fleischer’s more famous short cartoons will appreciate the unholy marriage of canonical literature and characters such as Sneak, Snoop, and Snitch, not to mention the voice of Popeye the Sailor Man (Jack Mercer) in the mouth of the Lilliputian king. Arguably the most inventive animation in this period came from Warner Brothers. Though not the studio’s first appropriation of Brit-Lit (see, for example, “A Tale of Two Kitties” [dir. Bob Clampett, 1942]), or by any means its last (see, for example, Shakespeare’s great performance in “A Witch’s Tangled Hare” [dir. Abe Levitow, 1959]), the most memorable Looney Tunes venture into Brit-Lit has to be Friz Freleng’s 1955 “Hyde and Hare.” The story focuses on the kind Dr Jekyll’s adoption of Bugs Bunny as his pet. Jekyll is a Peter-Lorre–like character, voiced by Mel Blanc, sinister especially in all his sweetness. But when they return to his Victorian home/laboratory, the “Doc” gives in to his temptation and drinks the potion that turns him into the hideous Hyde (see Figure 5.12). The remainder of the film is basically a comedic chase sequence, but the highlights of the film are the numerous reveals of the monster, including the famous one of Bugs at the ending, after he’s drunk the potion. If all productions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde hinge on the reveal, this one is special for highlighting the violence and abruptness of the transformations through a celebration of animation’s seemingly unlimited

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FIGURE 5.12 Friz Freleng’s “Hyde and Hare” (1955).

capacity for visual magic. While traditionally the success of the reveals depends on the management of duration, either through the actor’s virtuoso performance of agonized, slow change—through time-lapse special effects, or a heavily shadow-strewn mise-en-scène that can support other types of editing—these hilarious transformations consist of three individual jerks of the body, in what seems a deliberately brightly lit room. The only real alterations over the three shots are the gradual appearance of two teeth, the slight lengthening of Jekyll’s gray hair, and the greening of his tan skin, yet the difference is extreme—as if Freleng is flaunting what can be done through animation with little more than a different paintbrush.

Race films During the 1920s, a relatively small number of films made by and for African Americans were produced, originally by the Colored Players and, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, under the direction of black artists like Oscar Micheaux. Though one of the first successful films in this category was an adaptation of the American temperance play Ten Nights in a Barroom (dir. Charles Gilpin, 1926), most race films were original stories focused on themes of “improvement” of the black race; often, they highlighted the numerous environmental obstacles to black individuals’ happiness and success, even survival. Many of the films featured music—especially jazz, swing, and blues numbers—more centrally than nonmusical mainstream American films.76 One of these films, Joseph Seidler’s 1939 Paradise in Harlem, epitomizes the genre in its oscillation

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between spotlighted musical numbers (many featuring Mamie Smith) and a narrative focused on the struggles of Lem Anderson to graduate from the blackface comedy theater to the legitimate one, where he can at last fulfill his dream of playing Othello. Played by real Broadway actor Frank H. Wilson, Lem’s ambitions are thwarted by his having witnessed a gang hit which leads to endless harassment and temporary exile from Harlem. When he returns, facing the threat of more violence toward him and his family, he bravely stages Othello through a local church sponsor at an all-black theater. At first, the setup looks simply like the typical fantasy scenario according to which the barbarous other will come under the saving influence of the great white author of authors. Certainly, the vexed relationship between Shakespeare and African American art forms began to be explored at least as early as the mid-nineteenth century. According to Douglas Lanier, for example, who has written both on this topic and on Paradise in Harlem, Shakespeare became as early as the 1840s “an ambivalent standard against which the popularity and artistic achievement of minstrelsy should be measured.”77 Certainly, a similar ambivalence pervades the film’s presentation of Othello in the final scene. Condensed to a section of the play focused on the murder of Desdemona, the scene may be appropriating A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its simultaneous focus on the play and the audience members who are watching it. Like the nobles witnessing “Pyramus and Thisbe” in Shakespeare’s early comedy, the theatergoers loudly mock the performance, suggesting the distance between their own experience and what Shakespeare offers them. When Lem says “put out the light,” a young man yells “yeah, put out the light so we can all go home!” The crowd continues to laugh until “the performance, in dreamlike fashion, changes from Shakespearean oratory to a slow blues song built on the half-sympathetic, half-taunting refrain, ‘I don’ wanna die.’”78 Before long, the entire crowd—suddenly mesmerized by the tragic events unfolding before their eyes—has begun singing and moving to the music, an “up-tempo hot swing number” that provides the soundtrack for the murder and closes out the play, just before the crowd erupts in frenzied applause (see Figure 5.13). Lem is astonished, remarking “it wasn’t exactly the Othello I wanted.” His nephew responds, “It might not have been the Othello you planned, but you sure made ‘em like it.” Here, the planned adaptation has organically evolved into an African American appropriation of Shakespeare. One final note about this wonderful film. Harlem was the major site between 1935 and 1939 of the Negro Theatre Project (a part of the Federal Theatre Project or FTP), a New Deal endeavor providing employment to black directors, actors, and other aspiring artists in major cities throughout America. The Lafayette Theatre in Harlem put on some thirty plays during this time, most famously Orson Welles’s so-called Voodoo Macbeth in 1936. One of the

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FIGURE 5.13 An Audience Adapts Shakespeare in Paradise in Harlem (1939).

key actors in many of these productions was, in fact, Frank Wilson, who played Lem in Paradise in Harlem. The fact that funding was cut for the FTP in 1939, the year of the film’s production, ending one of the few existing support systems for African American art, gives Paradise in Harlem’s ending a more defiant, and perhaps triumphant, meaning. Especially in light of the near-complete lack of support and resources for black film artists, the ending also begs to be read as highly self-reflexive. In the film’s highly ambivalent engagement with Shakespeare, British literature’s, and high culture’s, imperial, civilizing power has been reappropriated by the African American community in the form of music that will come to form the basic soundtrack of modernity.

Musicals Kiss Me Kate (1953) is one of the earliest of the major Hollywood musicals based on British literature, the equally famous, later ones being West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), and Oliver! (1968). Only Universal’s The Boys from Syracuse (1940), an adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, came before it. Based on the 1948 Broadway production which featured Tony Award–winning music and lyrics by Cole Porter, the MGM film was directed by George Sidney. The story focuses on the divorced-but-still-in-love couple of Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi, who are the stars of the play within the film, Kiss Me Kate, a Broadway musical version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The couple’s latest blow-up mirrors the relationship of Katherine and Petruchio, right on up to the predictable conclusion in which they both decide

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to put down their fists and admit they still love one another. Featuring some rather wonderful set pieces, including “Why Can’t You Behave,” “Always True to You in My Fashion,” and “Brush up your Shakespeare,” this big Technicolor production was filmed in 3D—coming at the tail end of the craze—and has long been regarded as one of the most successful specimens of the polarized 3D system. (For more on the later Brit-Lit musicals, see below, pp. 278–9.)

Westerns Though numerous classic westerns appropriated Brit-Lit in creative ways, the best example being John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), which used Hamlet explicitly as part of its meditation on revenge, only a small number can be said to have been based on British literature.79 One that was is the aforementioned King Lear adaptation Broken Lance, which essentially was a remake of House of Strangers. Two others were William A. Wellman’s Yellow Sky (1948), based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Delmer Daves’s Jubal (1956), which exploits numerous parallels with Othello. Like Forbidden Planet, Yellow Sky reimagines The Tempest in a frightening, inhospitable land—this time in Death Valley, California, rather than an alien planet. Gregory Peck plays “Stretch” Dawson, a morally complicated gang leader of thieves and rapists who—in an attempt to escape the army—treks across the desert for days until arriving at the ghost town on the other side, Yellow Sky, which is occupied only by an old man and his granddaughter “Mike” (Anne Baxter). The journey changes all of the men, making some wilder and some tamer, and the rest of the film follows their struggle over the girl and the gold that she and her grandfather are hiding. Peck is characteristically brilliant in an uncharacteristic role, straddling the parts of Antonio and Ferdinand, both prodigal son on his way home and lover. What makes Yellow Sky fascinating, however, is the diminishment of the Prospero figure in favor of “Miranda” as the moral beacon in this barren and black world. Rather than suggesting to the men the possibility of some “brave new world,” though, “Mike” triggers in them memories of a lost paradise—specifically, the warmth and security of childhood. Those men, like Stretch, who are lucky enough to have such memories eventually come round; those who never experienced paradise remain in hell or, yet worse, wind up dead.

Mystery Since this chapter begins with the Sherlock Holmes series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, some mention of the mystery subgenre is in order.

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Between 1939 and 1946, the pair starred in fourteen Holmes films, ranging from period films that stuck relatively close to the source material (e.g., The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1939) to original screenplay modernizations like Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943). The first two films in the series were produced by 20th Century Fox, whose vision was to reproduce in Victorian detail the major stories of Conan Doyle and his authorized American devotee William Gillette (see The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1939); conflicts between the studio and the Conan Doyle estate, however, and concerns about the relevance of the spy series in wartime, caused Fox to cease production of the films. According to David Stuart Davies, producers feared that the films’ period settings would make them seem irrelevant in wartime: “Foreign agents and spies were much more typical and topical than the antiquated criminal activities of Moriarty and the like.”80 Universal swept in in 1942 and bought the series from Fox, making three films per year until 1946, when Rathbone quit and producers determined it was prudent simply to cancel the series. As we’ve seen, Universal did not disagree with those at Fox about the relevance of the Victorian Holmes during the Second World War, but rather than ditching Holmes, the studio decided to update him. As the opening title card of the first Universal film, Voice of Terror (1942), clearly declared: Sherlock Holmes, the immortal character of fiction created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is ageless, invincible and unchanging. In solving significant problems of the present day he remains—as ever—the supreme master of deductive reasoning. Here is that wonderful paradoxical rhetoric we find in the marketing of so much adapted canonical literature: the idea that a particular work is so “ageless” and “unchanging” that it needs to be modernized and changed in order for it to speak to our time! In any case, Universal had solved the “war problem”; the series was immensely successful, and the modernized Sherlock has been a staple of film, television, and literature to this very day. *** The period 1940–55 ushered in numerous changes to American film production: the Second World War, postwar economic decline, the rise of conservative ideology, the Red Scare, the issuance of the blacklist, studio divestiture, and the rise of widescreen and other technologies designed to combat television’s growing influence, all contributed to these changes. One of the best outcomes of them, however, was the greater diversity of offerings resulting from the rise of independent producers, a diversity that film historian Peter Lev sees as leading, in the later 1950s, to “an important shift away

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from a relatively stable system of film genres (reflecting the studios’ sense of the audience) and toward more variety and experimentation (reflecting the range of interests of the independent producers interacting with a changing, fragmenting audience).”81 We’ve attempted to demonstrate in this section just how much of this increasing diversity already was evident in the genre films of the 1940s and early 1950s.

5 World cinema adaptations of Brit-Lit If American filmmakers were forced by Britain’s cinematic triumphs to reconsider their uses of Brit-Lit, especially due to the importance of the British import market, filmmakers elsewhere remained, theoretically speaking, more free to do with the material what they wanted. Still, even if we include those films by Buñuel and Kurosawa which we discuss below in the section on auteurs, the number of memorable non-Anglophone Brit-Lit films made in this period is relatively small. Aleksandr Andriyevsky’s 1946 Soviet film, Robinzon Kruzo, holds the distinction of having been the world’s first glasses-free 3-D film, as well as the first 3-D movie ever filmed in color. The movie was a sensation, running for two years at the 200-seat Stereokino in Moscow, and earning the praise even of Eisenstein himself, who believed that 3-D was part of the cinema’s natural evolution. If it seems odd that the Soviet Union tried to win this particular technological “race” by adapting the ultimate British novel of bourgeois individualism, we might consider the immediate postwar context. As film critic J. Hoberman notes, “In the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, it was surely the spectacle of Robinson’s survival that appealed to the Soviets. Hadn’t Maksim Gorky called Robinson Crusoe the ‘Bible of the Unconquerable’? And hadn’t Stalin himself during his 1915 exile been something like the ‘Robinson Crusoe of Siberia’? Andriyevsky’s Robinzon Kruzo wasn’t Defoe’s song of bourgeois capitalism but of Soviet endurance and ingenuity.”82 Another peculiar film was R. C. Talwar’s Sangdil or Hearts of Stone (1952), a Hindi adaptation of Jane Eyre—both the novel and the Robert Stevenson film. It focuses on the trials of the orphan Kamla, left by her dying father to his closest friend, a kind but sickly man whose wife—the Mrs Reed figure— beats and berates the girl constantly. Fortunately, Kamla enjoys the friendship and love of the couple’s child, Shekhar, until she is sent away from the home. The story then meanders both toward and away from Jane Eyre, through numerous musical interludes, until the adult Kamla (played by Madhubala) meets the adult Shekhar (Dilip Kumar), the two are reunited, and they fall in love. Everything is pointing to their marriage and happiness until Kamla learns

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of his dark secret. She leaves him, but on the night that Shekhar’s mad and truly frightening wife burns down their (impressively English-Gothic-looking) home, Kamla hears his cries over an impossible distance, rushes back to the house, and finds him there, alone and blind. In the final shot, the two lovers hold one another tightly, together at last. The film is a curious mix of a thoroughly indigenous Parsi-influenced melodrama; an exploitation of the Indian Gothic craze of the late 1940s and 1950s, which was inspired by the landmark film Mahal (1949), also starring Madhubala; a creative adaptation of the Brontë novel; and a beautiful black and white homage to, and reworking of, the famous Hollywood film of 1943. This last fact demonstrates the degree to which the Jane Eyre craze kicked off by Hitchcock’s Rebecca became a truly global phenomenon, lasting well over a decade. What interests us most about Sangdil, however, is the manner in which the film appears to be using the plot of Jane Eyre to fantasize an alternative ending to another Brontë’s novel, Emily’s Wuthering Heights. We’ve seen before, and we’ll see again later, the tendency of filmmakers to collapse the two novels in various ways, but here the decision to make the Jane and Rochester characters childhood soul mates and non-blood siblings introduces Emily’s story in a much more direct manner than we’ve seen before. The kind old “father” resembles Mr Earnshaw, and accordingly his abusive wife combines the roles of Hindley and Mrs Reed. This setup leads to some interesting crossings of the two main couples, with the Kamla/ Jane character—wild and dirty and sent away—taking on some of Heathcliff’s character, and the Shekhar/Rochester character—married into misery—taking on some of Catherine’s qualities. The upshot is that when the two are reunited and eventually wind up together, the informed audience perceives these quasi-supernatural events in terms of a cosmic justice. Unlike the close of Jane Eyre, which provokes a certain ambivalence in many readers, Sangdil pleases by allowing Heathcliff and Cathy their chance to live a while together. A final film worth mentioning belonged to the so-called “Tradition of Quality” panned by Truffaut in his first articulation of the auteur theory (see below, pp. 255–7). Marc Allégret’s L’Amant de Lady Chatterley (1955) proved controversial, though mainly because of the mess surrounding Lawrence’s 1928 novel, which still hadn’t been published in Britain at the time of the film’s release. The film, which imagines the story in the present time but follows the plot of the novel quite closely (barring its happy “Hollywood” ending),83 was banned in America for four years due to a New York state lawsuit claiming that it promoted adultery. Eventually, the case was dismissed when “the Court of Appeals unanimously and explicitly rejected any notion that the film is obscene.”84 All of this controversy ensured that Allégret’s awkward little film would eventually be seen by more people than it probably deserved. It’s an admirable enough

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attempt to get at some of Lawrence’s class and sexual themes; at times the discussions about sex are quite direct. The times and the threat of censorship ensured, however, that the sex scenes would have to be symbolized by lame cutaway imagery such as (phallic) trees being chopped down by workers.85 More important, the novel’s crucial themes—such as the spiritual yearning for the integration of mind and body—wound up being cut away along with those sex scenes. The film thus becomes more about the drama of adultery than the growth of Constance and Mellors through their affair. Arthur Knight, writing for the Saturday Review, neatly summed up the matter in 1959 after the long court case: “The real importance of this Lady Chatterley, I’m afraid, lies in the law books, not in the film itself. The triumph is for freedom, not for art.”86 A year later, a similar statement would become applicable in Britain, since that was the year that jurors determined that Penguin Books was “not guilty” of violating the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 for having finally published an unexpurgated edition of Lawrence’s novel. Some other noteworthy international films produced during the war and in the following decade include Odio, based on The Mill on the Floss (Mexico, 1940); Sürtük, based on Shaw’s Pygmalion (Turkey, 1942); Enamorada, based on The Taming of the Shrew (Mexico, 1946); Al Comps de tu Mentira, or The Importance of Being Earnest (Argentina, 1950); Kanske en Gentleman, based on Pygmalion (Sweden, 1950); and It’s Never too Late, based on A Christmas Carol (Italy, 1953). One of the greatest films of the era, or any era, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) explicitly appropriated Shakespeare’s Othello, leading Brian Stonehill to claim that the film presents itself “as a set of variations on the theme[s]” of the play.87 Though no longer appropriated as a means of establishing the legitimacy of national cinemas, Brit-Lit continued throughout this period to influence and inspire international filmmakers.

6 The auteur theory and adaptation If Thomas Schatz was correct in 1981 that the auteur theory is “the single most productive concept in film history over the past quarter century,”88 then obviously its importance for our study will need to remain clear in all of the remaining chapters. We could have begun the next chapter in 1954, the year in which Truffaut published “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” widely regarded as the opening salvo of the auteur movement. Instead, and in the face of numerous other options, we’ve decided to make the later 1950s—the original years of the French New Wave—our starting point for the next chapter. In doing so, we’ve granted ourselves a little room to reflect on the auteur theory’s rise in relation to past events such as the decline of the studio system.

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The auteur theory will have profound implications for film’s relationship to literature and the other arts, as well as related concepts such as “authorship” and “originality”: theoretically, if not practically, auteurism helps bring to an end, or at least impacts profoundly, many of the major patterns this book’s first five chapters have traced. At the same time, because this book downplays the case study approach to adaptation history, the auteur concept offers many pitfalls, including the temptation to cover all of the “great” directors’ films, or to write a great deal on films that scholars already have analyzed in detail. One of our major goals is to avoid any suggestion that great films by exceptional directors typically can stand in as emblematic of the larger trends in adaptation history. More centrally, auteur theory is firmly entrenched in cinematic history and that’s the main lens through which we view adaptations. That is, once the theory gained acceptance, it clearly went beyond merely offering analytical purchase and actually affected how filmmakers operated. It changed the practice of those who inhabited the role of the auteur. As important for our purposes, we view the concept’s general privileging of a singular and more or less consistent creative force to intersect more neatly with typical concepts of literary authorship than do theories of industrial film production. As a result, the auteur theory introduces new terms—some quite problematic—for thinking about the ever-changing, perhaps evolving, relationship of literature and film. According to John Caughie, Truffaut’s early celebrations of “auteurs” were directly influenced by the late 1940s writings of Alexandre Astruc, who understood the evolution of film artistry in terms of the ever-closing gap between film and the traditional arts: The cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successfully a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo.89 Words that might have seemed revolutionary to Truffaut were in fact merely a restatement of a very old idea: film evolves by developing a “language” which—formally and aesthetically—separates it from literature; in developing this distinctive language, film becomes more like literature, a serious cultural art form. This paradoxical language defines film’s evolution in terms of its simultaneous movement toward and away from literature.

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Truffaut’s “A Certain Tendency” manages to communicate the same paradox by using the concept of “literariness” as a measuring stick for a film’s quality. In fact, auteurism might be said to begin with adaptations and adaptation theory since, for Truffaut, the strength of a director has precisely to do with his ability to transform his source material into an expression of his own personality and vision. To establish the traditional cinema against which the auteur must define himself, Truffaut focuses specifically on films that might be called “literary,” in one sense or another. Edward Buscombe has brilliantly and influentially summed up this logic: Truffaut attacks what he calls the tradition of quality in the French cinema, by which he means … especially the adaptations by Aurenche and Bost of well-known novels. They are attacked for being literary, not truly cinematic, and are also found guilty of “psychological realism.” Truffaut defines a true film auteur as one who brings something genuinely personal to his subject instead of merely producing a tasteful, accurate but lifeless rendering of the original material.90 How much impact might the auteur theory’s insistence on originality, as opposed to fidelity, have exerted on the emergence of the scholarly “fidelity” discourse? As we’ve seen, fidelity analyses of film began to plague reviews in the teens and became more prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, but we might speculate that the influence of the auteur theory helped to sustain a polemic that should have died off from its own tediousness a long time ago. In any case, if we accept that Truffaut’s seminal essay served as a starting point for the Cahiers du cinéma group’s development of the theory over the following decade, we must understand how central the literature-film relationship is to their thinking. We of course agree that the greatest adaptations show a willingness to move beyond simple loyalty to their source texts. To the degree that nonfidelity is what the auteur theory clearly endorses, it can be said to celebrate more radical adaptation methods. On the theory’s other side, however—the one that compares the great director to the great author—the auteur theory promotes a conservative approach to artistry and textuality, which John Caughie rightly describes as a form of romanticism, “the installation in the cinema of the figure who had dominated the other arts for over a century: the romantic artist, individual and self –expressive.”91 Nor has it been lost on others that such romanticism has served precisely to thrust film into the antiseptic and relatively apolitical realm of high culture; for John Hess, auteurism was “a justification, couched in aesthetic terms, of a culturally conservative, politically reactionary attempt to remove film from the realm of social and

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political concern, in which the progressive forces of the Resistance had placed all the arts in the years after the war.”92 Such a theory cannot account for the radicalism which could be unleashed by individual auteurs such as Buñuel or Pasolini, but it accurately diagnoses the conservative impulses underlying the movement. The legacy of auteurism has as much to do with reception, of course, as it does with production, and in this regard the contributions of the theory to adaptation studies are potentially profound. Simply put, we read films differently as a result of the auteur theory, adaptations included. Again, it is Caughie who has best formulated the reasons why: The attention to mise en scène, even to the extent of a certain historically necessary formalism, is probably the most important positive contribution of auteurism to the development of a precise and detailed film criticism, engaging with the specific mechanisms of visual discourse, freeing it from literary models, and from the liberal commitments which were prepared to validate films on the basis of their themes alone.93 We would add that the new attention to the positively theorized derivations from, and original riffs on, source material may be the most important contribution of auteurism to a more precise and detailed type of adaptation criticism. When encountering an adapted Shakespeare film by Kurosawa or a D. H. Lawrence novel by Ken Russell, the viewer adjusts his viewing expectations significantly. Rather than seeing them as Shakespeare or Lawrence as filmed by a certain director, the viewer likely sees them as Kurosawa’s or Russell’s creative engagements with classic source texts. The difference is everything, for the critic will look first to the mise-en-scène and camera movement, trusting the director’s understanding and artistry rather than assuming his inferiority. For the cinephile or the expert, the “primary” and “secondary” text relationship has been fundamentally altered by the presence of the auteur. From our perspective, the key issue in identifying an auteur adaptation would be the degree to which one’s knowledge of the director—whether we mean by this something biographical, stylistic, or ideological—clarifies something important about the adaptation. Since the protocols of reading according to the theory apply just as well to pre-1954 films as later ones, questions will emerge here as to whether some of the directors on whom we’ve already focused, especially Michael Powell, David Lean, William Wyler, and Laurence Olivier, should be considered auteurs and discussed alongside those we touch on below: Buñuel, Welles, and Kurosawa. The question is especially pertinent considering that the auteur theory was in many ways anticipated as early as 1950 by the English critic Lindsay Anderson, who surely had the

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examples of Olivier and Lean before him when he praised the ability of certain directors to “use the cinema to express his own feelings or his own ideas” rather than attempting to realize the adapted “author’s intentions.”94 Olivier’s “essay on” Hamlet seems the epitome of the auteur film, but what might we say about his restrained Technicolor Richard III of 1955, which shows relatively few touches of his personality or the self-reflexive style he pioneered in Henry V and Hamlet. Furthermore, what about our primary interest in historicizing the making of adaptations? The case of Henry V is particularly interesting, for example, because of the film’s obvious embeddedness in the wartime context. Is there a conflict between historicist film analysis and the auteur theory? How representative of their historical moments are personally inflected films directed by strong individuals? Different films and their creators can of course be discussed within multiple appropriate contexts. At least one of Welles’s Shakespeare films could be discussed just as logically in the section above on American postwar adaptations. Instead, we discuss his films below. The history of candidates for the category of auteur adaptation, in this period and just beyond it, is potentially huge. Hitchcock’s Rope and Ford’s My Darling Clementine are obvious examples of auteur Brit-Lit adaptation and appropriation, respectively. We’ve tried throughout this book to select the most appropriate contexts for analyzing the films, but we suffer no illusions about the arbitrary nature of many such decisions. In the few paragraphs that close out this chapter, we wish to consider just a few films that we think shed light on the value of the auteur theory for adaptation studies specifically. Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe of 1954 is arguably the most useful example of a contemporary Brit-Lit adaptation best approached through the auteur theory. The sheer amount of ideological misdirection in the film might be impossible to sort out if we did not know so much about Buñuel’s aesthetic and political priorities. Essentially, the film manages to follow the novel’s plot fairly closely while transforming Defoe’s celebration of the bourgeois Christian hero into an indictment of the values he represents. As Gillian Parker eloquently explains, “What Buñuel does is divide off from the original work its whole freight of implications—its economic, religious, moral, political meanings—either by simply omitting implications, showing the event but excluding Crusoe/Defoe’s interpretation, or by including, for example, some of the religious or imperial overtones, but only for critical scrutiny or rejection.”95 Particularly remarkable, though, is how insistent Buñuel is that the audience be constantly aware of a tension between the events presented in the film and the methods according to which they are presented. For example, the film’s mawkish score is highly reminiscent of a big-budget Hollywood film, but it often works to undermine rather than reinforce the film’s positive portrayal of Crusoe. It does so mainly

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by suggesting the excessive degrees of sentimentality and shallowness on which such celebratory readings of the character depend. Were the film directed by some studio hack or even an unknown, a viewer might become exasperated early on and give up on the film as an unimaginative tribute to Defoe’s values. Knowing that the director is Buñuel, however, a man who not only preferred surrealism and absurdism to cinematic illusionism, but also made several films explicitly critical of the bourgeoisie, encourages the viewer to stay put and see the confusing project through to its end. By the time the credits roll, his aims have become clearer, having altered our perspective of Crusoe not by changing him fundamentally but by presenting him to us through a medium whose ability to objectify the subject is unlimited: “In the novel we look at the world solely through Crusoe’s eyes; in the film we look at the world and at Crusoe, now a separate figure, situated within it.”96 Knowing what Buñuel thinks of this world will inevitably guide our evaluation of Robinson. Buñuel’s other Brit-Lit film from this period, Abismos de pasión (1954), a version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights set in nineteenth-century Mexico, also benefits from our understanding of his politics. In spite of its different setting and mainly original dialogue, Buñuel in this case wishes to highlight the closeness of his film to Brontë’s novel. The opening captions stress this fact almost to the point of redundancy: This picture is based on Wuthering Heights, the immortal work of Emily Bronte, written more than a hundred years ago. Its characters are at the mercy of their own instincts and passions. They are unique beings for whom the so-called social conventions do not exist. … Most importantly this picture tries to remain true to the spirit of Emily Bronte’s novel. Whereas one may be shocked that Buñuel wished to adapt Defoe, one might say “of course” upon hearing he adapted Wuthering Heights. In this case of an almost surreal novel focused on two characters driven by their passions and destroyed by the social order, we have a story which seems—in ideological and thematic terms—directly linked to L’Age d’Or (1930), Belle de Jour (1967), or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Although his film departs radically from Brontë’s novel in its details, it insists on a “spiritual” kinship between the two texts, which serves to emphasize how we should read the story—that is, not merely as Joyce Carol Oates would have it, “an assured demonstration of the finite and tragically self-consuming nature of ‘passion,’”97 but instead, as a diagnosis of the social conditions which would make passion so pathological a condition. Again, Buñuel’s consistent ideological commitments help us to read his complex adaptation of a classic novel.

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In turning to Welles’s aforementioned early Shakespeare films, Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952), we might question the degree to which the director’s vision is represented at all, especially in light of the budget constraints he faced in making them. Both are wonderfully conceived adaptations and deeply flawed films, marked by flashes of utter brilliance and hobbled by limited resources. For Macbeth, Welles was forced to accept the limited funds (about $800,000) granted to him by Republic Pictures, famous of course for producing westerns. He shot the entire film in twenty-three days. The darkly lit, rocky, labyrinthine castle spaces sometimes work brilliantly as a metaphor for the dark recesses of the Macbeth’s minds and souls; it seems a strange coincidence that Olivier’s Hamlet was made the same year, using essentially the same approach to his castle sets. In Welles’s case, however, the decision to move in such a direction may have been forced upon him by virtue of the fact that he’d inherited the craggy sets Republic had hanging around from previous western shoots. Interestingly, Welles pitched Macbeth as perhaps the most cinematic of Shakespeare’s plays, “a perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and Bride of Frankenstein,”98 and his film has always been admired for its relentless and characteristically Wellesian filmic qualities; as Jean Cocteau remarked, “not a single shot is left to chance.”99 Still, the frantic pace of filming and monetary constraints took their toll on Macbeth. The shoddy costumes, uneven editing and sound dubbing, and the too-theatrical performances of several key actors are hard to ignore. Welles himself is said to have pulled the movie out of the Venice Film Festival after seeing Olivier’s Hamlet. Yet, in spite of such weaknesses, who in their right mind would change even a millisecond of the foggy horror-film opening involving the three Weird Sisters and their “Voodoo” mud-doll Macbeth (see Figure 5.14)?

FIGURE 5.14 The Weird Sisters of Welles’s Macbeth (1948).

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In the case of this film, one can easily overlook the flaws of the adaptation simply by focusing on the wonders of the mise-en-scène. Though similar budgetary constraints plagued Welles’s Othello—this time filming was protracted over a period of three years, and similar costuming, sound editing, and acting problems are evident—the film might justifiably be called a masterpiece. A joint United Artists-Marceau Films production, the film won the Palme d’or at Cannes in 1952 and then failed to find an American distributor for three years. When it finally was released in 1955, it made only $40,000, the result almost certainly of the savagely cranky reviews of British and American critics who could not abide so thoroughly cinematic a handling of Shakespeare.100 Thematically unified around the conception of Iago as a spider at the center of a deadly web he himself has spun (see 2.3.361), the film’s most memorable moments involve intricate chiaroscuro shadow-work and set designs which multiply net, web, and prisongrate motifs from the first to the last shot. But the most striking feature of Othello, and the one that seems to have baffled conservative critics, is the rapid montage style which imposed upon Othello an increasingly disoriented, fragmented subjectivity that gradually begins to wear down the audience as well. Kenneth Rothwell exaggerates the case when he says that with Othello, Welles invented the MTV style decades before it was invented,” but he’s right in noting how the Eisensteinian techniques Welles employs here “brought together fragments from all corners of the play, [and] reworked them into a mosaic.” Certainly, Welles’s bold approach to Shakespeare as a movable text, a collection of “fragments” that can be reordered, cut down, expanded, and excised explains why it took Anglophone critics accustomed to Olivier ’s more mainstream style nearly forty years to recognize the genius of Othello. Welles would go on to employ an even more diverse range of filming and editing techniques in his third Shakespeare film, Falstaff, aka Chimes at Midnight (1966), whose famous battle scene remains, in our estimation, perhaps the single most functional and successful example of Eisensteinian découpage in the history of Brit-Lit adaptations (see pp. 307–8). We might note, though, how the guiding hand of this famously brash, eccentric, and experimental auteur caused his Shakespeare films to seem for many years as if they were somehow outside of their historical moments—outside the history of film that they so influenced. More for all time, that is, than of an age. Perhaps the most impressive of all Shakespeare films of this era, however, was Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 adaptation of Macbeth, Kumonosu-jô, or, as it’s usually called in English, Throne of Blood. In this case, the auteur theory promotes our special reflection on the skillfulness of Kurosawa’s transposition

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of the Jacobean play into a feudal Japanese setting, on the one hand, and the beauty and thematic functionality of the mise-en-scène, on the other. Much like Olivier’s Hamlet, whose brilliance consists in its efficient narrowing of the story through a provocative, unified theme, Kurosawa zooms in on the futility of humankind’s ambition in the face of nature, effectively swerving from any digressive paths down which a less confident artist might be led. He explicitly integrates and celebrates the native Japanese tradition of the Noh theater to highlight the degree to which even the actions of the main characters are limited, even determined, by nature. The Lady Macbeth figure, Asaji, for example, is made up to resemble the Shakumi figure from Noh, the middleaged woman, suffering internally, whose expressionless face paradoxically highlights an interiority that passes show. As Donald Richie argues, “She is the most limited, the most confined, the most driven, the most evil” of the film’s characters, and this may be why her associations with Noh are the most obvious ones in the film.101 Kurosawa’s seamless transposition of historical setting, his devotion to native theatrical tradition, his very Japanese emphasis on group responsibility over individual ambition, and his film’s tonal reflection of the harshness of postwar Japanese life, all suggest the degree to which the film is of its time and place. And yet, as in the case of Welles, the auteur theory helps us to see those elements of the film that seemingly transcend time and place. As Richie has suggested, the description of Kurosawa by some Japanese critics as their “least Japanese” director is “understandable in the sense that he is Western enough to be openly individual. Completely uninterested in the standard program film, … he has gone beyond the accepted confines of cinematic language as the Japanese understood them and, in so doing, has broadened them.”102 Part of this relatively universal appeal has to do with the clarity and power of Kurosawa’s mise-en-scène. Jack J. Jorgens persuasively argues that “Kurosawa is one of the few film-makers to adapt Shakespeare, whose screen images have the density and power of Shakespeare’s poetic images.”103 Jorgens demonstrates how thoroughly these images reinforce the central interpretive focus of the film, analyzing, for instance, how the film’s extensive screening imagery—tree branches, fog, rain, and numerous items fashioned from the wood of the Cobweb Forest, including arrows (see Figure 5.15)—serves to remind viewers of the dominance and inescapability of nature.104 In spite of the fact that Kurosawa was by 1957 a significant international film celebrity, Throne of Blood, like Welles’s films, wasn’t well received by those mainstream critics who perceived adaptations as a “literary” genre first and foremost. Even Bosley Crowther, who tended to heap praise on even the

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FIGURE 5.15 Nature Overwhelms Washizu in Throne of Blood (1957).

least deserving adaptations of literature, thought that it looked “fantastic and funny,” largely because of how far it left Shakespeare behind: Let us quickly remark that he has not attempted to employ the Shakespearean dialogue in even a sketchy translation, nor has he used all the Scottish characters, nor even the names of the characters in the original play. He has simply purloined the thread of the drama and used it as the plot of a film that splatters the screen with a wild horse-opera set in medieval Japan.105 This is a bad review, simply because Crowther couldn’t see beyond what Kurosawa was doing to Shakespeare. Those critics able to examine what he was doing with Shakespeare saw a very different picture. With the gradual entrenchment of the auteur theory, those critics have grown in number, and today Throne of Blood stands out as one of the two or three greatest Shakespeare films ever made. The auteur theory quite directly impacted the relationship of film and literature, by elevating certain directors to the level of great artists and thereby permitting them to take greater control over the literary material they adapted. One has the sense while watching Buñuel direct Defoe, or Kurosawa Shakespeare, of two mighty forces combining their powers to create new worlds, like virtuoso jazz musicians. What is weak in Welles’s Shakespeare is balanced by what is strong in Welles, so that these films demand to be read as more than mere “versions” of powerful source texts. Such a dynamic might also explain why so many of the essential directors—Woody Allen, Buñuel,

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Coppola, Ford, Godard, Griffith, Hitchcock, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Lean, Méliès, Murnau, Olivier, Pasolini, Polanski, Rivette, Welles, et cetera—have adapted British literature, and especially Shakespeare, at some point during their careers: the temptation to wrestle with the traditionally recognized luminaries of the Western literary tradition—the temptation, that is, to define one’s artistic excellence, distinctiveness, and originality by confronting one’s most famous artistic forebears—has proven irresistible to a large number of great film artists.

7 Conclusion By the end of this period, world cinema had produced just about every type of adaptation and/or appropriation of British literature imaginable (with maybe the exception of pornographic adaptations, which didn’t arrive until the 1960s and 1970s). Arguably, the most important shift during this period was the British Empire’s successful reclamation of its own literary and historical culture, as it managed to wrest away the Brit-Lit film from Hollywood. This did not mean an end to Hollywood’s or other international film producers’ interests in Brit-Lit source material, of course, but it did mean a necessary rethinking of the traditional approaches to it. The postwar British film and television industries’ claims of “authenticity” redefined the politics of Brit-Lit adaptation by establishing a new style and ideal which other films, both inside and outside of Britain, would have to negotiate in the years ahead.

6 Traditions and revolutions: The Brit-Lit film, 1957–79

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lthough by the 1950s US producers had largely scaled back their reliance on British literary source material (see above, pp. 234–6), the international Brit-Lit film still had the cultural capital to dominate the Academy Awards well into the 1960s. The Best Picture nominees included: Sons and Lovers (1960), West Side Story (1961), Lawrence of Arabia* (1962), Tom Jones* (1963), Becket (1964), Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady* (1964), A Man for All Seasons (1966), Dr. Doolittle (1967), Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), and Oliver!* (1968).1 Some of these films drew on adaptation styles and assumptions about Britishness that were forged in much earlier decades of film history. In a decade of great upheaval and cultural strife, tradition fared surprisingly well in the mainstream movie house. In the art houses, however, where Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave had begun to exert a considerable influence on film styles,2 the adaptations were becoming grittier, angrier, at times even nihilistic: Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963), Peter Hall’s underrated A Midsummer Night Dream (1968), Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), and the two remarkable films of King Lear made in 1971 by Brook and Grigori Kozintsev respectively. Indeed, several of the darker Brit-Lit films of the 1970s continue to be regarded today as among the most dynamic and revolutionary movies of any era: A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and Apocalypse Now (1979), to mention a few. Though Brit-Lit films could easily have ossified into irrelevancy, then, they were far from peripheral in the era of independent production. In this chapter, we examine Brit-Lit adaptations beginning in the late 1950s, with the formation of the French New Wave, and stopping in the late 1970s, just prior to the surprising resurgence of the heritage film in the following decade. Identifying unique trends in national styles of adaptation (mainly in Britain and the United States) becomes complicated in these decades, given the increasingly hybrid, international nature of film production, but we suggest

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that British producers were mainly responsible for an ambitious reinvention of the Brit-Lit prestige film, which we call the “Panavision adaptation,” as well as a distinct brand of literary horror in Hammer films. In the United States, much of the interest in British literature was localized in this period in the production of mainstream fare such as musicals, animation, and thrillers based on genre fiction. The second part of the chapter charts the influence of European cinema on art-house movements such as the British New Wave, arguing that the rise of auteur theory led to the creation of a new kind of Brit-Lit film, which we call the “auteur adaptation.” Though such films emerged from, and still had strong roots in, a number of national cinemas, it’s also true that under the influence of the international auteur cinema, the Brit-Lit film continued to be, more than ever, a transnational phenomenon. Before turning to the chapter’s first focused section on Panavision adaptations, we’d like to discuss just briefly what we see as some of the most relevant trends in film production between the late 1950s and 1970s. British cinema in the 1960s experienced a fair amount of growth and energy. A new sense of prosperity followed the long postwar recovery, and a number of films sought to address, often critically, the rise of a consumer culture (see below, pp. 290–4). According to Paul Newland, “The British working classes became less deferential and more affluent, and more able to enjoy a kind of consumer lifestyle their parents could only have dreamed of.”3 As in the United States, cinema attendance in Britain had declined since the 1950s, and this sparked the turn to movies for and about youth.4 Amy Sargeant associates 1960s British cinema with the “birth of cool,” otherwise known as Swinging London: “Many of the films of the 1960s are the work of visiting directors, attracted by a much publicized and promoted London scene in music, art, architecture, industrial design, fashion and photography.”5 Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) captures the energy of the art and fashion scene in London, and a new sense of social mobility and sexual freedom informs a series of films starring Michael Caine: The Ipcress File (1965), Alfie (1966), and The Italian Job (1969). Sargeant also identifies Julie Christie as an ambassador of 1960s style and attitude in such films as Billy Liar! (1963) and Darling (1965).6 Probably the most important cinematic movement of the decade, however, was the so-called British New Wave, a socio-realist cinema focused on the mobile working and middle classes of the industrial North (see below, pp. 290–6).7 The relative prosperity of the 1960s British film industry was fueled partly by an influx of American financing, especially in Hollywood’s British subsidiaries.8 Compared to the relative confidence and style of 1960s filmmaking, the British film industry suffered several setbacks in the 1970s.9 There was a precipitous drop in Hollywood’s investment in the British film industry,10 and the first Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher made good on a

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promise to end subsidies for the industry.11 The number of registered British productions fell from ninety-eight in 1971 to a mere thirty-six by 1981.12 It was a gloomier and much more divisive decade than the 1960s in many ways, with the rise of inner-city racial tension, the crisis over Home Rule in Northern Ireland accompanied by a series of IRA bombings in London, as well as a series of protracted industrial actions.13 British cinematic talent like John Schlesinger and Jack Clayton moved to Hollywood, and others turned away from the cinema toward television production. Shail is correct in noting, then, that the “1970s has invariably been seen as an era of decline for British Cinema.”14 At the same time, the Carry On franchise thrived, and so did the Bond films. The 1970s offered opportunities to alternative and art-house filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick (see below, pp. 311–14), Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, and Susan Clayton, whose remarkable The Song of the Shirt (1979) translated Thomas Hood’s poem on the poverty of garment workers into a striking experimental documentary.15 Not all film historians, therefore, view the 1970s as mere “shlock and dross.”16 Andrew Higson, for example, sees the decade as a vital transitional period leading to a 1980s revival, in which productions such as Chariots of Fire (1981) found international success.17 Though film historians have never acknowledged the fact, Brit-Lit adaptations thrived in this era and could be said to have formed the backbone of the film industry: The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970); A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971); The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971); Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (joint US/UK, Mel Stuart, 1971); Don’t Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973); Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974); Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975); The Tempest (Derek Jarman, 1979), et cetera. Hollywood took a quite different direction in these decades. Competition from television forced many US studios to farm out the production of feature films to independent film companies so that by “1958, half of the features produced in the United States were ‘independent.’”18 As we’ve seen, Hollywood relied increasingly in the 1960s on independent British producers, which contributed directly to the large number of mainstream Brit-Lit adaptations. By the end of the decade, in a time of financial crisis for the Hollywood studios, independent productions were exerting even greater influence on American cinema. Independent films like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) were widely credited as having saved Hollywood from financial and artistic ruin. Peter Biskind writes that these particular films “sent tremors through the industry”19 and gave birth to “The New Hollywood” of the 1970s: This was to be a directors’ decade if ever there was one. Directors as a group enjoyed more power, prestige, and wealth than they ever had

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before. … The first wave … included Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Coppola, Warren Beatty, Stanley Kubrick, Dennis Hopper, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Bob Fosse, Robert Benton, Arthur Penn, John Cassavetes, Alan Pakula, Paul Mazursky, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, and Richard Lester. The second wave was made up by the early boomers …, the film school generation, the so-called movie brats. This group included Scorsese, Spielberg, George Lucas, John Milius, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma, and Terence Malick.20 In contrast to Great Britain, American cinema enjoyed in the 1970s one of its golden ages. The antiestablishment sentiment of many New Hollywood films was striking for American pictures, and many of the era’s most famous directors, much influenced by the auteur theory, drew heavily on European art-house styles in cinematography and editing.21 Nonetheless, signs of trouble were also visible by mid-decade, when the runaway success of Jaws (1975) served to redirect Hollywood financing back toward big-budget films and blockbusters and away from the more progressive films of the director’s cinema.22 David Cook, in fact, characterizes the release of Jaws as the “paradigmatic event of the seventies,”23 establishing new models of studio investment in so-called “event films.” The soundness of these strategies would soon be validated by the international success of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), whose earnings surpassed 750 million dollars. If such blockbusters can be said to have killed the too short-lived American director’s cinema of the 1970s, Michael Cimino’s 44 million dollar western, Heaven’s Gate (1980)—which managed to earn back only three and a half million dollars at the box office and was panned by critics—can be said to have buried it.

1 Reinventing the prestige film: The “Panavision adaptations” of the 1960s and 1970s In this section, we discuss a group of films that we call “Panavision adaptations,” which attempted to put a new spin on the Brit-Lit prestige film that had emerged in the 1930s. Like those earlier films, they seek to transport audiences into a “romantic” and literary past, using all the devices of the classic costume drama: historical settings, period dress, music, et cetera. While the earlier prestige films were generally shot in black and white, projected onto screens in the Academy ratio,24 and filmed largely in studio, these films employed wide-screen formats, usually Panavision, made full use of color, and were passionately dedicated to location shooting and a pictorialism arising

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from it.25 This emerging style of adaptation was largely pioneered by British directors and probably had its roots in earlier films like Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, which paid such lyrical homage to the countryside of Kent, albeit in smaller-screen black and white formats. A significant subset of these adaptations were intent on emplacing the literary text in period worlds and landscapes that are not only ravishingly beautiful but which move in a sympathetic orbit with the word painting of the authors being adapted. For most of them, “setting” is a weak word for describing their particular approach to literary and cinematic place. Perhaps predictably, filmmakers working in this school of adaptation were drawn to the works of Emily Brontë, Hardy, Conrad, and Fowles, and they exploited the long take and slower editing paces. The lush pictorialism of their films seemed calculated to transport audiences into a past that stood at a significant distance from the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—into the unspoiled bucolic landscapes of a barely industrialized England. Adjectives like “lush,” “gorgeous,” “ravishing,” and “sweeping,” accurately describe the cinematic effect of such adaptations, which distinguished the films from the smaller-format television adaptations that continued to make headway throughout the period.26 This is not to say that the films necessarily harbored a type of regressive nostalgia. For example, as the sexual revolutions of the 1960s were rewriting the very moral and social underpinnings of the nineteenth-century novel of marriage, these films tended to meditate on the tragic consequences of repression and patriarchy. The “Panavision adaptation” did not emerge overnight. A few adaptations attempted to replicate fairly precisely the prestige formulas of earlier decades. A Tale of Two Cities (1958), for example, is a film that has the palpable look and feel of a 1930s prestige production. It was directed by Ralph Thomas for the premiere film company in Britain after the war, the Rank Organization, a vertical combine dominating production, distribution, and exhibition of films. Given the new uncertainties of film adaptation in the post-studio era, Rank may have been consciously attempting to appropriate the aura of MGM’s 1930s BritLit classics. With the hindsight of cinematic history, such a move seems illcalculated since the quality film approach to adapting classics by authors like Dickens had migrated almost completely to television by the 1960s and 1970s (see above, pp. 228–34). MGM had made its famous A Tale of Two Cities in 1935, featuring matinee idol Ronald Coleman and sparing no expense for costumes and sets. In the Rank version, the formula isn’t radically different: the film, shot largely at Pinewood Studios, starred Dirk Bogarde, a matinee idol under virtual contract with Rank, and highlighted elaborate costumes and sets—though it included a bit more location shooting than its predecessor. The black and white cinematography and score also seem to operate largely

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in the 1930s mode; see for instance the storming of the Bastille sequence, which hinges on a satisfying but seriously dated use of double exposures. This film represented the end of the line for the Brit-Lit prestige film forged at the height of the studio system. Doubtless the most epic of all prestige adaptations in the period covered by this chapter was Lawrence of Arabia (1962). David Lean’s masterpiece, unlike A Tale of Two Cities, paid homage to, but also significantly reinvented, the prestige adaptations and imperial epics of the 1930s. Based on the writings of T. E. Lawrence, primarily his outsized memoir The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the film is an extended flashback, following the death of Lawrence in a motorcycle accident, to his life in the British army in Cairo, his unlikely rise, and his role as a flawed, perhaps murderous, messiah for pan-Arabian independence. To call Lean’s film vast would be to understate the matter: he makes full use of the Super Panavision 70 process, the successor to CinemaScope, a 1950s technology intended to offer a spectacle impossible for its rival, broadcast television, to duplicate.27 The film’s politics, particularly its critical reappraisal of Britain’s imperial project in Egypt, Suez, and Palestine from the point of view of the post-1957 world, are strikingly contemporary. In many other ways, though, Lawrence of Arabia evokes a classical cinema of an earlier era. In fact, Alexander Korda had attempted to make this film in the middle 1930s but was thwarted by the BBFC’s aversion to controversial political themes (see above, p. 202).28 At the heart of the film, the two arduous desert crossings, Lean depicts tiny human figures dwarfed by vast landscapes of sand dunes and mountains (see Figure 6.1). Lawrence of Arabia, though, exhibits few of the modernist traits—such as narrative ambiguity or formal disjunctions—prized by the period’s art-house filmmakers (see below, pp. 289–96). Instead, it depends on the conventions of classic narrative cinema, especially in the first half, in which the drive to Aqaba over an unforgiving landscape consumes every single shot.

FIGURE 6.1 Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Desertscape.

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In the last section of this chapter, we will consider the “auteur adaptation,” a category to which some readers might prefer to assign Lawrence of Arabia. Lean is a director, however, who fits uneasily into the category of auteur despite the fact that his was clearly the controlling intelligence of the film on every level.29 (For example, Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolton confidently restructured the narrative and rewrote the historical events in Lawrence’s classic book.30) The epic tracking shot in the attack on Aqaba sequence reveals an incredible level of control and vision, following the rebels from their desert base through the Turkish encampment and, finally, onto Aqaba itself, with its massive guns pointed uselessly toward the sea. Despite such cinematic virtuosity, the shot demonstrates the classic narrative focus of Lean’s cinema. Though the driving story of the first half of the film becomes more complex, darker, and episodic after the intermission (featuring Maurice Jarre’s score on a blank screen), the cinematic pleasures afforded by Lawrence of Arabia link it very naturally to the epic prestige pictures of the 1930s. Another impressive prestige adaptation of this period is John Schlesinger’s 1967 version of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. The several British New Wave adaptations Schlesinger made earlier in the decade (see below, p. 290) cast into starker relief the inspired classicism of his later film. It is a prestige adaptation displaying the narrative mastery of the best studio adaptations, films like Wyler ’s Wuthering Heights (1939) and Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1943). Similar to Lawrence of Arabia, it fully embraces the new wide-screen pictorialism. It also announces its superior quality first, with an overture, played over an unmoving freeze frame of a beachy landscape; and later, with a formal intermission featuring entr’acte music and a freeze frame of a hay wagon which will appear in the second half of the film. Overtures and intermissions signal not only quality, of course, but also the more formal, theatrical aspects of movie viewing celebrated in earlier periods. Far from the Madding Crowd shows an extraordinary commitment to evoking Hardy’s Wessex through a lush, color Panavision. Unlike classic 1930s and 1940s adaptations, the film was shot on location in Dorset and Wiltshire rather than in the studio or in the Hollywood hills. Schlesinger’s patient, lyrical camera follows its characters through both large and small rural landscapes, which dominate the film as much as the story and characters. Schlesinger has commented on the film’s pacing, which he later regretted: “I think it’s terribly slow. … I was in the habit of liking the leisurely pace and starting on a detail of a building and then panning down and opening the whole thing up to a street, or whatever it was.”31 The adaptation uses this technique and others to show respect for the novel’s own evocation of place, exercising a level of care verging on reverence.32 Especially in its treatment of the classic source text,

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FIGURE 6.2 Far from the Madding Crowd (1967): Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene.

Far from the Madding Crowd conjures the aura of the big studio adaptations while updating many of their visual and cultural formulas. While the film goes to great lengths to immerse viewers in a fully visualized past, it seems to aim at something more than pure escapism or nostalgia, especially in its attention to gender roles. Schlesinger shows Christie’s Bathsheba, for instance, taking charge of her farm and dealing with men in the corn exchange. Additionally, in one of the film’s most memorable sequences, the dashing Sergeant Troy demonstrates his mastery of swordplay before Bathsheba in a small grassy valley (see Figure 6.2). The scene communicates a kind of aggressive sexual energy that surprises in the context of this otherwise restrained film. As the shots start piling on top of each other in ever more rapid succession, the camera assumes Bathsheba’s perspective—the focus goes soft and the action slows, melting into a dream or imaginary scene of Troy charging on horseback into battle. Schlesinger devotes a moderate amount of energy to this kind of subjective camera work, giving some impressive point-of-view shots to the key characters at the most dramatic moments of their stories. On the whole, though, Far from the Madding Crowd remains the kind of adaptation that seems intended to immerse viewers in the lives of its characters, in the text and its mentalities, in the gorgeous rural and village landscapes of England—rather than calling direct attention to the medium or the presence of the director. Other Brit-Lit prestige films like George Cukor’s epic Justine (1969), based on the Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell, and most notably, Robert Fuest’s Wuthering Heights (1970), starring Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall, also belong to this pictorial, immersive style of adaptation. Though much more direct and provocative in its eroticism, Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969) employs the same visual grammar as the other Panavision adaptations. In concluding this section, however, we wish to consider a much later film, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977). Based on a Conrad novella, The Duel, the film stars American actors Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine and is set in

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France during the Napoleonic wars. It focuses on a simmering contest of honor between Keitel’s hot-headed Feraud, and Carradine’s sensitive D’Hubert. The Duellists has much in common with Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd in its desire to immerse the audience in the particularities and beauties of the past. The rich material world Scott presents through the mise-en-scène is romantic and convincingly historical—showing great attention, for instance, to the flash and tassels of the hussar military uniforms. In such a way, Scott mimics the intense visuality of Conrad’s story: for example, as a number of elegant people speculate about the cause of a duel, Conrad writes that “A sub-commissary of the Intendence, an agreeable and cultivated bachelor in kerseymere breeches, Hessian boots, and a blue coat embroidered with silver lace, who affected to believe in the transmigration of souls, suggested that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence.”33 Here Conrad writes in a nineteenth-century descriptive mode that matches rather precisely the type of novelistic cinema Scott is dedicated to advancing. The entire film seems under the spell of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), an “auteur adaptation” par excellence; in fact The Duellists might be thought of as a Barry Lyndon in which something actually happens. Scott shows interiors in a natural or natural-seeming light and frames them in a very painterly way. As D’Hubert returns from attempting to arrest Feraud, the camera pans around his quarters and lingers slowly on the still life of his supper, a broken crust of bread, two pears, and a glass of wine, with the sunlight streaming in through an open window. The still Vermeer-like interiors contrast with the violence of the many duels and skirmishes the film presents, typically shot with handheld cameras and edited at a startling pace.34 The sound design contributes greatly to the romantic realism of these scenes, with the harsh and deep clang of swords giving a sense of the materiality and danger of the fights. As the film progresses, the rivalry between the two men over their honor and a woman broadens to include the wars in which they fight, giving way to a series of increasingly epic panoramas of fields, mountains, and rivers reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich. Despite its intense action, The Duellists is ultimately a film invested in the immersive pictorialism we have identified as the hallmark of the Panavision adaptation. Moreover, the film’s larger meditation on the causes of violence and warfare reveals that, like other Panavision films, The Duellists is no mere escapist historical fantasy but, rather, a film capable of a subtle yet powerful presentism. The films belonging to this naturalistic cycle tend to equate place fully with fate and, in the period considered by this chapter, probably reach their height in works like Barry Lyndon and Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979), which we consider below (see pp. 301–2). Both of these films set the fates of their protagonists against vast historical landscapes but in ways that explicitly invoke

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the contemporary auteur aesthetic. Panavision adaptations often express a novel-like ambition to create fully realized worlds in which to immerse their viewers but, in general, they avoid the reflexive, antinarrative montage and cinematography associated with European New Wave, art-house, and auteur films. Though lines of descent are difficult to trace definitively, we would suggest that the lasting influence of the Panavision cycle of adaptations is most legible in the Merchant-Ivory heritage films of the 1980s and 1990s, and even in more recent Brit-Lit adaptations like Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005). Pamela Demory observes that Wright’s adaptation “ratchets up the romanticism with sweeping widescreen shots of lush English countryside, brooding Darcy in long black coat, Elizabeth in flowing gown standing at the edge of a dramatic cliff.”35 Some of the film’s power, then, depends on an exploitation of landscape that isn’t fully native to Austen’s novel and may be derived at least in part from this earlier adaptation tradition.

2 Brit-Lit genre films As discussed in the previous chapter, US producers in the 1940s and 1950s turned surprisingly often to British literary source material for a number of their most inventive genre films, while British producers continued to use canonical and contemporary British literature for more prestige-oriented pictures. In the 1960s and 1970s this dynamic seems to hold—with a few significant differences. While the Panavision adaptation was pioneered mainly by British directors on the model of the earlier Hollywood prestige films, US producers continued to rely on Brit-Lit sources for certain types of genre film, including musicals and animations, science fiction, and thrillers. British producers, however, took the lead at this time in revitalizing both the horror and spy genres largely through a systematic reliance on Brit-Lit source material.

Brit-Lit musicals and animated films So many of this period’s animated films were also essentially musicals, and some of the musicals, like Mary Poppins (1964), included animation. Furthermore, both types of film often were aimed at audiences composed mainly of children. In surveying the films made in both genres in the 1960s and 1970s, especially those aimed at children, we are struck by how many of them are Brit-Lit properties of an intensely traditional sort. A number invoke or rework famous prestige Brit-Lit films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s:

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Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967) depends clearly on Korda’s 1942 version starring Sabu, whom the animators used as a model for their Mowgli; Carol Reed’s musical Oliver! (1968) has an eye on David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948) as well as earlier film versions, and in the musical Scrooge (1970), Albert Finney filters his performance through that of Seymour Hicks in Scrooge (1935) and Alastair Sim in A Christmas Carol (1951). Disney’s Robin Hood (1973) is partly a parody and partly a remake of Michael Curtiz’s Robin Hood (1938), with Peter Ustinov channeling in his voice work the charming ooze of Claude Rains as King John; finally, My Fair Lady (1964) follows the plot and dialogue of Asquith’s Pygmalion (1930) very closely.36 On the whole, animated or musical adaptations made for children tend to be rather cautious or conservative with regard to issues of race and colonialism, perhaps the reason that a certain kind of old-fashioned or depoliticized Brit-Lit was chosen in the first place. Disney’s The Jungle Book, for example, appropriates Dixieland jazz styles in a potentially offensive way in songs like “I Want to be Like You.” As Michael Newton puts it, Given the Imperialist complexities and context of Kipling’s stories, it should be no surprise that one unspoken tension in Disney’s The Jungle Book forms around the representation of race. This is, after all, a film about an Indian boy (with an American accent) in an Indian jungle, that equates that jungle with jazz, a style of music once itself thought to be “jungle music,” a “dark” and “primitive” subversion of western classical standards.37 Newton goes on, however, to suggest that jazz had lost its dangerous associations by the 1960s and that Louis Prima, a white Italian American jazz star, who channeled Louis Armstrong in many of the film’s songs, was not so much pretending to be African American but performing a form of New Orleans jazz through which Italian Americans and African Americans had forged particularly close-knit ties. In other words, though Disney made the choice to use jazz music in The Jungle Book, it did so in a manner which allowed it to avoid directly raising issues of colonialism and race. Other musical films with Brit-Lit sources—Mary Poppins (1964), for example, based on the children’s book by P. L. Travers, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), adapted from the novel by Ian Fleming, or Dr. Doolittle (1967), based on the children’s book by Hugh Lofting—seem stuck in a Victorian or Edwardian time loop, evoking Anglophilic stereotypes of traditional Britishness favored in the 1930s and 1940s. Mary Poppins, for example, mocks, ever so gently, the pompous, stiff-upper-lipped Britishness of Mr Banks. He objects to the playful outings Mary Poppins organizes with

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FIGURE 6.3 Mary Poppins (1964): Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke. the song, “A British Bank”: “A British bank is run with precision / A British home requires nothing less, / Tradition, discipline and rules / must be the tools / without them, disorder, chaos, moral disintegration / in short you have a ghastly mess.” In the end, though, the film does not stray very far from traditional British stereotypes, since it features a revised version of the Victorian nanny and a caricature of the Cockney chimney sweep, played by the very American Dick van Dyke (see Figure 6.3). Mark Glancy called the view of Britain in Hollywood’s “British” films of the 1930s and 1940s “backward looking” since these classic adaptations “often focus on the rigidity of the class system, social snobbery, and Anglo-American differences.”38 “Backward looking” would also be a good way to describe both the animated and musical adaptations of this era. There are some notable exceptions, however. West Side Story (1961), based on the stage version of the musical, successfully transferred Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from early modern Verona to the gang-infested streets of early 1960s New York, reimagining the Montagues and Capulets as the Anglo Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The stylish choreography of Jerome Robbins is iconic, and the songs written by Leonard Bernstein, with lyrics by Steven Sondheim, have a distinct 1960s political edge, particularly in the song “America,” which constitutes a full-scale debate about the degree to which the nation has turned its back on its immigrants. The immense success of West Side Story’s appropriation and Americanization of Shakespeare’s play established a precedent for later modernizations of canonical Brit-Lit geared primarily toward a youth market. A larger trend of explicitly Americanizing Brit-Lit source material is, in fact, unmistakable in this period. Only rarely was the decision to Americanize justified by the intrinsic nature of the adaptation, as in West Side Story’s

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desire to explore ethnic and racial strife in New York City. One peculiar convention that developed in 1960s animation in particular converted British child protagonists—like Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), Mowgli in The Jungle Book, and Arthur in The Sword and the Stone (1963)—into American speaking and singing characters. Upper-class British accents, on the other hand, were usually reserved for villains like King John in Robin Hood or Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, magnificently voiced by George Sanders. Even in pushing these conventions, the films were in many ways merely reviving certain formulas of classic Hollywood films like MGM’s David Copperfield and 20th Century Fox’s Jane Eyre, which usually featured at least one Hollywood star, sometimes with a doubtful British accent, among a mixed cast of British and American character actors. The two most prestigious Brit-Lit musicals of the era, George Cukor’s My Fair Lady and Carol Reed’s Oliver!, both of which won Oscars for Best Picture, stoutly resist the creeping Americanization of many US-produced Brit-Lit musicals and invest strongly in an “authentic,” though literary, Britishness. The general absence of Americanisms in My Fair Lady is particularly striking since it was written by the legendary American composer-lyricist team of Lerner and Lowe, directed by Hollywood legend George Cukor, and filmed on Warner Brothers’ back lot in Burbank, California. The cast, however, consists of toprank British actors Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. Oliver!, by contrast, was made in Britain and might be regarded as a British response to the painful fakeries of the Disneyesque Brit-Lit musicals. Unfortunately, neither film updates the politics of its original convincingly, showing a sentimental preference for a traditional Britain in which a rigid class structure remains firmly in place. In My Fair Lady, Eliza does not leave Higgins but turns up at the end of the film, ambiguously bearing his slippers, hinting strongly that she has not become as liberated from the trammels of class and gender as the play insists. Oliver! doesn’t send Fagin to the gallows but, instead, pairs him with the Artful Dodger for a future, glorious life of crime. They both dance off into the sunset to the song, “I think I’d better think it out again!” Reed softens Fagin (played by Ron Moody) considerably, and his rather simple strategy for dealing with the long tradition of anti-Semitic portrayals of the character, including Alec Guinness’s infamous one, is simply to bury Fagin’s Jewishness altogether.39 In Chapter 5, we argued for the anarchic and inventive nature of many animated Brit-Lit films of the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s and 1970s such films seem to have been recuperated by Hollywood, which continued to push a nostalgic aesthetic in its mainstream Brit-Lit adaptations. In the musicals too, at least those likely to draw in large numbers of children, the same aesthetic seems to have prevailed.

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Horror From the 1930s through the early 1950s, US studios like Universal had a virtual monopoly on Brit-Lit horror (see above, pp. 166–71), but at the same moment that the Hollywood studio system was losing its influence, one small, British production company managed to thrive. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the success of Hammer Film Productions was shot through with accident and luck. Founded in 1935 by comedian William Hinds (whose stage name was Will Hammer), this was a studio with a sense of humor from the very beginning. Its first production was The Public Life of Henry the Ninth (1935), a cheeky play on the title of Alexander Korda’s international hit, The Private Life of Henry VIII. But not until the 1950s did Hammer Films stumble on the formula that would define the studio for the next twenty years: a series of horror films that invoked the iconic monsters of 1930s Universal Studios and reinvented British Gothic in the process. In every way that mattered, Hammer Productions functioned like a studio built on an old-fashioned model—not just an independent film company. It was run by impressarios (William and then Tony Hinds along with Michael and then his son, James Carreras), boasted a dedicated studio space (Bray Studios located in a country mansion in Berkshire which first was leased and then purchased), as well as a pool of reliable directors (Terence Fisher, Michael Carreras, Peter Sykes, et cetera), writers (principally Jimmy Sangster), a stock company of actors (including stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, starlets and bombshells like Stephanie Beacham, Ingrid Pitt, Veronica Carlson, as well as character players like George Woodbridge and George Benson), and other loyal artists and technicians (like composer James Bernard, cinematographer Jack Asher, makeup artist Philip Leakey, and special-effects technician Les Bowie). According to Peter Lev, the major US studios in the 1950s were desperately scrambling to keep their audience, which was turning more often to television for its entertainment. Many of them sold TV rights to their back catalogs, and others turned to independent film companies to make films that they would partly finance and then distribute.40 Columbia Pictures found great success, for example, in shifting production to its French and British subsidiaries. Even before the decline in markets in the 1950s, Universal Studios had turned to B movie serials starring Francis the Talking Mule and Ma and Pa Kettle, also turning its back catalog of 1930s monsters into fodder for a series of Abbot and Costello monster mashups. Hammer Films succeeded in this environment precisely because it could supply cheap, stylish products on time to those US studios and distributors just

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beginning to give up on the production of feature films. In a sense, Hammer Productions can be viewed as leading the wave of independent producers about to arrive on the film scene in the late 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps the closest parallel to Hammer in the United States was Roger Corman’s Filmgroup, which also concentrated on literary horror, particularly adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe such as House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Corman’s operation, like Hammer’s, ran on tight budgets and quick production schedules, and Corman himself acted as a mentor for a generation of young independent filmmakers who would help to form the New Hollywood and shake the major studios to their foundations—most prominently, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.41 Hammer’s working relationship with Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios and later MGM itself, once at the top of the food chain in the Hollywood studio system, would turn out to be key: Columbia financed and distributed many Hammer films in the 1950s and 1960s, but Hammer’s complicated relationship with Universal, more than any other factor, determined the shape of the Hammer horror line. After producing melodramas and science fiction films based largely on BBC radio series earlier in the decade, Hammer made its first foray in 1957 into the kind of Gothic horror that would later define it with The Curse of Frankenstein. Universal was concerned about the prospect of Hammer poaching one of its most iconic franchises from the 1930s and threatened to sue if Curse turned out to be an unauthorized remake of their 1931 classic. Universal was particularly insistent that Hammer not borrow Jack Pierce’s makeup effects and general look for their creature.42 Universal’s warnings may ironically have acted a catalyst for the creation of Hammer’s distinctive horror style. The film is at pains to distinguish itself visually from Universal’s Frankenstein, on the one hand, but to draw on its electrifying power, on the other. It achieves this uneasy balance in several ways. First of all, the art design for Curse rejects decisively the German expressionist style that influenced Universal’s Frankenstein—its canted angles and deep chiaroscuro lighting effects. In its place is a vivid color palette, starting with the blood-red background of the opening credits, and radiating out through the wallpaper and stained glass of the sets. The color design of Curse and other Hammer films was carefully calibrated. It may well be that the central European setting of Curse determined the fixed locale of the Frankenstein and Dracula franchises that were to follow: though the protagonists in both Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker’s novels travel widely, the Hammer versions of both stories are rooted in a strange European noplace, probably an amalgam of Switzerland (the setting for key scenes of

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Frankenstein) and Transylvania, though the language and place names are always in German. The Curse of Frankenstein refocuses the story on Frankenstein the scientist—veering away from Whale’s emphasis on the monster. Sangster cleverly and breezily reengineers Shelley’s original, which acts more as raw material than a true source, making the Baron into an autocratic intellectual whose single-minded devotion to science and logic leads him to commit atrocity after atrocity. As Sinclair McKay observes, “Then there is the Baron himself, a frosty psychotic figure many light years away from the tortured romantic sensibility of Mary Shelley’s original. Yet Hammer’s Frankenstein is still intriguingly closer in spirit to that very British sense of the gothic.”43 Peter Cushing plays this brittle, bloodless psychopath to perfection. But even the minor characters of the novel are radically reassigned; instead of having his childhood friend of the novel, Henry Clerval, act as his main confidant, Sangster picks from the novel the name of Frankenstein’s antagonistic and skeptical professor, M. Krempe, and fashions a rival out of him in the shape of Paul Krempe, Victor’s tutor, friend, and ultimately rival for Elizabeth’s affections. Similarly, Justine, who in the novel is wrongly accused of killing Frankenstein’s brother William, appears as Frankenstein’s jealous maid and mistress. Following the example of James Whale and Tod Slaughter, Hammer movies showed next to no reverence for their sources as literary classics. As McKay notes, “In truth, even at the start, Hammer owed less to literary antecedents, be they Shelley or Stoker, than it did to that old British tradition of barnstorming bloodthirsty melodrama.” In fact, they rely on a form of the Gothic which started as a literary phenomenon but was prized away from books to become an independent cultural force.44 More than any single literary source, Hammer appropriated and transformed the Universal back catalog of monsters, indicating again that Hammer horror depended on a combination of imitation and innovation. Perhaps the clearest indication that Hammer was thinking carefully about how to appropriate Universal horror was the fact that it established lucrative franchises just as Universal had once done. The Frankenstein series included The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein must be Destroyed (1969), The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974); while the Dracula series consisted of The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), Dracula has Risen from the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Scars of Dracula (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Countess Dracula (1971), and Dracula, A.D. 1972 (1972). The Curse of Frankenstein was an unexpected hit, particularly in the United States, despite excoriating reviews in Britain. Hammer quickly moved to revive

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another Universal monster, Dracula, choosing Christopher Lee to play the Count and casting Cushing in the role of Van Helsing in The Horror of Dracula (1958). Here again, Sangster treated the original material as freely as possible, and the desire both to appropriate Universal’s house style and differentiate the Hammer product typifies the Dracula films as well. Though Sangster preserved at least the notion of Jonathan Harker’s diary and Van Helsing’s Dictaphone recordings, he dispensed with telegrams, Mina’s typewritten diary, et cetera, and basically rewrote the motivations and actions of the central characters. Lee’s Dracula, for example, is less the hypnotic foreigner with gigantic, ominous eyes as played by Universal’s Bela Lugosi, and more of a suave aristo with a cape; both had their own unique brand of sex appeal, but Lee’s Dracula is more conventionally romantic than Lugosi’s. Whereas the Universal horror films were A pictures with big budgets, Hammer’s films were made cheaply but in such clever ways that the low budgets rarely called attention to themselves, outside of the special effects which are used only sparingly in the early films. Dracula’s disintegration on being exposed to sunlight is lightning fast and fairly unimpressive, and outside of makeup (see Figure 6.4) and a few electrical effects with the machinery, there are no effects at all in Curse. Another way in which frugality shows itself relatively unobtrusively is in the camera work and editing: when Van Helsing pursues the Count through his castle, for instance, intent on driving a stake through his heart, Fisher employs long takes reminiscent of television— using very little rapid cutting to ramp up tension. Hammer made up for these economies with the solid and understated acting of Cushing and Lee as well as the dramatic musical scores of James Bernard. After Dracula’s success at the box office, Universal began to view Hammer Productions less as a plagiarizing rival and more as a potentially profitable

FIGURE 6.4 Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).

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partner, quickly dropping its opposition to the company’s appropriations of its most lucrative 1930s franchises. Michael Hearn notes that Universal’s change of heart owed much to the fact that its share of Dracula’s profits more or less saved the US studio from bankruptcy.45 In Hammer and Beyond, Peter Hutchins points out that an important connection between the British and American ‘schools’ of horror lies in the copyright agreement struck between Hammer and Universal permitting the former’s “remakes” of Universal horror classics. This was only one of a series of agreements between US and UK companies that signalled the importance attached by British film producers to the US market. In this respect, it makes sense that Hammer should turn to Americanized models of horror, if only to transform them.46 This theme is a common one in this chapter: British filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s regularly looked to classic Hollywood movies, intent on borrowing their formulas and aura, while fundamentally reworking many of their basic conventions. A few other Hammer horror films have British literary origins and are worth briefly mentioning here: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1961, in which repression is worse than libertinism), Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971, which exploits the gender-bending transformation of Dr Jekyll at the height of the sexual revolution), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959, in the Sherlock Holmes franchise that never happened), and She (1965) and The Vengeance of She (1968), both featuring European bombshells in the title roles. Each of these films exploited Hammer’s characteristically free approach to adaptation, retaining the character names and macro plot elements, but restructuring nearly everything else. In addition, Hammer films tended to question openly class and gender stereotypes, even if many of the productions thrust scantily clad, buxom women under the full glare of the camera lights. Additionally, the lasting influence of Universal’s horror legacy reached well beyond Hammer Films Productions. Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), written by Gene Wilder, positively embraces the look and feel of at least five of Universal’s Frankenstein pictures, borrowing most from Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Frankenstein (1931). In his history of seventies American cinema, David Cook calls Brooks’s film “a nearly perfect balance between parody and homage.”47 As with Hammer, the literary origins of the film are obscured under layers of references to its filmic predecessors. In a more explicitly literary horror film, Theatre of Blood (1973), directed by and starring Vincent Price, a stage actor takes revenge on his critics by making them real-life participants in Shakespeare’s most hideous death scenes. This

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camp horror film, standing more or less in its own category, underscores that, for the most part, Brit-Lit horror films of the period retreated to a maximum distance from their literary and theatrical sources. The popularity of Hammer horror itself also spawned many imitations. In Spain, Jesús Franco made a series of campy, sexually charged Dracula and Frankenstein movies: Vampiresas 1930 (1962), Count Dracula (1970), Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Drácula contra Frankenstein (1972), La fille de Dracula (1972), and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1972), among others. And in the United States, Dracula and Frankenstein were appropriated in the blaxploitation cult classics Blacula (1972) and Blackenstein (1973). Viewers of Blacula, made by African American director Willaim Crain, easily detected the film’s subversive allegorical meanings—its suggestion, for example, of the “explicit connection … between slavery and vampirism,” or its idea that, in the words of one African American reviewer, “white vampirism” is the source of “the black man’s plight.”48 In Blacula, Crain brilliantly exploited and interrogated both the literal whiteness of Stoker’s pasty vampires and the cultural whiteness of traditional Brit-Lit (see Figure 6.5). After the notable success of Blacula, American International Pictures announced its intention to remake all the classic Hollywood horror films with black casts, a project that never fully succeeded, though it did produce the sequel Scream Blacula Scream (1973). Other small film companies followed with less successful efforts like Blackenstein and Mr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1975, also directed by Crain).49

FIGURE 6.5 William Marshall in Blacula (1972).

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The international thriller and the birth of Bond With East-West tensions at their height, other forms of Brit-Lit genre fiction served as popular material for film adaptation, the international spy thriller in particular, a genre that British writers like Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Graham Greene, Alistair MacLean, and directors like Carol Reed and Alfred Hitchcock helped to create in the 1930s and 1940s. Filmmakers of this era seem to have preferred a darker, existential strain of this material by writers like John le Carré and Greene, both of whom dissected wearily the conflicts of the Cold War from a distinctly disillusioned post-empire point of view. Three of le Carré’s novels were made into British films in the 1960s: The Spy that Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965), The Deadly Affair (Sidney Lumet, 1966),50 and The Looking Glass War (Frank Pierson, 1969). Following the success of earlier adaptations of his work like This Gun for Hire (US, Frank Tuttle, 1942), Brighton Rock (UK, John Boulting, 1947), and The Third Man (UK, Carol Reed, 1949), filmmakers turned increasingly to Graham Greene’s fiction. Across the Bridge (UK, Ken Annakin, 1957), Our Man in Havana (UK, Carol Reed, 1959—a comic take on the emerging spy genre), The Quiet American (US, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1958),51 The Comedians (US, Peter Glenville, 1967), Travels with My Aunt (US, George Cukor, 1972), a comic road caper, England Made Me (UK/Yugoslavia, Peter Duffell, 1973), and The Human Factor (UK, Otto Preminger, 1979). Without a doubt, though, the adaptation of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels represents one of the most enduring Brit-Lit cinematic events of the period—or any period. Fleming began writing the series in 1953 with Casino Royale and had completed a total of nine Bond narratives by the time he sold the rights to two UK-based North American producers: New Yorker Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Canadian Harry Saltzman; the arrangement stipulated that Fleming would not be writing the screenplays.52 The first film in this joint American/British series was Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962), featuring Sean Connery in the part of 007. From Russia with Love (Young, 1963), Goldfinger (Young, 1964), and Thunderball (Guy Hamilton, 1965) followed in short order, with a new Bond film appearing every year or two thereafter. In an incredibly short period of time, the “Bond film” formed as a full-fledged, self-contained cinematic genre, with its own set of unmistakable conventions: the pre-title action sequence, the iconic Bond-Barrel sequence, the visually innovative title sequence with its commissioned theme song, exotic international locations, the focus on spy gadgetry, Cold War politics, shadowy confederations of villains (SMERSH and SPECTRE), underground lairs, “Bond” women, and sex.

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No surer sign of the franchise’s immediate generic status exists than the parody film Casino Royale (Val Guest/Ken Hughes, 1967),53 predating the Austin Powers homage by decades. The film features David Niven as a suave James Bond, coaxed out of retirement to take over the directorship of MI6 after M’s death. To confuse SMERSH, who is eliminating British agents, Bond declares that all agents will be called James Bond and receive extensive training in withstanding the sexual temptations of enemy agents. This army of fake James Bonds, including Peter Sellers, must eventually confront Woody Allen as the real Bond’s psychotic nephew and head of SMERSH. Casino Royale was not in fact a parody of the novel, but of the Bond films of the earlier 1960s, especially their sexual politics. Another early parody, Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959), plays upon the conventions of the emerging Bond genre. Based on Greene’s 1958 novel, this film might in fact be considered practically a “pre-parody.” The alwaysprescient Greene spoofed the spy novels and movies that gave rise to Bond, and surely had an eye on Fleming’s fiction. In the film version, a spymaster played by Noel Coward (!) recruits an ordinary British vacuum cleaner salesman to be Britain’s “man” in Havana. His fake network of spies and reports of military installations (based on drawings of vacuum cleaners) almost sets off the Third World War. At first glance, the status of the early Bond films as literary adaptations is not always clear. The main titles always give the author’s name: Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, et cetera, but he is not credited as a writer, nor are the novels ever mentioned in the opening credits. Some of these omissions had to do with the particular rights Fleming sold to Broccoli and Saltzman. For the most part, though, including an author’s name in the title of a film—Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1972) or Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights (1992), for example—indicates the great popularity or prestige of a book and its author. After examining the history of Dr. No, James Chapman suggests that in the early days of the Bond franchise, the “popularity of the novels was seen as an important factor in the likely box-office success of the films.”54 Later on, when the movie versions became something of a cultural phenomenon in their own right, the argument could be made that they actually served to lend the books a certain literary cache they had previously lacked as genre fiction. Probably no other group of films contributed more to a popular sense of “Britishness” in this period than the Bond films. The British master spy exuded a sense of sophistication and intelligence, not to mention sex appeal, far surpassing that of his American counterparts, who Bond was always bailing out. Bond’s knowledge of fine wines, art, and world history formed part of this mystique and suggests how conservative Fleming’s cultural politics tended to be. Bond is an old-school, Times-reading patriot uncomfortable with social

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change. Dr. No “was redolent with the remnants of British imperialism and the class system that sustained it.”55 At the same time, Bond isn’t really a classic gentleman in the mold of Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond, but a modern professional killer who can be ruthless, at times underhanded, sexually manipulative, and despite his suave connoisseurship, relatively unmarked by class. Though the Bond films were made in Britain, financing for them came almost entirely from US backers, and so the “Britishness” of the Bond series has an oddly international currency. As Paul Monaco writes, The Bond movies were ingenious hybrids of an increasingly internationalized popular culture industry where, in this instance, British production talent blended neatly with American producing and marketing skills. In essence, the Bond movies offered to Hollywood a model for a phenomenon of the screen basically unknown before the 1960s but increasingly prominent in Hollywood after the late 1970s—the action blockbuster.56 That Brit-Lit films with such mixed origins—created by a Canadian and an American and cofinanced by companies in Britain and America—were able to market so highly artificial but enduring a form of Britishness, shows how the industrial nature of cinema was driving it toward postnationalism even as early as the 1960s.

Mysteries and science fiction A number of whodunits and mysteries based on classic British authors continued to be made. Agatha Christie’s mysteries were among the most popular cinematic sources: see Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (1965), Ten Little Indians (1974), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and Death on the Nile (1978). Sherlock Holmes films were pulled even further away from their literary origins into a number of free appropriations like A Study in Terror (1965), Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), The Seven Percent Solution (1976) and parodies like Gene Wilder’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975). Brit-Lit science fiction continued to be represented by the cinema’s fascination with the works of H. G. Wells: in big-budget adaptations such as The Time Machine (1960) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), as well as B movie adaptations like Terror is a Man (1959—based on The Island of Dr. Moreau), made in the Philippines by Gerardo de Leon, and The Food of the Gods (1976). Seen as a whole, Brit-Lit genre fiction continued to serve as a major source of material for musicals, animated films, science fiction, horror, and thrillers in both the United States and the United Kingdom. As we have seen

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in this section, though, the contributions of British filmmakers to revising and sometimes reviving these genres—especially the horror and spy genres— were significantly greater than in previous decades.

3 Art-house adaptations About the same time that Hammer Films was beginning to make a name for itself in quasi-literary horror and the Bond franchise was gaining traction, another more revolutionary cinematic development was reaching the height of its influence: the international art-house cinema. Though art house, with its many sources and influences, could never be called a genre, David Bordwell makes a strong case that it is at least “a distinct mode of film practice, possessing a definite historical existence, a set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures.”57 What distinguishes it most clearly is its opposition to Hollywood narrative cinema. The protagonists of art-house films often have no classically clear motivation for their actions, and narrative structure tends to be episodic. More importantly, Bordwell notes that arthouse style often violates clear lines of narrative causation in temporality and spatiality, embracing a kind of ambiguity and disjunction that forces viewers to develop a particular kind of art-house “viewing procedure”: when faced with an inexplicable or unexpected moment, the viewer attempts to resolve ambiguity first by seeking out “realistic motivation,” then by using a character’s subjective mental state to explain the ambiguity, before finally turning to “authorial motivation,” what the director or the guiding intelligence of the film intends to express. Obviously, in this last point, the art-house mode merges significantly with auteurism.58 Given the conventions that Bordwell lists, it stands to reason that arthouse literary adaptations would spurn the classic storytelling mode of the quality film in favor of a more disjunctive and subjective narrative mode. Early auteur theory focused on such self-conscious, anti-narrative formal characteristics as evidence of the auteur at work. Art-house adaptations by and large rejected classic or canonical texts, choosing to embrace literary source texts of a more modern, more fragmented, and sometimes more challenging kind. On the other hand, great auteurs in this period sought out great authors, as we’ve seen (see above, pp. 255–65), Shakespeare in particular, and there is some reason to argue for a certain separation between the styles, techniques, and aims of quotidian art-house adaptations on the one hand and auteur adaptations on the other, though the separation may be a matter of degree and emphasis rather than substance. The lines between the two are often unclear.

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We will first turn our attention to a cycle of art-house films typically grouped under the term “British New Wave” or “kitchen sink realism,” associated with the Free Cinema movement and the work of young directors like Jack Clayton, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, and John Schlesinger. British New Wave directors were committed to social realism and exploration of class conflict, and for this reason, they chose to set a number of their films in northern industrial cities and narrated them from the point of view of working-class protagonists with distinct northern accents. Most of the films, shot in grainy black and white with complex layerings of mid-tone grays, are intent on evoking the land- and cityscapes of the industrial midlands and north in a style that veers between documentary reportage and lyric naturalism. The founding films of the British New Wave were Room at the Top (1958, directed by Jack Clayton and based on the novel by John Braine) and Look Back in Anger (1958, directed by Tony Richardson and adapted from John Osborne’s play)—both set in the midlands and focused on the vagaries of social mobility in the postwar era. Other Brit-Lit films included: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960, directed by Karel Reisz and based on Alan Sillitoe’s novel), The Entertainer (1960, directed by Richardson, screenplay by Osborne), A Taste of Honey (1961, directed by Richardson and adapted from Shelagh Delaney’s play), A Kind of Loving (1961, directed by John Schlesinger, based on the novel by Stan Barstow), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962, directed by Richardson based on a Alan Sillitoe short story), and This Sporting Life (1963, directed by Lindsay Anderson and adapted from the novel by David Storey). John Hill in particular has contextualized New Wave films in relation to the economic upturn and the rise of consumer culture in the late 1950s after nearly a decade and a half of postwar austerity. This period was also marked by signs of Britain’s loss of international influence after the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the continuing dissolution of the old empire.59 In general New Wave films and their overwhelmingly male protagonists bitterly rejected this new consumer culture, which is strongly associated with women, betraying a nostalgia for the male working-class solidarity of industrial labor. Unlike the realist turn in Italy and France, though, in the 1940s and 1950s the British New Wave had a distinct literary impetus, and a majority of the central New Wave films were based on contemporary novels and plays of the so-called “angry young men”: John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Allan Sillitoe, and the angry young woman, Shelagh Delaney. This short-lived cinematic cycle, which generally is thought to have begun around 1957 and ended around 1963, was also associated with the avant-garde and politically engaged scene swirling around the Royal Court Theatre. If the French New Wave in general and Truffaut in particular rejected the un-cinematic “films

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of quality,”60 often based on literary classics (see above, pp. 255–8), it could be argued that the British New Wave directors revealed a similar aversion to classic British authors adapted in earlier decades: Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontës, et cetera, gravitating instead toward the most contemporary writers and dramatists for material, and preferring radical new forms of adaptation. In the discussion that follows, we will consider the British New Wave adaptations as forms of rebellion against the classic adaptations like 1958’s A Tale of Two Cities. Though many film scholars think this short-lived movement ended around 1963, New Wave styles and themes proved influential for the rest of the decade.61 For example, Room at the Top was followed by two sequels, both written by John Braine: Life at the Top (1965) and Man at the Top (1970), while Red, White and Zero (1967) and Charlie Bubbles (1967, directed by Albert Finney), both written by Shelagh Delaney, still show an intense interest in the northern industrial cityscape and its politics. The New Wave style and subject matter influenced films on the periphery of the cycle as well, such as To Sir, with Love (1967—based on the novel by E. R. Braithwaite), which shows an interest in the lives of working-class kids in East London and acknowledges growing West Indian immigration in its protagonist, Mark Thackery, played by Sidney Poitier. Amy Sargeant points out that New Wave filmmakers used location shooting, much more prevalent in post-1950s cinema in general, in a particularly distinctive way: The Free Cinema and British New Wave directors prided themselves on their atmospheric use of actual locations: the Locarno Dance Hall, Yorkshire countryside and blood, sweat and mud of the rugby scrum in Anderson’s 1963 adaptation of David Storey’s 1960 novel This Sporting Life …; the Nottingham factory, fairground and countryside of Karel Reisz’s 1960 (commercially successful) adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.62 This commitment to location certainly contributes to the realism championed by New Wave filmmakers and was a hallmark not only of the British New Wave but also of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave itself. Room at the Top arguably established the basic dynamics for the British New Wave adaptations that followed. In it, Joe Lampton leaves the small factory town he grew up in and arrives in the industrial city of Warley (filmed in Bradford) as a clerk in the Borough Treasury. He sets his ambitious eye on the daughter of the local industrialist, Susan Brown, but is snubbed by her posh friends and parents. In the meantime, he falls in love with an older

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married French woman, Alice, who draws him into the local theater scene. In the end, Joe tragically pursues his ambitious goal of climbing to the top by pursuing a flat, loveless marriage to Susan and abandoning Alice to her fate. Braine’s novel offers not only thick descriptions of the industrial city of Warley but takes the time to analyze its districts and their history. Typical of such evocations is the description of the district around the train station: “The station was at the centre of the eastern quarter of Warley. The effect was as if all the industries of the town had been crammed into one spot. Later I discovered that this segregation was Council policy; if anyone wanted to set up a mill or factory in Warley, it was the east or nowhere.” Braine contrasts this crowded space of labor with the “top” of Warley, St. Clair Road, the tree-lined avenue where the wealthiest citizens live. In adapting Braine’s novel for the screen, Richardson gives some sense of this complex geography. Throughout the film the camera offers significant glimpses of Warnley (Bradford). For example, Alice and Joe have a romantic encounter on Sparrow Hill overlooking the entire city. In another scene, Joe returns to Dufton to visit his parents, and the camera frames him and his old house squarely in a panoramic industrial wasteland (filmed in Barnsley). The film’s crucial use of place has the force of nineteenth-century naturalism;63 showing that the characters are caught up in the fate of place, but going beyond the urge merely to document social conditions, the camera also infuses these industrial settings with a lyric quality. A Taste of Honey offers a different spin on the formula suggested by Room at the Top. It follows a female protagonist, young Jo, who lives in the chaotic orbit of her mother, who drags them from lodging to lodging and brings home men of questionable character. When her mother abandons her for Peter, Jo gets pregnant with the child of a black sailor but makes a sort of idyllic life, a substitute marriage of sorts, with her gay friend Geoffrey before her mother returns to take her up again. Filmed largely in Salford, the cityscape, even more than in Room at the Top, dominates the film. Although Geoffrey proposes marriage in the country of beautiful views near Castleton in the Peak District, the film implies that escaping the city is not so easy: in a famous scene, Jo and Geoffrey discuss their future together by an industrial canal with factories looming over the polluted water, while children play in the debris (see Figure 6.6). The camera tracks them in a very long shot that curiously flips the usual relationship between background and foreground— what Jo and Geoffrey say or do in this scene does not matter nearly as much as where they are. The New Wave approach to adaptation as it emerges here is largely novelistic in its world-creating ambitions, and though Delaney’s play takes place exclusively in apartments and pubs, Richardson renders it cinematic by reading the story against the broad background of an industrial

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FIGURE 6.6 Jo and Geoffrey in A Taste of Honey (1961). northern city that’s not actually depicted directly in the play. Ultimately, the film’s exploitation of city space can be traced back to the urban politics of Braine’s novel. Later on in her original screenplays, Delaney seems to have appropriated the landscapes of Braine’s novel for her New Wave films. She placed this distinctive industrial landscape at the center of Red, White and Zero, which revolves around a suicidal woman’s surreal bus tour of an industrial city. Similarly, in narrating the return of a successful author to his hometown, Charlie Bubbles shows him driving his Rolls Royce around dilapidated sections of Manchester in scenes that both document the city’s squalor and render it lyrically at the same time. Clearly, the boundary between literary text and film adaptation in the New Wave was a particularly porous one, part of a twosided conversation rather than a one-way transmission from source text to adaptation. The reception of British New Wave, despite its literary connections, was complicated. Many New Wave films were commercially successful in both Britain and America, received positive reviews in the popular press, and were nominated for major film awards. Room at the Top, for example, was nominated at the 1960 Academy Awards in six major categories including Best Motion Picture,64 and Rita Tushingham won a British Academy Award for her performance as Jo in A Taste of Honey. Even at the time, though, culture critics especially from the Left tended to dismiss the New Wave films as phony representations of working-class life.65 Along with Andrew Higson, Sargeant, and others, Hill faults New Wave films on a number of fronts. First of all, their protagonists, though born to working-class parents, generally have middle-class jobs and aspirations.

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Uniquely among New Wave films, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning we see Arthur Seaton working on the factory floor. In general, though, as Hill points out, the films focus not so much on work or industrial labor, as on new opportunities for leisure and consumption among working-class Britons. Another critique leveled against New Wave films and their literary sources is that they betray a deep misogyny. In Look Back in Anger especially, Jimmy Porter treats his wife Allison with absolute brutality, blaming her for her posh upbringing and family. Many of the other literary texts and the films based on them showcase resentful men of working-class backgrounds who are either outright womanizers (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) or social climbers who view women and marriage as mere opportunities for sex or social advancement (Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving). Women are also depicted in films like A Kind of Loving and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner as particularly susceptible to the superficial enticements of consumer culture. The films also were conservative in their treatment of race, immigration, and generational conflict. The cultural elites in the late 1950s and early 1960s were very concerned with the chaos of youth culture and juvenile delinquency. As a result, the New Wave films reveal a particularly split position on the culture of jazz: though the soundtracks pulse with it (Look Back in Anger has a jazz trumpeter, played by Richard Burton, as its protagonist), many of the films assign it an anarchic quality and associate it with the racial other of West Indian immigrants. Thus, though the New Wave seems to claim a radical politics of resistance and to take up the cause of the working class, its political commitments are open to interpretation. Perhaps the most sustained critique of the New Wave films, though, concerns their deployment of mise-en-scène. The essential criticism is that, inspired by 1930s documentary films of working-class life,66 the New Wave poeticized industrial and working-class landscapes to the point of making them mere aesthetic objects.67 Hill notes that the long “descriptive” shots in films like A Taste of Honey and A Kind of Loving create spaces that fail to become realms of narrative action and thus have a kind of added, supplemental feel and function: “Rather than place providing the setting for narratively significant action, it is insignificant action which provides the pretext for a visual display of place.” He calls this focus “an ‘excessive’ emphasis on place that impedes or delays the narrative and becomes a kind of inoperative lyricism.”68 In terms of adaptation, critics like Hill would claim that place seems ladled on top of the literary source materials in a particularly inorganic way. Higson too criticizes the New Wave fetishization of place along similar lines. Noting that most New Wave films contain at least one sequence that could be described as “That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill,” he suggests that

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such panoramic shots empty cityscapes of people and history and render them aesthetic objects, very much blunting the moral realism that the New Wave seemed to court and even separating protagonists from place rather than locating them within it. It has the further effect of shifting the point of view from the working-class protagonists to that of a sympathetic, but outside viewer—perhaps another kind of moral deflection.69 If these criticisms have a broad applicability to New Wave films viewed as a group, they can be a misleading shorthand for reading individual films. For example, Alice in Room at the Top comes across as a three-dimensional character with her own agendas and problems, not merely an object of lust. A Taste of Honey in a different way shows how men disrupt women’s lives and turn out to be unreliable or incomplete partners, seeing and evaluating them through a feminized point of view. Overlooking the significant achievements of cinematographers like A Taste of Honey’s Walter Lassally would also be a mistake in our view. Finally, the way landscape functions in a film like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner arguably challenges pretty dramatically the reductionist aesthetics identified by Hill and Higson. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner follows Colin Smith’s life in a borstal, where he is imprisoned after perpetrating a robbery with a friend. Smith is passionate about his father’s socialist politics and identity and resists the reforming attempts of the prison’s governor, who fervently wants Smith to win a cross-country race held between the prison and a local public school. Smith doggedly resists any invitations to work toward a brighter future through athletic achievement. The film weaves the national hymn “Jerusalem” ironically through the story in both the score and diegetic music, suggesting through the subjective camera that the beautiful countryside that Smith runs through belongs to him, not to any grand, unified nation (“In England’s green & pleasant land”). Further, the flashback scenes of Smith’s life at home amid factories and crowded streets have a gritty quality that thwarts any attempt to make the scenes mere objects of aesthetic enjoyment. Finally, Smith’s refusal to win the cup is an act of defiance and a statement of his allegiance to his father’s working-class identity. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner doesn’t merely evoke some vague sense of class consciousness, but makes it the uncompromising subject of the film. The British New Wave, as short-lived as it may have been, had an essential art-house look and feel. Its unique treatment of place through location shooting was shared among a number of directors who later on would pursue quite different cinematic paths. Thus the New Wave was something of a “school” of filmmaking rather than a collection of would-be auteurs. Perhaps surprisingly, the focus on cinematic place in the New Wave had distinct parallels to the use of landscape in the Panavision adaptations, however

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differently place functioned in the two modes. New Wave exploited industrial settings in a neorealist style while the Panavision adaptations operated in an almost purely pastoral mode. But if their techniques and aims were radically different, both achieved at their best a lyricism of place that could be thought of as the hallmark of British Brit-Lit adaptation in this era. Most important for our book is the fact that the New Wave reflected its era’s changing attitudes about the canon of British “literature.” In its commitment to a new sort of text and deliberate shunning of classical ones, it established for a time a distinct politics of adaptation.

Other Brit-Lit art-house films Similar to the New Wave directors, other producers looked to more recent writers for source material: among the most popular choices were D. H. Lawrence: The Fox (Canada, Mark Rydell, 1967), Women in Love (UK, Ken Russell, 1969), The Virgin and the Gypsy (UK, Christopher Miles, 1970), and Winner (UK, Charles Griffin/Richard Tarrant, 1977); Evelyn Waugh: The Loved One (US, Tony Richardson, 1965), and Decline and Fall … of a Birdwatcher (UK, John Krish, 1968); John Fowles: The Collector (UK/US, William Wyler, 1965), Magus (UK, Guy Green, 1968), and The Last Chapter (UK, David Tringham, 1974); William Golding: Lord of the Flies (UK, Peter Brook, 1963); Iris Murdoch: A Severed Head (UK, Dick Lement, 1970); and Lawrence Durrell: Judith (US/UK, Daniel Mann, 1966), and Justine (US, George Cukor, 1969). Yet other filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s did give classic texts the arthouse treatment. As in all periods of film history, Shakespeare was an obvious choice given his cultural centrality and international currency. Basil Reardon’s appropriation of Othello in All Night Long (1962), for example, sets the events of the play in the cool and chaotic London jazz scene of the early 1960s. The film features some of the contemporary jazz greats like Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck playing themselves, mainly at their instruments. The entire plot, except for a few street scenes, takes place in the warehouse music pad of a wealthy jazz lover and patron. It’s an indoor drama shot in confined spaces, giving it a theatrical feel, though it retains little of Shakespeare’s language. All of the main characters are American jazz musicians, including Rex, the fictional African American version of Othello and his white muse and girlfriend, Delia. Johnny Cousin, a jazz musician played by Patrick McGoohan, struggles to find an audience and assumes the role of jealous Iago. The film explores the play’s problematic assumptions about race in a way that must have felt new in 1962, but using the relatively safe strategy of depicting American cultural problems in a British setting, where they can be observed and dissected.

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Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) operates in another mode altogether. Filmed on location in Verona in period costumes and settings, the film gives Shakespeare top billing, working from a pared-back script of the play toward achieving a naturalistic verisimilitude. Romeo and Juliet proved a remarkable success at the box office, raking in nearly 40 million dollars against its tiny budget of under one million dollars, and has remained an influential Shakespeare adaptation ever since—partly for having been the first version to cast teens in the central roles (Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey) and partly because of its immense popularity with young viewers. At the time of its release, R. Cirillo wrote that in “many ways, this film is a ‘youth movie’ of the 1960s which glorifies the young and caricatures the old, a Renaissance Graduate.”70 Other art-house–influenced Shakespeare adaptations included Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Tony Richardson’s Hamlet (1969), Polanski’s dark and bloody Macbeth (1971), Grigori Kozintsev’s powerful King Lear (1971), Peter Brook’s austere, hopeless King Lear of the same year, and Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979, discussed below on pp. 347–8). In many ways the art-house aesthetic we have been outlining here stands in a continuum with the auteur adaptations to which we are about to turn. We would argue, however, that the auteur adaptations pursued a considerably different type of relationship with their literary source texts.

4 Brit-Lit adaptations in the age of the auteur In the final section of this chapter, we examine the adaptations of filmmakers who worked self-consciously in the auteur mode and were affected by early promulgations of the theory. Our goal is to analyze auteurism as a historical phenomenon that had a powerful effect on the production and reception of film adaptations in the period. In the discussion that follows, however, we place directors roughly in order of the claims for auteur status made for them by previous film scholars, however subjective and contentious their arguments may be. In doing so, we argue that a new kind of adaptation, which we call the “auteur adaptation,” was built on a different type of relationship between the literary source texts and the filmic hypertexts. The best auteur adaptations achieve an equilibrium or peace in the battle for authority between source and adaptation: such films seek to stand on an equal or perhaps even higher ground than their inspiring source texts, and questions about the hierarchical relationship between the two tend to melt away. In general, this suspension of the source text’s authority does not occur because an auteur chooses a subliterary text with little cultural

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capital (Hitchcock’s usual strategy—see above, pp. 195–7) but, on the contrary, occurs in spite of the auteur ’s bold appropriation of a canonical or contemporary literary text of some stature. The Brit-Lit film played a key role in the formation of the international auteur adaptation, precisely because so many of the literary sources drawn from it possessed the cultural capital to challenge or provoke the filmmaker ’s vision. Different directors of course sought authority for their films through vastly different means, including thoughtful negotiation with the source text, subtle subversion of it, all-out attacks on it, or the subordination of it to an exclusively cinematic vision. As we argued in Chapter 5, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood achieves a certain authority in part by drawing deeply on the conventions of Noh theater, but principally through a powerful deployment of nature in the mise-en-scène. The stylistics of the auteur films, though as varied as the individual directors, were influenced by the reflexive cinema of the postwar art-house scene. In this final section, then, we take time to explore the individual practices of some truly accomplished directors, analyzing some of the most iconic films of the 1960s and 1970s. In making our claims about the auteur films, we urge readers to remember that our use of names like “Kubrick” and “Coppola” are in no way intended to exclude the brilliant cinematographers, designers, writers, and other collaborators with whom these directors worked.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American Joseph L. Mankiewicz is probably best known for All About Eve (1950) and The Barefoot Contessa (1954), films centered on strong female characters and performances. Mankiewicz was as accomplished a writer as he was a director, and he had a serious interest in the theater, which forms the setting for All About Eve.71 He directed a highly regarded adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1953 and in interviews talked of his aborted plans to adapt Macbeth (starring Marlon Brando and Maggie Smith), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night for the movies.72 As we saw in Chapter 5, he also directed a modernized adaptation of Shakespeare (see above, pp. 241–2). He made a wide variety of films including the notorious financial train wreck of a historical film, Cleopatra (1963), the musical Guys and Dolls (1955), and many others. Mankiewicz was a powerful director in the dying days of the studio system. Andrew Sarris himself had no doubt that Mankiewicz bore “the signature of a genuine auteur.”73 Later, he wrote that “Mankiewicz has paid a high price for the literate quality of his scripts, and for disdaining subjects and genres that lent themselves to facile mythmaking. He is obsessed with that civilized realm in which characters are conscious of the roles they play

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and examine them with the gravest humor.”74 Indeed, Mankiewicz’s best films have an unmistakably pessimistic and bitter tone. Mankiewicz’s 1958 adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American deserves special attention here since it reverses so radically the politics of Greene’s story. In fact, the film actively attempts to refute the novel—a rare example of a consciously hostile adaptation. Interestingly, Graham Greene himself correctly predicted the sorts of changes that would need to be made for a Hollywood adaptation of the novel.75 Though politically left-leaning and a filmmaker who had employed writers blacklisted during the Red Scare, Mankiewicz seems to have taken a dim view of what he called the “absurd AntiAmericanism” of Greene’s novel. He attempted to show how “the emotions of a man can affect his political convictions,”76 perhaps a euphemistic way of saying that Mankiewicz thought Greene’s emotions had affected his political views or that Fowler’s barbed dismissal of American blundering in Vietnam was motivated by mere romantic jealousy. Critics of the time believed that Mankiewicz “changed the ending to avoid angering both American exhibitors and Figaro’s financing distributor, United Artists,” but Mankiewicz denies this version of events.77 History has proven Greene’s critique of America’s tragically naïve intervention in Vietnam uncannily prescient—and Mankiewicz in this adaptation turned out to be largely on the wrong side of that debate, though as Cheryl Bray Lower and R. Barton Palmer point out, Pyle’s death in the film “does call into question the efficacy of an American problemsolving approach to Vietnam. … Even as rewritten, The Quiet American hardly presents American involvement in a positive light.”78 This film, then, should not be viewed as politically reactionary, though it is intensely oppositional. In his rewriting of the novel, Mankiewicz set out to reverse completely Greene’s sympathies toward the two main characters—and the politics of the novel along with them—all the while following the source rather closely in both plotting and dialogue. Both film and novel revolve around two men: a middle-aged, jaded journalist, Thomas Fowler, who is covering the Viet Minh revolt against French rule, and the young American Alden Pyle, an idealistic but tragically misguided political operative in Vietnam, circa 1954. Fowler and Pyle’s political ideas couldn’t be more opposite, but the problems begin when Pyle begins to woo Fowler’s very young Vietnamese mistress, Phuong. Mankiewicz retains much of Greene’s language, particularly several of Fowler’s jaded but incisive critiques of Pyle’s naivete and also appropriates Greene’s flashback structure. Occasionally he sharpens the anti-American bite of Fowler’s language, such when he denounces Pyle’s politics as amounting to “cellophane wrapped security for the atomic future.” Only at the end, though, does Mankiewicz engage in any wholesale rewriting. In the novel, Pyle’s childlike sense of good and evil, and his belief

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in “a third way,” based only on the out-of-touch political theory he has read in books, leads him to supply explosives to a dangerous rebel general, who then uses them to set off a bomb, killing many innocent bystanders. To prevent Pyle from creating more havoc and death, Fowler contributes to a string of events that leads to Pyle’s assassination. In the film, however, we learn that Pyle was framed by Chinese operatives and had nothing to do with the plot to supply the explosives. Further, Pyle claims to have absorbed his ideas for Vietnam at Princeton from a Vietnamese leader in exile, who appears to be based on Ngo Dinh Diem.79 Pyle himself, played by decorated war hero Audey Murphy, is transformed into a plain-dealing and chivalrous aid worker in the film (not a likely CIA agent acting under the cover of the US legation, as in the novel). And Fowler, in his desperate bitterness about losing Phuong, comes across as an older man intensely jealous of his younger rival, willing to betray him and bring about his death. In the novel, Phuong stays with Fowler, but she utterly abandons him in the film, going back to her job as a dancer. Despite these fundamental changes, it is worth recognizing that two-thirds of Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American might be called a “faithful” adaptation. The ending, though, changes everything. In a none too subtle twist of the knife and the plot, Mankiewicz has Fowler deliver a prearranged signal to Pyle’s assassin by standing on the balcony with a book, which turns out to be a copy of Shakespeare from which he happens, at random apparently, to read out Iago’s speech to Othello about how “oft my jealousy/Shapes faults that are not.” Kenneth Geist thinks that this heavyhanded citation shows a “distinctive and irritating Mankiewicz trait in a work so audaciously heedless of commercial or popular appeal”—namely his inability to trust or give credit to the audience’s intelligence.80 But the device also reverses the direction of gullibility between Fowler and Pyle, since it is now Fowler who is primed to make a naïve blunder because of his insane, Othellolike jealousy. If Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American finally fails as an adaptation, we include it here because it reveals the ambitions of some auteur adaptors to challenge or even replace the literary original they have chosen to adapt. Mankiewicz produced two other Brit-Lit adaptations near the end of his career: The Honey Pot (1964) and Sleuth (1972), adapted from Anthony Shaffer’s play. The Honey Pot, though ultimately neither a financial or critical success, is fascinating for the way it hijacks the plot of Ben Jonson’s Volpone to meditate reflexively on the difficulty of the filmmaking process. The film’s radical metacinematic turn is a hallmark of the auteur adaptation of this era in film history, but Mankiewicz gives it a uniquely bitter spin. As with The Quiet American, The Honey Pot is perhaps more notable for its ambition to master and rework its literary source text than its actual success in accomplishing that goal.

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Roman Polanski’s Tess Throughout his directorial career, Polanski has shown an interest in the literary film, starting with his adaptation of The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), loosely connected to Bram Stoker’s novel, then moving into the realm of high literary adaptation with his films of Macbeth (1971), Tess (1979), and more recently, Oliver Twist (2005). Polanski’s films tend to be intensely personal and connected to the events in his chaotic and tragic personal life. His 1970s adaptations show Polanski striving for radical forms of historical authenticity.81 His Macbeth—which confronts rather directly the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, through the Lady Macduff massacre scene—contains horror elements that link it directly to his general exploration of evil in a string of films including Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974). Tess (1979) has much in common with the Panavision adaptations considered above. Whether Tess should be treated here as film that constitutes an auteur adaptation of course remains open to question. An interview with Polanski in 1979, though, sheds some light on the issue, thanks in part to a telling question from Max Tessier: “My first impression is that with Tess, your personality as a director has become invisible. The story is not told as subjectively as some of your previous films, in particular The Tenant. Do you think auteurs are moving towards populist cinema while still maintaining strong personal influences over their work?” Polanski responds that, at the level of structure, Tess lacks the subjective narrator of a story like Chinatown, which is told through the eyes of Jake Gittes; in other words, the stories are basically different: “It’s the novel that actually suggests this different approach, and I felt it would have been quite silly to use a more subjective method when telling the story. … But I don’t have any reverence or religious respect for the novel in its entirety. I’m just very keen on it, maybe because [my wife] Sharon gave it to me.”82 Tessier’s question and Polanski’s response suggest that his approach to the film takes Hardy’s omniscient narration of the novel as its starting point. In place of the subjective camera used in some of his other films, or of objective narration, Polanski’s ambition is to make a film in which the mise-en-scène trumps everything else, including storytelling. By and large, however, Polanski rejects the self-conscious art-house style of other auteur adaptors, opting instead for an inquisitive camera that follows patiently every detail within the frame (see Figure 6.7). Polanski’s painterly cinema is on full display when Tess sits down apart from her coworkers near a steam-driven threshing machine to eat her lunch. The golden sheaves, the workers lounging with their lunches, invoke the peasant scenes of Pieter Brughel the Elder or possibly the lush naturalism of Terence

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FIGURE 6.7 Polanski’s Tess (1979): Nastassja Kinski as Tess. Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), released the year before. Similarly the scenes of Tess’s seduction by Alexander D’Uberville show the pair riding through a flourishing, sun-dotted forest, with leaves and branches often obstructing our view of their tense encounter. The cinematography and editing, however effectively they contribute to this pastoral lyricism, rarely call attention to themselves. One exception is the scene in which Tess discovers that her letter of confession, pushed under Angel’s door, has gone under the carpet, and that Angel has not read it. Embracing Tess’s subjectivity in that moment, the camera jerks up toward the noonday sun, washing out everything for a few seconds in blinding light. Perhaps the best arguments for Tess as an auteur film are to be found in the patience of Polanski’s camera and its general inquisitiveness. In an early scene at the dairy, the camera pans slowly in a circular arc around the milkmaids’ quarters, drinking in the rustic tools, beds, and belongings—all bathed in a golden light streaming in from a small window. This probing, descriptive camera seems to merge the guiding vision of Polanski with the descriptive mode of the novel—making a peace between them.

Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones We have already discussed Tony Richardson’s New Wave film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and placed it at the more radical end of the New Wave school of adaptation. It could be argued that Richardson produced the most significant and interesting body of literary adaptations of any of his peers in the period covered by this chapter. One key to Richardson’s relative freedom to make the films he wanted to make was the founding of Woodfall Film Productions in 1958, the company that made Look Back in

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Anger and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Richardson´s vital connections to the contemporary British stage, especially the Royal Court Theatre, arguably introduced an experimental, oppositional aesthetic into his films. According to Robert Shail, Richardson almost immediately abandoned the realist and naturalist style of filmmaking associated with the New Wave for a more ironic cinematic style. His next Brit-Lit adaptation was his most famous, the one for which he is still known: Tom Jones (1963), the tale of the bastard foundling and his various lusts, loves, and adventures. Though set in eighteenth-century England, the film engaged directly the sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s. The tavern scene in which Tom and a chambermaid orgiastically devour a variety of increasingly sexualized foods is justly famous (see Figure 6.8). Tom Jones is of course far from a reverent adaptation of a high classic. In the credit sequence, for example, screenwriter John Osborne gets a much larger font than Henry Fielding himself, announcing the film’s prioritization of cinema over literature. It is, in fact, more of a cheeky, slapstick comedy than a lofty adaptation. Richardson begins with a wonderfully confusing mishmash of modern and silent film techniques. Though a harpsichord starts in an eighteenth-century style, it quickly jerks into the music hall mode used to accompany silent films. The frame rate is faster than normal in this opening sequence, and title cards announce the main characters and plot lines with a slapstick-like irreverence, shifting to spoken dialogue with voiceover narration after the credits. Richardson also employs a stunning variety of vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and iris wipes from an earlier era of film practice throughout the movie. Other contemporary techniques clash with these historical ones: Richardson uses long freeze frames at key moments to

FIGURE 6.8 Albert Finney in Tom Jones (1963).

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disrupt the narrative and call attention to the filmic medium, and Tom Jones is made in vibrant colors with many scenes filmed in a cinema vérité style with handheld cameras. So from the beginning, Richardson appeals, tongue in cheek, not to literary history but to film history, playfully combining the techniques of different eras. Calling this a meditation on film history might be going too far, but in referring to the history of cinematic styles and forms, Tom Jones does seem to appropriate Fielding’s own comic meditations on the history of literary forms such as epic, romance, history, and the novel itself. See, for one of many examples, the first chapter of Book 5, “Of the SERIOUS in writing, and for what purpose it was intended,” where Fielding considers satirically the unities of time and place, and gives a potted history of the harlequin in English comedy. Richardson’s seemingly effortless transposition of literary to cinematic reflexivity is remarkably effective and authoritative. Richardson’s other Brit-Lit adaptations of the era reveal a constant reengagement with issues of adaptation, film history, and stage practice. These include The Loved One (1965), an uneven adaptation of a minor novel by Evelyn Waugh; The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), an antiwar film related tangentially to Tennyson’s poem; Hamlet (1969), a restrained and consciously theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare’s play; and Joseph Andrews (1977), a likable adaptation of yet another Fielding novel. In this same period he also adapted films from literary sources as diverse as Marguerite Duras, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edward Albee. On the whole, Richardson’s body of Brit-Lit films is an impressive one, showing a serious and evolving interest in the problems of adaptation. *** If directors like Mankiewicz, Polanski, and Richardson operated somewhere between the art-house and auteur modes, the following group of directors— Pasolini, Welles, Kurosawa, Kubrick, and Coppola—were recognized in their own times as auteurs and often embraced this identity. Their films stand as some of the most original and audacious Brit-Lit adaptations in the entire span of film history.

Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales Pasolini’s lone Brit-Lit adaptation, The Canterbury Tales (1972), stands alongside his reworkings of other classic medieval tale collections, The Decameron (1971) and The Arabian Nights (1972), which many commentators prefer to view as parts of a trilogy.83 In each of these films Pasolini boldly hijacks the

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source material with the confidence and authority of an auteur. In the case of The Canterbury Tales, he employs several techniques to undermine the priority of Chaucer’s classic Brit-Lit text. First of all is selection—he chooses only the fabliau, the bawdiest of Chaucer’s tales. In this film, the naked body lusting or being lusted after, queer or straight, commands the ultimate authority. Pasolini’s inclusion of the “Pardoner’s Tale” near the end of the collection might seem to veer away from this principle toward a higher seriousness, but his depiction of the revelers as drunken whoremasters, one of whom pees on the inhabitants of the tavern, steers the tale back to the body, the unavoidable site of all drama in Pasolini’s film. He also dispenses largely with the storytelling frame; the host announces it, but the tales are not “told” and generally transition from one to the next with no structural cues that a new tale has begun. Second, Pasolini shows that he is adapting far more than a single canonical text by citing a number of other “texts” from literature, art history, and cinema within the frame of the film. In a mischievous scene, he shows Chaucer himself at his desk in a skullcap furtively reading a tattered copy of The Decameron. When the poet hears someone coming, he hides this volume among a huge pile of other books, but not before his shocked wife (we presume) shouts scoldingly, “Geoffrey Chaucer!” The Canterbury Tales is, Pasolini implies, already subordinate to another text, The Decameron, from which Chaucer takes his inspiration. The fact that Pasolini himself plays the part of Chaucer blurs the lines of authorship and authority in the film even further: the auteur and author here merge (see Figure 6.9). Pasolini also makes The Canterbury Tales over into an Italian classic. In this, he projects not just the title of Boccaccio’s work onto the film, but much of its spirit and aesthetics as well. Chaucer scholars still argue today about how well he knew Boccaccio’s great tale collection,84 and Pasolini’s playful scene also appropriates Chaucer’s own ironically humble statements about being a mere compiler of other writers’ material.85

FIGURE 6.9 Pasolini as Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (1972).

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In another scene, Chaucer, apparently struggling to find anything to write about and with his bare feet on his desk in a narrow alcove, dreams up a series of sexual encounters—blowjobs, S&M whippings, and copulations that lead to the “Pardoner’s Tale”. Here, Chaucer with his bare feet becomes just another lusting body with no special authority, just like all the other characters in the film. Pasolini cites other “texts” as well. Famously, he makes over the “Cook’s Tale” into a homage to Charlie Chaplin slapstick comedy. His randy, happy, yodeling, and strangely cherubic Perkins (based on Chaucer’s Perkin the reveler) has a leather hat that looks just like a bowler and carries a cane. We first see him being chased away by a merchant—“Get out of here you ugly little sod!” At this point, the film speeds up as he races away, suggesting the faster frame rates of silent film. Two anachronistic looking policemen with leather hats suspiciously resembling the helmets of bobbies or turn-ofthe-century American policemen, discover Perkins devouring the donut of a child in gigantic, joyful gulps. Like Keystone cops, they chase him through the narrow streets to a quay, but misjudge the descent and careen into the river while Perkins escapes. Later on, quite deliciously, Perkins gets the job of egg polisher, ideal work for a slapstick tramp. This citation of early silent comedy sits side by side with the material actually derived from the “Cook’s Tale”. Finally, in the last sequence, based on Chaucer’s “Summoner’s Tale”, Pasolini brings to life the filthy anti-fraternal joke found in the tale’s epilogue. In a vision, a friar is given a tour of hell and is impressed that there are no friars to be found there. His guide laughs and asks Satan, a Dantean figure on the floor of hell, to lift up his tail. From his anus erupts a swarm of friars in a massive fart; they fly around hell before flying right back into the devil’s arse. For this sequence, Pasolini gleefully quotes Hieronymous Bosch’s visions of hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Last Judgment, demons, red and green, a devil penetrating with a pitchfork a man on a bed. Pasolini again subordinates Chaucer’s text by inserting it into a chain of references and citations. In another scene, actors in friars’ habits explode from a gigantic prop of the devils red buttocks, dropping like brown shit onto the ground. In spite of such scatalogical imagery, or perhaps because of it, Pasolini’s hell is a space that mainly provokes laughter and pleasure. The demons of hell are clearly “naked men painted in red and wearing fake horns,” celebrating a kind of anal eroticism.86 These citations—the master citation of Chaucer’s text, but also the quotations from Boccaccio, Chaplin, and Bosch, among others—serve to collapse hierarchies and suggest that Chaucer is merely one in a massive chain of signifiers87 that the director is commandeering in a story about the politics of bodies.88

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Welles: Falstaff—Chimes at Midnight Welles’s brilliant but flawed Brit-Lit adaptations of Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952) belong to an earlier period of film history (see above, pp. 261–2), but his last Shakespeare adaptation Falstaff—Chimes at Midnight (1965) has all the hallmarks of a mature auteur adaptation. Welles more or less creates a new Shakespearean tragicomedy by weaving together the Falstaff material from 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V. He doesn’t merely stitch together the Falstaff scenes from surviving plays but shapes the whole into a complete narrative of Falstaff’s friendship with Prince Hal, which could have been titled the Rise and Fall of Falstaff. That meant leaving to the side the broader Falstaffian comedy of The Merry Wives of Windsor and employing Holinshed’s Chronicles, read in voice-over by Ralph Richardson, to help glue the parts together into a convincing whole. Welles was clearly attracted to the dramatic power associated with great characters from classic Brit-Lit, having himself played Rochester in Jane Eyre (1943), as well as the title roles in Macbeth and Othello, Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1965), and Shylock in a TV adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (1969)—not to mention his numerous stage roles as both actor and director. It is easy to imagine how the enormous emotional and physical size of Falstaff’s character would draw him to the project as an older man. As a director, Welles brought a mastery of mise-en-scène to Chimes at Midnight. He always had a talent for creating surreal psychological spaces: famously he staged the closing of Othello by showing the vertiginously twirling Othello as he cradled the dead Desdemona in his arms. He looks up suddenly to see a round hatch in the very top of the ceiling open, through which witnesses, perhaps surrogates for the film’s audience, peer down at him from a great height as he begs them to set down his story. The sequence ends as this surreal hatch is closed from above with an echoing crash, transforming the space where the events of the drama just took place into something like an underground crypt. Welles manipulated space even more dramatically in his great adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial (1962). The lived spaces he created for this film verged on the allegorical due to their psychological weight. Joseph K’s rooms at the beginning of the film, for example, have such a radically low ceiling that they produce a feeling of dread and claustrophobia, while the nightmarish home of the Advocate, played by Welles himself, is a nightmarish blend of public office, private Victorian bedroom, and industrial work space. The spaces in Chimes at Midnight have an equally symbolic, nearly allegorical function. The court, presided over by King Henry IV, is filmed in a cold, angular cathedral of stone with stark shafts of light and dark cavernous rooms. By contrast, the tavern where Falstaff and friends carouse is made

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FIGURE 6.10 Tavern Scene from Chimes at Midnight (1965). almost entirely of wood.89 One of its passageways is comically small compared to the enormous girth of Falstaff, but the main space is large and well lit, and Welles’s trademark deep focus reveals the deep sociality of the place. In the scene in which Falstaff boasts about his having defeated an ever-growing number of assailants during the robbery single-handedly (when we and Hal know he ran away), women look on from a distant window in the very back of the room, participating in the story (see Figure 6.10). Welles’s cinematic spaces, thus, have an intensely self-conscious feel—they call attention to themselves and prevent any narrative immersion. The third space of the film is nature, woods, and fields, the site of the robbery of the friars and the climactic battle of Shrewsbury. Semenza notes that Welles employed in this battle sequence “a relentlessly fast-paced montage style, stringing together hundreds of glaringly non-contiguous shots … and manipulating drastically both sound and the classic 24-frames-per-second pacing” in a way that is “fiercely intertextual … [an] homage to Eisenstein’s great battle scene in Alexander Nevsky.” The scene is indeed exemplary of Welles’s intensely reflexive cinema of adaptation.90 In his manipulation of the story and all its elements—from his construction of the narrative from fragments, to montage, and the creation of potent cinematic spaces—Welles produces an auteur adaptation that shows off his control over every plastic cinematic element. Like other auteur adaptors, he puts the medium of film in direct competition with the authority of the literary text he is adapting.

Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well Kurosawa, along with Antonioni, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Bergman, Kubrick, and Fellini, is not just a director whose auteur status was debated in the period covered by this chapter; his cinema was actually used to construct what was

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meant by the “auteur” per se.91 Thus, a perilous circularity comes into play when thinking of Kurosawa as an auteur adaptor, especially the way that his films can be read through a theory which, in its emphasis on a kind of formalism, cuts them off from their context in the history of postwar Japanese cinema. We are, of course, interested in Kurosawa’s Brit-Lit adaptations, specifically his transformations of Shakespeare. Though sometimes criticized in Japan for exhibiting the West’s influence on his movies, Kurosawa’s talent and authority as a filmmaker allowed him to commandeer Shakespeare and translate him within the traditions of Japanese theater and cinema (see above, pp. 262–4), all the while exploring human relationships so elemental that they seemingly erase cultural boundaries. These talents parallel Shakespeare’s own, since he too took his narrative raw material from various other literatures and translated them in the cultural terms of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Kurosawa’s iconic Shakespeare adaptations Kumonosu-jô [Nest of Spiders], or Throne of Blood (1957), and Ran (1985) fall outside the scope of this chapter, but his bold rewriting of Hamlet in Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemru [The Bad Guy Sleeps Well Enough], or The Bad Sleep Well (1960), deserves some attention here. Tetsuo Kishi writes that “because Westerners thought of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare … as a kind of ‘samurai Shakespeare,’ they took a remarkably long time to notice how Kurosawa’s next excursion into Shakespearean territory came in the fiercely contemporary and much underrated film,” The Bad Sleep Well.92 The Bad Sleep Well is set in a world of corporate and government corruption about ten years after the end of the American Occupation in 1951, at the beginning of a remarkable economic boom. The film spotlights the murderous politics of the “Public Corporation for the Development of Unused Land,” a government entity charged with building public infrastructure, and its corrupt relationships with construction companies and private corporations. In the course of building its headquarters, it forces one of its employees to commit suicide to cover up its pattern of bribes and dirty bidding practices. This act sets the events of the film in motion. The son of this dead man soon begins to wreak revenge on the officers of the corporation who killed his father. Kurosawa’s meditation on contemporary corporate politics surely offered a model for Michael Almereyda’s more merely atmospheric transformation of Denmark into the Denmark Corporation in his 2000 adaptation of Hamlet (see below, pp. 369–70). The Bad Sleep Well is not an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in any conventional sense, though, but rather a basic reimagining of the story in terms relevant to contemporary Japan. Kurosawa essentially takes the Hamlet narrative apart, piece by piece, examines it carefully, and puts it back together by radically inverting the main pressure points in character and plot.

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Kishi notes that the connection to Hamlet is intentionally obscured in the first half of the film but reveals itself “in an astonishing, rapidly multiplying series of reversals and inversions.”93 At a wedding of the vice president’s daughter to his lieutenant Nishi, who is rapidly rising in the corporation, reporters gather on the news of an arrest. In one of the more awkward weddings ever to appear on screen, the officers of the corporation squirm as some invisible hand orchestrates their humiliation before the press, culminating in the wheeling in of an enormous cake in the shape of their corporate headquarters, with a red flag indicating the window from which their employee jumped to his death. Kurosawa in general makes little use of the text of Shakespeare’s plays in his adaptations, but one might be tempted to think that the line describing the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude at the beginning of act one receives a visual embodiment here: “The funeral baked meats/did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (Hamlet 1.2.180–81). It slowly emerges that it is the groom, Nishi, who is orchestrating these events, and we eventually discover too that the dead employee was his father. As Kishi points out, the powerful vice president of the corporation is the Claudius figure and the antagonist whom Nishi attacks by going after his immediate underlings. In the first of many striking inversions, it becomes clear that Nishi is, unlike Hamlet, completely uninhibited in his pursuit of revenge, carrying it out methodically and ruthlessly. Only when he falls in love with his wife, a version of Ophelia, whom he married as part of his plot for revenge, does he develop the scruples that lead to his fall. These few remarks on Kurosawa’s rewriting of plot and characters of Hamlet may give some sense of the fundamental nature of his appropriation of Shakespeare, but it must be said too that the cinematic spaces he creates rival Welles’s in their symbolic function. In one of the more startling sequences, Wada stumbles past a huge sign, “Public Corporation’s Site #3,” onto a blasted, volcanic mountain, to commit suicide for his bosses. The black soil, rising steam, the absence of any growing or living thing transforms this place into a kind of hell (see Figure 6.11). As he grovels abjectly near the peak, ready to throw himself down, Nishi towers over him, preventing his leap with a violent slap. However much the corporation would project itself into spaces like the luxury hotel of the opening scenes or into its lavish corporate headquarters, this barren, horrible landscape is its real home. Later on, the bombed out shell of a factory where Nishi starves Shirai into submission is pressed into an allegorical function, showing the moral devastation the seemingly prosperous corporation is capable of creating. In his creative reworking of the characters and plot of Hamlet, his thorough transfer of the play’s context to the corporate world of 1960s Japan, and

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FIGURE 6.11 Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960). his masterful and reflexive use of place, Kurosawa created a film that puts Shakespeare to use in the service of his own artistic goals.

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange Of all the filmmakers associated with auteurism in the 1960s and 1970s, Stanley Kubrick’s body of Brit-Lit adaptations are perhaps the most revolutionary and startling of the period. He made three such films, all of which could be called auteur adaptations: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories; A Clockwork Orange (1971), adapted from Anthony Burgess’s controversial novel; and Barry Lyndon (1975), based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s classic The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844). Though we will focus on A Clockwork Orange as the prototype of the auteur adaptation, it is worth mentioning that 2001: A Space Odyssey operates fully in the art-house mode, an aesthetic Kubrick used to transform the relatively straightforward science fiction stories on which it is based.94 With Barry Lyndon, made immediately after A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick turned to a much more traditional style of literary adaptation, one directly related to the Panavision adaptations surveyed above—yet one that also flaunted its own virtuoso exploitation of the cinematic medium. A Clockwork Orange remains one of the most disturbing and controversial Brit-Lit adaptations in the history of cinema, and we believe that it exemplifies as completely as any other film in this chapter the auteur adaptation we have been defining and exploring. Its amoral, even gleeful depiction of the ultraviolent rampages of Alex and his droogs in a near future dystopian Britain is filled with images of graphic sex and violence so unsettling that the film received a number of scathing reviews equating it with pornography and accusing Kubrick of nihilism, sadism, or worse. Its distributor Warner Brothers, stopped its release in Britain, where it has never been officially released. The

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film represents a frontal attack on almost every institution in Britain of the time: the family, leftist politics, the welfare state, the middle class, social engineering, consumer culture, the penal system, high art, et cetera. The film and novel both suggest to different degrees that the society that produced Alex is on the whole more horrific and dead on the inside than he himself is. As adaptations go, the film tracks the novel fairly closely but Kubrick adjusts details subtly to make Alex more sympathetic (omitting for example his lust for ten-year-old girls) and renders his victims less human (the “cat lady”, for example, who in the book lives with dozens of cats amid antique art and valuables, is an elderly woman. In the film, however, she is transformed into a cold, middle-aged health nut with a severely upper-class accent, who collects sexually charged, avant-garde art.). Kubrick does introduce one significant change: he omits the final chapter of the British edition of the novel, in which Alex decides to turn away from violence and rape to get married and start a family and become a functioning member of society. Many critics think he was right to do so, but Burgess objected strenuously to this omission, arguing that it altered not only the genre of the piece from novel to fable, but wrecked the central point of the narrative. According to Krin Gabbard and Shailja Sharma, Kubrick’s desire to provoke and shock was part of the modernism he adopted as an auteur. They see A Clockwork Orange as a turning point in the art-house cinema of its time. Though the “most admired films of Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Truffaut, and the rest took large helpings of inspiration from the Realist novel of the nineteenth century,” A Clockwork Orange turns to a style of literary modernism created by Joyce and Beckett and later inherited by writers like Burgess. “The sensation of shock, so important to the avant-garde and modernism from Surrealism to the Nouveau Roman—both in cinema and in the other arts—is an integral part of Kubrick’s project, even as he foregrounds the music of High Romanticism.”95 In fact, the juxtaposition of the beauty and joy of the music (Beethoven and Rossini mainly at their lightest and airiest) and the horrific deeds that Alex and his gang inflict on their victims has the very unsettling effect of aestheticizing the violence. Kubrick introduces a clash between classical music and violence as a dissonant subjective element which forces the audience to identify with Alex’s inner life, his pleasure, and even aesthetic enjoyment of violent thuggery. In the scene of Alex’s home invasion of the novelist and his wife, music plays perhaps the most disturbing role. It opens with a glimpse of the novelist at his desk, writing on an intensely red typewriter, with books behind him. The set suggests a sleek futuristic minimalism which is shot through with eyescalding colors of reds and oranges. The camera tracks to the next room where the novelist’s wife, in a red jump suit, is reading in a futuristic chair made of

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shiny white plastic. The doorbell rings, ominously chiming the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Alex pleads through the chained door to be allowed to use the telephone to call an ambulance for his friend, dying in the road, but the novelist’s wife is reluctant and suspicious. Her husband calls in from the next room and asks what the matter is, and he languidly says, “I suppose you better let them in.” The film rather remarkably manages to render this couple, otherwise completely innocent, starkly unsympathetic in their affluence, their aesthetics, and perhaps their lack of knowledge of the world; this is accomplished mainly through the mise-en-scène. The attack which proceeds is disturbing to say the least: the victims are tied, gagged with balls, and beaten to the rhythm of “Singin’ in the Rain,” which Alex gleefully mouths during the attack. This is choreographed, aestheticized violence, and the line “I’ve a smile on my face” is probably the operative text for the scene. The music embodies Alex’s pure joy in his heinous act. He cuts away the clothes of the wife to the song, and forces the husband, filmed in a distorted closeup, to watch as Alex takes down his trousers ready to rape this utterly naked and terrified woman. Music plays a similar role in the attack on the “cat lady,” where this time Rossini’s happy overture to “The Thieving Magpie” swells as Alex menaces her with a large white sculpture of a penis and testicles, part of her massive collection of sexually explicit contemporary art. Significantly, she picks up a bust of Beethoven with which to attack him. Like other auteurs, Kubrick puts cinema itself at the heart of the film—Alex’s reformation in prison under an experimental program known as the Ludivico technique is essentially a commentary on the cinema itself (see Figure 6.12). When Alex asks how the process works, the doctor tells him “we’re just going to show you some films.” He answers incredulously, “You mean like

FIGURE 6.12 The Ludovico Technique: A Clockwork Orange (1971).

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going to the pictures?” She then fixes him with a slow stare, “Something like that.” The films that Alex watches are mirrors of his own life—groups of young thugs, beating, killing, and raping. Other citations of films include the reference to Singin’ in the Rain, mentioned above, and the clear display of the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, among a set of albums in a record shop. At least in the dystopic culture of the film, the cinema and other forms of high art like classical music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and theater are shown to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever, suggesting that they may even encourage decadence and violence. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange has more or less eclipsed its source text, mainly through the power of its mise-en-scène, its ironic and disturbing deployment of classical music in the score, and its reflexive focus on cinema, which is presented as the most powerful and subversive of all the arts depicted in the film.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Given its enormous budget and the spectacular choreography of its battle sequences, Apocalypse Now (1979) clearly exhibits many key elements of the 1970s blockbuster, while at the same time functioning self-consciously as an auteur adaptation. For this reason, to step back and consider Apocalypse Now mainly as a Brit-Lit adaptation might seem perverse, perhaps because by speaking so powerfully to the politics of the Vietnam War, it seems to have freed itself fully from any subservience to its primary source. Jamie Sherry writes that Apocalypse Now surpassed the “cultural presence” of Conrad’s story, while at the same time remaining “indelibly linked to Conrad’s source text in a culturally more profound way than many adaptations that foreground their adaptive status.”96 In its quest to become one of the first films really to engage the horrors of the Vietnam War, it may be surprising that Apocalypse Now first turned to a constellation of Brit-Lit sources. Its plot and characters, even its mode of narration, are built around a surprisingly close reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, supplemented by the modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot, specifically “The Hollow Men,” and The Waste Land. Coppola preserves Conrad’s mode of narration by having Willard, in his voice-over narration, take over the function of Conrad’s narrator, Marlow. Both Willard and Marlow go searching for the shadowy Kurtz, and both attempt to understand the man through others’ speculations, documentary evidence, and finally, faceto-face encounters. Though Apocalypse Now quotes both “The Hollow Men” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” directly, it evokes The Waste Land more subtly. And when the camera pans across Kurtz’s small library of books,

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FIGURE 6.13 Kurtz reads Eliot in Apocalypse Now (1979). we see Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, important inspirations for The Waste Land (see Figure 6.13). John Milius wrote the original script as an adaptation of Conrad’s novella, and according to his biographer Gene Phillips, Coppola considered changing the title of the film to Heart of Darkness. The script had a long gestation period, with contributions by George Lucas, and Coppola himself. As Phillips writes, Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness is in the spine of Apocalypse Now.”97 Most of Coppola’s revisions to Milius’s script intensify the connections to Conrad by, for example, adding the insane photojournalist (played by Dennis Hopper), based on the Russian sailor and disciple of Kurtz from the novel. Coppola’s ending returns to the revulsion felt by Marlow for Kurtz (Milius has them fighting side by side against the Viet Cong.) Given the history of the screenplay, however, it is an ironic fact that Conrad’s novella does not appear as a source in the credits. In its critique of Western, specifically American imperialism, Apocalypse Now exudes a raw antiestablishment politics. Though it depicts the Asian people of Vietnam and Cambodia mainly as unknowable others (with the exception of a few scenes such as the devastating attack on the sampan), it does acknowledge how the obscene violence of the war fell heaviest on the young and African American soldiers like Clean and Chief Phillips. With a few notable exceptions, Brit-Lit adaptations of the 1960s and 1970s, even those made by auteurs, rarely addressed so openly issues of race, colonization, or imperialism. Coppola’s film links the crudest form of European colonialism directly to the American project in Vietnam. Only Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and perhaps Ridley Scott’s The Duellists could be said to engage in anything like a similar critique of America’s war in Vietnam, though those films are much less direct than Apocalypse Now. Brit-Lit up to this point had rarely been deployed for such a full-frontal critique either

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of British imperialism or of the US imperialism that evolved in part from it. Though the imperial films of the 1930s (see above, pp. 201–5) sometimes contained subtle moments of doubt about the imperial project, for the most part they celebrated the order and military might of the British Empire while underscoring the barbarity of native populations. In following Conrad’s logic so closely in the last third of the film, Apocalypse Now becomes even more disturbing in its critique of US colonial ambition and its expose of military insanity than Milius could ever have envisioned.98 After Willard’s boat crosses into Cambodia and arrives at Kurtz’s camp, the landscape of the film becomes a surreal “native” one, dominated by fog, the ruins of an ancient temple, dismembered and executed bodies, gruesome heads on sticks. Like Marlow, Willard discovers Kurtz’s manifesto or report. In Heart of Darkness Kurtz writes his report, “Suppression of Savage Customs,” arguing that Westerners must exercise their seeming godlike powers for greatly benevolent ends. In his madness, Kurtz scrawls “Exterminate the Brutes!” at the end of the last page. In Apocalypse Now, Kurtz’s report, “The Role of the Developed [World] in the Underdeveloped World,” commissioned by the “Center for Democratic Studies, Santa Barbara California,” has “DROP THE BOMB EXTERMINATE THEM ALL!” scrawled on an interior page in crude red lettering. Colonel Kurtz, then, like Mr Kurtz, goes “native,” embracing in his madness the savagery of the underdeveloped world, or at least the West’s fantasy of that savagery. Ultimately, the brilliance of Apocalypse Now as an auteur adaptation is most apparent in the paradoxical manner in which it radically appropriates and transposes Conrad’s story while, at the same time, adhering so closely to its basic themes, plot, and structure. Like other auteur adaptations we’ve seen, Apocalypse Now is a film that manages to clarify its source text precisely by transforming and even disfiguring it.

5 Conclusion As a group, the auteur adaptations we’ve considered represent an incredibly diverse range of films. Some of them, like Tess and Barry Lyndon fetishize the landscapes of a barely industrialized England. Others, like Welles’s Chimes at Midnight or The Bad Sleep Well, create cinematic places so potent that they take on quasi-allegorical significance. Still others, like Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales and Richardson’s Tom Jones, place film history in direct competition with literary history. Finally, films like A Clockwork Orange and Apocalypse Now appropriate Brit-Lit texts to wrestle with the most difficult of contemporary

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issues. Each auteur adaptation worthy of the title invents its own methods and procedures of adaptation—the very reason we have devoted so much space to examining so many individual films. It seems appropriate to close this chapter as we have with a discussion of Apocalypse Now. As David Cook reminds us, “Budgeted at $12 million and shot on location in the Philippines, the production was plagued by illness, natural disasters, and other logistical problems which nearly tripled its costs (to $32.5 million) and resulted in a flawed if brilliant film. … Widely viewed as an act of hubristic folly, the film permanently damaged Coppola’s position within the industry,”99 even though it more than earned back its costs in the long run. Despite the film’s brilliance, then, Apocalypse Now needs to be regarded as one of several big-budget auteur films that contributed directly to the end of the New Hollywood era, an event punctuated by the Heaven’s Gate debacle. Though the directors had enjoyed their brief moment, one which gave rise to some of the most memorable and innovative adaptations in movie history, it would be the legacy of Jaws more than that of Kubrick or Kurosawa, that would determine the course of moviemaking in the 1980s and beyond.

7 The Brit-Lit film after film, 1979–2015

I

n March of 2007, The New York Times announced the intentions of independent producer Vincent Newman to make a 100-million-dollar adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.1 Having purchased the script from screenwriters Philip de Blasi and Byron Willinger in 2006, Newman managed to secure cofinancing with the fledgling Legendary Pictures company, which—along with distributor, Warner Brothers—has gone on to produce such blockbuster films as the Christopher Nolan Batman series (2005–12), Superman Returns (2006), Nolan’s Inception (2010), Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013), and Gareth Edward’s 160-million dollar digital epic, Godzilla (2014). As such a record of megahits might suggest, this would not be an adaptation dedicated to exploring the finer details of Milton’s sophisticated theodicy, or even the human psychodrama of the Adam and Eve narrative (Newman admitted that the first couple presented filmmakers with a “nudity problem”).2 Rather, the filmmakers would focus on “the greatest war that’s ever been fought,” the battle in heaven depicted in Books 5 and 6 of the poem between Satan’s and the Father’s armies. Initial buzz about the film was loud, with numerous commentators weighing in on who should play Satan (from Daniel Craig and Heath Ledger to eventual choice Bradley Cooper), who should play Eve, and who should direct. Whereas the initial choice of the American, evangelical Christian director Scott Derrikson promised the most orthodox version of the tale possible, the eventual choice of Australian Alex Proyas (Dark City, 1998) seemed more inspired. Unfortunately, as the film’s budget continued to swell to over 120 million dollars, Legendary decided in 2012 to shut down the project.3 This was not the first time that ambitious plans for a film version of Paradise Lost had failed to materialize. In 1911, for example, Vitagraph had pursued plans to continue their half-decade-old campaign to produce “quality” films based on British literature by tackling Milton’s poem. They acknowledged

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the project as a “stupendous undertaking” that would “not only eclipse all previous efforts” but would become a “world beater,” “more wonderful than anything they had ever evolved,” but Vitagraph wound up canceling the project when it became too stupendous to manage.4 Again, in the late 1960s, plans for a Hollywood Paradise Lost, to be “the most spectacular motion-picture ever made,” wound up going nowhere. The planned film, associated with John Collier’s wonderful screenplay, Milton’s Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (published in 1973), was finally canceled in 1970. Eric Brown notes that, as a result of all these cancelations, “no feature length treatment of Paradise Lost has ever been successfully mounted.”5 Though Tristram Shandy may hold a reputation as the most “un-filmable” work in British literature, Milton’s poem has proven the most “impossible” of adaptations—in spite of the unparalleled splendor of its visual imagery, its spectacular narrative, and its complex psychological characterization. The reasons why Paradise Lost is attractive to filmmakers seem consistent and logical even across different time periods. In 1911, as narrative multireel films became the norm, and as big-budget adaptations of such epic literary masterpieces as The Inferno (1911) and The Odyssey (1912) thrived— serving, one should remember, to counter popular images of the cinema as a culturally debased industry—a poem as revered and spectacular as Paradise Lost would have immediately suggested itself to producers. In 1967, two years after the massive success of The Sound of Music (1965), which momentarily erased memories of the Cleopatra debacle (1963), the scramble for a “most spectacular film ever made” again would have led pretty naturally to Milton’s epic poem. And in 2006, in the midst of the digital revolution and on the heels of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001–03), Warner Brothers’s Harry Potter series (2001–11), and the coproduced, co-distributed The Chronicles of Narnia (2005–present) film franchises—along with a successfully rebooted James Bond series, the most financially successful Brit-Lit project of all time—Paradise Lost seemed like a less than crazy idea. In all three scenarios, however, problems of capital (the extreme costs of maximizing each period’s technological capabilities) and cultural conservatism militated against completion of the films. Especially in Hollywood’s America, where even as relatively innocuous a work as Philip Pullman’s “Paradise Lost for teenagers,” The Golden Compass (2007), could be derailed by Catholic propaganda and pressure,6 it’s hard to imagine a Paradise Lost film that wouldn’t simply eliminate the poem’s theological and literary complexities. Things were hardly different in the respective climates of “uplift” and the Vietnam War than they are today, though we routinely convince ourselves that religion’s grip on Hollywood ended sometime after the decline of the Code. All of this serves merely to clarify a particular dynamic that has always

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characterized the adaptation process: certain texts demand the sort of financing only Hollywood can provide, but the same texts require the sort of creative treatment Hollywood is least able to provide. For the best possible Paradise Lost film, we will almost certainly have to wait until sophisticated CGI becomes more affordable for independent filmmakers, or until religious and cultural mores evolve. We’ve gone on at some length about this unmade film of Paradise Lost because, in several ways, it brings our study full circle—elucidating certain key themes in the history of British literature on film and suggesting some of the likely courses this history might take in future decades. Regardless of how new technical developments and changing economic and political climates impact processes of filmic adaptation, the key questions today are similar to those asked by pioneer filmmakers: what are the potential financial, cultural, and artistic benefits of adapting a particular literary work? How well do existing technologies support the likelihood that a particular adaptation will be successful? Which local risk factors, whether economic, aesthetic, or political, make a particular adaptation a potentially risky endeavor? In this final chapter of The History of British Literature on Film, which focuses on the years 1979 to the present, we’ll continue to explore these and other questions in the context of several major developments in film history, including, but not limited to, the following: (1) the impact of 1980s conglomeration and merger mania; (2) the impact of new technologies: VHS, cable television, ondemand, and especially digital; (3) the impact of globalization; (4) the impact of postmodern theory. The sheer quantity of international adaptations produced during this period (numerous books are devoted to the Shakespeare and Austen films alone) makes anything resembling a comprehensive survey impossible; our hope is that attention to the most significant historical and cinematic developments of this long period, and the films which best illustrate their impact, will bring some degree of closure to this story.

1 Adaptation in the age of conglomeration and consumer-driven cinema As Stephen Prince remarks, “The 1980s stand as a seminal decade. The scale and the legacy of the industry’s changes make this decade comparable in significance to the other two transforming events in the history of American film, the coming of sound in the late 1920s and the industry’s loss of its theaters in the late 1940s.”7 For our purposes as scholars of Brit-Lit on film in particular, the most obvious terminus a quo for such changes would be

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the respective elections in 1979 and 1980 of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and American President Ronald Reagan. For more than a decade, both the UK and the US governments would turn dramatically to the Right, establishing similar policies supporting the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the unionized labor and state welfare systems, and the deregulation of businesses. In the United States, deregulation included the federal Justice Department’s clear indication by 1985 that it would stop enforcing the 1948 Paramount decision, thereby sanctioning traditional models of vertical integration by the major studios. According to Jennifer Holt, “By the end of Reagan’s tenure in office, the major studios or their parent companies owned almost the same percentage of the country’s theaters that the ‘Big Five’ held prior to the Paramount consent decrees.”8 Moreover, by 1985 the major “studios” were hardly studios in the traditional sense, having been absorbed by massive conglomerates focused on film as merely one spoke in the wheel of an increasingly integrated entertainment industry. Technically, the age of conglomeration began in 1952, when Universal helped to form MCA/Revue, and in the 1960s key mergers involved Paramount (Gulf and Western) and Warner Brothers (Seven Arts). In the 1980s, though, all of the major studios except Disney were merged with or acquired by massive parent corporations that sought to profit from evolving synergies between the film, television, video, and music markets, among others.9 In spite of the fact that film appeared to be a less important determinant of such companies’ overall profits, the Reagan administration’s encouragement of vertical integration acknowledged film’s role as “the engine driving the interlinked global entertainment markets.”10 As Holt explains, The fact remains that first-run domestic exhibition still determines how a film performs in all other arenas: international exhibition, television, video, marketing tie-ins, etc. If a film flops at the box office, this undeniably hurts home video orders, television rights, and all other ancillary sales. Conversely, a profitable first run can send these revenues soaring.11 The age of merger and acquisition marked another key moment in American film’s evolution within an increasingly complex global economy, and Hollywood—meaning the major studios who already held all the power—was the primary beneficiary of conservative policy. In Great Britain, where Hollywood continued to dominate box office revenues to the effect of 88 percent,12 Thatcher’s conservative policies essentially “brought the UK film and television production industry to its knees.”13 The decline followed the government’s gradual reduction of state

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support of the cinema in favor of various privatization schemes. Such a maneuver necessitated the government’s outright repeal of quota policies dating back to the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, and its abolition of the Eady Levy (established in 1957), whose purpose was to channel a proportion of film profits back into production. To subject the relatively small and already struggling national cinema to the international free market, however, was to offer it up as prey to the dominant Hollywood machine. John Hill says, “State intervention was historically based upon a recognition that the British film industry did not, and could not, compete on equal terms within the international film market. By withdrawing its support, therefore, the government did not revive the industry, only enfeebled it further.”14 As a result, most domestic companies which financed film production suffered greatly without assistance from government programs, and even traditionally reliable companies such as EMI and Rank began to exit the industry by mid-decade.15 Of course American companies—especially independents such as Cinecom and Orion—then sought to occupy the vacant spaces (succeeding modestly, in some cases, as we’ll discuss below). British producers such as Handmade and Working Title also sought deals with American distribution companies in the hope that they’d be rescued by the massive American filmgoing population, a strategy which failed more often than not.16 The fact is that by decade’s end, investments in British film had fallen off dramatically (from $270.1 million in 1986, for example, to $49.6 million in 1989),17 and cinema admissions reached an all-time low in 1984.18 Whereas laissez-faire policies of deregulation and privatization served in America to make the rich richer, they served in Britain to widen the gap between Hollywood and the relatively poor UK film industry. By mid-decade, the dream of a true British film renaissance—which had seemed a very real possibility after the international triumphs of Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982)—seemed beyond reach. One partial solution to the British film industry’s financial woes came in the form of greater ties with the television industry, which in some ways continued to be supported as a “public service” by the British government. The launching of Channel 4 in 1982 proved especially crucial for British film due to its unique remit as a channel which “did not operate as a production house but either purchased or commissioned work from independent production companies.”19 Not only did it become more usual for “Film on Four” products to undergo theatrical releases, but somehow the TV budget was doubled for film funding even when those films became more antiestablishment. The key film in this regard was My Beautiful Laundrette, which in 1985 received full funding from Channel 4.20 The channel remains to this day a source of funding for many of the edgier Brit-Lit films.

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The case of My Beautiful Laundrette, a decidedly progressive film produced with indirect support from the Thatcher government, raises immediate questions about the ideological impact of the rightward turn upon the individual films produced during the 1980s and beyond. The general consensus among British scholars is that although Thatcherism influenced the cinema in multiple direct ways, “it is much easier to identify an anti-Thatcherite cinema than a pro-Thatcherite one.”21 Such a fact is hardly surprising in light of the Thatcher administration’s gradual but systematic elimination of support for the film industry. If any particular body of films has tended to be viewed as conservative, however, it is the heritage films which were so popular in this period, particularly in the United States, and which so often adapted British literary source material. We discuss these films at some length below (see pp. 342–7). In America, scholars are much more divided about the politics of 1980s cinema. Early commentary followed Andrew Britton’s 1986 characterization of “Reaganite entertainment” as a kind of “Blissing Out” through which “we are invited deliberately to forget our troubles.”22 Outspoken critics of 1980s cinema included Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, and especially Robin Wood, who analyzed systematically the reactionary “reassurances” offered by mainstream 1980s films, such as their appeal to “a widespread desire for regression to infantilism, [for] a populace who wants to be constructed as mock children.”23 Still, “Hollywood” has always been large enough to complicate sweeping generalizations, and the 1980s proved no different. While critics like Britton and Wood offered persuasive readings of many of Hollywood’s most successful films during this period, other scholars such as William J. Palmer and James Monaco have challenged the idea of 1980s American cinema as mere “Reaganite entertainment.”24 Stephen Prince probably articulates the most balanced view of the period when he says that the Reagan administration helped to set a moral and ideological temper for the eighties; films participated in that process, but not in a unidimensional fashion. Much writing about the era’s films, though, has tended to reduce them to a set of ideological symptoms. … From a cultural and aesthetic standpoint, however, heterodoxy is the norm—a profusion of styles and subjects. … While some of these films are reducible to a deductive framework … many others are not.25 In conclusion, both British and American films of the 1980s reflected the impact of their era’s ruling politicians, but they also responded to the conservative climate in extraordinarily diverse ways.

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Prince’s focus on heterodoxy in 1980s cinema speaks indirectly to one final aspect of Thatcher and Reagan’s cultural legacy which, we believe, had massive consequences for audience reception: the continuing erosion in both countries of political consensus. According to Kenneth MacKinnon, “In both Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain, consensus politics is viewed with strong suspicion and undisguised hostility.”26 Matthew Dalleck adds that “Ronald Reagan’s most divisive legacy, probably, resulted from his role in the culture wars. … For all his political gifts, Reagan was hardly the most unifying president of recent decades, … applying his skillful rhetoric to inflame voters who were most likely to vote based on a single social issue.”27 In Britain, argues Kenneth O. Morgan, The problems of the early eighties were intensified by a Conservative government under Thatcher which seemed to be the most right-wing that Britain had known in the twentieth century. At the same time, the Labour Party, with Tony Benn spearheading a grass-roots movement towards fundamentalist socialism, appeared to be moving equally far to the left. Consensus seemed to have disappeared.28 At what point, might we ask, does the appearance of cinematic diversity actually reflect the industry’s attempt to accommodate this growing political divisiveness? The British and American cinemas of earlier periods, such as the 1940s, might also be singled out for producing a stunning diversity of forms, but had mainstream audiences ever before been presented with such polarized and polarizing responses to a single major historical event as, say, Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985) and Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989)? Along with the rise of video and DVD, of cable television, and eventually, on-demand Internet services like Netflix and other ancillaries, the impact on cinema of the so-called culture wars might be seen as having exacerbated industry-wide “uncertainty and instability about the reception of a product that has too many audiences or too vague an audience.”29 The problem of audience fragmentation as it pertains to film reception has undoubtedly escalated over the past three or four decades. By “fragmentation,” we mean not only the splintering of a relatively general audience into conservatives, liberals, horror fans, “tweens,” and so forth, but also the fragmented interiority of individual audience members in the age of infinite choice.30 Since such fragmentation first became a special problem back in the late 1960s and 1970s, the industry has responded by attempting to address an imagined universal audience through blockbuster productions, or “high-concept” films, meaning films whose pitch can be reduced to a single concept or ad-line.31 Such films by their nature must be appealing enough to

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attract potentially everyone—or at least “everyone” likely to attend a theater, mainly people between eighteen and thirty-five years of age—and innocuous enough to offend no one. High-concept films can be said, then, to have been both the accelerator of conglomeration and the natural offspring of it. After the sensations caused by such films as Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), the major American production companies—the only companies in the West, we should note, capable of supplying such a product—have been more invested in high-concept filmmaking. We’ll note from the outset that such changes haven’t meant all doom and gloom for literary adaptation; as mentioned earlier, three of the five most lucrative film franchises in movie history—Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and the James Bond films—are Brit-Lit adaptations financed or cofinanced by Hollywood studios. In spite of the profitability of these three franchises, British literature is not, in the vast majority of cases, easy to appropriate as a high-concept commodity, and for fairly obvious reasons. Dawn Steel once characterized the ideal film after Star Wars as one “capturing the spirit of the times … geared to the youth audience … [and] whose themes could be explained in a sentence or two.”32 Her words still apply today, and they’re not exactly a ringing endorsement of the need for more Brontë adaptations. In fact, the main role of Brit-Lit films in the age of conglomeration has been as an alternative to the high-concept Hollywood film—a role it has performed remarkably well in cultural terms, and less well in economic ones. Since the major film-producing companies of America have committed more and more of their resources to their high-concept productions, BritLit movies might be said to have evolved in one of two ways since the Star Wars era: they have either proven themselves amenable to high-concept adaptation or found their way into the light through independent, art-house, and foreign film productions, which have tended deliberately to eschew Hollywood ideals and practices. In the remainder of this section, we’ll consider more deeply these divergent strategies, concluding with a focus on the production team that became briefly synonymous with Brit-Lit on film: Merchant-Ivory. In the case of Brit-Lit films with high-concept appeal, the vast majority will be genre movies seeking to capitalize on their massive child, teen, and young adult fan bases. Of course, genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror tend to draw in younger audiences anyway, so much of the work is done simply in choosing particular texts to adapt. Furthermore, because of their target audiences, such films will have tremendous potential for merchandising and for ancillary market profits. We would break up most common sorts of highconcept adaptations into four distinct but overlapping categories: “children’s films,” “teenpics,” “remakes and reboots”, and “event films.”

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Children’s films Imagine Shakespeare’s Hamlet with lions and hyenas on the African plains and you’ve got Disney’s The Lion King (1996). How about another Romeo and Juliet for the next generation? What rhymes with “Romeo”? Why, Gnomeo, of course. So how about an adaptation of the play centered on the hilarious lives of garden gnomes? Call it Gnomeo and Juliet (Touchstone, 2011). We need not only look to Shakespeare, though, for inspiration. The triumphs of digital help us to rationalize the need for yet another version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (Disney, 2009), even if the animated characters are so un-lifelike that they’re likely to send shivers down the adults’ spines. Now let’s apply the same technique to Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010). To be fair, not all contemporary children’s films based on British literature have been so problematic (though the fact that Pixar has emerged in the twenty-first century as the most reliable studio in the United States certainly highlights by contrast the absurd number of failures and misfires we’ve been subjected to). Certainly, The Lion King is a beautiful and entertaining film, and its strategy for adapting Hamlet for children, however saccharine, is quite brilliant. In its quest to render the play comedic, the film pinpoints Hamlet’s bitter “guts of a beggar” (4.3.19–31) speech as the primary source of his melancholy and tragic vision. In that speech, natural life, the universal human experience, is reduced to a grotesque cycle of eating and shitting, of life from death and death from life. Simba suffers from a similarly pathological obsession with death after his father is murdered—and in fact he seeks to ease his pain by giving himself over entirely to his appetites, symbolized best through his unnatural gorging on worms, grubs, and slimy insects (see Figure 7.1). Ultimately, though, since Simba’s perspective of the natural world must be influenced by the observable laws of the plain and the jungle, not through

FIGURE 7.1 Hamlet gets the Disney Treatment in The Lion King (1996).

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the corrupting lenses of civilization, Christianity and Platonism, he will come to terms with a different “circle of life,” one in which “everything you see exists together in a delicate balance, … from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope.” In The Lion King, the father teaches Simba to “take your place in the circle of life,” with the emphasis on life, as opposed to the cycle of death the old King Hamlet urges upon his son in the play: “Remember who you are” (a part of the living world) as opposed to “remember me” (a ghost in purgatory or perhaps even a demon). The film’s complex engagement of Hamlet is all the more remarkable for the source text’s near-total invisibility for most viewers. Not so with Brian Henderson’s Brit-Lit Muppets adaptations, The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) and Muppet Treasure Island (1996). Though the latter film is entirely forgettable, an attempt by Disney to repeat the successful formula established by its predecessor, Christmas Carol is a witty adaptation featuring several catchy musical numbers and a strong performance by Michael Caine as Scrooge, as well as the usual impeccable puppetry work featured in most Muppets productions. The film boldly announces its literary progeny, both in the opening titles and its presentation of Dickens as its narrator—Dickens as portrayed by the Great Gonzo, that is: “A blue, furry Charles Dickens who hangs out with a rat.” Gonzo’s role is to provide a combination of biographical information about Dickens, historical information about the era, and of course to frame the story for children in several ways, including extensive direct quotations of the novella. Christmas Carol announces itself boldly, then, as an introduction for children to a book that is, along with Hamlet, the most adapted of all Brit-Lit stories; however, it does so in a decidedly different way than The Lion King.

Teenpics As we saw in Chapters 5 and 6, the youth film or teenpic can be traced back to 1950s Hollywood. As Thomas Doherty notes, filmmakers after the rise of television and fall of the studio system were “forced to narrow their focus and attract the one group with the requisite income, leisure, and gregariousness to sustain a theatrical business.”33 Early examples of the teenpic included the beach flicks and rock ‘n’ roll pictures, and we’ve seen several such as West Side Story (1961) that adapted or appropriated Brit-Lit in fairly complex ways. If the teenpic can be said to have contributed to the “juvenilization of American movies in the 1950s,”34 it ironically began in the 1980s to take on more “adult” themes just as the adult cinema was, in ways, becoming more juvenile. The appearance in the 1990s and 2000s of powerful, sympathetic portraits of

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youth in crisis—for example, John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991)—can of course be traced back to classic youth films such as Rebel without a Cause (1955) and even The 400 Blows (1959), but the modern market for such serious films might ironically have been reestablished by the successful 1980s teen comedies made by John Hughes and Amy Heckerling. The success of the better Hughes films—including Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)—and especially of Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), all of which managed to portray the daily lives and (largely interior) struggles of middle-class, white American teenagers in a funny and humanizing way, raised the bar for character development in the American teenpic. It was perhaps a little less surprising in the 1990s, therefore, when the teenpic began turning regularly to British literature for its inspiration. The year 1995–96 saw the release of two hugely successful films, which earned 56 and nearly 150 million dollars, respectively: Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo ⫹ Juliet (1996). Unlike earlier teenpic Brit-Lit sensations such as Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), these were thorough modernizations of their source material, making their real predecessor West Side Story. Heckerling’s comedic adaptation of Jane Austen’s 1815 novel Emma into modern-day Beverly Hills stuck close to the plot but kept none of Austen’s original dialogue (see Figure 7.2); Luhrmann kept nearly all of Shakespeare’s language and modernized the setting to a modern-day Californian beachfront city. The two films came in the middle of Austen- and Shakespeare-mania, a period of more than a decade when Hollywood adaptations and appropriations of the two authors’ works were produced with unusual regularity and often found large audiences. More important, both Clueless and Romeo ⫹ Juliet were so clever about how they adapted the source material, so lovingly and skillfully directed,

FIGURE 7.2 Amy Heckerling’s Influential Austen Appropriation, Clueless (1995).

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and well calibrated for the teenage audience—that they sparked an entire subgenre of teenpics based on literature (Shakespeare-dominated, of course), a development which is still continuing as late as 2015. The many films they inspired include: 10 Things I Hate About You (based on The Taming of the Shrew, 1999); She’s all That (based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, 1999); Never Been Kissed (based on As You Like It, 1999); O (based on Othello, 2001); Wuthering Heights (MTV, 2003); She’s the Man (based on Twelfth Night, 2006); Hamlet 2 (2008); and Warm Bodies (inspired by Romeo and Juliet, 2013); this trend also featured several films based on other national literatures, including Cruel Intentions (based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1999); Whatever it Takes (based on Cyrano de Bergerac, 2000); and Easy A (based on The Scarlet Letter, 2010). Clueless also inspired a hit TV show that ran on ABC from 1996–99. Of these films, perhaps two deserve further consideration, Gil Junger’s 10 Things and Tim Blake Nelson’s O. Junger’s film earned over 53 million dollars at the box office and became a generational favorite through DVD and on-demand services. The choice to adapt for teens Shakespeare’s most unmodern (some might say unforgivable) play certainly seems odd on the surface, but the film might have succeeded had it not attempted to stick so closely to the central “taming” metaphor upon which Shrew is structured. 10 Things can be quite funny in spots, but it also centers on one of the more insidious conventions of the teenpic formula which, as Richard Burt points out, tends to bank on a “conservative idealization of the good girl” whose ultimate happiness hinges on her involvement in a heterosexual relationship with a largely asexual male.35 The plot trajectory of 10 Things might be neatly captured by two classroom scenes on either end of the film. In the first, Kat (Julia Stiles) reveals her independence and strong feminist views, for which she is abused by the other students and sent to the principal’s office by her English teacher. In the final scene, she stands before the classroom and reads a love poem to her boyfriend while breaking down in tears and then rushing from the classroom. In such a way, Kat reveals that she does in fact need her man, and so the shrew (i.e., feminist) has been readied for her proper role in American society. Nelson’s modernization of Othello breaks the dumbing-down and/or reactionary formula of so many films in this subgenre—though, disgracefully, the MPAA rated the film R, which greatly hindered teens’ ability to see it. Though the final product is something of a mixed bag, at times awkward, at times moving and surprisingly smart, O deserves credit for using the Othello plot to weigh in on the American school shooting epidemic.36 In fact, the film’s release was delayed for almost two years due to fears that memory of, and pain caused by, the Columbine shootings still was too immediate.

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But the whole point of the film was to ask why such tragedies occur and, more important, to encourage teenagers to think critically about this question. Whereas the American film industry took a disturbingly paternalistic—in the sense of patronizing—control over the film, in effect censoring the conversation when it was most badly needed, the film itself sought to understand the relationship between school violence and such cultural factors as race, wealth, and peer pressure.37 The cases of 10 Things and O illustrate how the Brit-Lit teenpic craze is at once a credit to Hollywood’s creativity and an exposure of its spineless approach to complex and controversial subject matter. As Michael Friedman has shown, any inclination Gil Junger might have felt to protest from a feminist perspective the basic narrative of Shakespeare’s play seems to have been quashed by her producers.38 The result is that feminism itself is ridiculed in and by the film. Conversely, Nelson manages to make a relatively challenging and thoughtful film, but Miramax’s refusal to release it, in addition to the MPAA’s R rating, has the effect of branding it inappropriate for its target audience. The Brit-Lit teenpic subgenre stands as perhaps the clearest example of how Hollywood tends in one way or another to crush the radical potential of British literature in the process of cinematic adaptation. Still, the artists keep trying and, every now and then, manage to get something meaningful onto the screen.

Remakes and reboots Of course, some things in Hollywood never change. The staple Brit-Lit subjects of Dracula, Frankenstein, and Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, simply refuse to be put down.39 This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Two fine Dracula films were made in 1979, John Badham’s Dracula starring Frank Langella—arguably the first Stoker-influenced film to centralize the title character’s sexual seductiveness—and Werner Herzog’s masterful homage to Murnau, Nosferatu the Vampyre. A decade later, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) further advanced the character’s evolution on film. Coppola’s movie features strong performances by Gary Oldman as the Count and Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing (as well as one of the worst performances of all time by Keanu Reeves), a remarkable, expressionistic costume design by Eiko Ishioka, top-notch special effects conceived mainly by Roman Coppola, and some truly memorable set pieces, including a London cinematograph scene which serves as one of many reflexive nods toward the character’s rich cinematic history. In spite of the title’s appropriation of Stoker’s authority, the film presents Mina as Dracula’s reincarnated wife, interpreting their love affair—which ends

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with his eventual redemption by her loving, murderous hand—as a tale of star-crossed lovers. In a sense, Coppola uses all the resources of modern moviemaking to bring us back round to Murnau’s Nosferatu, through special effects, self-reflexivity, and an emphasis on the redemptive powers of love. F. W. Murnau’s Dracula might have been a more appropriate title for the film. Frankenstein’s poor creature fairs far less well than Dracula in the mainstream cinema of the past few decades. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) sought to capitalize on the success of Coppola’s film (American Zoetrope produced it, in fact). Although the film marketed itself as the most faithful adaptation of Shelley’s novel—not an entirely outrageous claim—it somewhat absurdly required a 45 million dollar budget to demonstrate its fidelity. The filmmakers’ desire both to tell a classic story and to stage a big-budget spectacle had unfortunate results. Both Universal and Hammer Studios had proved much earlier that massive budgets were not required to capture the miscalculated ambition of Victor Frankenstein, the suffering and loneliness of the creature, or the horrific consequences of both. Branagh’s film is the classic case of an ambitious vision ruined by a Hollywood emphasis on gimmicks and spectacle over story and character. Fortunately, we have Tim Burton’s two Frankenweenie films (1984 live-action short, 2012 stop-motion feature), which bring the story back down to earth in a creative and intelligent manner. One curious “remake” that ignores its own intertextual progeny is Robert Zemeckis’s Tom Hanks vehicle Cast Away (2000). Focusing on the adventures of an American plane crash survivor on an uninhabited island somewhere in the Southwest Pacific, the film makes obvious, even to the most casual observer, its indebtedness to Robinson Crusoe. More stunning, however, is the film’s direct mimicry of the plot of a literary work filmed multiple times in the early twentieth century (see above, pp. 92–4, 134–5): Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden.” At the end of Cast Away, Hanks’s character, Chuck Noland, returns after many years to America, where he tracks down his one-time fiancé. The two profess their undying love for one another but ever-noble—as all Tom Hanks characters must be—Chuck decides to sacrifice his happiness for the good of Kelly (Helen Hunt), her young husband, and their baby daughter. Amazingly the film fails to credit either Defoe or Tennyson as sources—a fact that speaks to the degree to which both tales are now so enmeshed in our popular culture that they’ve become almost invisible. Perhaps the most significant reboot of the era began with the casting of Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale (2006). Earlier attempts to reinvent the character by darkening his soul (Timothy Dalton) or dressing up smugness as “cool” (Pierce Brosnan) had mixed results. While Dalton’s more physical, more introspective Bond anticipates Craig, though a few

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years too early for many Bond fans, the Irish-born Brosnan’s version of suave was close enough to Roger Moore to satisfy for a while. The Brosnan films were immensely successful at the box office, but they eventually pushed the Hollywood blockbuster formula too far even for the gimmick-loving Bond crowd; Die Another Day (2002) featured an invisible car, which sort of epitomized the problem of a franchise that had gone too far away from the mesmerizing charisma and charm of Sean Connery, not to mention the more subtle playfulness and ultimate anguish of George Lazenby. The closest thing to those more sympathetic Bonds was a character named Jason Bourne, whose human story upped the ante for the Bond franchise, but whose relative asexuality also left doors open. Enter Daniel Craig, probably the least popular Bond ever at the moment of his casting. The blond-haired, blue-eyed, and medium-height actor (5´10”) seemed the antithesis of the tall and slim, dark-haired character conceived by Ian Fleming. In reality, Bond is described in the novels as being about 6 feet tall with black hair and cold eyes of bluish-gray, a description that no previous Bond really meets. In any case, Casino Royale—the first serious cinematic adaptation of Fleming’s first Bond novel—changed nearly everyone’s mind about Craig. In this case, the piercing blue eyes give the character a deeper humanity which the film’s story of love and loss manages to accentuate and linger on, and Craig’s stunning physique is believable as that of a true killer. This physique, which made him an immediate sex symbol, was highlighted in what we might regard as the film’s own announcement of itself as a reboot of the franchise, a now-famous beach scene which puts Bond in the place of Ursula Andress’s Honey Rider in the first Bond film Dr. No (see Figures 7.3 and 7.4). Andress’s memorable appearance in a white bikini was the original “Bond girl” moment, setting a pattern used in all of the

FIGURE 7.3 Ursula Andress’s Iconic Turn in Dr. No (1962).

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FIGURE 7.4 Daniel Craig in Casino Royale (2006). films of submitting highly objectified women to the male gaze. Halle Berry’s appearance on the beach in Die Another Day had attempted a different kind of statement, though she wasn’t the first African American Bond girl, but Craig’s beach turn proves far more radical and inventive. In the scene, Bond can be seen emerging from the crystalline blue waters off the Bahamas and then wading out of the sea onto the beach. The Andress homage would be interesting enough from this image alone, but director Martin Campbell goes out of his way to highlight themes of objectification and the gendered gaze by emphasizing different points of view. First we are shown a beautiful bikini-clad woman on a white horse galloping across the sand as a group of children follow closely behind. It’s a tracking shot from several perspectives which eventually halts on the face of one small child who gazes adoringly on the woman who then disappears from our view. We then switch to close-up and medium shots of Bond himself as he emerges from the sea and approaches the beach. For a moment, we are the gazers who look on and objectify Bond until he accuses us of doing so by looking directly back at us through the camera. The perspective changes, however, to Bond’s own perspective as he spies the woman who has just climbed off of her horse. She soon sees him staring, and we are treated to several close-up shots of the two characters gazing at one another. Bond then watches her walk away until he notices that the woman’s lover has been staring at him the entire time. Here the traditional male gaze is simply part of a much larger web of highly varied desires: the child’s nonsexual but affectionate desire for the woman; Bond’s and the woman’s curious, perhaps lustful but mutual desire for one another; her lover’s suspicious and menacing and perhaps queer desire for Bond.

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Thus the film embraces the franchise’s usual custom of paying reflexive homage to the earlier films but with an ideological sophistication simply lacking in the earlier films. Craig’s Bond, the film seems to say, still is sexy and charming but he’s no womanizer like all the other fellows. This sexual evolution is yet more clearly pronounced in Skyfall (2012), when Javier Bardem’s villainous Silva makes a clear pass at Bond, threatens even to rape him. Stroking Bond’s chest and legs, he mutters, “Well, there’s a first time for everything, yes,” to which Bond smilingly replies, “What makes you think this is my first time?” If it isn’t, was the first time simply part of the job? Indeed, the Craig Bond is quite unlike his predecessors in making sex seem so much like an afterthought that one begins to wonder if he approaches it merely out of a sense of duty. The emblematic scene comes again in Casino Royale where Bond—learning that a terrorist attack is soon to be launched at the Miami airport—leaves his first lover on the spot entirely unsatisfied. Can one imagine Roger Moore or Sean Connery not finishing the job? No, Craig’s Bond is far more interested in killing demons, within and without, and the makeover has its advantages and disadvantages. Casino Royale became the highest grossing film in the series until Skyfall raked in a billion dollars and became the ninth highest grossing film of all time. Yes, the films still had Hollywood backing and budgets of over a hundred million, but they worked because they went away from invisible cars and returned to character. Now that the Fleming novels have all been exhausted and we’re onto original scripts, the notion that Bond has taken on a life of his own has new meaning.

Event films Nearly all true “event films” these days are genre films, mainly science fiction and fantasy, though in the days since Jaws set the new paradigm for Hollywood economics, plenty such films have been based on British literature. The most obvious and significant of these projects was the filming over a decade of all seven of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy novels for children and young adults. Arguably, no single written story has spawned a more ambitious adaptation than Rowling’s worldwide literary phenomenon. The Harry Potter franchise includes eight feature-length films (the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was split into two parts), filmed by four different directors and six different cinematographers, and starring an impressive cast of British and Irish actors, many of whom literally grew up on film before our eyes. Like the James Bond franchise, Harry Potter is technically a joint British and American project, coproduced by the British Heyday films and American 1492 Pictures (among others), filmed at Leavesden Studios, and distributed by Warner Bros. Rowling

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FIGURE 7.5 The Memorable “Great Hall” of Hogwarts (Harry Potter, 2001–11). demanded in her contracts that the principal cast for any adaptations be British, allowing for exceptions only where the novels invited them. Due in part to the multiple directors and cinematographers, the films are somewhat uneven in their tone and look, though they are held together by a strong narrative and especially by Production Designer Stuart Craig’s now-iconic sets (see Figure 7.5). Comparisons to cable television series such as the Sci-Fi Network’s excellent Battlestar Galactica (2004–09) seem in order here (see below, p. 355), since audiences today are quite used to long-running genre series, filmed by multiple directors, but anchored in a regular reliance on cliffhanger plot devices, solid character development, and consistent production design. In any case, whatever unevenness may mark the series, audiences around the world seemed not to mind. Harry Potter was a critical success and is today the most financially successful franchise in film history, with every one of its films ranking in the top fifty highest grossing films of all time. Though the argument has been made that Rowling’s massive audience made such an outcome all but inevitable— Steven Spielberg reportedly turned down an offer to direct because he believed taking it on would offer “no challenge”40—the fact is that producer David Heyman managed the franchise brilliantly, showing genuine respect for Rowling’s vision and garnering her consistent support for the films, and securing top industry talent whose early successes served as justification for continuing to film the entire saga. A quick consideration of New Line Cinema’s failed attempt to adapt Philip Pullman’s award-winning young adult fantasy series, His Dark Materials, gives one new appreciation for what Heyman pulled off. To be fair, Pullman’s pro-secularist, pro-science trilogy raises certain difficulties for mainstream scriptwriters that Rowling’s series did not (how many children’s books feature, even celebrate, the death of God?); nonetheless, the series was

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voted third as the most popular book among Britons in the BBC’s 2003 Big Read national poll, behind only The Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice, was selected by the Carnegie Medal judges as one of the ten most important books for children of the previous seventy years, and sold more than eight million copies in nearly forty different languages.41 Though on a smaller scale than Harry Potter, His Dark Materials too had a loyal audience that should have made for a successful film franchise. The first book in the trilogy, The Golden Compass (American title), was directed by Chris Weitz and released in 2007. Unlike Rowling’s Harry Potter, however, which the creative team managed to keep as “British” as possible,42 Pullman’s The Golden Compass was essentially hijacked by an American production company (New Line Cinema) that chose to placate the Catholic Church and other American religious groups precisely by refusing to engage any of the work’s antireligious themes.43 As The Atlantic accurately summed up the matter: “With $180 million at stake, the studio opted to kidnap the book’s body and leave behind its soul.”44 The result is a film that features excellent special effects, a strong production design, and a rushed, meandering plot with nothing to anchor it in place. Due largely to the film’s underperformance at the international box office—the book’s fans protested the final product nearly as loudly as did the religious zealots—New Line decided to scrap plans for the sequels and to merge with Warner Bros. to save itself from financial ruin. Finally, we would be remiss in failing to discuss the most artistically successful film “event” of the conglomerate era, Peter Jackson’s three-movie epic adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. These films also were produced by New Line, which—in this case—had wisely committed to a trilogy before any actual filming began. This commitment allowed Peter Jackson and his team of writers much artistic freedom in world building and developing character at a reasonable pace. It also allowed Jackson to film the content of all three movies at once, most of which he did in his stunning New Zealand homeland between 1999 and 2000, which lent the films a tonal and atmospheric consistency lacking in similar projects such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. In the end, Jackson produced about six million feet of film, which over several years were edited down to three movies of nearly 200 minutes each (extended versions exist for each film). One of Jackson’s key strategies in adapting the novels was to depict events mainly in chronological order, as opposed to using flashbacks and other devices preferred by Tolkien—which simplifies and streamlines somewhat the huge number of interlocking stories he manages to cover. The three films, which cost approximately 280 million dollars, made back nearly three billion dollars, making The Lord of the Rings the most financially successful trilogy of all time. In addition, the films were

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nominated thirty times for Academy Awards and won seventeen (it won about the same number of BAFTA awards). The final film in the trilogy, The Return of the King, won Best Picture in 2003 and a total of eleven Academy Awards, tying it for most all-time. As this book hits the press, we await the release of the third and final installment of Jackson’s prequel Tolkien trilogy, The Hobbit (2012–14), a visually striking if less groundbreaking and engaging trilogy than its predecessor.45 Franchises like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings prove not only that Brit-Lit films remain financially viable in the age of the high-concept film, but also that they can be adapted in thoughtful and inventive ways capable of sustaining their relevance for future generations. Of course, only a very narrow portion of British literature makes for appropriate high-concept material, mainly genre works of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, and some classics which can be adapted for the children’s and teen markets. But what about the rest? *** In the case of what we will facetiously label “low-concept” Brit-Lit films, a primary assumption is that the mythic universal audience is not likely to be interested in the final product. Productions in this category begin therefore with strategic assessments of specialized markets typically neglected by Hollywood—the largest and most obvious one being the educated adult market. In America, such films tend to be produced by independent film companies and subsidiaries of the major conglomerates. In Britain, a majority of all films produced in any given year will fall into this category due to their smaller budgets. Though the financing and production of American independent and British films differ significantly, such films can be discussed together as rivals and/or partners in the nearly 100-year-old history of attempts at anti-Hollywood product differentiation. We began our own consideration of such attempts as early as Chapter 3 of this volume with the post–First World War strategies of Germany and other nation to distinguish their films from the dominant Hollywood style. We’ve seen numerous examples throughout the twentieth century of similar calculated responses to Hollywood dominance. With conglomeration, the disparity between the haves and have-nots was exacerbated, so strategic product differentiation became more of an obvious necessity for filmmakers working outside the major Hollywood companies. Another way of thinking about the issue, though, is in terms of the opportunities the current system offers to filmmakers outside of Hollywood. As Justin Wyatt acknowledges, “Realizing the potential from targeting an upscale, educated audience aged twenty-five to forty-five …, [independent] companies have been producing films which represent a viable alternative

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for the older audience. … The unifying elements among these films are an attention to theme, character relationships, and social relevance.”46 Robert Sklar noted a pronounced heightening of the same trend in the late 1990s, when Hollywood’s near-exclusive interest in “formulaic moneymakers” over “quality films” seemed a clear enough explanation for the general superiority of independent films.47 Especially as the importance of VHS/DVD and on-demand services has increased into the twenty-first century, allowing consumers to seek out films which would have been inaccessible in earlier periods, incentives for providing such “alternatives” to Hollywood product have also increased. That adaptations constitute a major portion of such films will hardly be surprising. Taking Wyatt’s terms alone—complex themes, complex characterization, social relevance—we might see how a certain type of traditional adaptation associated with art-house cinema or the “quality” film might suggest itself to non-Hollywood producers.48 Jeremy Isaacs, the founding chief executive of Britain’s Film on Four, for example, admitted that one of his primary goals was to produce a more highbrow type of film than what Hollywood was likely to churn out, leading to such productions as Michael Elliott’s King Lear (1983) and David G. Hopkins’s adaptation of Percy Shelley’s Zastrozzi (1986). According to John Hill, Isaacs “regarded such films as having ‘a socio-cultural provenance and purpose,’ which went beyond their financial returns or contribution to the ratings. In this respect, the channel has been content (and able) to carry the ‘losses’ of film production because of its belief in its cultural value.”49 Though Four’s commitment even to unprofitable, highculture adult fare did not last into the 1990s, it reveals precisely the sort of market the New Hollywood showed little interest in owning. Thus, a solid number of stylistically conservative period adaptations of British literature continued to be made well into the twenty-first century. In the early 1980s, perhaps buoyed by the critical and sometimes financial successes of several key British period films including Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982), and The Dresser (1983), which were BAFTA and Oscar darlings three years in a row, almost in spite of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Return of the Jedi (1983), British and American independent producers began turning with greater regularity to British literature for their material. David Lean’s final film, A Passage to India (1984), was the first of the period’s many films based on Forster novels, including Merchant-Ivory’s international hits A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (Ivory, 1987), Where Angels Fear to Tread (Sturridge, 1991), and Howard’s End (Ivory, 1992). Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) sparked an even greater explosion of films, the so-called Shakespeare film renaissance, which lasted throughout the 1990s and can be argued not to have yet run its full course: the important

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FIGURE 7.6 Ian McKellen’s Fascist Richard III (1995).

“quality” Shakespeare films were Branagh’s sensuous and glowing Much Ado about Nothing (1993) and his ambitious “complete” version of Hamlet (1996); Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990), starring Mel Gibson; Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995); Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night (1996); John Madden’s “Best Picture” winner, Shakespeare in Love (1998), with its Tom Stoppard script; and Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999). Though in the 2000s, most British and American Indie Shakespeare adaptations—almost certainly influenced by Luhrmann’s Romeo ⫹ Juliet and Richard Loncraine’s brilliantly inventive modernization of Richard III (1995)—chose to popularize and openly challenge the sacredness of Shakespeare’s work (see Figure 7.6), sporadic “quality” films continued to appear, including Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004) and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010), which starred Helen Mirren in the role of Prospero, but proved a disappointing follow-up to the same director’s stylish and provocative Titus (1999). The other British canonical author who, along with Forster and Shakespeare, became something of a subindustry in this period was Jane Austen, whose cinematic presence had been relatively limited prior to 1995. In that year, the BBC ran Andrew Davies’s six-part adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which starred Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Darcy and Elizabeth; and Ang Lee directed Sense and Sensibility, based on an Academy Award–winning adapted screenplay by Emma Thompson. Both works found larger than expected audiences and received nearly universal acclaim from critics. Along with Clueless, which was released the same year, the success of these two works spawned a series of Austen films which included Douglas McGrath’s Emma (1996), with Gwyneth Paltrow in the first of several Brit-Lit films in which she would star; Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999); and Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005). Finally, the usual staple of canonical authors found new lives due in part to the success of the Forster, Shakespeare, and Austen films. Other key heritage (or anti-heritage) adaptations of such authors between the

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mid-1980s and 2015 included Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit (1988); the British/German joint production Rebecca’s Daughters (1992), based on a story by Dylan Thomas; Sally Potter ’s 1992 Orlando, based on the Woolf novel; Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1996); Marleen Gorris’s Mrs. Dalloway (1997); Paul Morrison’s award-winning Romeo and Juliet appropriation, Solomon and Gaenor (1999); Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (2005); Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005); Rowan Joffe’s update to a 1960s context of Brighton Rock (2010); Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre (2011); and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011). (Several of these films are discussed below.) A quick look at this considerable body of films, its size and its stylistic and ideological diversity, suggests how impossible it is to generalize about the politics of post-Thatcherite/post-Reaganite adaptations of canonical literature. While there’s no doubt that the popularity of the heritage film after 1979—in terms of both production and reception—must be considered in the contexts of industry conglomeration and the rightward turn on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s also the case that there’s nothing particularly surprising about this development. Since at least 1907, when the New York City nickelodeons were temporarily shut down, filmmakers have responded to various sociopolitical and economic crises—either within the industry or outside of it—by exploiting the assumed links between classic literary source material and more conservative cultural values. British literature especially has always provided the most symbolically ripe store of materials for cinematic poachers around the globe. In the context of 1980s British and American politics, the strategic production of such adaptations might be seen as participating in a rightward turn. We think it important, however, to stress that the politics of any given adaptation tend to be largely inscrutable. Whereas any film seeking to exploit the high-culture progeny or elitist aura of classic literature would seem on the surface to be quite reactionary, the production of such films as an alternative for audiences repelled by the sausage being churned out of the Hollywood machine could be seen as salutary. Indeed, as we shall see momentarily, the major audience for such adaptations tends to be more liberal, more educated, and female.50 Furthermore, the politics involved in a certain film’s production do not necessarily correspond with the politics of the adaptation. A particular production of King Lear might wish to exploit, even for profit, the reputation and cachet of Shakespeare, or it might wish to lambaste the utter brutality and hypocrisy of capitalism, but it can also do both at the same time. Certain cultural conservatives lionize Brit-Lit, but within many of the source texts lie an essential unruliness that makes their full domestication very difficult if not impossible in the end.

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The Merchant-Ivory adaptations In adaptation studies, the films of the Merchant-Ivory-Prawer-Jhabvala production team have attracted an outsized amount of scholarly attention and controversy. The team is probably best known for their respectful adaptations of the novels of E. M. Forster: A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), and Howards End (1992)—although they have also shown a particular affinity for the fiction of Henry James—The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), and The Golden Bowl (2000)—as well as Man Booker Prize–winning authors Kazuo Ishiguro—The Remains of the Day (1993) and The White Countess (2005)—and Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala herself—The Householder (1963), The Guru (1969), Roseland (1977), and Heat and Dust (1983). Most of their iconic films are set in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries in England, Europe, or America and could be called costume dramas except for the fact that their loving focus on buildings and landscapes usually proves the dominant element: they expend great energy to represent lush, detailed, and visually gorgeous interiors of upper-middle-class and bourgeois characters. This fetish for the beauty of stately homes and palazzos has proved to be one of the more distinctive signatures of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala brand but also the source of the greatest controversy among film scholars. (Although the company’s actual title, Merchant-Ivory Productions, obscures the crucial contributions of the third member of the team, Prawer-Jhabvala, we will use “Merchant-Ivory” as a shorthand for representing the work of all three collaborators.) The scholarly critique of Merchant-Ivory films in particular and of “heritage films” in general arose at a particular moment in Britain in the early 1980s. On the one hand, the box office success of A Room with a View brought new mainstream visibility and respectability to Merchant-Ivory. On the other hand, this success coincided with upheavals associated with the cultural politics of the Thatcher government in the early to mid-1980s, which passed National Heritage Acts in 1980 and 1983 governing how historic properties could be taxed, and reengineering the financing and governance of national museums. The latter Act established English Heritage as the governing body overseeing the preservation of historic properties. In these years, the word “heritage” came to bear tremendous political weight. For the Thatcher government, “heritage” referred to the best of the country’s past and strategies for preserving and profiting from it, while to critics on the cultural left, like Robert Hewison, “heritage” represented nostalgia for the past and the commodification of culture for mass consumption.51 After crushing the Miners’ Strike of 1984, Thatcher spoke of replacing dying industries with heritage tourism and, in some cases, coal mines were transformed into “heritage centers” and “visitor attractions.”52

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In this climate and its immediate aftermath a number of scholars tended to see Merchant-Ivory films, especially the Forster adaptations and their imitators, through the lens of Thatcherite politics. In the early 1990s, Andrew Higson, Tana Wollen, and Cairns Craig in particular offered serious critiques of heritage cinema which have reverberated until the present day.53 Under this heading they include Merchant-Ivory productions as well as films and TV miniseries like Chariots of Fire, Brideshead Revisted (1981), and Jewel in the Crown (1984), which in their view attempt to construct a stable, unified national identity by recreating a nostalgic image of a prosperous imperial past. Higson puts the case succinctly: heritage films turn “their backs on the industrialized, chaotic present, they nostalgically reconstruct an imperialist and upper-class Britain. … The films thus offer apparently more settled and visually splendid manifestations of an essentially pastoral national identity and authentic culture: ‘Englishness’ as an ancient and natural inheritance, Great Britain, the United Kingdom.”54 Though he refuses to assign a direct complicity in Thatcherite politics to such films, he does point out the tension between “visual splendor” and the liberal-humanist struggles of the characters. Craig also singles out the historic mise-en-scène as particularly troubling in the heritage films: “We are indulged in a perfection of style designed to deny everything beyond the self-contained world the characters inhabit.” Such interiors and landscapes project a “seeming permanence of the architecture, landscape and possessions that fill the screen. And it is this secure world of an earlier Englishness—the antithesis of the fissiparous relativism of the present—that the films re-create, rather than what the novels acknowledge: that England must change, or has already changed beyond recognition.”55 For such critics, the heritage films represent a dangerous fantasy of a hermetically sealed past of beautiful buildings, landscapes, and objects—with next to no acknowledgment of the brutal economies that made such things possible. Since this initial round of critiques, the debate about heritage films has evolved significantly. First came the rebuttals. Claire Monk points out that the “Englishness” of Merchant-Ivory productions has itself a hybrid quality: “The Merchant-Ivory literary adaptations are films of multiple cultural origins—‘English’ films directed by a Californian, produced by an Indian Moslem and usually written by a Polish woman married to an Indian.”56 In both their personal histories and cultural orientations, they reflect the growing globalism of the modern cinema (see below, pp. 358–66). Second, she shows that many heritage films represent clashes between social classes and genders, and struggles of sexual identity, rather than any unified sense of national consciousness. Further, Merchant-Ivory films such as Maurice and A Room with a View can be read from feminist and gay perspectives far more progressive than earlier criticism has acknowledged.

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Both critics and defenders of the Merchant-Ivory heritage film have recently moved away from strictly formalist analysis. Higson, for example, has turned increasingly to the reception of such films in government circles in the United Kingdom, popular culture, and the heritage industry, showing the political uses to which the heritage film has been put.57 Monk on the other hand has recently undertaken an in-depth study of the audiences for heritage films, showing that their viewership was remarkably heterogeneous but that a “younger, more liberal or left-wing, and more sexually diverse … audience … showed a strong brand awareness of Ivory’s films and were likely to have seen a broad range of them.”58 These newer strands of analysis challenge the notion that Merchant-Ivory films were made as hopelessly conservative exercises in nostalgia. Few critics or defenders of heritage films look seriously at the movies that the team made in the decades preceding the 1980s. In some ways it is easy to see why. As a group, their heterogeneous styles and subjects make it difficult to find the Merchant-Ivory we think we know. One important theme uniting some of the earlier films with the more famous heritage ones, however, is an obsession with clashing cultures of various sorts. As a film student at USC, James Ivory set out to make his first movie about Venice and, in undertaking research for that project, accidentally stumbled upon a cache of Indian miniature paintings with which he became obsessed and about which he eventually made a documentary, The Sword and the Flute (1959). Though written and made by Ivory in the United States, the film was narrated by Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey.59 Ishmail Merchant, having himself graduated from film school at NYU sought out and met Ivory because of this film, and they decided to make The Householder, based on a novel by Prawer-Jhabvala that Merchant had just read. The film brought the director, producer, and writer together for the first time. The early films have a great deal to say about how Merchant, Ivory, and Prawer-Jhabvala approached literary adaptation and provide a commentary of sorts on the later films. For The Householder, Prawer-Jhabvala wrote the screenplay based on her own novel, which concerns a newly married couple in India, especially the husband’s struggle with his independent and freespirited wife.60 It should be said that early Merchant-Ivory films have a New Wave experimental feel with many and varied influences. The team as yet had developed no house style and each new film has quite a distinct look and feel. Shakespeare Wallah (1965), more than The Householder, employs some striking camerawork. In an early scene, for example, the audience for a disorienting theatrical performance is revealed slowly in a very long tracking shot that gives an intriguing sense of the vast number of audience members. Shakespeare Wallah chronicles the travels of the Buckingham

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family, a troupe of Shakespearean actors in postindependence India. The film’s nearly anthropological style treats the fading remnants of British rule and culture objectively, on the same level as the developments in the emerging independent India. Such anthropological ways of seeing are nowhere better traced than in the rather bizarre film Savages (1972) in which a tribe of primitive mud people follow a croquet ball to a stately mansion and slowly transform into socialites, before reverting to primitivism and wandering back into the woods to disappear into obscurity. If in the 1960s and 1970s Merchant-Ivory were intent on making films set in India, they did so from positions both inside and outside the culture. Could it be that in their classic Brit-Lit adaptations of the 1980s and 1990s, England becomes something like an India—a culture which fascinates them as filmmakers, but which they attempt to represent, perhaps ventriloquize largely as observant outsiders? Against the grain of the later heritage films in both style and narrative form was Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980). The film is set in the Greenwich Village of the late 1970s and depicts a troupe of avant-garde actors. Their director, a charismatic British thespian with a cult-leader’s sway over rich patrons, and his former acting teacher, manipulates a wealthy patron into buying at auction a copy of Jane Austen’s unpublished play, Sir Charles Grandison (a farcical adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison) at great expense.61 The way in which Pierre fetishizes Austen’s text as an object is notable, but his troupe’s performance of this opera couldn’t be further texturally and visually from the ravishing style of classic MerchantIvory adaptations. As the backers watch the performance, they seem to imagine a very conservatively staged opera (albeit on a garishly lit and stylized eighteenth-century stage). This respectful adaptation clashes with the troupe’s actual performance, on a bare white stage with a padded floor, several trap windows and doors, and three prominent stage lights hovering over the space (see Figure 7.7).62 In this version the actors are dressed in a mix of eighteenthcentury dress and modern street clothes, and the action, an attempted rape, is rendered as a full farce with silly noises and pratfalls—accompanied by a modernist score in contrast to the operatic music of the “respectful” adaptation. As the horrified backers look on, one shrugs, “Well, we have to respect this originality,” while another demands, “The manuscript, the manuscript—what about respect for the manuscript?” This direct meditation on the politics of literary adaptation stands at odds with the largely reverent Merchant-Ivory adaptations of Forster that followed and which have attracted so much critical attention. To imagine, though, that Merchant, Ivory, and Prawer-Jhabvala have not reflected on the dynamics of fidelity or the effects of empire, especially the

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FIGURE 7.7 The Play within Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980). British Empire in India, does not stand up in light of their earlier films, though it is fair to say that in style and method their “classic” heritage films are far less experimental and more conservative in their almost scholarly pictorialism. This mature Merchant-Ivory house style, however, did not arrive fully formed and was practically nonexistent until the successful run of adaptations beginning with A Room with a View. In that film, their approach to literary adaptation is far more reverent than in earlier productions. The classic films betray a careful, though not slavish faithfulness to the source texts, from their basic narrative structure down to their dialogue. But there is also a fidelity to something less tangible perhaps— to the look and feel of the periods in which they are set. Of course, it is the mise-en-scène in particular that has attracted the most criticism. According to Higson, in lovingly and lavishly recreating Forster’s England, the filmmakers have perhaps unintentionally “re-invented Forster as an antiquarian rather than a modernist and his story as a costume film rather than a contemporary drama.”63 In our view, Higson is right to point out the “invented” nature of the heritage film from the 1980s onward, despite the fact that the films seem traditional at first glance, and to identify the ways in which literary modernism tends to be ossified or encrusted by this particular adaptation style. And yet it could be argued that the arc between A Room with A View, Maurice, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day shows a steady progression away from the mere aesthetic appreciation of beautiful houses and landscapes populated by plutocrats and toward a fuller awareness of what price had to be paid to make such places. Howards End, for example, unmasks the kind of murderous business practices that gave the Wilcoxes their wealth

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and the Basts their poverty, and The Remains of the Day paints a colorful picture of the people who maintained Darlington Hall as well as the fascist politics of one of its owners. Even with this critique woven more fully into the fabric of the mise-en-scène and its deployment, however, there arguably remains even in the later Merchant-Ivory films a longing for the museum-like beauty of an English past. *** In concluding this general overview of Brit-Lit films since the 1980s, we wish to linger for just a moment on a handful of adaptations that seem almost impervious to larger industry trends, but only because their defiance of mainstream industry pressures—both economic and ideological—is so fundamental a part of their ethos and aesthetics. Whether we label them arthouse or auteur films, the point is that certain key adaptations would appear to represent, above all, their filmmakers’ personal explorations of certain source texts and/or the texts’ cultural legacies. Their seeming indifference to the financial profitability of their endeavors results in more idiosyncratic adaptation approaches, with mixed results. The beauty of Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) stems from its director’s attempt to explore the very materialist dimensions of artistic creation itself. Explaining why the title of his film foregrounds the magus’s books, Greenaway says it “deliberately emphasises and celebrates the text as text, as the master material on which all the magic, illusion and deception of the play is based. Words making text, and text making pages, and pages making books from which knowledge is fabricated in pictorial form.”64 To achieve this particular sort of film magic—to pictorialize the painterly, three-dimensional materiality of text(s), in other words—Greenaway’s team employs cutting-edge digital and animation postproduction techniques of overlaying still images upon still images, all while the background movement remains fluid and voice-over narration works to unify the competing images (see Figure 7.8). The cinematic, painterly, and literary texts all are conflated into a “multi-hybrid” in which, as Kenneth S. Rothwell aptly describes it, “John Gielgud as Prospero, Peter Greenaway and William Shakespeare all rolled into one is self-reflexively writing The Tempest.”65 The film is a masterpiece of both digital filmmaking and the postmodern cinema of the nineties and beyond (see below, pp. 366–72). Two other auteur pictures from the period deserve mention as having been especially innovative among Brit-Lit films—both reflecting the impact by the early nineties of queer theory and the gay-rights movement. Derek Jarman’s earlier art-house film of The Tempest (1979) had sought to foreground gay issues through a predominantly camp style; in spite of the film’s considerable

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FIGURE 7.8 The Overlaying Technique of Prospero’s Books (1991).

strengths, the world proved unready for it at the time, with Vincent Canby of The New York Times noting the homoeroticism of Jarman’s previous work and giving away unashamedly his own prejudice: “It’s full of impertinent inspirations without a single interesting or especially coherent idea, exactly the sort of film you’d expect from a director better known as Ken Russell’s production designer.”66 Jarman’s colorfully stylized Edward II (1991), based on the play by Christopher Marlowe, is considerably more transgressive than The Tempest. The film includes an explicit sex scene involving two men and boldly announces its allegorical mode by mixing early modern and contemporary costumes and settings and—more obviously—by associating Edward’s supporters with modern gay-rights protesters (played by members of the British gay-rights group OutRage). In elaborating the more radical textual elements of Marlowe’s play, Jarman—who five years earlier had been diagnosed as HIV positive—presents Edward as something of a historical martyr for gay rights, angrily lambasting the persecutory, transhistorical homophobia of British society. Gus Van Sant’s independent American film My Own Private Idaho (1991), a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V plays, is less openly transgressive in its treatment of homosexuality than Edward II, but no less powerful, focusing mainly on the life of a gay street hustler named Mike (River Phoenix) in Portland, Oregon. In an especially moving scene, he admits to his best friend Scott (Keanu Reeves) that he is in love with him; though Scott is compassionate and loving as a friend, he does not return Mike’s more serious feelings. Scott is also a hustler, but he stands to inherit a fortune from his estranged millionaire father, so the sex work is for him more about fun and personal exploration than desperation. At the heart of Mike and

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Scott’s group of hustlers is the Falstaffian older surrogate father-figure Bob (William Richert), whose heart is eventually broken when Scott, hearing of his father’s death, leaves the gang, falls in love with and marries a woman, and refuses to acknowledge his former friends. Though the plot parallels with the Shakespeare plays are clear enough, the film only quotes them directly in one key scene. Nonetheless, it manages to explore both the more sympathetic and more destructive sides of the Henry character by placing the vulnerable Mike in something like the position of Poins, and allowing the audience to experience through his perspective the damage wrought by the powerful on the marginalized and weak. At the same time, the film’s defense of a motley crew of underworld eccentrics who persevere even after Bob’s death and Scott’s hypocritical embrace of a heteronormative, bourgeois existence, raises its visibility as a gay-rights film. Something of a surprise, Van Sant’s film was a success at the box office as well as with critics, almost tripling its two and a half-million dollar budget and going on to gain something of a cult status. Two years after the release of Jarman’s and Van Sant’s provocative 1991 films, Jonathan Demme’s comparably mild and stylistically forgettable mainstream film, Philadelphia, would be praised by critics for acknowledging homophobia and the devastation wrought by AIDS.

2 Technological revolution During the 100-plus years of film’s existence, the medium has faced constant threats to its well-being: from cultural critiques to financial disasters, from the coming of sound to the rise of television, from celluloid to acetate, “the end of film as we know it” has been a constant enough refrain. Generally speaking, though, traditional film—by which we mean motion pictures produced on analog equipment of any sort—would indeed appear to be facing extinction sometime in the near future. When we talk about the death of film, then, we don’t mean the death of the cinematic art, of course. We simply mean that an older cinematographic apparatus is once again being replaced by a newer one. Such changes are interesting to us here mainly insofar as they impact the history of cinematic adaptations of literature—both in terms of production and reception—and of the Brit-Lit film more specifically. The story of technological innovation between the late 1970s and 2015 might be divided into two parts: the production chapters—those developments impacting the actual sound and look of films—and the reception chapters— those developments impacting how films are seen and understood by their audiences. ***

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On the production end, the most visibly impactive development of this period has been the use of CGI special effects, which began in George Lucas’s computer development labs around 1978, but received its initial boost in 1982 with Disney’s Tron (featuring almost twenty minutes of unadulterated CGI footage) and became increasingly popular and effective over the following years with films such as James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Movies in this period were of course still filmed on 35 mm with digital work being saved for postproduction, and it wouldn’t be until about 2000 when mainstream moviemakers led again by Lucas and Pixar studios would begin filming or animating entire movies digitally (as opposed to independent filmmakers who, following the Dogme 95 movement, had begun a half-decade earlier). If early cinema was largely about the thrills of seeing and the power of magic, then the evolution of CGI might be said to have returned us in the 1980s and 1990s to a sort of original state of childlike awe at the cinema. As these technologies have continued to develop, their magic has become more and more invisible, requiring from audiences less a suspension of disbelief, and restoring the tendency of mainstream cinema toward realism. The larger history of adaptations was altered by CGI in two closely related ways: first, because CGI allowed filmmakers to achieve effects that were nearly impossible prior to digital, literature thought previously “un-filmable” has become fair game and even an attractive commodity—as New Line’s motives for filming Paradise Lost suggest. Certainly the same company’s conception of The Lord of the Rings trilogy—previously adapted only in Ralph Bakshi’s stylish animated film of 1978—grew directly out of advances in digital technology. The amazing performance capture effects used to bring Andy Serkis’s Gollum onto the screen kept the film’s realist photography consistent and believable and, at the same time, enhanced its fantastic elements (see Figure 7.9). CGI was sensibly and logically integrated into the trilogy where it was needed, in other words, marking a clear case for the necessary, functional

FIGURE 7.9 Andy Serkis as Gollum in The Return of the King (2003).

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use of digital technology. Why other adaptations in this period which didn’t require half as much digital work were filmed entirely in the distracting motion capture format—Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf (2007), for example—wasn’t always clear. The second logical effect of CGI on adaptations speaks more to the phenomenon of “repetition with variation,”67 the pleasure of seeing a familiar story in a completely new, or deliberately contrastive, light. Countless remakes of Brit-Lit favorites such as A Christmas Carol and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have always exploited the most recent technological developments as part of their own self-justification (consider Paramount’s 1931 sound remake of its own 1920 Jekyll and Hyde; or Hammer’s numerous colorized riffs on Universal horror), but CGI raised the bar, allowing filmmakers to alter more radically than ever before the familiar faces and places of the Brit-Lit film. The digital technology driving Steven Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds (2005), for example, alters dramatically the audience’s experience of the alien Earth invasion by putting us, realistically, into Ray Ferrier’s (Tom Cruise) shoes as all hell breaks loose (compare this to the famous 1953 film, which allows us a classic third-person perspective of the events unfolding before us). Though Spielberg’s version of the novel introduces plenty of distinguishing plot elements, its most memorable variation is this hyperrealistic perspectival shift brought about by the most extensive use of digital technology to that point in the director’s career. Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010) seems a mere demonstration in the ways the character Ariel might be reconceived in the age of digital; whether the effects enhance appreciation of the complex relationship between the sprite and Prospero or merely serve as distractions will depend on individual viewers. Guy Ritchie’s 2009 Sherlock Holmes was, for the most part, a giant mess—especially in comparison with the BBC’s phenomenal, near-contemporaneous series Sherlock (2010–present)—but the film’s special-effects team deserves credit for their digital world building, presenting us with a remarkable portrait of a decidedly grubby late Victorian London as viewed through a steampunk lens. Still, whereas a film like The Fellowship of the Ring demonstrates how literary texts can be made cinematic through digital technologies, others like Sherlock Holmes tend to suggest the ways digital will be used in the coming decades to justify the production of mediocre fare. Digital technologies have the contradictory potential on the one hand to bolster the majors’ power by raising audience expectations for ever-more spectacular effects,68 and, on the other hand, to democratize filmmaking by offering DIY filmmakers cheaper and more efficient ways to make their movies. One curious case of Brit-Lit filmmaking which speaks to the two opposed aspects of the digital revolution is Joss Whedon’s Much Ado about

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Nothing (2012), which exploited the greater efficiency and affordability of digital recording to make a highly personal film unlikely to be backed by any Hollywood conglomerate. In fact, what makes the success of Whedon’s film so fascinating is the symbolic juiciness of his having made it in his own Santa Monica home during a 12-day contractual break from postproduction on The Avengers (2012), which pulled in more than a billion and a half dollars for Marvel and Disney. Produced by Whedon and partner Kai Cole’s own Bellweather Studios and distributed by Lionsgate, Much Ado modernizes the setting of the archetypal rom-com while keeping Shakespeare’s early modern language intact. All of the action takes place within the boundaries of the home property, which gives the film a slightly claustrophobic, television-oriented aesthetic, but the intimate handheld camerawork, crisp black and white photography, and fresh performances (few scenes were shot in more than two takes) all result in a delightfully original little film (see Figure 7.10). Whedon’s essentially simultaneous release of the two vastly different projects, raking in profits of five million and five billion dollars, respectively, stands as a testament to the divergent capabilities of digital to render filmmaking more intimate and personal and to increase the monopolistic powers of Hollywood in the quest for the universally appealing blockbuster film. Digital has altered not only how we see the moving image, but also how we experience movie sound. In this realm too, the gradual shift from analog to digital production began in the early 1980s. Digital increased the ability of filmmakers to isolate and manipulate sound elements, and it greatly reduced background noise, allowing sound technicians to exploit the new technology’s superior range. The audio digital revolution was accelerated by George Lucas’s THX Sound System Program (introduced in 1983), which sought to establish minimum quality standards for optimal theater sound. The introduction in 1982

FIGURE 7.10 Close-up on the Lovers of Whedon’s Much Ado about Nothing (2012).

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of CDs and Dolby Surround sound systems to the general public increased pressure on theater owners to meet Lucas’s criteria, in part by demonstrating to audiences what they’d been missing at the cinema all along.69 Interestingly, a key film predating the digital sound revolution was the Brit-Lit epic Apocalypse Now (1979), the first film ever to credit a “Sound Designer”—the individual responsible for all aspects of a film’s audio track, including dialogue—a crew position likely coined by the film’s own sound designer, Walter Murch. Murch was largely responsible for developing and standardizing the 5.1 channel sound system and, with Apocalypse Now, he became the first sound technician to mix a multichannel soundtrack on a computer board. The film, which won an Academy Award for Best Sound, is of special interest because of its narrative use and mixing of both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds and music. The non-diegetic use of The Doors’ hallucinatory, apocalyptic anthem “The End,” which frames the film at top and tail, would have been stunning even had it functioned more traditionally as background music. The manner in which Murch mixed the song, however, overlaying diegetic and quasi-diegetic sounds (as in the return of the whirling helicopter blades during Kurtz’s dying moments), invites the viewer to reflect on Jim Morrison’s lyrics and to incorporate their (ambiguous) meanings as part of an overall analysis of the film. The technique also works to blur the lines between the audience’s and Willard’s experience of the events unfolding on screen. Though Apocalypse Now can’t be credited with having invented such techniques, the technological improvements in sound quality and multichannel mixing which it exploited can be said to have made the viewing audience more conscious of how soundtracks participate in film narration. Except in musicals such as West Side Story, non-scored music and songs had traditionally been used in adaptations primarily to alter the mood of the viewer or to emphasize particular themes–not to drive narrative forward.70 But in the 1980s and especially the 1990s, non-diegetic popular music begins to function much more narratively in film, leading to what we might call the Wes Anderson soundtrack style. Conglomeration and media mergers— not to mention the success of MTV music videos—directly impacted this development by promoting tie-ins between the music and film industries (and training a younger generation how to read the complementary workings of soundtrack and mise-en-scène). Some Hollywood films whose levels of success would have been unthinkable without such music tie-ins included Flashdance (1983), Top Gun (1986), and even Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), which featured original music by Prince on its hit soundtrack. The most important developer of such tie-ins for the Brit-Lit film was Baz Luhrmann, whose masterful arrangement of pop and rock music for the soundtrack of Romeo ⫹ Juliet resulted in one of the most memorable

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and complex soundtracks of the 1990s. Luhrmann’s success had much to do with his selection of the right musicians for the right songs, which he commissioned for particular scenes. From the recurring twang of Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host,” which we come to regard as Romeo’s anthem, to pieces like One Inch Punch’s “Pretty Piece of Flesh,” which engage Shakespeare’s play directly, songs on the soundtrack do far more than impact mood or emphasize themes. The success of Romeo ⫹ Juliet paves the way for an increasingly common use of both preexisting and original songs in Brit-Lit adaptations. Though less obvious to the casual viewer than the impact of digital on the visual style and content of contemporary films, digital audio’s impact has been no less meaningful. *** At least as dramatic as the impact of digital technologies have been the extraordinarily rapid shifts in the ways film is now consumed by audiences. Since the late 1970s, when cable television, pay-per-view, laser disc, and VHS seriously began to compete with theatrical exhibition, film has become less a distinct entity and more like the hub in a constantly expanding web of ancillary technologies. As Stephen Prince puts it, “Film became video for its distribution in pay-per-view, pay-cable, tape, disc, and broadcast television markets. Hollywood film in the 1980s became the engine driving the interlinked global entertainment markets.”71 Indeed, by mid-decade, video revenues began to top box office revenues for the first time,72 and most films were now being viewed on “small screens” in people’s homes and, eventually, in their hands. Regardless of the changing providers, technologies, and physical formats which have come and gone through the 1990s and 2000s—most notably DVD—all have participated in this general trend toward private unlimited access to the world’s store of movies. At the time of this book’s publication, the most rapidly growing providers of film are the various Internet streaming service companies such as Netflix and Hulu, and no end to their dominance appears to be in sight. As Andrew Leonard reminds us, “In 2012, for the first time ever, Americans watched more movies legally delivered via the Internet than on physical formats like Blu-Ray discs or DVDs.”73 Surely the same will happen in most countries around the world in the coming years, and eventually revenues from streaming sources will match and then surpass those generated by DVD and Blu-Ray sales. Though a film’s success in the theaters continues to be a strong determinant of its success in ancillary markets, film can no longer be called a “big screen” art form. Though the Brit-Lit film has survived every challenge television has posed— from declines in theater attendance in the 1950s that led to prioritization of

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the teen market, to the BBC’s takeover of most literary dramas in subsequent decades, to the direct competition posed by cable movie networks and on-demand services in the 1980s and beyond—the continuing evolution of TV since the nineties poses interesting new questions about the future of the literary film. The most obvious has to do simply with the visual quality of modern television, both in terms of technological improvements such as HD and the stylistic advances in cinematography and editing, ushered in by shows such as NBCs long-running drama ER (1994–2009). A little less obvious, and unexplored critically, is the likely impact of the high-quality writing and character development characterizing so many programs, from HBOs The Sopranos (1999–2007) and Six Feet Under (2001–05) to more recent nonpremium channel shows such as Breaking Bad (2008–13) and the recent British remake of Sweden’s police series Wallander (2008–present).74 It’s not that great shows haven’t been on television before. Rather, it’s the fact that the quantity of such great shows today, around the globe, is so high as to suggest that we’re living in something of a golden age of TV drama. How can the characters in an average film of 90–120 minutes possibly compete with characters whose lives are presented over eighty episodes and six or seven years? Aside from long-running franchises such as Harry Potter, or quirky, impractical (and wonderful) films such as Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), the simple answer is that they can’t. This is especially a problem for literary films of the art-house and heritage varieties, which tend not only to adapt revered and critically acclaimed source material but also often define their distinctness in portraying exceedingly well the complex inner lives of characters. We don’t wish to suggest that great films can’t manage any longer to pull off such a feat (clearly they can), or that new TV shows will entirely usurp the small market such films still are able to tap. We simply wish to prompt thinking about how the further encroachment of mainstream television into the terrain of literary adaptations might impact future developments in their production and reception. Furthermore, the “mainstream” nature of these shows is precisely the issue that interests us. One might object that a film version of Pride and Prejudice couldn’t really compete either, even twenty years ago, with a six- or sevenpart BBC miniseries and that, therefore, shows like The Sopranos present no new challenges for film. The difference is, however, that the audiences for film and television versions of Pride and Prejudice have always been more or less the same, whereas the challenges being posed by today’s excellent television programs have to do with their ability to draw in audiences that previously needed the cinema for superior dialogue and character development. The fact that so many popular series have also been literary in recent years (the Canadian Slings and Arrows [2003–06] or BBC’s Sherlock [2010–present]) or

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heritage productions (Showtime’s The Tudors [2007–10] or ITV’s Downton Abbey [2010–present]), raises the stakes even higher for the Brit-Lit film. Additionally, such developments raise the likelihood that more attention and money will be poured into those high-concept blockbuster adaptations like The Hobbit which TV can’t match, adding to the considerable challenges that “low-concept” adaptations already are forced to surmount. So what are the implications of such developments for Brit-Lit film? One of the most significant, we think, is the extension of a particular adaptation’s afterlife—and potentially its revenue-generating potential—even years after its theatrical release.75 While this is true of all films, and while video, digital, and Internet formats merely pick up in some ways where television left off, even mediocre literary adaptations of canonical works are far more likely to continue being viewed by generations of high school and college students who are forced to read those works in their English classes. Today a student reading Hamlet for the first time will have literally dozens of film adaptations to choose from, whether on DVD, Netflix, or across the Internet. From a reception-oriented perspective, viewing films for educational purposes differs dramatically from viewing them for pleasure or intellectual stimulation. It’s intriguing to think about how the small screen shift, and especially the millennials’ relationship with new media, might be serving to transform previously intimidating literary works into more accessible and therefore analyzable filmic texts. The act of holding Dickens or Joyce films in the palm of one’s hand can be said to contain the same aura-deflating potential as mechanical reproduction on Walter Benjamin’s early twentiethcentury artwork.76 Numerous film adaptations themselves have chosen over the past few decades to reflect openly on this fact. In a wonderful moment in Heckerling’s Clueless, for example, Cher manages to correct a pseudointellectual acquaintance’s mistaken attribution to Hamlet of the words “To thine own self be true.” Cher points out that she remembers “Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn’t say that. That Polonius guy did.” In Cher’s case, then, access to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 action-hero version of Hamlet gives her more reliable knowledge of the play than that held by one of Hamlet’s actual readers. Such fantasies play out across the postmodern adaptations of the 1990s and 2000s, but they carry within them seeds of truth about the changing nature of cultural literacy in the age of home-viewing technologies, cable television, and new media. Furthermore, video-sharing media such as YouTube reveal to audiences the ways in which individual films—and cinema more generally speaking—are largely the sum of their parts; if they are put together, that is, they can also be taken apart. Type in “Hamlet” on YouTube, and you’ll get about 812,000 results, a huge number of which are scenes cut from the hundreds of Hamlet

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films which have been produced since the early twentieth century. An entire archive of materials is now at the fingertips of any child with access to the Internet, and we’ve only just begun to think through the aesthetic, political, and educational usefulness of this fact. Consider for a moment the teaching of British literature. One of the key classroom functions of film for decades has been its usefulness in demonstrating the artistic importance and pleasures of textual indeterminacy and ambiguity. For an example, we might consider the famous fact that Ophelia has no stage exit prior to Hamlet’s most famous speech in act three scene one; along with several other factors, her possible presence renders highly problematic the old commonplace that “To be or not to be” is a soliloquy. A teacher gains much, and her students even more, by engaging in conversations about the upshot of such a fact: why does it matter that the most famous lines in English literary history may or may not be part of a soliloquy? If Hamlet knows he’s being heard, how does this change our relationship with him? And so on. After such conversations take place, film clips can illustrate in helpful ways the various options that directors might exercise to pursue specific interpretations of the scene. Perhaps such filmic illustrations will confirm a student’s own imaginings of the available options, or perhaps they will challenge them. Either way, the useful work has been done. Today thousands upon thousands of clips—from film and other media, including filmed stage productions of the plays—are immediately available to a large population of both students and non-students. Unlike in the past, the ability of interested parties to discover such critical ways of reading on their own suggests how the new technologies are capable of creating more active readers of both film and “print” texts. If Whedon’s Much Ado seems somehow revolutionary, it is mainly technologically and not aesthetically so. To see this, we need only think about how the low-budget digital indie film merely extends the work of the mucholder DIY movement that involved (and still involves) shooting in 8 mm or 16 mm film. To most viewers, Much Ado won’t look much different than an equally well-crafted 16 mm film such as Red Kingdom Rising, Navin Dev’s 2014 horror-adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels. More revolutionary indeed are the various mashups, recut trailers, clip-montages, video-game adaptations, and other such postmodern appropriations of Brit-Lit, which the new technologies have made more possible and affordable—in part by continuing to chip away at the traditional positioning and theorization of canonical literature as sacrosanct. As already mentioned, we discuss the postmodern Brit-Lit film below in much greater detail (see pp. 366–72); here we simply wish to reinforce the point that the most significant changes ushered in by the technological developments of the past thirty years may have to do with the more interactive audiences they’ve helped to raise up.

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What will be the long-term effects on the Brit-Lit film of our increasingly unlimited ability to choose what we watch and how we watch it? Will ondemand services such as Netflix expand our film experiences and horizons by bringing us into contact with genres and foreign cinemas to which we traditionally wouldn’t have access? Or will they make us more provincial by defining our tastes for us in specific ways (one of us recently learned from Netflix, for example, that he likes “movies from the 1940s with a strong female lead”) and bombarding us with titles that are always sure to comfort and satisfy? Although the same questions might be asked in relation to other subgenres, or any thematically cohesive body of films, the Brit-Lit film will doubtless undergo unique metamorphoses as old audiences continue to evolve and new ones keep springing to life.

3 Globalism: The Brit-Lit film in modern world cinema The multinational corporations, transnational mergers and acquisitions, and runaway productions discussed above all were results of, and sometimes contributors to, one of most important developments of the past three or four decades: globalization. We will define this notoriously elusive term generally, as having to do with the changing networks of power, influence, and capital which have eroded previously clear lines of demarcation between nations. According to Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake: “The space of cultural production and national representation … is simultaneously becoming more globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition and resistance) in everyday texture and composition.”77 These simultaneous globalizing and localizing pressures—and additionally, the scholarly global/ local binary itself—serve to highlight ever-more difficult questions about the positive and negative implications of globalization for cinema. To what degree might globalism be regarded as a privileging of the world’s concerns above those of any particular nation-state? To what degree is it a euphemism for the increasing power of a few nations and private interests over the rest of the world under free-market capitalism? As we’ve seen, Hollywood—or Hollyworld—has been the world’s dominant producer of movies since at least as early as the First World War. Over time, the importance of world markets for Hollywood has increased so that by 2014, about seventy percent of the studios’ profits came from international markets,78 many of which continue to grow at a rapid rate, especially Latin

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American and Asian markets.79 According to the MPPA’s most recent report on theatrical market statistics, for example, the Chinese box office grew by 27 percent in 2013, and became “the first international market to exceed $3 billion in box office.”80 Estimates suggest that the Chinese box office will surpass the US box office by 2020.81 Furthermore, the Asia Pacific region became the top region in international box office in 2013, surpassing total profits in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.82 Despite the fact that Hollywood continues to lead the world in film exports by a considerable margin, and owns a majority share of the box office in most countries other than Japan (as of 2010), China (as of 2013), and India (the most prolific film producer and third-largest market in the world, and one upon which Hollywood has exerted relatively little influence), trends reflect the increasing challenge to Hollywood that cinemas around the world currently are mounting. However, it’s worth pointing out that Hollywood can’t really be thought of as an “American” industry anymore—at least not in the traditional sense. According to a certain way of thinking, Hollywood already is a global industry. The economic and cultural implications of runaway productions, the increasing investment in the American film and entertainment industry by European and Asian multinationals, and Hollywood’s need to cater its product specifically to the cultural interests of other nations,83 are merely a few signs of how the world influences Hollywood rather than simply being influenced by it.84 The impact of these developments on the history of the Brit-Lit film have been quite significant and obviously not just for Hollywood. Kenneth Branagh was one of the first major directors whose adaptations reflected an awareness of the new global markets; beginning with Much Ado about Nothing (1993), Branagh began experimenting with international casts, a strategy he used especially to market his 1996 “complete” Hamlet. His films also tended to de-historicize the literary source texts, highlighting instead their supposed “universal” appeal. Globalism has motivated Hollywood as well to strengthen its commitment to high-concept films with such “universal” appeal, in the process weakening the American commercial film industry’s hold over filmgoers in search of a more sophisticated or adult-oriented product. While Hollywood non-adult fare such as The Lord of the Rings might be said to be a product of globalism nonetheless (filmed in New Zealand, international cast and crew, multinational production, universal themes, et cetera), we will focus primarily in what follows on the surprising number of non-Anglophone and international coproductions based on British literature that have appeared over the past few decades—as well as the unique work they do. In referencing the “globalism” of the modern Brit-Lit film, one might draw on the fact that adaptations of high-profile literature have recently been produced or shot in such vastly distant locales as Argentina (Viola, inspired by

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Twelfth Night, 2012); Brazil (O Cravo e a Rosa, inspired by Shrew, 2001); China (The Banquet, based on Hamlet, 2006); Cuba (Alice in Wondertown, 1991); Czech Republic (Jan Svankmajer’s Alice [1988], adapted from Lewis Carroll; and Lesson Faust, based loosely on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe, 1994); France (Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent, based on Wuthering Heights, 1985); India (multiple films; see below, pp. 362, 364–5); Japan (Arashi Ga Oka, a Kurosawa-influenced Wuthering Heights set in medieval Japan, 1988; and Kurosawa’s own Ran, based on King Lear, 1985); Madagascar (Makibefo, based on Macbeth, 1999); Mexico (Huapango, based on Othello, 2004); Nigeria (In Iredu, based on Macbeth, 2013); Philippines (Hihintayin Kita Sa Langit, based on Wuthering Heights, 1991); Russia/Soviet Union (Chelovek-Nevidimka, based on Wells’s The Invisible Man, 1984); Singapore (Chicken Rice War, based on Romeo and Juliet, 2000); Tibet (Prince of the Himalayas, based on Hamlet, 2006); and Venezuela (Sherlock Holmes en Caracas, 1991)—only to mention a few of the more interesting films in a select number of the many countries we could have included. As suggested above, most scholarly work on such films has tended to focus specifically on the basic ethical dilemma posed by globalism—which often is described in terms of the global/local binary. As Mark Thornton Burnett puts it, “On the one hand, globalization allows for bonding and interconnectivity; and, on the other, policies of integration dislodge, divide and even eradicate the indigenous.”85 With this global/local binary serving as the lens through which many scholars consider these films, the goal of criticism has too often been to determine whether the films should be condemned for their assimilation to Western (i.e., American and British) artistic or ideological values, or praised for their radical breaks from the West. The films are then ironically evaluated according to different (usually higher, sometimes lower) standards than American and British adaptations which, equally problematically, are assumed always to be in line with hegemonic systems of power. Stuart Hall usefully reminds us, though, that only a very reductionist definition of terms would insist on always tying the centers of imperial power—the United Kingdom and the United States, in this case—to hegemonic cultural production, and members of the (sometimes) colonized periphery—“foreign” or nonAnglophone countries—to cultural resistance: “The global post-modern is not a unitary regime,”86 Hall argues, and Shakespeare critics like Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey have studied UK productions such as Richard Curtis’s Skinhead Hamlet which work to expose the hostilities birthed by imperial culture: “In a globalized world where power has shifted from the old imperial centres to international capital and global bureaucracy, Shakespeare can be more ‘foreign’ on the Isle of Dogs than in Dehli or Cairo.” The authors go on to argue that “Shakespeare has become … a vehicle of global communication,

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a repository of universal themes … and is no longer the property of any one national constituency.”87 According to this view, Shakespeare—or Jane Austen or Sherlock Holmes, for that matter—can no longer be tied so automatically and universally to the traditional “centers” of power. The various methods under postmodernism of appropriation and/or adaptation, and of course the vagaries of reception, are merely two factors militating against the simple assignment of ideological positions to either the adapted or adapting texts. Three recent films of Macbeth, from Thailand, India, and Madagascar, respectively, reveal in strikingly different ways the degree to which the creators of such adaptations also view Shakespeare as a “vehicle of global communication” rather than an icon of traditional Britishness, conservative ideology, or high culture. The goal of such films is not to ignore or erase a European imperial past, which of course involved the imposition of Shakespeare in many colonial educational curricula, but rather to reappropriate Shakespeare as a vehicle for exploring that past’s troubled legacy. Thai writer/director Ing Kanjanavanit’s Shakespeare Must Die was completed in 2012 and screened at a handful of international festivals, but the film remains banned by the Thai government for being “in conflict with peaceful social order or good public morality.”88 Set in a land clearly resembling Thailand, the film follows a theater troupe’s performance of Macbeth; in a fashion similar to Olivier’s Henry V, the play gradually shifts into a dreamlike reality, following closely the plot of Shakespeare’s tragedy, before shifting back to theatricalism near the end. Exactly what the censors deem to be immoral and threatening has never been articulated clearly, but the film was funded by opponents of former prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (2001–06) and his sister, then-prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, and its Macbeth character (“Dear Leader”) resembles Thaksin in obvious enough ways. Still, the film’s field of reference is much larger than the current moment, using the story of a ruthless dictator’s maniacal rise to power as a lens through which it can comment on at least the last forty years of Thailand’s history—with its numerous military coups and constant political corruption. The most controversial moment in the film comes at the end when Dear Leader’s execution morphs into a scene of general disorder reminiscent of the Thammasat University Massacre of October 1976, when at least forty-six student protesters in Bangkok were beaten, murdered, and then mutilated by the right-wing national police force. Like Roman Polanski, who sought to depict the never-ending cycle of violence implicit in Macbeth rather than the apparent peace accompanying Malcom’s crowning, Kanjanavanit uses the allusion to Thammasat to comment not merely on Thailand’s past but also its predictable future. Still banned, Shakespeare Must Die has nonetheless proved itself somewhat prophetic: as a result of yet another coup in May 2014, the corrupt

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prime minister, Yingluck, was forced to step down, and the army declared martial law a few weeks later. Beyond featuring one of the most fascinating reworkings of Lady Macbeth on film, Vishal Bharadwaj’s 2003 Hindi/Urdu film, Maqbool, uses Shakespeare to comment on the changing cultural and political realities of modern Mumbai. It focuses on the rise and fall of a ruthless but sympathetic hitman, Mian Maqbool, in a minority-Muslim crime family led by Abbaji (or “father” in Urdu), as the Brando-influenced don is affectionately called. One of the most provocative themes Bharadwaj explores is that of the costs of Mumbai’s emergence as a truly global center of commerce and multiculturalism. The impact is felt mainly in the gaps between the older and younger generations. As the emblem of the older generation, Abbaji is open-minded enough to embrace both Hindus and Muslims in the family, but he is skeptical about the encroachment of the outside world into his native city. Given the chance at one point to spread his business “all over the world,” Abbaji responds, “Mumbai is my sweetheart. Can’t jilt her at this age and settle down in Karachi or Dubai.” And the film validates his concerns to a certain degree by showing later how Maqbool’s global expansion of the business winds up being precisely the dagger that stops his heart. This is no reactionary or xenophobic film, however, especially since Maqbool celebrates openly the ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity of modern Mumbai, and ultimately holds up the ideals of the younger generation as being at least equal to those of the older one. Throughout the film, the younger characters are depicted wearing American rock t-shirts and bearing other signs of Western influence, and they speak regularly in English to one another. At times, they are shown to be impulsive and ambitious, and they drive their parents nuts, but they are also loyal, intelligent, and less cynical than their elders; in the end, they not only quash Maqbool’s new tyranny, but they also promise a more peaceful future for their own children. In the context of a film that openly adapts both Britain’s most famous playwright and America’s most influential modern crime film, The Godfather (1972), without privileging them above its own Bollywood conventions (which the film is both loyal to and willing to subvert) or its focus on specifically Indian issues, Maqbool’s complex meditation on globalism must be understood as forming part of the tradition of highly self-reflexive adaptations we’ve been highlighting throughout this book. Whereas Shakespeare Must Die employs Macbeth allegorically and Maqbool adapts it in a deeply self-conscious manner, Makibefo (1999) presents itself as something of an experiment in cross-cultural adaptation. The Britishborn, French national director Alexander Abela set his Malagasy film among the Antandroy tribe of Faux Cap, a small fishing community in the southern

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FIGURE 7.11 Amateur Actors of the Antandroy Tribe in Makibefo (1999).

tip of the country. Mark Thornton Burnett has written extensively on the unique process according to which Abela and his sound assistant taught tribe members the play through comic strips and photographs and then asked them to create a script in their own language. To establish a more primitive setting for the play, those locals whom Abela cast to star in the film were costumed in loincloths (see Figure 7.11), but otherwise the familiar tragedy of overreaching ambition is reworked as the result of a “communal and intercultural reading of Shakespeare.”89 In terms that might suggest different ways of reading the politics of this film, Vanessa Gerhards categorizes this “multicultural treatment” (174–5) of Macbeth as a “cross-cultural re-colonization of sorts enacted upon the previously dominant European culture on the island” (187). Makibefo has prompted critics to describe it as everything from global and transnational cinema to documentary realism, pseudo-ethnography, and even European auteur cinema—a variety of terms that seek to capture not only its complex, non-Hollywood style but especially the complex politics of its multicultural production. As Kate Tomkie points out, the film seems openly invested in complicating assumptions about the unidirectional flow of cultural influence from Europe to Africa, though she hesitates to declare Abela’s attempt entirely successful.90 These three films of Macbeth seem different from the international and non-Anglophone Shakespeare films that preceded them—the Asta Nielsen Hamlet, for example, or Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood—in that they go so far as to reflect openly on the political implications of their own priorities regarding the cross-cultural adaptation of texts.91 Kurosawa’s beautiful 1985 film of King Lear, Ran, is undoubtedly a masterpiece of modern adaptation, but it does not seem particularly interested in thinking through the ideological or cultural implications of its own relationship with Shakespeare. The textual

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confrontations in Kurosawa’s case tend to feel more personal—Kurosawa meets Shakespeare—than communal, more local than global. Such a dichotomy might recall Stephen Crofts influential distinction between the individualism privileged in Western cinema and the communalism privileged in Third Cinema.92 In any case, the three Macbeth films discussed above are marked by a certain ambivalence about the role of Shakespeare in the local culture, in the history of film, and in modern political struggles. In none of these cases can it be said that Shakespeare is allowed to operate as a hegemonic force upon the passive, colonized periphery. While the number of similarly self-reflexive global films based on British authors other than Shakespeare is limited, a small number deserve mention here: one of the first was Cuban director Daniel Díaz Torres’s Alicia en el Pueblo de Maravillas (1991) or Alice in Wondertown. The film uses Lewis Carroll’s famous story loosely, though explicitly (beginning with an epigraph from the novel), to launch an allegorical critique against Fidel Castro’s increasingly dictatorial rule. Focusing on middle-age drama teacher Alicia’s experiences in and eventual escape from—or, possibly, nightmares about—a surreal village named Maravillas, the film is broken up into little segments whose beginnings are marked with John Tenniel’s illustrations (or fragments of them) of Alice’s adventures. As in Shakespeare Must Die, the literary references serve largely to camouflage the film’s political critiques of the current government. Though tame in comparison with later Cuban satires such as Strawberry and Chocolate (1994), the film was seen as subversive and pulled by censors shortly after its release. A final film worth mentioning in this section is Michael Winterbottom’s provocative and moving 2011 film Trishna. The British director’s third adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel (after Jude and The Claim [2000], based on The Mayor of Casterbridge), this modern-day Tess of the D’Urbervilles is set alternately in Jaipur and Mumbai and stars a predominantly Indian cast including Freida Pinto as Trishna. Produced by India’s Sunil Bohra and cofinanced by British and Swedish companies, the film focuses on the short, tragic life of a poor woman from Rajasthan who becomes involved with a wealthy British man whose father, of Indian descent, owns several hotels throughout northern India. Winterbottom chose to set his film in India precisely because its current class structure and marriage customs resemble more closely than those in modern-day England the nineteenth-century Wessex of Hardy’s novel. He makes numerous gestures in the film toward Bollywood, ranging from several characters’ direct involvements with filmmaking in Mumbai to multiple musical and dance interludes reminiscent of the Bollywood style, and even credits Indian film with a familiar plot structure amenable to Hardy: “The story Hardy was telling is ‘poor girl meets rich man and falls in love,’ and that is … the

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story of many Bollywood films.”93 Indeed, Winterbottom’s is the third version of Tess set in India since 1996.94 The risk of such a film is, of course, similar to the one haunting Makibefo— that Winterbottom will construct India and its people in a sentimental or culturally insensitive light. Thankfully, the film deliberately avoids romanticizing India in any way, and the problems of perspective are solved in part by showing the constantly changing Indian locations through the eyes of the young and inexperienced Trishna and her foreign lover, Jay, who is an amalgam of the Angel Clare and Alec characters. More importantly, the film chooses to engage metaphorically—though unflinchingly—the legacy of Britain’s imperial past in South Asia. Not only are massive swaths of Indian land, which Trishna’s impoverished family can only dream about, controlled by these rich AngloIndian families, but Jay’s seduction, temporary abandonment, and eventual humiliation of Trishna—which includes him raping her serially—serves as a devastating commentary on Britain’s relationship with India. Like other globalist Brit-Lit films, then, Trishna succeeds by confronting, not eschewing, the complicated flow of cultural and economic power across constantly changing international borders. *** We’ve obviously chosen to privilege a certain type of world cinema above. At the same time, we believe it would be oppressive to hold every adapter of Brit-Lit outside of Los Angeles and London to some impossible standard whereby their work can only be judged adequate if it manages to be political or self-reflexive. Feng Xiaogang’s wuxia film The Banquet brilliantly reworks Hamlet in the context of tenth-century China, and from the perspective of the Gertrude character, Little Wan.95 It’s a gorgeous film and an extraordinarily provocative, because unapologetic, sidelining of the most famous character in English literature. Bharadwaj’s later films Omkara (2006), based on Othello, and Haider (2014), based on Hamlet, lack the sort of explicit self-reflexive subtexts of Maqbool but are quite ingenious adaptations nevertheless. The latter film uses Shakespeare’s tragedy to explore the costs of the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. Beyond all the Hardy and the Shakespeare, global Jane Austen has become a phenomenon to be reckoned with, particularly in the form of Bollywood and Bollywoodstyle comedies: Kandukondain Kandukondain or I have Found It (2000) is a beautifully photographed adaptation of Sense and Sensibility; Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2005), which received partial funding from the UK Film Council, was filmed largely in English, and made back nearly three times its budget at the box office; Aisha (2010), based on Emma, fared less well but was notable for its popular soundtrack.

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Over the coming years, it will be most interesting to see what happens to the Brit-Lit film in an increasingly globalized world. Overall, the quality and variety of international films have never been higher, and British literature, perhaps reframed as world literature, will undoubtedly continue to be transformed and reimagined across wider and wider spaces.

4 The nineties and beyond: Postmodernism goes mainstream In the introduction, we singled out four characteristics of innovative adaptations which we might vaguely refer to as “postmodern” qualities: (1) an unusual degree of self-reflexivity; (2) a playful or ironic pastiche of various styles and generic conventions; (3) a manipulation of traditional narrative and formal structures; and (4) a subversion of traditional artistic hierarchies. We say “vaguely” because we don’t wish to limit application of the term “postmodern” to a particular historical moment (after modernism, say) or to engage in unnecessary arguments about the term’s usefulness or the soundness of the ideas and methods it typically is used to describe. Today the term has become part of everyday modern usage, and we will be employing it accordingly to refer to films exhibiting any combination of the four qualities (along with a few additional ones) just mentioned. Since the late 1970s especially, the Brit-Lit film—which earlier had often borne the awful burden of high-cultural worthiness—has become less plagued by the fidelity hounds (which is not to say un-plagued), and this fact has further freed filmmakers to experiment with and advance their art. A key film along the way is Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), which—on the basis of a strong screenplay by playwright Harold Pinter—adapts John Fowles’s 1969 postmodern neo-Victorian novel for the screen. It does so precisely by making the film partly about the screen, intercutting stories of a modern affair between two film actors (portrayed by Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons) and the Victorian affair played out by their two characters. Other than the opening scene, where a clapperboard introduces the Victorian characters and setting, the parallel stories are shot for verisimilitude; we don’t see the modern actors in makeup or on sound stages. Occasionally characters in the modern story will discuss the film production, such as when an outsider asks which of the novel’s two endings—the happy one or the sad one—the production is privileging. The effect is of two parallel plots whose action serves to compare and contrast Victorian and modern codes of morality, asking whether one period’s really are more stifling than the other’s.

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This relatively subtle metacinematic framing of the story engages Fowles’s own meta-historical narration of the Victorian affair. Rather than being told by the narrator—or the novel’s narrative apparatus—the numbers of Victorian men who frequented brothels, for example, we hear about it from the actors as they research their parts. Just as the reader is educated about the myths and realities of the historical period, so too is the viewing audience, but they also are invited to use the Victorian period setting as a lens through which to view modernity.96 Furthermore, the film’s two-story structure solves the problem of how to accommodate Fowles’s important presentation of multiple endings: in the film, the Victorian lovers wind up together but the modern actors who play them do not. Kenneth Branagh uses a similar tactic, though less subtly, in his revisionist Henry V of 1989. The now-famous opening prologue scene features Derek Jacobi as the Chorus amid the cameras, lights, and wires of a Shepperton soundstage—a different kind of “unworthy scaffold” than the bare stage referenced by Shakespeare and played with so masterfully by Olivier (see Figure 7.12). Here the metacinema doesn’t stop the Chorus from informing us that we are about to witness a “play,” just as he thrusts back two massive doors that open out onto a predominantly realist cinematic space. Branagh’s film is at once less reflexive than The French Lieutenant’s Woman, quickly dispensing with the cinematic references almost as quickly as it introduces them,97 and more reflexive in its sustained awareness of and response to the famous earlier Henry V of 1944. In 1987, two years before Henry V, Robert Stam lamented that “modernist and reflexive strategies, accepted in literature, remain, at least for the mainstream of journalistic critics, anathema in the cinema.”98 Few readers would have argued with Stam then, but now almost three decades later—after

FIGURE 7.12 The Unworthy Scaffold in Branagh’s Henry V (1989).

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Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, Charlie Kauffman and The Matrix trilogy—it’s safe to say things have changed. In fact, film historicist William J. Palmer has called the 1990s the “decade of spin,” focusing on a rising awareness of the “relative power to manipulate reality” which resulted in large part from the seepage of post-structuralist and postmodern thinking into mainstream discourse: The nineties also saw the discourse of postmodernism become a part of the discourse of everyday life. The noun “deconstruction” and its verbal and adjectival uses, for example, became a commonplace in newspapers and on the nightly network news. It made no difference that Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings had no idea what “deconstruction” really was. … In tune with this popularized postmodernism, in the nineties, … texts became cultural texts, subtexts, intertexts, and metatexts.99 If the impact of French theory and postmodernism was felt in discursive communities as mainstream as the American network news shows, it was especially influential for filmmakers, who began to push the boundaries as far as they could go. As we’ve seen, Peter Greenaway may have come close as early as 1991 (see above, p. 347). After yet another decade, by the time Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) and Kaufman’s Synechdoche, New York (2008) were released, the mazes of irony and intertextual play had begun to seem almost trite, however fun they still were to explore.100 Numerous 1990s and post-2000 Brit-Lit films, some which we’ve already discussed such as Prospero’s Books, Clueless, Romeo ⫹ Juliet, O, and Maqbool, revel in similarly explicit metacinematic moments—though they do so in considerably different ways. One of the most playful recent Shakespeare adaptations is Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film of Richard III, which features a screenplay largely written by its leading star, Ian McKellen. At least partly in order to render less jarring its regular breakings of the fourth wall, the film seeks to situate itself as film, alluding openly to numerous iconic Hollywood films, from Star Wars to The Godfather to James Cagney’s memorable final scene in Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). The far more ponderous Hotel (Mike Figgis, 2001) focuses on a documentarian who is attempting to film British filmmakers who are adapting John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi! The single Brit-Lit film perhaps best understood within this broader discursive milieu, however, is Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005). If digital innovations made possible certain adaptations which had previously seemed too challenging, the same might be said about postmodernism in this case. As the film itself proudly boasts, Tristram Shandy is the “book many people say is unfilmable.” Laurence

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Sterne’s pseudo-biography of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is known for its digressive narrator’s inability to move any kind of narrative forward, its most famous joke being the fact that it takes three volumes simply to get to Tristram’s birth (the film actually ends once it arrives at this point in the narrative). Winterbottom engages the novel’s reflexive narration and manipulation of plot conventions by creating a metacinematic quasi-documentary about a film crew’s attempt to adapt it.101 Using a decidedly nonlinear structure, the film moves us through conversation after conversation about what the best adaptation strategies are, which characters and episodes should be included, and even whether certain scenes are filmable considering the low budget with which the crew has to work. At one point, an interviewer even asks the film’s star, Steve Coogan (played by Steve Coogan), why they’re bothering to take on the project, and he tellingly responds that the very challenge of pulling it off was itself the attraction: “Tristram Shandy was a postmodern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about.” When the director within the film is asked the same question, however, his response is tellingly different than Coogan’s: “Because it’s funny.” Presumably Winterbottom’s reasons for filming involved some combination of these two, but what makes his Tristram Shandy so delightful, and yet incisive as an appropriation of Sterne, is the confidence he and the entire cast show in asserting that “funny” is more than good enough. Winterbottom is not typically linked to the circle of world cinema auteurs famous for tackling Brit-Lit—the Welles’s, Kurosawa’s, Buñuel’s, Branagh’s, and so forth—but with Tristram Shandy, his fourth film based on classic British literature, he probably deserves to be. Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) features Ethan Hawke modeling the sweet prince—a grunge filmmaker-within-the-film—after Kurt Cobain. The language is Shakespeare’s, but the setting has shifted to modern-day New York City, where Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius has just become CEO of the Denmark Corporation. Whereas Olivier once referred to his Hamlet as an “essay” on the play, Almereyda has described his film much more modestly as an “attempt” at it.102 The term reflects the filmmaker ’s anxiety about tackling a play that has been infinitely reproduced and reinvented through numerous technologies and media over centuries, though he capitalizes on this anxiety by making it perhaps the major subject of the film. As Kenneth Rothwell says of the film’s concentration on the individual’s complexly mediated experience of the external world, “‘Meta-electonicity,’ if there be such a thing, replaces the meta-theatricality of Shakespeare’s play.”103 Indeed, the camera’s lingering on other cameras, on computers, DVDs, cellphones, and every type of technological device popular at the turn of the twentieth century, suggests how the older strategies of reflexivity—mainly, metacinema—had begun to

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evolve with the transformation of film into a mere part of a massive new global entertainment industry. The fact that we can no longer show the film to our students, a mere fifteen years later, without having to hear how its datedness prevents them from relating to it, is perhaps the best evidence of the film’s insightfulness. Metacinematic, and even meta-post-cinematic, varieties of self-reflexiveness are not the only postmodern aspect of nineties and twenty-first-century films, of course. Generally speaking, films from this period which seek deliberately to modernize—as opposed to period films which continue to bank on some kind of fidelity, however creatively—demonstrate a much more flexible view of the hypotext’s elasticity and tend to blur the lines between adaptation and appropriation, very often refusing to acknowledge themselves as either. They often are as interested in a text’s cultural legacy or intertextual relationships as they are in the source texts themselves. Finally, such films exhibit—sometimes refreshingly, sometimes pretentiously—a far less reverent attitude toward literature than that expressed in many films of earlier periods. Two films from the year 1990, one B-film and one art house, make for interesting examples. The first is Roger Corman’s final film as a director, the surreal time travel–horror flick, Frankenstein Unbound. The film takes the audience from America in 2031 back to Geneva in the mid-nineteenth century, where we meet Mary Shelley along with Lord Byron and Percy (a subject also visited by Ken Russell’s Gothic [1986] a few years earlier) and then back to the yet more distant future again. As the title would suggest, the film ponders the classical origins of the Frankenstein tale, offering an interesting commentary on the ironic fact that, especially after Shelley (Mary and Percy now), the Promethean myth has become timeless, placeless, and detached from any specific text. The second, more successful example is Tom Stoppard’s film of his own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Though not by any means the first movie to adapt a classic literary text from a minor character’s perspective, the cult film–status of this superbly acted comedy certainly authorized a trend of similar adaptations including Stephen Frears’s Mary Reilly (1996), a servant’s-eye view of the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the lush Chinese film The Banquet, which privileges Gertrude’s experiences in the Hamlet tragedy; and Wide Sargasso Sea (1993), based on Jean Rhys’s postcolonial novel about Bertha Mason’s life prior to the events depicted in Jane Eyre. Other films, following Romeo ⫹ Juliet, simply pushed back against the conservative traditions of adaptation which had grown up around specific texts. One undervalued schlock-fest of a film, Lloyd Kaufman’s Tromeo and Juliet (1996), highlighted the Troma Entertainment banner in part to signal its deliberately subversive approach to the material. Shot on a budget of just over

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$300,000, this gory, profane, semi–soft porn modernization of Shakespeare’s play manages to stick fairly closely to the plot structure and themes that also have attracted conservative directors such as Zeffirelli. Zooming in especially on the play’s interrogation of Romeo’s professed “love” for Juliet, Tromeo playfully challenges heteronormative conceptions of love, friendship, and sexuality, all while offering a new perspective on the hypocritical adult society of Verona/Tromaville, New Jersey (see Figure 7.13). Alfonso Cuarón’s decidedly more mainstream Great Expectations (1998) cleverly transplants Dickens’ early nineteenth-century English setting into modern Florida and New York City settings.104 The film sticks fairly close to the plot of Dickens’ novel, but presents itself as an anti-adaptation in at least one sense: deliberately eschewing Herbert Pocket’s training of Pip to be a gentleman which has become synonymous with the David Lean version of 1946. Beyond such self-awareness, the film has its merits, including its rather beautiful cinematography, a complex Luhrmann-inspired soundtrack mixing score and non-diegetic and diegetic popular music, and a stylized mise-en-scène ably complemented by a first-person voice-over narrative written by David Mamet. Unfortunately, the film too often relies on shortcuts for inter-character development, using especially shots of body parts as a substitute for intimacy and shared experience between Finn (Pip) and Estella. Finally, we wish to mention briefly four films based on the graphic novels of Alan Moore: the Hughes Brothers’ dark and gripping From Hell (2001); Stephen Norrington’s shallow special-effects vehicle, The League of Extraordinary

FIGURE 7.13 Shakespearean “Body Film” (Tromeo and Juliet, 1996).

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Gentlemen (2003); James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2005), from an adapted screenplay by the Wachowskis; and Zack Snyder’s film of Watchmen (2009). Moore is easily one of the most revered comic book writers of all time, and he has received praise well beyond the comics world; his Watchmen (1986–87), for example, has been listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels written since 1923.105 His adapted novels all tend to focus on the haunting legacies of British literary and historical characters/figures (e.g., Jack the Ripper, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Guy Fawkes, Ozymandias), making the pop-culture appropriation and adaptation of such figures both a subject and a strategy of his writing. Moore does not illustrate his own graphic novels, choosing instead to collaborate with a host of top artists including Eddie Campbell, Kevin O’Neil, David Lloyd, and Dave Gibbons. The fact that he writes for visual artists whom he knows will be attempting to depict his worlds and characters might suggest he’d be a natural fit in the world of cinema, but Moore has been hostile and dismissive of nearly all the films which have adapted his work. The more obvious reasons for such hostility have to do with his sense that they have often stripped away the more radical elements of his writing in the process of adaptation; this is undoubtedly true, for example, of V for Vendetta, whose anarchist sentiments are extremely watered down in the Wachowski’s production.106 The main objections, however, have more to do with what Moore sees as film’s violation of comic aesthetic principles: I feel that if we only see comics in relationship to movies then the best that they will ever be is films that do not move. I found it, in the mid 80s, preferable to try and concentrate on those things that only comics could achieve. The way in which a tremendous amount of information could be included visually in every panel, the juxtapositions between what a character was saying, and what the image that the reader was looking at would be. So in a sense I suppose that you can say that most of my work from the 80s onwards was designed to be un-filmable.107 Interestingly, Moore may do more here to explain how his books might be filmed rather than why they can’t be filmed. More important, the deeply atmospheric and rich worlds Moore creates, along with the strong characters he and his collaborators have brought to life suggest why his graphic novels have been and will continue to be attractive to filmmakers. Along with a handful of other British authors including Shakespeare, Austen, Forster, and Greene, few writers have had so many of their writings adapted for the screen in so short a period of time. We expect that Moore will remain a reluctant Hollywood writer for years to come.

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5 Conclusion Postmodern Brit-Lit films raise provocative questions not just about the individual literary works they engage but also, to varying degrees, about the nature of those fundamental categories our book explores: what is literature? What is a text? What is Britishness? What is an adaptation? Though our history of the Brit-Lit film comes to an end in 2015 for the rather simple reason that this is the year in which we’ve published this book, we may have reached, in fact, a pretty natural stopping point. Books of course are still part of our global entertainment industry, but they play a less and less central role in it, giving way with each passing year to other popular media. Certainly the concept of what constitutes “literature,” a problematic enough topic for any era, becomes less clear as both art and academic theory continue to break down categories of high and low culture, and as language departments continue their steady migration away from classical canons and toward textuality more generally—meaning everything from film and television to digital and video games. As we’ve discussed, film itself is often no longer actually film and, more important, is a medium which continues to lose its autonomy in relation to the numerous other technologies and media it both supports and depends on; one can easily envision future histories of “film” that employ a different terminology altogether—one better capable of capturing the art form and/or entertainment product that emerges in the increasingly expansive nexus of various production industries, technologies, and media platforms. Questions about Britishness too have come to the fore especially in the past twenty years, most notably in relation to the devolution of centralized power implemented by Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the late nineties. The success of majority referenda in Wales, Scotland, and England, which led in 1998–99 to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland and London assemblies, will of course continue to redefine Great Britain for decades to come. Such questions about British identity are not new of course. They also were raised in earlier periods as the processes of decolonization and the dissolution of empire played themselves out. But contemporary British film has predictably played more of a role in contemplating such questions than at any other point in history. As Steve Blandford claims, For Britain, at this particular historical moment, it is arguably a category of more use than ever in that the tensions that have always been inherent in the idea of any kind of British national cinema have been highlighted and exposed, particularly by devolution, but also by the intensification of other factors implicated in the “break-up” of the idea of Britain.108

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The “idea” of Britain was of course one reinvented constantly by the cinema of earlier eras as well, sometimes in similarly critical terms of exposure and interrogation, as in the British New Wave, but more often in terms of a (primarily) conservative quest for unity and consensus, as in the Second World War era. One outcome of that conservative quest was that cinematic “Britishness” has historically tended to mean “Englishness.” This too has been changing for a while. As we’ve seen throughout this book, the stable of authors chosen for adaptation is keyed to the tastes and ideologies of particular historical periods; only a small number of “classic” authors have been adapted in every period. It’s unclear of course what future British literary canons might look like, and we’ve been somewhat coy in this chapter about assuming which of today’s authors might be tomorrow’s Austen or even Graham Greene. Any list of film adaptations of more or less contemporary British “literary” authors, however, would have to include such titles as Neil Jordan’s 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on short stories by Angela Carter; Crash (1986), a characteristically memorable adaptation by Canadian director David Cronenberg of the J. G. Ballard novel; Stephen Gyllenhaal’s 1992 adaptation of Graham Swift’s Waterland; Danny Boyle’s excellent and much-praised Trainspotting (1996), an adaptation of the novel by Irvine Welsh; Marc Evans’s 1998 adaptation of Eoin McNamee’s thriller, Resurrection Man; Stephen Frears’s reworking in 2000 of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in an American setting (Chicago); Sharon Maguire’s 2001 hit adaptation of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (itself an appropriation of Pride and Prejudice); Neil Labute’s disappointing film of A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession (2002); Richard Eyre’s 2006 Academy Award and BAFTA-nominated adaptation of Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal; Joe Wright’s acclaimed and financially successful Atonement (2007), after the novel by Ian McEwan; Mark Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland’s haunting 2010 adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer’s ambitious but messy Cloud Atlas (2012), after the novel by David Mitchell; and Jonathan Glazer’s masterful Under the Skin (2013), an adaptation of a novel by the Dutch-born, Scottish author Michael Faber. As the English, foreign-born, Northern Irish, and Welsh names and identities of such authors would attest, Brit-Lit on film is becoming less English and more international, less bourgeois and more reflective of the full spectrum of socioeconomic classes, less male and more female. Moreover, such changes do not merely describe the changing faces of literary authorship in contemporary Britain; their influence extends backward through time, changing too how Dickens and Austen and Shakespeare will be adapted for tomorrow’s audiences. ***

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The best example of a fully realized contemporary Brit-Lit film may be Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011). The third feature-length film by the director whose own working-class background and experiences have influenced profoundly all of her work, Wuthering Heights is in many ways a revision and a critique of the Victorian parlor-room film versions which came before it—especially Wyler’s film, which famously altered the setting to the mid-nineteenth century. Arnold’s adaptation is set in the late 1700s and filmed on location in North Yorkshire. It exemplifies contemporary pure cinema, minimizing both dialogue and music (with one prominent exception) in favor of composition and movement, being filmed in natural light with several lightweight 35 mm cameras; these allow Arnold to achieve a handheld style very similar to the Dogme 95 one she employed in her first feature, Red Road (2006). Especially the first hour, which focuses on Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s relationship prior to her marriage and his departure, is practically silent. The film is not shot digitally but employs, nonetheless, a decidedly digital aesthetic. While Wuthering Heights can be called revisionist due to its naturalism, its return to the muddy, damp, and exceedingly harsh Yorkshire environs; it is most obviously revisionist, ideologically speaking, as a result of casting two black actors in the role of Heathcliff at different stages of life (James Howson as the adult; Solomon Glave as the youth). Heathcliff is famously described by Brontë as a “dark skinned gypsy in aspect,” and originally, before selecting Howson, Arnold had sought a Romani actor for the part. Amazingly, Arnold’s is the first adaptation of the novel to feature a black-skinned actor, and it does so to powerful effect (see Figure 7.14). Especially in the scenes of

FIGURE 7.14 James Howson as Heathcliff in Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011).

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Hindley’s torturous abuses of Heathcliff, including one in which he calls him a “nigger,” the racial element serves not only to comment on the significance of skin types in the novel but also to draw out the severity of the abuse by offering modern audiences a crystal-clear analog for the brutal classism of late eighteenth-century English society. In terms of content, Arnold makes the common-enough decision, also made by Wyler, to cut the second generation of characters altogether. Nonetheless, the film performs a rather sophisticated move of retaining the hopefulness associated with the younger generation by centralizing the importance of memory—whether through flashbacks or recurrent imagery associated with the younger Catherine and Heathcliff. Lingering “silent” shots of flowers, of blowing grass, of the interlocking of gentle hands dominate the film, juxtaposed in focus against the relatively shallow long shots of the wider landscape (see Figure 7.15). Nostalgic memories of a quasi-sacred past—obliterating almost entirely the brutal realities of that past—constantly vie with the painful events of the present. Arnold’s use of montage as a disruption of plot linearity and celebration of emotion’s primacy and power also reveals the degree to which this Wuthering Heights is practically a psychomachia of the Heathcliff character. The fact that Arnold chooses to end the film so radically—combining non-diegetic popular music (“The Enemy” by Mumford and Sons) and flashbacks of Catherine and Heathcliff as children—suggests her desire to render more transparent the film’s unique interpretive strategies, and to show that only film is capable of telling this particular version of the story.

FIGURE 7.15 The Shallow-Focus Close-ups of Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011).

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In 2011, then, we discover in Wuthering Heights a film that forces us to grapple with the longer history of film and, of course, the more focused history of Brit-Lit on film. Arnold’s adaptation appropriates many of the stylistic priorities of the Dogme 95 group that so influenced her and, in doing so, it champions those fundamental principles of filmmaking that will lead us back even to the titans of silent cinema like Murnau and Dreyer. Its use of montage will undoubtedly remind us of Eisenstein. Its focus on class division and domestic turmoil should make us think about Arnold’s earlier films such as Fish Tank (2009) and the longer tradition of British cinematic social realism as well. The power of its character and setting revisions will only truly be felt if we know our William Wyler and the many films and television dramas that his own Wuthering Heights influenced over the course of the twentieth century. And yes, the film will also remind us of a novel by Emily Brontë, with its meditation on the consuming nature of passion as experienced by two of the most original characters ever written in English. Like all great adaptations, then, Arnold’s film is merely the most recent—and perhaps the most evolved—individual successor in an incredibly rich ancestral line of works. It came into its own through infinitely complex processes of replication, mutation, and competition—processes which can only be truly appreciated and understood in relation to the longer histories of film and cinematic adaptation that this book has attempted to narrate. Our hope is that we’ve succeeded in illustrating both the value and the pleasures yielded by greater scholarly engagement of these histories and, specifically, of the BritLit film’s contributions to them.

Notes Introduction 1 The aforementioned references to British literature are by no means the only ones in the film. Among others, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress loom especially large. 2 We discuss this fact at length in Chapter 5: see pp. 207–22. 3 Ian Christie explains that “Powell told the story on several occasions of how Jack Beddington, head of the film department at the Ministry of Information, had suggested … that the Archers might tackle the theme of worsening Anglo-American relations” (A Matter of Life and Death [London: BFI, 2000], 12). 4 On the subject, see especially Chapter 3 of Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 5 Schatz, “A Passage to Hollywood: British Literature and American Film in the 1990s,” review of Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature, by Jennifer M. Jeffers, Literature/Film Quarterly (2009): 77–80, 77. 6 Quoted in Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: BFI, 1994), 78. 7 Andrew, “Adaptation,” in Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 104. 8 Numerous critics have recognized in different ways the institutional identity crisis suffered by adaptation studies. For example, see James Naremore, ed. Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 1; and Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. 9 Bluestone, Novels into Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). 10 Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2012), 9. 11 Murray, The Adaptation Industry, 8. 12 Murray, The Adaptation Industry, 9. 13 The key books associated with these authors include the following: Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge, 2006); Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of the Christ” (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

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23 24

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26 27

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University Press, 2007); Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Stam’s relevant works are many, but see especially his “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2004). Murray, The Adaptation Industry, 6. The declaration that “it is time for adaptation to take a sociological turn” was first sounded by Dudley Andrew in 1984 (“Adaptation,” 104). It is the contention of this book that his call for greater attention to historical specificity and change has never been answered properly by adaptation scholars. Murray, The Adaptation Industry, 20. Murray, The Adaptation Industry, 21. The quote is from Cartmell and Whelehan, who argue in favor of the full range of adaptation studies approaches rather than lamenting the field’s impoverishment or myopia (Cambridge Companion, 5). Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation. The specific quotation (our italics) is from the description of the book on its back cover. In addition to Murray’s The Adaptation Industry and Leitch’s Film Adaptation (see notes 10 and 13), see Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); DeBona’s Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010); and Geraghty’s Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). Corrigan, “Literature on Screen, a History: In the Gap,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–44, 33. One study of this cinematic relationship, which figures centrally in Chapters 3 and 4 below, is Mark Glancy’s When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood “British” Film 1939-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Corrigan, “Literature on Screen,” 33. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner, Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 26. Gardiner, “English Literature as Ideology,” in Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness, and English Literature, ed. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 203–17, 204. Steve Blandford, Film, Drama and the Break-up of Britain (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), 10. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Indian Education,” in Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, ed. G. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 721–4, 729. See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

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29 M. Keith Booker, Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 1997), 29. 30 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 62–3. 31 Stam, “Introduction,” 2–3. 32 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 189. For a more extended treatment of “memetics,” see Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). See Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 31. 33 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 4. 34 Leitch, “Adaptation, the Genre,” Adaptation 1 (2008): 106–20, 108. 35 Deborah Cartmell, “Pride and Prejudice and the Adaptation Genre,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 3 (2010): 227–43, 229–30. 36 Cartmell, “Pride and Prejudice and the Adaptation Genre,” 230. 37 Rick Altman calls this process of imitation “the Producers’ Game” (Film/Genre [London: BFI, 1999], 41). 38 We are referring, of course, to the massive influence of Cahiers du cinéma on subsequent filmmaking and film criticism. Editors Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni issued their famous manifesto in 1969, which practically sought to prescribe a proper course for future filmmakers: “Once we realize that it is in the nature of the system to turn the cinema into an instrument of ideology, we can see that the filmmaker’s first task is to show up the cinema’s socalled ‘depiction of reality’ [in order to] disrupt or possibly even sever the connection between the cinema and its ideological function” (“Cinema/Ideology/ Criticism,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 6th edn [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 812–19, 815). While the legacy of the Cahiers school is too substantial to trace here, essays by JeanLouis Baudry (“Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28 [1974–75]: 39–47) and Brian Henderson (“Toward a NonBourgeois Camera Style,” Film Quarterly 24 [1970–71]: 2–14) might be cited as exemplary of the range of metafilmic techniques praised by subsequent film theorists for showing up the ideological functions of bourgeois cinema. 39 Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 129. 40 Stam, Reflexivity, 159. 41 Rothwell, “Representing King Lear on Screen: From Metatheatre to ‘MetaCinema’,” in Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 211–33, 211.

Chapter 1 1 The Phonoscope, May 1897, p. 11. A similar idolatry of Edison is on full display in a newspaper science fiction piece, “Edison’s Conquest of Mars”: “This most startling story of modern times shows how people from this earth, after the invasion of the Martians, invaded and vanquished Mars, using therefor wondrous flying and war machines invented by Thomas A. Edison”

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(New York American, January 10, 1898, p. 9). In hindsight, Edison’s ferocious management of his empire through patent litigation makes his legacy seem far less heroic. The Phonoscope, May 1897, p. 11. The single best history of the period is Charles Musser’s The Emergence of Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Charles Musser, “Towards a History of Theatrical Culture: Imagining an Integrated History of Stage and Screen,” in Screen Culture: History and Textuality, ed. John Fullerton (Eastleigh, Hamps: John Libbey, 2004), 3–19, 7. Musser suggests that many early film adaptations of theatrical performances served the purposes of publicity or advertising. Musser, “Towards a History of Theatrical Culture,” p. 7. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Ledya (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1949), 195–256. See George Bluestone’s classic Novels into Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). Altman, “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 321–59, 324. David Mayer, “Learning to See in the Dark,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 25 (1997): 92–114. Organized by Eileen Bowser, curator of the film collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and sponsored by FIAF (the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film), this conference screened a great number of rare early films to an assemblage of international scholars and is considered a watershed moment for work on pre–feature film cinema. See especially David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See Wanda Straueven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2006). Andre Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, “Early Film History as a Challenge to Film History,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Straueven, 365–80, 375. Tom Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 59. Charles Musser, “Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Straueven, 389–416, 395. Musser, “Rethinking Early Cinema,” 406. New York Herald, October 5, 1890, p. 8. Worcester Daily Spy, October 15, 1893, p. 5. Springfield Republican, December 19, 1891, p. 1. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 10, 1894, p. 11. Kalamazoo Gazette, February 23, 1890, p. 5. Star Films Catalog, 1901, p. 17. Mary Chapman examines several of the contemporary manuals that instructed amateur companies in presenting tableaux. See “‘Living Pictures’: Women and Tableaux Vivants in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Culture,” Wide Angle 18 (1996): 22–52, 26 ff.

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24 See Jack McCullough, Living Pictures on the New York Stage (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1983). 25 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Picture Catalogue (New York, 1902), 61. 26 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Picture Catalogue, 61. 27 Laura Mulvey followed her seminal article on the male gaze in cinema (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 [1975]: 6–18), with a book-length study entitled Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 28 Chapman, “Women and Tableaux Vivants,” 28. 29 Rip Van Winkle stars the famous actor Joseph Jefferson, who played in stage versions of Rip Van Winkle from the 1860s to his death in 1905, while Death of Nancy Sykes represents a filmed sketch by prominent vaudevillian actors Mabel Fenton and Charles Ross (see below, 40–4). 30 John Hollingshead, My Lifetime (London, 1895), v. 2:189. 31 In 1868, for example, the Lord Chamberlain refused to license a sensational version of Oliver Twist. See Andrew Maunder’s “Sensation Fiction on the Stage,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Andrew Mangham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52–69, 58–9. 32 Richard P. Fulkerson, “Oliver Twist in the Victorian Theatre,” Dickensian 70 (1974): 83–95, 88. 33 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Picture Catalogue, 54. 34 See Eileen Bowser’s discussion of the star system in The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 106 ff. 35 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Picture Catalogue, 56. 36 Philadelphia Inquirer, June 24, 1894, p. 10. 37 Daily Inter Ocean, August 7, 1896, p. 3. 38 Daily Inter Ocean, August 7, 1896, p. 3. 39 This is the argument of A. N. Vardac’s classic study, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). 40 David Mayer, “Learning to See in the Dark,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 25 (1997): 92–114, 98. 41 Sue Zemka, “The Death of Nancy ‘Sikes,’ 1838–1912,” Representations 100 (2010): 29–57. 42 Zemka, “Death of Nancy,” 52. 43 George Almar, Oliver Twist (London: Chapman and Hall, 1839). 44 OED. 45 Horton, Driftwood of the Stage (Detroit, MI: Winn and Hammond, 1904), 213. 46 Boston Daily Journal, July 2, 1895, p. 5. 47 James Sheridan Knowles (1784–1862), an Irish playwright, based his tragedy on Livy’s Roman history, but Chaucer borrowed the same plot, probably from Livy as well, for the “Physician’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales. 48 See also Robert A. Armour, “Effects of Censorship Pressure on the New York Nickelodeon Market, 1907–1909,” Film History 4 (1990): 114. 49 Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1903), 105–6.

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50 Nicholas Daly, “The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage,” Victorian Studies 53 (2011): 255–85, 276–7. 51 The New York Times, June 9, 1889, p. 12. 52 Warwick Trading Company Catalogue, no. 7024, 1898. 53 Frank E. Emson, Bumble’s Courtship: A Comic Interlude in One Act (London: S. French, 1881). 54 See “Northgate Wesleyan Band of Hope,” Gloucester Citizen, December 13, 1894, p. 3; “Deighton Methodist New Connexion Choir,” Huddersfield Chronicle, March 8, 1893, p. 3; “Bazar at Lanhydrock: Women’s Home Mission Association,” Royal Cornwall Gazette, September 19, 1894, p. 6; [In aid of a fund for the relief of the poor], Royal Cornwall Gazette, December 4, 1895, p. 7; “Café Chantant” [fundraiser for the St Rule Ladies’ Club], Dundee Courier February 12, 1899, p. 3; “St. James Parochial Entertainment at Bury St. Edmonds,” Bury & Norwich Post, January 15, 1900, p. 6. 55 The quotation comes from the edition of the play contained in The New York Drama: A Choice Collection of Tragedies, Comedies, Farces, et cetera with Casts of Characters, Stage Business, Costumes, Relative Positions &c., Adapted to the Home Circle, Private Theatricals, and the American Stage (New York: Wheat and Cornett, 1878), v. 4:31. 56 In an article on “Amusements in Plymouth,” The Era (January 3, 1896, p. 7) reviews a Christmas pantomime, “Dick Whittington and his cat” in which Bumble, “a beadle of the corpulent type” is one of a number of comic characters at a birthday party. 57 Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 58–9. 58 The Sketch, September 27, 1899, p. 413. Reproduced by Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 65. 59 Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 67. 60 Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 63. 61 See John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901: Vol. 4 1899 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 143. 62 H. Berbohm Tree, “The Staging of Shakespeare: A Defence of the Public Taste,” in The Fortnightly Review 74 (1900): 52–66, 53. 63 Tree, “The Staging of Shakespeare,” 58. 64 Haggard, She: History of An Adventure (London: Longman Green, 1919), 286. 65 Musser, “Towards a History of Theatrical Culture,” 7. 66 André Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity, Trickality,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 15 (1987): 112–19, 117. 67 Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-Up? Or, the Trick’s on Us,” in Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1990), 95–103, 97. Gaudreault makes a similar point. 68 See Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Solomon notes that many early magicians sought to debunk popular forms of spiritualism. 69 Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity, Trickality,” 115.

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70 Solomon, for example, identifies a narrative strain in a number of trick films, an interest he traces to the use of narrative in theatrical magic acts: “Many trick films, especially cinematic magic sketches and trick-based subjects that depart from a strictly theatrical structure to achieve comic effects, often veer towards storytelling. Likewise, contemporaneous theatrical magicians often presented illusions within a narrative trajectory” (“Up-to Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film,” Theatre Journal 58 [2006]: 595–615, 614). In addition, Musser finds a complex kind of narrative coherence in Porter’s trick films such as Jack and the Beanstalk and Dream of a Rarebit Fiend; see Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 200 ff. 71 On the basis of the narrative description in Paul’s catalogue, Michael Pointer identifies a stage production of 1901 as the most likely source for the film: “The stage dramatization of the story, as sketched out by Seymour Hicks, written by J. C. Buckstone, and performed earlier the same year under the title Scrooge” (see Charles Dickens on the Screen: The Film, Television, and Video Adaptations [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow P, 1996], 13). 72 Pointer, Charles Dickens on the Screen, p. 13. 73 Pointer, Charles Dickens on the Screen, p. 8. 74 For a history of Hepworth’s innovations in intertitling, see Gregory Robinson, “‘Oh! Mother will be Pleased’: Cinema Writes Back in Hepworth’s How it Feels to be Run Over,” Literature Film Quarterly 39 (2011): 218–30. 75 Edison Films, 1902, 116. 76 Edison Films, 1902, 117. 77 Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 205 ff. 78 Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 206. 79 See Katherine Singer Kovács, “George Melies and the Feerie,” Cinema Journal 16 (1976): 1–13; and Ian Christie, “The Magic Sword: Genealogy of an English Trick Film,” Film History 16 (2004): 163–71. 80 Polyscope Films, 1903, 44. 81 See Garth S. Jowett, “First Motion Picture Audiences,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 196–206; and especially Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds, American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI, 1999). 82 Star Films Catalogue, 1903, 20. 83 Star Films Catalogue, 1903, 20. 84 See Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2009), 125 and ff. 85 William Davenport Adams’s A Dictionary of the Drama: A Guide to the Plays, Play-wrights, Players, and Playhouses of the United Kingdom and America (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904) lists no less than seven theatrical productions of Swift’s novel from 1869 to 1901, most of them London-based pantomimes or musicals. Judging by the titles and descriptions in Adams’s entry, strict fidelity to Swift’s text was very low on the priority list of the adaptors: Gulliver’s Travels, or, Harlequin Lilliput and the Merry Elf in the Stalactite Caves

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95

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97 98

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(1869), Gulliver and the Fair Persian: A Pantomime (1872), Gulliver’s Travels: A Spectacular Piece (1879). French adaptations were also rife: see for example, Jean Coralli’s Gulliver: Ballet-Pantomime en 2 Actes (Brussels, Poublon, 1827) and Albert Monnier’s Les Voyages de Gulliver, Pièce Fantastique en 4 Actes et 30 Tableaux (Paris: Libraire international, 1867), among many others. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, into Several Remote Regions of the World, ed. Thomas M. Balliet (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1900), 44. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 39. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 67. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 93. Proving that, even in this early period, Brit-Lit adaptations referenced each other as much as any literary source, two films attempted to capitalize on Méliès’s success with this film: (1) Vitagraph’s eight minute Gulliver’s Travels (US, 1903), and Segundo de Chomón’s Gulliver en el País de los Gigantes (Spain, 1903). The BFI has recently done a great service to the history of cinema by restoring the film, with some of its original tinting, from the only surviving copy, which was heavily damaged. The film reorients the illustration, with the Rabbit facing the viewer, rather than turning to the side, as in Tenniel’s illustration, but otherwise the details, down to the checked pattern on the Rabbit’s waistcoat, are remarkably faithful. Notice that the film produces the exact blocking of Tenniel’s illustration and even goes so far as to duplicate the design of Alice’s chair. Robert F. Moss argues that “aesthetically speaking, the dominant figure of the infant British film world was Cecil Hepworth. … Hepworth explored the boundaries of the medium as restlessly as Smith or Paul, but with an orientation that made technique serve the cause of art rather than vice versa”; see The Films of Carol Reed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 3. Andrew Higson, “Cecil Hepworth, Alice in Wonderland and the Development of the Narrative Film,” in Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930, ed. Andrew Higson (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002), 42–64, 43. Henry Savile Clarke’s adaptation, Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Dream Play, in Two Acts, appeared at the Exeter Theatre (Western Times, January 26, 1903, p. 2), and other adaptations played at the Queen’s Theatre in Manchester (Manchester Evening News, December 19, 1903, p. 5), the Vaudeville Theatre in London (Morning Post, December 21, 1900, p. 5), in Coventry (Coventry Evening Telegraph, July 27, 1903, p. 3), et cetera. For a good account of Carroll’s interest in Victorian adaptations for the stage, see Richard Foulkes, Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2005). Worcestershire Chronicle, July 21, 1900, p. 8. At the end of the first shot, the Rabbit and Alice enter the hole starting from the right side of the frame and moving left, but in the second shot, their movement through the tunnel is from left to right. Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 224. Musser tracks Porter’s use of this device in Life of an American Fireman (1903).

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100 Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 225. 101 In the book, she is snatching at the Rabbit and his accomplice to frighten him away, and in Tenniel’s illustration of the scene, the Rabbit (missing in the film) is clearly visible below her giant hand. 102 See Gaumont’s Dolly Varden (1906) and Oliver Twist (1906). 103 A copy of the film survives in the BFI’s archive. A website dedicated to films made in Brighton describes it this way: “In the first section of this pantomime, four women dance the cancan in costume. A pirate captain pursues a young woman who refuses his advances. The young woman is saved by Crusoe and shooed away by an old woman. The group perform a folk dance in pairs. The pirate returns brandishing a sword to take Crusoe away. Crusoe, Friday and a monkey are seen inside a hut. Friday puts some food on the table in preparation to cook but the monkey knocks the table over. The old woman enters with some washing and Friday dances. The monkey throws flour in the face of Friday who then chases him around the table. Crusoe opens the door to the hut and the sailors enter. The company perform another dance. Outside, the pirate captain is pushed to the floor by the old woman.” See “Robinson Crusoe,” brighton.ac.uk, accessed June 1, 2013, http://sasesearch.brighton.ac.uk/view/?from=themes&fromid=1730&film=8378. 104 It was almost certainly based on one of many theatrical performances of the novel between the 1880s and the early teens. 105 A clearly cerebral Sherlock Holmes is baffled and overcome by a burglar who can materialize and dematerialize at will. 106 Another burlesque on Romeo and Juliet. A black maid is substituted for “Juliet” and Romeo kisses her passionately in the dark until he realizes his mistake. See a similar plot in The Misdirected Kiss (1904). 107 “Oh, how are the mighty fallen. Here is a great Shakespearean actor on his uppers, actually broke; but he retains his valet and the two of them see the ghost walk. Ah, but then there is joy. What’s that? It’s a real ghost. Ah, what sorrow. Never mind. See this picture; something new, and we assure you if you carry our line of subjects you will never meet with the fate of this artist.” (Selig Catalogue, 1903). 108 Also known as Dothebboys Hall, the film features an ignorant teacher (Squeers), who beats a pupil and is caned by his new assistant (Nicholas Nickleby). It survives in the Library of Congress’s Paper Print Collection. 109 Based on Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. 110 A number of excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were made as separate films with the early Chronophone sound system. 111 Robert A. Armour, “Effects of Censorship Pressure on the New York Nickelodeon Market, 1907–1909,” Film History 4 (1990): 113–21. 112 See, for example, A. N. Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949); Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul Matthew St Pierre, Music Hall Mimesis in British Film 1895–1960 (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2009); David Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2009). 113 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, “The Illustrated Enoch Arden and Victorian Visual Culture,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 14 (2005): 43–66. 114 Rolf Giesen and J. P. Storm, Animation Under the Swastika: A History of Trickfilm in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 222.

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Chapter 2 1 See Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915, History of the American Cinema (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990); Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp, ed., American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Richard Kozarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928, History of the American Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 2 See Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema. 3 See Charlie Keil, “From the Manger to the Cross: The New Testament Narrative and the Question of Stylistic Retardation,” in Une Invention du Diable?: Cinema des Premiers Temps et Religion, ed. Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault, and Tom Gunning (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1992). 4 “The Nation-Wide Wave of Moving Pictures,” The New York Times, January 3, 1909, part 5, p. 10. 5 Robert C. Allen, “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906-1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 174. 6 Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, “How Many Times Shall Caesar Bleed in Sport: Shakespeare and the Cultural Debate about Moving Pictures,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London: Routledge, 2004), 155. 7 Pearson and Uricchio, “How Many Times,” 156. 8 Rachael Low, The History of the British Film: Volume 2: 1906-1914 (1948; repr. Surrey: Unwin, 1993), 25. 9 Bioscope, March 9, 1911, p. 5. 10 Allen, “Motion Picture Exhibition,” 164. 11 Robert A. Armour, “Effects of Censorship Pressure on the New York Nickelodeon Market, 1907-1909,” Film History 4 (1990): 114. 12 Armour, “Effects of Censorship Pressure on the New York Nickelodeon Market, 1907-1909,” 115. 13 Pearson and Uricchio, “How Many Times,” 157. 14 Frank L. Dyer, “The Moral Development of the Silent Drama,” Edison Kinetogram, April 15, 1910, p. 11. 15 Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5. 16 See especially Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-34 (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1985). 17 Bowser, The Transformation, 23. 18 Don Fairservice, Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 71. 19 Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 88–9; See also Abel, The Ciné, 43.

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20 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 57–8. 21 Low, History of British Film, 184. 22 “Browning Now Given in Moving Pictures,” The New York Times, October 10, 1909, part 1, p. 8. 23 Low, History of British Film, 189. Low goes on to list some of the adapted authors: “The novelists of the early romantic revival—Walter Scott, Harrison Ainsworth, Lord Lytton, Charlote Brontë; the mid-Victorian novelists of social ferment—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Reade; the later Romantics—Robert Louis Stevenson, George du Maurier, Thomas Hardy, Conan Doyle—all were discovered and rediscovered, and even the neat sentimentality of Mrs Hodgson Burnett was seized, concentrated, and served anew. Literary humor, on the other hand, was represented only by W. W. Jacobs, Oliver Goldsmith, and F. Anstey, an oddly assorted trio, and Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer were the sole protagonists of eighteenth-century wit, which appealed neither to producers nor to their public at this time.” (Low, History of British Film, 189–90). 24 It would perhaps be impossible to determine the specific impact of the First World War on literary films. As Paul Fussell has shown in his chapter on the “literary war,” decline certainly cannot be linked to an ideological backlash against the classics (Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], 155–90). Though there would appear to be a marked decline in the Italian and German production of Brit-Lit films during the War, it still does not account for their overall decline. Finally, though Kristin Thompson has demonstrated the impact of the war on the international exportation and importation of films (see Thompson, Exporting Entertainment), neither governmental regulation and licensure practices nor shifting exportation practices explain the decline. Our conclusion is that while the war certainly did impact the production of the literary film, it is impossible to tell how it did so exactly, and it served mainly to facilitate a decline that began earlier; the literary-film boom sparked by the New York City affair appears to have run its course by the beginning of the war, the decline of production beginning at least one year prior to July, 1914. 25 James B. Crippen, “Realism and the Photoplay,” Motography, April 11, 1911, p. 14. 26 The Moving Picture World, February 12, 1910, p. 217. 27 The Moving Picture World, April 30, 1919, p. 834. 28 The Moving Picture World, March 16, 1912, p. 941. 29 The Moving Picture World, April 27, 1912, p. 313. 30 W. M. Fitch, “The Motion Picture Story Considered as a New Literary Form,” The Moving Picture World, February 19, 1910, p. 248. 31 Fitch, “The Motion Picture Story Considered as a New Literary Form,” p. 248. 32 The Moving Picture World, May 22, 1909, p. 669. 33 Bowser, The Transformation, 44. 34 Quoted in Bowser, The Transformation, 48. 35 The Moving Picture World, November 9, 1912, p. 643. 36 Quoted in Bowser, The Transformation, 168. 37 Quoted in Pearson and Uricchio, Reframing Culture, 74.

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38 The New York Times, November 29, 1915, part 11, p. 3. As late as 1920, The Moving Picture World can begin an article with so general a claim as the following: “That costume pictures have not been entirely successful in recent years is an accepted fact within the motion picture industry” (September 25, 1920, p. 469). 39 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2. 40 Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 74. 41 Pearson and Uricchio, Reframing Culture, 66. 42 Quoted in Bordwell and Thompson, Film History, 43. 43 Quoted in Pearson and Uricchio, Reframing Culture, 59. 44 “Lecturing the Show,” Nickelodeon, December 1909, pp. 167–8. 45 The Moving Picture World, April 6, 1912, p. 30. 46 Bowser, The Transformation, 19. 47 Bowser, The Transformation, 19. 48 Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 25–6. 49 The Moving Picture World, December 16, 1911, pp. 886–7. 50 The Moving Picture World, May 4, 1912, p. 418. 51 The Moving Picture World, August 19, 1911, p. 446. 52 W. Stephen Bush, “Do Longer Films Make Better Show,” The Moving Picture World, October 28, 1911, p. 275. 53 Quoted in The Moving Picture World (advertisement) June 1, 1912, p. 800. 54 The Moving Picture World, June 1, 1912, pp. 814, 816. 55 Pearson and Uricchio, Reframing Culture, 65. 56 The Moving Picture World, April 2, 1910, p. 508. 57 The Moving Picture World, June 18, 1910, p. 1045. 58 The Moving Picture World, January 13, 1912, p. 128. 59 The Moving Picture World, May 11, 1912, p. 505. 60 Jack Jorgens confronts the highly reductive, negative criticism of Polanski’s supposed excesses, quoting one reviewer who remarked that “Roman Polanski has made so brutal and bloody a Macbeth that it is difficult to respond to on an aesthetic level at all, much less think about its relations to Shakespeare’s play.” Jack Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1977), 161. 61 In fact, Burton was prompted by criticism of his film—both technical and tonal—to defend his choice through comparison with the novel: “I kind of went out of my way to not make it too dark” (“Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World,” The New York Times, February 26, 2010, p. AR13). 62 Tromeo and Juliet constitutes the epitome of what Linda Williams calls the “body film.” See Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 2–13. For links between this type of film and the so-called “art film,” see Joan Hawkins, “Sleaze Mania, Euro-Trash, and High Art,” Film Quarterly 53, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 264–77. 63 Dore’s illustrations are in fact a major influence on the framing and aesthetic of the entire picture. 64 Dante, The Inferno, XXX.130–5.

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65 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. 66 Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 53. 67 Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 3. 68 Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood, 3. 69 Belasco, “Why I Stayed Out and Why I Went to the Movies,” New York Times, May 31, 1914, p. X8. 70 Pearson and Uricchio, Reframing Culture, 54. 71 Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 103. 72 Keil, “From the Manger to the Cross,” 118. 73 Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 98. 74 Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and Film Sense, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian, 1957), 205. 75 Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form, ed. Leyda, 205. 76 Tom Gunning, “Literary Appropriation and Translation in Early Cinema: Adapting Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Atlantis in 1913,” in True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, ed. Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47. 77 James Dudley Andrew, “Adaptation,” Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 100. 78 Simone Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry,” Literature/Film Quarterly 36 (2008): 4–20, 6; see also Brian McFarlane, “Reading Film and Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15–28. 79 Recently MacCabe, Murray, and Warner, in True to the Spirit, have also sought to redefine the complexity of “fidelity.” 80 Elias Boudinet Stockton, “Impressions of ‘Dante’s Inferno,” The Moving Picture World, September 16, 1911, p. 780. 81 Stockton, “Impressions of ‘Dante’s Inferno,” p. 780. 82 The New York Times, April 12, 1920, p. 13:1. 83 The Moving Picture World, February 19, 1910, p. 257. 84 The Moving Picture World, July 29, 1911, p. 188. 85 The New York Times, December 20, 1915, part 11, p. 1. 86 The New York Times, February 23, 1920, part 11, p. 2. 87 The New York Times, October 23, 1916, part 10, p. 3. 88 The Moving Picture World, March 19, 1910, p. 90. 89 The Moving Picture World, July 4, 1914, p. 21. 90 The Moving Picture World, September 10, 1910, p. 576. 91 Low, History of the British Film, 131. 92 The Moving Picture World, June 19, 1909, p. 834. 93 One exception would be the William G. B. Barker 6-reel production of East Lynne (1913) directed by Bert Haldane. 94 Low, History of the British Film, 238, 239. 95 Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 27. 96 Higson, Waving the Flag, 37.

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97 One exceptional late Thanhouser film is the studio’s 1916 production of Silas Marner starring Frederick Warde in his first movie appearance (dir. Earnest Warde). Though somewhat marred by sentimentality, this beautiful film also is characterized by stunning contrasts between airy open exteriors and masterfully lit, meticulously adorned interiors; effective dialogue titles which render an unusually comprehensible story; beautiful close-ups which effectively communicate Silas’s internal struggles; fairly rapid pacing; and occasionally strong inter-scenic continuity editing. 98 The Moving Picture World, December 16, 1911, pp. 886–7. 99 The so-called “nine-foot line” refers to the approximate distance, which was lessening at about this time, between the actors and the camera. For general discussion of the development, see Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 94; for a discussion of the Vitagraph Company’s use of the line around this time, see Barry Salt, “Vitagraph Films: A Touch of Real Class,” in Screen Culture: History and Textuality, ed. John Fullerton (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 61. 100 The Moving Picture World, May 18, 1912, p. 613. 101 Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents, 46. 102 See MacCabe, Murray, and Warner, True to the Spirit, 9. 103 Dudley Andrew, “The Economies of Adaptation,” in True to the Spirit, ed. Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 27. 104 Or, as Gunning puts it, “I take for granted the value, uniqueness, and the power of cinema, but adaptation might best be approached as an area in which cinema foregoes this preoccupation with its autonomy (without actually losing its identity) and becomes sincerely interested in how it can interact with literature” (“Literary Appropriation and Translation,” 42). 105 Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 54–76. 106 The review is actually much more effusive in its praise: His performance is one of pure motion-picture pantomime on as high a level as has ever been attained by anyone. … He creates such a genuinely beautiful Jekyll and compellingly hideous Hyde, and emphasizes the contrast between the two with such a sure eye for essentials, that one must believe in both while he sees them and afterwards admire a work of art (The New York Times, March 29, 1920, part 18, p. 1). 107 The Moving Picture World, September 23, 1910, p. 688. 108 The Moving Picture World, April 2, 1910, p. 508. 109 Another way of thinking about the matter is that science fiction and film science often were aligned in the period. One notable film in this regard is the 1916 Stuart Paton 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Universal), which promoted above all its own advances in underwater photography; an opening card presents “the Williamson brothers, who alone have solved the secret of under-the-ocean photography.” Filmmakers used a complex underwater tube and mirror system to facilitate the camera’s underwater photography. Long stretches of the film seemingly break from the storyline altogether so that Nemo can show his guests the wonders of the undersea world through his “magic picture window”—surely a metaphor for the camera itself. Indeed, when Nemo remarks that “we gaze on things God never

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intended us to see,” he places the film’s awed spectators in the privileged position of his guests, showing them the miracles of the cinema itself. But unlike Méliès’s inspired audiences more than a decade earlier, these particular viewers become witness to more than the illusion of reality, for the film offers an encounter with “reality” itself. 110 Abigail Burnham Bloom, The Literary Monster on Film: Five Nineteenth Century British Novels and Their Cinematic Adaptations (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 61. 111 The Moving Picture World, April 10, 1920, p. 239. 112 Andre Bazin, Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, ed. Bert Cardullo (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 50.

Chapter 3 1 The list was compiled by James Mark Purcell and published in Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928, History of the American Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 33. 2 The Moving Picture World 46.4, September 25, 1920, p. 469. 3 Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 186. 4 Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood, Film Culture in Transition Series (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 141. 5 Donald W. McCaffrey and Christopher P. Jacobs, Guide to the Silent Years of the American Cinema (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), 10. 6 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), 3. 7 Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-34 (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1985), 168. 8 In addition to the works cited throughout this chapter, see the following: Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, no. 3 (1993): 49–67; Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, eds, Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2006); Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds, Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006); Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds, Cinema and Nation (New York: Routledge, 2000); Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, eds, Theorising National Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2006); Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds, Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 9 See Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 279. 10 Quoted in Ruth Vasey, “The Open Door: Hollywood’s Public Relations at Home and Abroad: 1922-1928,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer (London: Routledge, 2004), 324.

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11 The item was part of a list of forty-three policy points for the BBFC, which O’Connor listed in 1916 in response to an inquiry by the National Council of Public Morals. The complete list is published on the BBFC website. T. P. O’Connor, “The Early Years at the BBFC,” British Board of Film Censors, 1916, accessed May 1, 2014, http://www.bbfc.co.uk/education-resources/ student-guide/bbfc-history/1912–1949. 12 The Moving Picture World, October 2, 1920, p. 667. 13 Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 29. 14 Quoted in Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign, 296. 15 Quoted in Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign, 125. 16 The Moving Picture World, April 24, 1920, p. 547. 17 The Moving Picture World, May 15, 1920, p. 961. 18 Quoted in The Moving Picture World, May 1, 1920, p. 848. 19 See David Bordwell, “Art Film as a Mode of Film Practice,” Film Criticism 4 (1979): 56–64. 20 This is precisely the question asked by Greg Colón Semenza in an earlier essay, some material from which appears in this chapter: see “The Globalism of Silent Shakespeare Film,” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 41 (2011): 320–42. 21 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 8. 22 Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, “Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1. 23 Dennis Kennedy, Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5. 24 Paolo Cherchi, “The Scandinavian Style,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 157. 25 David Bordwell, “Nordisk and the Tableau Aesthetic,” davidbordwell.net, June 2010, accessed January 20, 2014, http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/ nordisk.php. In The Danish Cinema Before Dreyer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1988), Ron Mottram has carefully traced Danish directors’ assimilation of crosscutting, scene dissection, and other “American” techniques. Yet it seems that most Nordisk directors, perhaps because they began working before the rise of “classical” editing, didn’t wholeheartedly embrace the new style. Their approach, at least in dramas, seems to have remained rooted in the “tableau” style discussed by Bordwell. 26 Of course, if Nordisk had more fully embraced Hollywood editing, they might also have been more successful. As the review suggests, the problem seems to have been that the film was a hodgepodge of too many different styles. 27 Variety, November 1, 1923. 28 Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 89. 29 Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 16, 104. 30 Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 23. 31 Quoted in The Moving Picture World, September 11, 1920, p. 181. 32 Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 90. 33 Quoted in The Moving Picture World, September 11, 1920, p. 181.

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34 The Moving Picture World, October 9, 1920, p. 759. 35 Robert Hamilton Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History (London: George Allen, 1968), 272. 36 Other than Ball (see previous note), only a few scholars have analyzed Hamlet in its cinematic context: see especially: Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 227–40; and Lawrence Guntner, “Expressionist Shakespeare: The Gade/Nielsen Hamlet (1920) and the History of Shakespeare on Film,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 17 (1998): 90–102. 37 See Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film, 277. 38 See Bordwell and Thompson, Film History, 147. 39 See Bordwell and Thompson, Film History, 58. 40 “Ordinary Movie Presentation of Famous Old Tragedy,” Wid’s Film Daily, December 14, 1916, p. 1170. 41 The Moving Picture World, October 29, 1921, p. 1019. 42 The Moving Picture World, November 19, 1921, p. 336. 43 John D. Barlow, German Expressionist Film (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 135. 44 Barlow, German Expressionist Film, 135. 45 Barlow, German Expressionist Film, 24. 46 William Luhr, “Nosferatu and Postwar German Film,” Michigan Academician 14 (1982): 453. 47 See Thomas Elsaesser, “No End to Nosferatu (1922),” in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Noah William Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 81. 48 See Angela Dalle Vacche, “Murnau’s Nosferatu: Romantic Painting as Horror and Desire in Expressionist Cinema,” PostScript 14, no. 3 (July 1995): 27. 49 Horak, “Faust [Liner Notes]” Faust, DVD, directed by F. W. Murnau (1926; New York: Kino, 2001). 50 One lost film that might have served as a useful example of localization was an Australian East Lynne (1922), which was said not only to have modernized the novel but to have emphasized strikingly Australian locations (Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 1922, 10). 51 Quoted in Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 161. 52 Abel, French Cinema, 173. 53 See Victoria C. Gardner Coates, Kenneth Lapatin, and Jon L. Seydl, The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalpyse, Resurrection (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 82–3. 54 Rajiva Verma, “Shakespeare in Hindi Cinema,” in India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance, ed. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 270. 55 K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change (London: Trentham Books, 2004), 98. 56 Sisir Kumar Das, “Shakespeare in Indian Languages,” in India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance, ed. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 56. 57 Das, “Shakespeare in Indian Languages,” in India’s Shakespeare, ed. Trivedi and Bartholomeusz, 56.

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58 Bordwell and Thompson, Film History, 82. 59 Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (New York: Routledge, 2000), 66. 60 Quoted in Edward G. Lowry, “Trade Follows the Film,” Saturday Evening Post, November 7, 1925, p. 12. 61 David Reynolds, “Rethinking Anglo-American Relations,” International Affairs 65 (1988–89): 89–111, 95. See also Henry Butterfield Ryan, The Vision of Anglo-America: The US-UK Alliance and the Emerging Cold War, 1943–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 62 See, for example, Bordwell and Thompson, Film History, 78. 63 Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (New York: Blackwell, 2005), 3. 64 The Moving Picture World, March 20, 1920, p. 2003. 65 Quoted in The Moving Picture World, July 31, 1920, p. 715. 66 Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger have discussed the technique as a device of The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 14. 67 The Moving Picture World, November 6, 1920, p. 100. 68 He may have felt invited to do so based on Griffith’s own “Preface” to The Birth of a Nation, which invokes both the Bible and Shakespeare. 69 The Moving Picture World, November 27, 1920, p. 459. 70 The Moving Picture World, October 23, 1920, p. 1073. 71 The Moving Picture World, January 10, 1920, p. 225. 72 See Richard Fine, Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928–1940 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985), 49. 73 See Fine, Hollywood and the Profession, 49. 74 See Fine, Hollywood and the Profession, 49. 75 See Fine, Hollywood and the Profession, 51. 76 The Moving Picture World, July 31, 1920, p. 581. 77 The Moving Picture World, October 16, 1920, p. 915. 78 See advertisements in The Moving Picture World, February 28, 1920, n.p. 79 Even smaller companies such as Kineto sought to cash in. In January of 1922, the company announced its “Single Reel Great Authors Series,” beginning with American authors like Whitman and Hawthorne but soon expanding to include British ones such as Dickens, Kipling, and Shakespeare. See The Moving Picture World, January 7, 1922, p. 78. 80 See Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 106. 81 The Moving Picture World, April 1, 1922, p. 507. 82 The Moving Picture World, December 31, 1921, p. 1051. 83 Quoted in The Moving Picture World, October 1, 1921, p. 534. 84 Fine, Hollywood and the Profession, 49. 85 A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn: A Biography (New York: Riverhead Books, 1989), 92.

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86 Samuel Goldwyn, Behind the Screen (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1923), 243. 87 Quoted in Fine, Hollywood and the Profession, 53. 88 Quoted in Fine, Hollywood and the Profession, 52. 89 Anthony Glyn, Elinor Glyn (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 278. 90 Quoted in Fine, Hollywood and the Profession, 54. 91 The Moving Picture World, March 27, 1920, p. 2158. 92 The Moving Picture World, March 25, 1922, p. 367. 93 The Moving Picture World, December 10, 1921, p. 669. 94 The Moving Picture World, May 13, 1922, p. 161. 95 The Moving Picture World, May 6, 1922, p. 87. 96 The Moving Picture World, November 5, 1921, p. 95. 97 Any discussion of adaptation at its limits might remind us of Deborah Cartmell’s third category of adaptation, the “analogue,” which refers to adaptations whose intertextual relationship with an earlier text may enrich, but in no way is necessary to, an audience’s appreciation or understanding of the work. See Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds, Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (London: Routledge, 1999), 24. 98 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 26. 99 See Miriam Hansen, “Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney,” South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (1993): 27–61; and Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002). 100 Though there were more of them, the “baby” and “little” Sherlock films were part of a larger trend in cinema. See, for example, Edward F. Cline’s Little Robinson Crusoe 1924, starring Jackie Coogan. 101 For a recent, excellent discussion of what is and isn’t an adaptation, see Thomas Leitch, “Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What isn’t an Adaptation, and What Does it Matter?,” in A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell (Chicester: Wiley, 2012), 87–104. 102 She even makes the claim (in intertitles) in a “Foreword” preceding the start of the film proper. 103 The phrase is a subtitle within Chapter 3 of Bordwell and Thompson, Film History. 104 Though Sidney Paget’s late nineteenth-century illustrations of Holmes undoubtedly deserve credit for first placing the deerstalker cap on the detective’s head. 105 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 29. 106 We are speaking here in terms of stylistic rather than ideological conservatism, and especially in terms of the specific films’ methods of adapting written texts. Certainly, films such as Griffith’s Broken Blossoms and Charles Bryant’s Salomé can be argued to have treated sensitive social issues like racism and sexuality quite progressively. 107 Bruce K. Hanson, Peter Pan on Stage and Screen: 1904–2010, 2nd edn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 137. 108 Quoted in Hanson, Peter Pan on Stage and Screen, 125.

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109 Quoted in Hanson, Peter Pan on Stage and Screen, 131. The thoroughness of Brenon’s decision to film a child’s fantasy was brought home by his casting of twenty-four-year-old Esther Ralston as Mrs Darling, based on the fact that “every child thinks of his mother as a young girl.” Hanson, Peter Pan on Stage and Screen, 131. 110 Hanson, Peter Pan on Stage and Screen, 136–7. 111 Cartmell, “100 ⫹ Years of Adaptation, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy,” in A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell (Chicester: Wiley, 2012), 1–14. 112 Higson, “The Limiting Imagination,” 60, 63. 113 Deborah Cartmell, “The First Adaptation of Shakespeare and the Recovery of the ‘Renaissance’ Voice: Sam Taylor’s The Taming of the Shrew,” in The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, ed. Greg M. Colón Semenza (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 130. 114 Cartmell, “The First Adaptation of Shakespeare and the Recovery of the ‘Renaissance’ Voice,” in The English Renaissance in Popular Culture, ed. Colón Semenza, 130.

Chapter 4 1 See the article entitled “Au Moulin-Rouge: Le Public Manifeste Contre La Projection d’un Film Sonore Américan,” Le Figaro, December 9, 1929, p. 4. 2 This motivation is spelled out in remarkably clear language in a 1939 addendum to the US Production Code, in a section concerned with profanity: The following words and phrases are obviously offensive to the patrons of motion pictures in the United States and more particularly to the patrons of motion pictures in foreign countries and, therefore, should be omitted: Chink (Chinese), Dago (Italian), Frog (French), Greaser (Mexico and Central America), Hunkie (Hungarian), Kike (US and England), Nigger (US), Spic (Mexico and Central America), Wop (Italian), Yid (US and England). See the useful, interactive edition of the Production Code here: http://productioncode.dhwritings.com/multipleframes_productioncode.php. 3 Richard Maltby stresses that the MPPDA was created in 1922 less “to safeguard the political interests of the emerging oligopoly, and while censorship and the regulation of content was an important aspect of its work, the Association’s central concern was with the threat of legislation or court action to impose a strict application of the antitrust laws to the industry” (“The Production Code and the Hays Office,” in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1339, ed. Tino Balio [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996], 42). 4 Trotti would go on to become a distinguished screenwriter and Hollywood insider, working on such films as Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Oxbow Incident (1943), and The Razor’s Edge (1946). 5 Lamar Trotti, “International Unity” (speech, MPPDA, March 4, 1928), online, http://mppda.flinders.edu.au/records/2303.

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6 Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-1939 (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1984), 254–5. 7 Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 103. 8 For a sustained study of Britain as Hollywood’s most crucial foreign market, see Mark H. Glancy, “Hollywood’s Foreign Markets,” in When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood “British” Film 1939-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 7–37. 9 Spectatorship reached a peak of around 23 million viewers a week by the end of the 1930s. See Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, 11. 10 Mark H. Glancy, “Hollywood and Britain: MGM and the British ‘Quota’ Legislation,” in The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema 1929-39, ed. Jeffrey Richards (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), 57–74, 60. 11 The act stipulated that a film was “British” if it was “made by a British subject or subjects, or by a British company; photographed in a studio in the British Empire; scenario author [was] a British subject; 75 percent of monies paid for wages and salaries [went] to British subjects of those domiciled in the British empire” (Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign, 83). 12 Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, 35. 13 Rachael Low and Roger Manvell, The History of the British Film, Vol. 7 1929-39 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985). 14 Mark H. Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood “British” Film 1939-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane, Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film (London: British Film Institute, 2007). 15 Glancy, “Hollywood and Britain,” 69. 16 See Adrian Song Xiang, “Hollywood and Shanghai Cinema in the 1930s,” Comparative Literature and Culture 15 (2013): 2–8. 17 Jens Ulff-Møller, Hollywood’s Film Wars with France: Film-Trade Diplomacy and the Emergence of the French Quota Policy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 57 ff. 18 See, for example, the Film Daily reviews for May 12, 1929, 8–9. 19 See Karel Dibbets, “The Introduction of Sound,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 218. 20 Thomas Leitch, “Adaptation: The Genre,” Adaptation 1 (September 2008): 106–20, 110; Joshua I. Weinstein, “The Market in Plato’s Republic,” Classical Philology 104 (October 2009): 439–58, 440. 21 See Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (New York: Regan Books, 2003), 139. 22 See Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, G. V. Alexandrov, and Dziga Vertov, “A Statement on Sound (USSR, 1928),” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press), 566–8, 567. 23 Dibbets notes that since “1932 the world has been divided into nations that prefer dubbing and those that hate it and favour subtitling of films. These preferences have become deeply rooted in national viewing habits, and eventually were transferred to television. It is not always clear, however, on

400

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25 26 27 28

29

30

31

32 33

34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42

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what grounds these choices were made at the time. Though dubbing is more expensive and can be processed profitably only in major language regions, the economic motive was not always decisive. Japan opted for subtitles though dubbing would have been economically feasible in this densely populated country” (Dibbets, “Introduction of Sound,” 218). See Richard Koszarski, “The Greatest Film Paramount Ever Made,” Film History 15 (2003): 436–43, 439–40, for a fascinating account of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1929 experiments in multitrack recording. Wes D. Gehring, Laurel and Hardy: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1990), 44. Film Daily, April 28, 1930, p. 6. The New York Times, April 27, 1930, p. 10. Garbo apparently preferred her performance in the German version: see Harry Waldman, Hollywood and the Foreign Touch: A Dictionary of Foreign Filmmakers and their Films from America, 1910-1995 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 11–12. One of the most interesting results of this collaboration is the UFA/Gainsborough production, The Queen was in the Parlour, or, Die letzte Nacht (1927). The only surviving print, in the BFI, has Danish intertitles. Charles O’Brien, “Multiple Versions in France: Paramount-Paris and National Film Style,” Cinema & Cie: International Film Studies Journal 4 (2004): 80–8, 83. For details of UFA’s multilingual program see Hans-Michael Bock, “Keine dramatischen Maggiwürfel: Die Einführung des Tonfilms,” in Das Ufa-Buch: Kunst und Krisen, Stars und Regisseure, Wirtschaft und Politik, ed. HansMichael Bock and Michael Töteberg (Hamburg: CineGraph & Hamburgisches Centrum für Filmforschung, 2002), 256–9. John Thomas McGuire, “Rending the Veils of Illusion: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter and its Two Definitive Film Interpretations,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 53 (2012): 7–21, 8. McGuire, “Rending the Veils,” 12. MacGuire believes that despite such “overt stereotypes,” the “Asian mistress does demonstrate a considerable agency” (MacGuire, “Rending the Veils,” 14). “Filming ‘The Letter,’” The New York Times, March 3, 1929, p. 8. See David J. Skal, “‘La Sangre Es la Vida’: The Romance of the Spanish Dracula,” in Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of “Dracula” from Novel to Stage to Screen (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004), 207–30. Brigid Cherry, Horror (New York: Routledge, 2009), 4. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004), 107–8. Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 120. See “New Year’s Big Start with Frankenstein,” Today’s Cinema, January 6, 1932, quoted in Tom Johnson, Censored Screams: The British Ban on Hollywood Horror in the Thirties (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 38. Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 163. Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 163. Other British entries in the horror genre like The Bucket of Blood (1934, based on a Poe short story) and Gainsborough’s The Man Who Changed his Mind (1936) were financed on similar, shoestring budgets.

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43 Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 64. 44 History of Cinema: Hollywood and the Production Code Microfilm Collection (Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Microfilm), Series 1, Reel 3, Joy to B. P. Schulberg, Paramount, December 1, 1931. 45 History of Cinema: Hollywood and the Production Code Microfilm Collection, Series 1, Reel 3, Lamar Trotti, December 1, 1931. 46 History of Cinema: Hollywood and the Production Code Microfilm Collection, Series 1, Reel 3, Joy to Will Hays, December 5, 1931. 47 History of Cinema: Hollywood and the Production Code Microfilm Collection, Series 1, Reel 3, Joy to Will Hays, January 11, 1932. 48 Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” 50. 49 History of Cinema: Hollywood and the Production Code, Microfilm Collection, Series 1, Reel 3. 50 See Tom Johnson, Censored Screams: The British Ban on Hollywood Horror in the Thirties (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997). 51 According to Martin Wills, “Vivisection had been in the public eye ever since the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, when the government set down policies for the practice of vivisection in Britain” (Mesmerists, Monsters, & Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century [Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006], 216). Anti-vivisectionism became a pressing concern in the 1880s and remained a hot-button issue for much of the twentieth century. 52 Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” 50. 53 Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” 60. 54 Will H. Hays, Plans and Programs of Motion Picture Production for 1934-1935: Submitted to the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., October 10, 1934 (New York: MPPD, 1934). 55 “Hays Sees an Era of Literary Films,” The New York Times, March 27, 1934, p. 24. 56 Hays, “Plans and Programs,” 7; see also Film Daily, March 27, 1934, p. 8. 57 Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” 62. 58 Balio, Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 180. 59 Balio, Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 180. 60 Balio, Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 180. 61 Balio, Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 180. 62 Balio, Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 180. 63 Balio, Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 62–3. 64 Rudy Behlmer and S. N. Behrman, eds Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Samuel French, 1989), 415. 65 “Hollywood is Proud of Alcott Film: Greatest Delicacy and Amount of Research is Claimed for Little Women,” Hartford Courant, July 13, 1933, p. 6. 66 “Hollywood’s Ways Puzzle G. B. Stern,” The New York Times, April 26, 1933, p. 13; “Better Do it Right,” Daily Boston Globe, April 27, 1933, p. 16. 67 Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine (New York: Random House, 2008), 55. 68 Film Daily, January 3, 1934, p. 8.

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69 “Mr. Selznick’s Fruitful Trip,” The New York Times, June 17, 1934, p. X3. 70 “Hugh Walpole Offers Ideas on Hollywood: British Author Hopes to Bring Spirit of Dickens to Films,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1934, p. A1. 71 See also “Word from Mr. Walpole: British Author to Guide Producers in Film of Dickens’s ‘David Copperfield,’” The New York Times, July 1, 1934, p. X2. 72 “London Boy to Play David Copperfield,” Hartford Courant, September 19, 1934, p. 11. 73 Mary Allen Rand Abbott, A Study Guide to the Critical Appreciation of the Photoplay Version of Charles Dickens’ Novel “David Copperfield” (Chicago: National Council of Teachers of English, 1935). 74 Abbott, A Study Guide to the Critical Appreciation, 5. 75 Abbott, A Study Guide to the Critical Appreciation, 4. 76 Abbott, A Study Guide to the Critical Appreciation, 8. 77 See Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of the Christ” (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 5. 78 In Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood, Emily W. Leider explains that Loy made the film while freelancing for Fox, Paramount, and Goldwyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, 81). 79 In the novel, this sentence, which appears at the end of the third paragraph, reads, “I remained an inmate of its walls, after its regeneration, for eight years: six as pupil, and two as teacher” (Jane Eyre, Everyman Library 287 [London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1908], 78). 80 Lee Kovacs suggests that Wuthering Heights belongs to a small but distinct film subgenre that he calls “romantic ghost films,” which thrived in the 1930s and 1940s (The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature and Film [Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2005], 1). See also Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Women’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987). 81 See Lin Haire-Sargeant, “Sympathy for the Devil: The Problem of Heathcliff in Film Versions of Wuthering Heights,” in Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film, ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1989), 161–91. 82 “These were often thrillers, whodunits and society melodramas adapted from novels and stage plays. Twickenham persisted in the fallacy that the Englishman’s home is a castle, and that only the murder of the wealthy is worthy of investigation” (Chibnall, Quota Quickies, 25). 83 Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign, 143–4. 84 Sarah Street, “Stepping Westward: The Distribution of British Feature Films in America: The Case of The Private Life of Henry VIII,” in British Cinema Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000), 316–26, 318. 85 Jeffrey Richards, ed., The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929-1939 (London: Tauris, 1998) is devoted to exploring the careers of a number of filmmakers and actors fleeing Europe for Britain in the 1930s.

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86 Chibnall, Quota Quickies, 10. 87 Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: BFI, 1994), 13. 88 Russell Jackson, “Remembering Bergner’s Rosalind,” in Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 237–55, 239. 89 Laurence Olivier, for instance, starred as Orlando in his first Shakespearean film role. 90 Jeffrey Richards, “Things to Come and Science Fiction in the 1930s,” in British Science Fiction Cinema, ed. I. Q. Hunter (London: Routledge, 1999), 16–32, 16. 91 Christopher Frayling, Things to Come (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 20. 92 Frayling, Things to Come, 21. 93 McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, 139. 94 McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, 15. 95 Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Moffat, Dumfriesshire: Cameron & Hollis, 1999), 162. 96 Barr, English Hitchcock, 162–3. 97 Barton R. Palmer, “Secret Agent: Coming in from the Cold, Maugham Style,” in Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor, ed. R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011), 89–102, 94. 98 See Ian Jarvie, “Trade Policy, Politics and the 1938 Act, 1928-1938,” in Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 135–78 for a detailed account of the evolution of the 1938 Act as it wended its way through Parliament. 99 See Sarah Street, British National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2009), 11–13. 100 Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 84. 101 Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 5. 102 Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 86. 103 James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull, Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 35–6. 104 In his analysis of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and its relationship to RKO’s Gunga Din, Kaizaad Navroze Kotwal writes that such films “are political not because that is what they set out to be, according to the intentions of their respective filmmakers, rather they are ‘accidentally political’ by virtue of their filmmaker’s willful misrepresentations” (“Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as Virtual Reality: The Orientalist and Colonial Legacies of Gunga Din,” Film Journal 12 [2005]: online, http://www. thefilmjournal.com/issue12/templeofdoom.html). 105 Though a film about Lawrence was made in Canada in 1935, David Lean directed Lawrence of Arabia, one of the most highly regarded of all British films, in 1962. 106 Richards, Age of the Dream Palace, 123. 107 Richards, Age of the Dream Palace, 137. Richards devotes an entire chapter, “Censorship in Operation: Imperial Policy,” to this issue in Age of the Dream Palace, 134–52. 108 Richards, Age of the Dream Palace, 136.

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Chapter 5 1 “British” in inverted commas is H. Mark Glancy’s useful term for American films set in Britain: See Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood “British” Film 1939-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). We use the term throughout this chapter. 2 Though these films have much in common with the “heritage films” of the Thatcher era and beyond, we wish to avoid confusion with those later films discussed in greatest depth by Claire Monk and Andrew Higson. 3 “England at War. Life goes on in the Dark,” Life, January 1, 1940, p. 40. 4 Dana B. Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press), 51. 5 Polan, Power and Paranoia, 51. 6 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 35. 7 Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 35. 8 Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 54. 9 Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 68–9. 10 Quoted in Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 81. 11 Quoted in Harper, Picturing the Past, 78. 12 Quoted in Harper, Picturing the Past, 78. 13 From William Wordsworth, “It Is Not to be Thought Of” (1802), lines 11–12, in The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Andrew J. George (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 288. 14 George Wilson Knight, The Olive and the Sword: A Study of England’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 1. 15 Knight, The Olive and the Sword, 2. 16 Douglas Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time: Some Comments (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1957), 2. 17 Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 343. 18 Jeffrey Sconce, “Narrative Authority and Social Narrativity: The Cinematic Reconstitution of Bronte’s Jane Eyre,” in The Studio System, ed. Janet Staiger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 149. 19 Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 160. 20 Quoted in Harper, Picturing the Past, 161. 21 Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 14. 22 Swann, “The British Culture Industries and the Mythology of the American Market: Cultural Policy and Cultural Exports in the 1940s and 1990s,” Cinema Journal 39 (2000): 27–42, 30.

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23 Quoted in Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 63. 24 In “Heritage Discourses and British Cinema Before 1920,” Higson goes back yet farther, to the actualities of 1895 such as Rough Sea at Dover. The essay is in Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema, ed. John Fullerton (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 183. 25 Quoted in Higson, Waving the Flag, 37. 26 Harper, Picturing the Past, 62. 27 “Interview with Actress Sheila Sim,” on A Canterbury Tale, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1943; New York: Criterion, 2006), DVD. 28 Fuller, “A Canterbury Tale” [liner notes], A Canterbury Tale, DVD. 29 Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 185. 30 In Glancy’s words, “Hollywood was always preoccupied with the upper classes, and so most ‘British’ war films seemed concerned primarily to show that the aristocracy was sacrificing and suffering just as much as their social inferiors.” Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 131. 31 C. A. Lejeune, “A Word in Friendship,” in British Film Yearbook 1947-48, ed. Peter Noble (London: British Yearbooks, 1948), 30. 32 Harper, Picturing the Past, 149. 33 Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (Praeger, 1970; rep. London: British Film Institute, 2011), 23. See also Philip Gillett, The British Working Class in Postwar Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 34 Durgnat, A Mirror for England, 23. 35 Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (London: Penguin, 1991), 247. 36 The Daily Mirror, January 8, 1948, 9. 37 Variety, December 31, 1948, 8. 38 Bosley Crowther, “The Rocking Horse Winner,” The New York Times, June 9, 1950, http://www.nytimes.com/movies/movie/41835/The-Rocking-HorseWinner/overview. 39 Durgnat, A Mirror for England, 24. 40 We find the scholarly debate about the play’s theatricalism somewhat silly. While certain aspects of the film are staged in a deliberately theatrical manner, the style of the film cannot reasonably be described as “theatrical.” Kenneth Rothwell covers the debate thoroughly in A History of Shakespeare on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 55. 41 Though Freud himself introduced some ideas about Hamlet’s Oedipal complex, it was his biographer Ernest Jones who made famous the Oedipal reading of Hamlet, first in a 1910 article “The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive” in The American Journal of Psychology 21, no. 1 (January 1910), then in several expanded writings in the 1920s and finally at greatest length in the book Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: Norton, 1949). 42 Laurence Olivier, “An Essay in Hamlet,” in The Film“Hamlet”: A Record of its Production, ed. Brenda Cross (New York: Saturn Press, 1948), 12.

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43 Roger Sales, “An Introduction to Broadcasting History,” in Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies, ed. David Punter (London: Longman’s, 1986), 48. 44 Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 33. 45 Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, 36. 46 Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, 75. 47 Our italics; quoted in Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, 76. 48 Our italics; quoted in Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, 7. 49 See Thomas Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” Criticism 45, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 153–4. 50 See note 38. 51 Kenneth O. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 57. 52 Quoted in Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, 132. 53 Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, 39. 54 Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, 100. 55 Jacobs, The Intimate Screen, 113. 56 See Julian Petley, “The Manxman,” Monthly Film Bulletin 56 (March 1989): 91. 57 Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 2009), 274. 58 Rudolph Cartier, “A Foot in Both Camps,” Films and Filming 4 (September 1958): 10. 59 Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 186. 60 Quoted in Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America (New York: Routledge, 1992), 90. 61 Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, vol. 6, The History of the American Cinema, ed. Charles Harpole (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 351–2. 62 Schatz, Boom and Bust, 65. 63 Schatz, Boom and Bust, 333. 64 Schatz, Boom and Bust, 333. 65 See Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960-69, vol. 8, The History of the American Cinema, ed. Charles Harpole (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 11–15. 66 Marc Svetov, “Noir and the Gothic,” Noir City Sentinel, October/November 2008, p. 8. 67 Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-59, vol. 8, The History of the American Cinema, ed. Charles Harpole (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 63. 68 Joyce A. Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 66. 69 Nora Sayre, Running Time: The Films of the Cold War (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1982), 192. 70 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, rep. (Red Wing, MN: Cricket House Books, 2012), 184. 71 Julian Cornell, “All’s Well that Ends Wells: Apocalypse and Empire in The War of the Worlds,” in A Companion to Literature and Film, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 439.

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72 “Through the Keyhole: A Companion’s Guide to Alice in Wonderland [special viewing mode],” on Alice in Wonderland, directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske (1951; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Home Entertainment, 2011), Blu-Ray. 73 Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Hyperion Press, 1976), 220–1. 74 Bosley Crowther, “Peter Pan,” The New York Times, February 12, 1953, http:// www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=940CE3DF1F3AE23BBC4A52DFB466 8388649EDE. 75 Frank S. Nugent, “Gulliver’s Travels,” The New York Times, December 21, 1939, http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D04E5D9153EE432A257 52C2A9649D946894D6CF. 76 See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 57–8; and Manthia Diawara, Black American Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993). 77 Douglas Lanier, “Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap: Shakespeare, African American Music, and Cultural Legitimation,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1 (2005): http://www.borrowers.uga. edu/782016/show. 78 Lanier, “Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap,” Borrowers and Lenders, http://www. borrowers.uga.edu/782016/show. 79 Without doubt, the most bizarre western appropriation of Brit-Lit was the 1943 Charles Vidor film, Desperadoes. Though a major “event” for Columbia, being the studio’s first Technicolor film, it’s a minor western. However, it’s also an extreme rarity after the silent era, a film which is also a (very) loose, and perhaps indirect, adaptation of a lyric poem: Ben Jonson’s beautiful song, “To Celia” (1616). 80 David Stuart Davies, Holmes of the Movies: The Screen Career of Sherlock Holmes (London: Brahmhall House, 1976), 69. 81 Lev, The Fifties, 217. 82 J. Hoberman, “No Man is an Island,” The Free Library, February 1, 2012, accessed March 18, 2014, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/No+man+is+ an+Island.-a0280312920. 83 For an extensive discussion of the film, see Louis K. Greiff, DH Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 162–85. 84 Kingsley International Pictures Corp. v. Regents of the University of the State of New York, 360 U.S. 684 (1959). 85 See Greiff, D. H. Lawrence, 171. 86 Arthur Knight, “Lady Chatterley’s Lawyer,” The Saturday Review, July 5, 1959, p. 25. 87 Marcel Carné, Children of Paradise [commentary], directed by Marcel Carné, New York: Criterion, 2002, DVD. 88 Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 7. 89 Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: la caméra stylo,” in The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), 18.

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90 Edward Buscombe, “Ideas of Authorship,” Screen 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1973): 76. 91 John Caughie, Theories of Authorship, ed. John Caughie (London: Routledge, 1981), 10. 92 John Hess, “La Politique des Auteurs,” Jump Cut 1 (1974): 19. 93 Caughie, Theories of Authorship, 13. 94 Lindsay Anderson, “The Director’s Cinema?” Sequence 12 (1950): 37. It is no mistake that numerous critics from around the globe anticipated the development of the auteur theory, in some cases years before the publication of Truffaut’s essay. French critic Claude-Edmonde Magny’s 1948 publication, L’Age du Roman Américain, for example, not only offered invaluable first thoughts about the reciprocal development of the American novel and the cinema, but also speculated that “it seems as if we are getting closer and closer to the time when the movie, like the novel, will unambiguously and unreservedly be attributable to one author.” Claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetics of Fiction Between the Two Wars, trans. Eleanor Hochman (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972), 32–3. 95 Gillian Parker, “Crusoe through the Looking Glass,” in The English Novel and the Movies, ed. Michael Klein and Gillian Parker (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 16. 96 Gillian Parker, “Crusoe through the Looking Glass,” in The English Novel and the Movies, ed. Michael Klein and Gillian Parker (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 26. 97 Joyce Carol Oates, “The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 2 (December 1982): 437. 98 Quoted in Clinton Heylin, Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006), 237. 99 Quoted in Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen, 71. 100 The Evening Standard’s review, for example, was entitled “Mr. Welles Murders Shakespeare in the Dark,” February 23, 1956. 101 Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. 102 Donald Richie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVDs (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001), 176. 103 Jack J. Jorgens, “Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood: Washizu and Miki Meet the Forest Spirit,” Literature Film Quarterly 11 (1983): 167. 104 Jorgens, “Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood,” 168. 105 Bosley Crowther, “Throne of Blood,” The New York Times, November 23, 1961, http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F07EFD81E3DE733A2 5750C2A9679D946091D6CF.

Chapter 6 1 Asterisks indicate films that were nominated and won the Best Picture category. 2 James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 45–82.

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3 Paul Newland, “Introduction,” in Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Paul Newland (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), 11. 4 See Bill Osgerby, “Youth Culture,” in A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939-2000, edited by Paul Addison and Harriet Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 127–46. 5 Amy Sargeant, British Cinema: A Critical History (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 240. 6 Sargeant, British Cinema, 235. 7 See B. F. Taylor, The British New Wave (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 1–36. 8 Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government 1927-84 (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 240 and ff. 9 The following account relies on Paul Newland, “Introduction: Don’t Look Now,” in Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Paul Newland (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), 9–19. 10 Dickinson and Street, Cinema and State, 240. 11 Dickinson and Street, Cinema and State, 227 and ff. 12 Linda Wood, British Films 1971–1981 (London: British Film Institute, 1983), 143. 13 See Stuart Laing, “The Politics of Culture: Institutional Change in the 1970s,” in The Arts in the 1970s: Culture Closure? (London: Routledge), 29–56, 28–30. 14 Robert Shail, “Introduction: Cinema in the Era of ‘Trouble and Strife,’” in Seventies British Cinema, ed. Robert Shail (London: British Film Institute, 2008), xi–xix, xviii. 15 Sargeant, British Cinema, 277 ff. 16 This is Sargeant’s phrase. British Cinema, 266. 17 Andrew Higson, “A Diversity of Film Practices: Renewing British Cinema in the 1970s,” in The Arts in 1970s: Cultural Closure?, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert (London: Routledge, 1994), 217. 18 Monaco, The Sixties, 24. 19 Patrick Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 15 and ff. 20 Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 15. 21 See Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 7–19. 22 Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 408–39. 23 David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970-79, History of the American Cinema, 9 (New York: Scribner and Sons, 2000), 40 and ff. 24 For a discussion of the prestige film and its relation to Brit-Lit adaptation, see Chapter 4, pp. 174–97. 25 Not all of the films that we gather under this heading were made with the Panavision process, but they all use widescreen formats. 26 See, for example a description of Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1971): “it’s a sweeping, lush, almost voluptuous evocation of an entire era.” New York Magazine, July 19, 1982, p. 74.

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27 See Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959, 112–25. 28 Shareen Blair Brysac and Karl E. Meyer, Kingmakers: Invention of the Modern Middle East (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 220 ff. 29 See Gene D. Phillip’s discussion of Lean’s status as auteur in Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 445 and ff. 30 Stephen Charles Caton, Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 114. 31 Ian Buruma, Conversations with John Schlesinger: The Director of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ on his Life, Loves, and his Films (New York: Random House, 2006), 96. 32 Schlesinger believes that “we were too much in awe of Hardy, and we should have taken more liberties with the screenplay.” (Buruma, Conversations with John Schlesinger, p. 96.) 33 Joseph Conrad, “The Duel,” in A Set of Six (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1920), 233. 34 William B. Parrill notes that Scott based key scenes directly on nineteenth-century paintings. Ridley Scott: A Critical Filmography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 35. 35 Pamela Demory, “Jane Austen and the Chick Flick in the Twenty-First Century,” in Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, ed. Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Ray Cutchins (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2010), 121–49, 132. 36 Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performances of Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 284. 37 Michael Newton, “‘Til I’m Grown’: Reading Children’s Films; Reading Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book,” Turning the Page: Children’s Literature in Performance and the Media (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 17–39, 31–2. 38 Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain, 5. 39 See Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 300. 40 See Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959, 112–25. 41 Cook, Lost Illusions, 133–4. 42 See Jimmy Sangster, Inside Hammer: Behind the Scenes at the House of Horror (Richmond: Reynolds and Hearn, 2001), 27. 43 Sinclair McKay, Thing of Unspeakable Horror: The History of Hammer Films (London: Aurum Press), 19. 44 McKay, Thing of Unspeakable Horror, 16. 45 Michael Hearn and Alan Barnes, The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films (London: Titan Books, 1997), 50. 46 Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1993), 23, n. 28. 47 Cook, Lost Illusions, 126. 48 Ian Cooper, “Manson, Drugs and Black Power: The Countercultural Vampire,” in Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television, ed. Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer, and Milly Williamson (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 23. 49 Harry Benshoff, “Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription?” in The Cult Film Reader, ed. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (Maidenhead: McGraw Hill for Open University Press, 2008), 219–20. 50 The film is based also in part on Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (uncredited).

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51 For an analysis of The Quiet American as an adaptation, see pp. 298–300. 52 James Chapman, License to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 55. 53 Casino Royale was the one book that Fleming did not option to Broccoli and Saltzman. See Chapman, License to Thrill, 5. 54 Chapman, License to Thrill, 56. 55 James Chapman, “Bond and Britishness,” in Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, ed. Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Witt, and Skip Willman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 136. 56 Monaco, The Sixties, 194. 57 David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Practice,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 7th edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 649. 58 Bordwell writes that “art cinema foregrounds the author as a structure in the film’s system. Not that the author is represented as a biographical individual … but rather the author becomes a formal component, the overriding intelligence organizing the film for our comprehension” (“The Art of Cinema as a Mode of Practice,” p. 652). 59 John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963 (London: BFI, 1986)—see in particular Chapter 1, “British Society 1956-63,” 5–34. 60 See Robert Stam, “Adaptation and the French New Wave: A Study in Ambivalence,” Interfaces 34 (2012–13): 177–97. 61 B. F. Taylor, The British New Wave (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 1. 62 Sargeant, British Cinema, 217. 63 Robert Shail, Tony Richardson, British Film Makers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 26–8. 64 The film actually won the awards for Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. 65 See Sargeant, British Cinema, 218. 66 Sargeant, British Cinema, 212–14; Higson, “Space, Place, Spectacle,” 137. 67 This criticism was also leveled at Italian Neorealist films: see Alessia Ricciardi, “The Italian Redemption of Cinema: Neorealism from Bazin to Godard,” Romanic Review 97 (2006): 485. 68 Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, 131. 69 Andrew Higson, “Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the ‘Kitchen Sink’ Film,” in Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson (London: Cassell, 1996), 148–9. 70 R. Cirillo, “The Art of Franco Zeffirelli and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” Triquarterly 16 (1969): 78. 71 Kenneth L. Giest, Pictures will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (New York: Charles Scibner’s Sons, 1978), 163. 72 Brian Dauth, ed., Joseph L. Mankiewicz Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 139. 73 Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968), 161. 74 Andrew Sarris, “Mankiewicz of the Movies,” in Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews, 37. 75 David Parkinson, ed., The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film Stories (New York: Applause, 1994), 569–70.

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76 From a 1973 interview with Michel Ciment in Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews, 141. 77 Kenneth L. Geist, The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1968), 268. 78 Cheryl Bray Lower and R. Barton Palmer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays with an Annotated Bibliography and a Filmography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 160, 162. 79 Geist, The Life and Films of Joseph L Mankiewicz, 275. Geist writes, “We now know that this leader ‘discovered’ at Princeton by John Foster Dulles and installed as a puppet president was none other than Ngo Dinh Diem, who just happened to be in office while The Quiet American was being shot in South Vietnam” (275). 80 Geist, The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 277. 81 Christopher Sandford, Polanski: A Biography (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 177. 82 Paul Cronin, ed., Roman Polanski: Interviews (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 81, 82. 83 Patrick Rumble, “Stylistic Contamination in the Triologia della vita: The Case of the Il fiore delle mille e una notte,” in Pier Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Patrick Allen Rumble and Bart Testa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 211. 84 Carol Falvo Heffernan, Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009), 55. 85 Before the “Miller’s Tale” begins, Chaucer characteristically disavows any responsibility for the tale—which belongs to the churlish Miller, not him: “M’ athynketh that I shal reherce it heere./ And therfore every gentil wight I preye,/ For Goddes love, demeth nat that I seye/ Of yvel entente, but for I moot reherce/ Hir tales alle, be they bettre or werse,/ Or elles falsen som of my mateere” (Fragment I, ll. 3170–75). Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 86 Armando Maggi, The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 49. 87 Some critics saw these quotations as indulgent distractions: In Allegories of Contamination: Pier Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), Patrick Allen Rumble summarizes such critiques: “The citational nature of the film, often divorced from narrative motivation, is perceived as destabilizing moments of pure excess,” 54. 88 In her study Pasolini, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Two Medieval Texts and their Translation to Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), Agnés Blandeau suggests that Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales critics the bourgeois reduction of the human body into a commodified product, “meant for joyless mechanical consumption,” 30. 89 See Russell Jackson, “From Play-Script to Screenplay,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18. 90 Gregory Semenza, “Radical Reflexivity in Cinematic Adaptation: Second Thoughts on Reality, Originality, and Authority,” Literature/Film Quarterly 41, no. 2 (2013): 146.

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91 Mark Thornton Burnett, “Akira Kurosawa,” in Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli: Great Shakespeareans, Vol. 17, ed. Courtney Lehmann, Marguerite Rippy, Mark Thornton Burnett, and Ramona Wray (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 89. 92 Tetsuo Kishi, Shakespeare in Japan (London: Continuum, 2005), 136. 93 Kishi, Shakespeare in Japan, 136. 94 Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 259 and ff. 95 Krin Gabbard and Shailja Sharma, “Stanley Kubrick and the Art Cinema,” in Stanley Kubrick’s The Clockwork Orange, ed. Stuart Y. McDougal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 85. 96 Jamie Sherry, “Paratextual Adaptation: Heart of Darkness as Hearts of Darkness via Apocalypse Now,” in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Kamilla Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 377. 97 Gene D. Phillips, Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 147. 98 Some critics like Cook believe that the last third of the film is deeply flawed: the “first two-thirds may be one of the greatest war/antiwar films ever made, but whose conclusion bogs down in a morass of pomposity and metaphysics,” Lost Ilusions, 137. 99 Cook, Lost Illusions, 137.

Chapter 7 1 Michael Joseph Gross, “It’s God vs. Satan. But what about the Nudity?,” New York Times, March 4, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/ movies/04gross.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 2 “In Eden there’s the nudity problem,” Newman points out, “which would be a big problem for a big studio movie.” Gross, “It’s God vs. Satan”, March 4, 2007. 3 Borys Kit, “Legendary Pulls Plug on Bradley Cooper’s Paradise Lost,” Hollywood Reporter, February 9, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ heat-vision/legendary-pictures-paradise-lost-bradley-cooper-288520. 4 Quoted in Eric C. Brown’s Milton on Film (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015), n.p. 5 Eric C. Brown, “How Fallen and How Changed: John Collier’s Screenplay Adaptation of Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 51 (December 2010): 205. 6 For a good example of the controversy, see “Is ‘Golden Compass’ AntiCatholic?” CBS News, November 28, 2007, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ is-golden-compass-anti-catholic/. 7 Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989, The History of the American Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), xii. 8 Jennifer Holt, “In Deregulation We Trust: The Synergy of Politics and Industry in Reagan-Era Hollywood,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 22. 9 For a useful list of these mergers, see Holt, “In Deregulation We Trust,” 27. 10 Prince, A New Pot of Gold, 141.

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11 Holt, “In Deregulation We Trust,” 28. 12 “UK Film, Television and Video: Statistical Overview,” in Film and Television Yearbook 1993, ed. David Leafe (London: BFI, 1992), 41. 13 John Woodward, “Cinema 1989-90: Production Focus,” in Film and Television Yearbook 1991, ed. David Leafe (London: BFI, 1990), 25. 14 John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 46. 15 See Hill, British Cinema, 39–46. 16 See Hill, British Cinema, 43–44. 17 See Hill, British Cinema, 37. 18 See Hill, British Cinema, 48. 19 See Hill, British Cinema, 54. 20 See Hill, British Cinema, 56. 21 See Hill, British Cinema, 29. 22 John Britton, “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment,” in Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 101. 23 Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond, 2nd edn (1986; New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 147. See also Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). 24 See William Palmer, Films of the Eighties: A Social History (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Palmer quotes Monaco on 8. 25 Prince, A New Pot of Gold, xv. 26 Kenneth MacKinnon, The Politics of Popular Representation: Reagan, Thatcher, AIDS, and the Movies (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992), 28. 27 Matthew Dalleck, “Not Ready for Mt. Rushmore: Reconciling the Myth of Ronald Reagan with the Reality,” American Scholar (Summer 2009), http://www.theamericanscholar.org/not-ready-for-mt-rushmore/. 28 Kenneth O. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 87. 29 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 22–3. 30 As Corrigan has described this issue, since the beginning of the conglomerate take-overs of the major studios in the sixties and the sweeping arrival of video and cable technologies in the seventies, the center of movie viewing has shifted away from the screen and become dispersed in the hands of audiences with more (real and remote) control than possibly ever before. The shifting and often uncertain identities of those audiences (in age, gender, economics, and race, for instance) have, at the same time, become much more difficult for a single movie to address” (Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls, 1–2). 31 Justin Wyatt’s book remains the best treatment of the concept, which he attempts to redefine as a style in High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), 7. 32 Quoted in Wyatt, High Concept, 9–10. 33 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), 2.

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34 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), 2. 35 Richard Burt, “Afterword: T(e)en Things I Hate about Girlene Shakesploitation Flicks in the Late 1990s, or, Not-So-Fast Times at Shakespeare High,” in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, ed. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 214. 36 For more on the film’s relationship to Columbine and other school shootings, see Gregory Semenza, “Shakespeare after Columbine: Teen Violence in Tim Blake Nelson’s ‘O’,” College Literature 32 (2005). 37 Gregory Semenza, “Shakespeare after Columbine: Teen Violence in Tim Blake Nelson’s ‘O’,” College Literature 32 (2005): 100. 38 Michael D. Friedman, “The Feminist as Shrew in 10 Things I Hate about You,” Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 45–65. 39 Roger Corman made a film about this very fact in Frankenstein Unbound (see above, p. 370). 40 He said making money was “a slam dunk. It’s just like withdrawing a billion dollars and putting it into your personal bank accounts. There’s no challenge.” Guylaine Cadorette, “For Spielberg, making a Harry Potter Movie Would Have Been No Challenge,” Hollywood, September 5, 2001, http://www.hollywood. com/news/brief/1091358/quote-of-the-day-spielberg-on-not-making-harrypotter. 41 Mike Gray, Transfiguring Transcendence in “Harry Potter”, “His Dark Materials” and “Left Behind”: Fantasy Rhetorics and Contemporary Visions of Religious Identity (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 34. 42 In addition to Rowling’s contractual demands, screenwriter Steve Kloves insisted that “the picture has to be British”; see Michael Sragow, “A Wizard of Hollywood,” Salon, February 24, 2000, http://www.salon.com/2000/02/24/ kloves/. 43 See note 6. 44 Hanna Rosin, “How Hollywood Saved God,” The Atlantic, December 1, 2007, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/12/how-hollywood-savedgod/306444/. 45 Jackson’s decision to film The Hobbit at a rate of forty-eight frames per second is both groundbreaking and controversial. 46 Wyatt, High Concept, 96. 47 Robert Sklar, “Behind the Triumph of Independent Films,” Chronicle, March 14, 1997, http://www.chronicle.com/article/Behind-the-Triumph-of/77954/. 48 As both such titles and such characteristics might suggest, the independent or “low-concept” adaptation can often be hard to distinguish from European art-house cinema and/or the BBC-style television drama, both of which are known for eschewing classic Hollywood narration in favor of greater realism, functional ambiguity, and psychologized characterization. See David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” Film Criticism 4 (1979). 49 Hill, British Cinema, 61. 50 Claire Monk, Heritage Film Audiences: Period Films and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 3–5. 51 Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen Press, 1987), 102.

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52 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Sage, 2006), 204 ff. 53 See Andrew Higson, “Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started, ed. Lester Friedman (London: University College London, 1993); Tana Wollen, “Over our Shoulders: Nostalgic Screen Fictions for the 1980s,” in Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture, ed. John Corner and Silvia Hardy (London: Routledge, 1991), 178–93; Cairns Craig, “Rooms Without a View,” Sight and Sound 1, no. 6 (June 1991). 54 Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past,” 110. 55 Cairns Craig, “The British Heritage Cinema Debate: Rooms without a View,” in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 4. 56 Claire Monk, “The British ‘Heritage Film’ and its Critics,” Critical Survey 7, no. 2 (1995): 119. 57 Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 156 ff. 58 Monk, Heritage Film Audiences, 168–9. 59 Laurence Raw, ed., Merchant-Ivory Interviews (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), xxlii. 60 Satajit Ray, ed., The Householder as a favor to Ivory. Raw, Merchant-Ivory Interviews, 13 ff. 61 This piece of Austen’s juvenilia was first published in 1980, edited by B. C. Southam and published by the Clarendon Press. 62 This is a speculative reading—the two adaptations are sandwiched together and alternate back and forth with no explanation. 63 Andrew Higson, “Instability of the National,” in British Cinema: Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000), 37. 64 Peter Greenaway, Prospero’s Books (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991), 9. 65 Kenenth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 199. The term “multi-hybrid” comes from Greenaway himself. See Peter Greenaway, “Movie Memories,” Sight and Sound 6, no. 5 (1996): 15, 16. 66 Vincent Canby, “The Tempest,” The New York Times, September 22, 1980, http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A07EFD81238F931A1575AC0 A966948260. 67 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 4. 68 According to Prince, the average Hollywood film in 1989 cost about 32 million dollars, more than double what it cost in 1980 (Prince, A New Pot of Gold, 20). By the time of publication, the number will be close to 150 million dollars. Bordwell and Thompson point out that “the rise in the number and complexity of FX shots drove up film budgets. CGI could consume half the cost of a movie.” Bordwell and Thomas, Film History, 719. 69 Prince, A New Pot of Gold, 292. 70 In referring to narrative and nonnarrative non-diegetic music, we are of course using Jerrold Levinson’s terms from “Film Music and Narrative Agency,” in Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 254–88.

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71 Prince, A New Pot of Gold, 141. 72 Prince, A New Pot of Gold, 97. 73 Andrew Leonard, “How Netflix is Turning Viewers into Puppets,” Salon, February 1, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/how_netflix_is_turning_viewers_into_puppets/. 74 See Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). 75 As Barbara Klinger says, “A film’s original release period is potentially dwarfed by its extensive ‘afterlife.’” Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 8. 76 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, 1968). 77 Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, “Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1. 78 See the MPAA’s 2013, “Theatrical Market Statistics” report, MPAA, accessed July 1, 2014, http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MPAATheatrical-Market-Statistics-2013_032514-v2.pdf. 79 See Sonia Koleskinov-Jessop, “Hollywood Presses its Global Agenda,” The New York Times, May 22, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/ business/media/23film-screensingapore.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 80 MPAA, “Theatrical Market Statistics.” 81 Ben Child, “China Will Be the World’s Biggest Film Market by 2020,” Guardian, November 29, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/ nov/29/china-biggest-film-market-2020. 82 MPAA, “Theatrical Market Statistics.” 83 For a useful example, see William Wan, “Ironman 3 is Latest Hollywood Movie to Court Chinese Censors,” Washington Post, May 6, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/iron-man-takes-heroicefforts-to-satisfy-chinas-state-censors/2013/05/06/62d11e08-b62e-11e292f3-f291801936b8_story.html. 84 This is merely one more reason why film critics such as Lúcia Nagib have urged scholars to stop defining world cinema as part of a Hollywood/other binary. Lúcia Nagib, “Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 30–7. 85 Mark Thornton Burnett, Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2. 86 Stuart Hall, “The Local and Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization, and The World System, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 33. 87 Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughry, “Arabesque: Shakespeare and Globalisation,” in Globalisation and its Discontents, ed. Stan Smith (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 36, 43. 88 Andrew Dickson, “Thailand’s Toil and Trouble Over ‘Divisive’ Shakespeare Film,” Guardian, June 5, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/05/ thailands-toul-and-trouble-over-divisive-shakespeare-film.

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NOTES

89 Mark Thornton Burnett, “Madagascan Will: Cinematic Shakespeares/Transnational Ex-Changes,” Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 240. 90 Tomkie’s fine paper, “The Problematic Politics of Abela’s Makibefo,” is as yet unpublished. 91 As Burnett says of Makibefo and other films like it, “Political freight is attached to the ways in which Shakespeare is absorbed and mediated.” Burnett, Filming Shakespeare, 13. 92 Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, no. 3 (1993): 49–67. 93 Jonathan Robbins, “Interview: Michael Winterbottom,” FilmComment, July 16, 2012, http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/interview-michael-winterbottom. 94 See also Rajiv Kapoor’s Hindi film, Prem Granth (1996), and Bidyut Chakrabarty’s Assamese film, Nishiddha Nadi (2000). Both were commercial failures. 95 See Niamh O’Leary’s excellent “Ambition and Desire: Gertrude as Tragic Hero in Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet,” Upstart Crow 31 (2012): 63–80. 96 Though we disagree with his argument that the film reduces Fowles’s complexity, see Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 160. 97 Exceptions include Henry’s Darth Vader–like entrance/appearance and all subsequent appearances of the Chorus in modern dress. 98 Stam, Reflexivity, 159. 99 William Palmer, The Films of the Nineties: The Decade of Spin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–2, 42. 100 Jeffrey Sconce has called such films members of the “smart film” category: “Irony, Nihilism, and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 349–69. 101 For a useful account of the film’s complex play, see Eckart Voigts-Virchow, “Metadaptation: Adaptation and Intermediality—Cock and Bull,” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 2 (2009): 137–52. 102 Michael Almereyda, William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (New York: Faber and Faber, 2000), xi. 103 Rothwell, History of Shakespeare on Screen, 256. For a brilliant reading of the film’s meditation on memory, experience, and new media, see Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 45–68. 104 Though the transformation of British cities into American ones seems like a more and more common element of recent Hollywood Brit-Lit films, it’s striking how rarely American stories travel to Britain. 105 Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, “All-Time 100 Novels,” Time, January 6, 2010, http://www.entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/. 106 “Alan Moore: The Last Angry Man,” MTV, http://www.mtv.com/shared/movies/interviews/m/moore_alan_060315/. 107 Quoted in the DeZ Vylenz directed documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore (The Disinformation Company, 2008), DVD. 108 Steven Blandford, Film, Drama, and the Breakup of Britain (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), 15.

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Index of Flims 10 Things I Hate about You (1999) 330, 331, 415 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1916) 392 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968) 311, 314 39 Steps, The (1935) 197 400 Blows, The (1959) 225, 329 Abbot and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953) 239 Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) 239 Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) 239 Abismos de Pasión (1954) 260 Across the Bridge (1957) 286 Actor’s Troubles (1903) 69 Adaptation (2002) 18, 368 Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, The (1975) 288 Adventures of Don Quixote, The (1934) 157 Adventures of Long John Silver, The (TV, 1954) 245–46 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (1938) 184, 277 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (TV show, 1955–1959) 231 Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (1903) 60, 69 Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (1910) 98 Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (serial, 1922) 150 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The (1939) 252 Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (1965) 288

Aisha (2010) 365 Al Comps de tu Mentira (1950) 255 Alexander Nevsky (1938) 308 Alfie (1966) 268 Alice (1988) 360 “Alice Comedies” (1923–27) 146–48 Alice in Wonderland (1951) 246 Alice in Wonderland (2010) 86, 327 Alice in Wonderland (TV, 1937) 200 Alice in Wonderland or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1903) 30, 60, 66–69 Alicia en el Pueblo Maravillas or Alice in Wondertown (1991) 360, 364 All about Eve (1950) 298 All Night Long (1962) 296 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 157 All’s Well that Ends Well (1907) 69 An Indian Romeo and Juliet (1912) 144 Animal Farm (1954) 227 Anna Christie (1930) 157, 163 Anna Christie (1931) 163 Anna Karenina (1935) 157, 179 Annabelle the Serpentine Dance (1894) 53 Another Dawn (1937) 184 Apocalypse Now (1979) 267, 314–16, 317, 353, 413 Arabian Nights, The (1972) 304 Arashi Ga Oka (1988) 360 As You Like It (1936) 191 Ascent of F6, The (TV, 1936) 229 Atonement (2007) 374 Austin Powers [franchise] (1997–2002) 287

438

INDEX OF FLIMS

Avengers, The (2012) 352 Aventures de Robinson Crusoé, Les (1921) 133 Avventure di Robinson Crusoe (1923) 133 Baby Sherlock (1912) 148 Bad Sleep Well, The (1960) 120, 308–311, 316 Banquet, The (2006) 360, 365, 370, 418 Bardell against Pickwick (TV, 1938) 200 Barefoot Contessa, The (1954) 298 Barry Lyndon (1975) 269, 275, 311, 316 Batman (1989) 353 Batman Begins (2005) 138 Batman [trilogy] (2005–2012) 138, 319 Battlestar Galactica (TV show, 2004–2009) 336 Beau Geste (1926) 115 Becket (1964) 267 Becky Sharp (1935) 175, 185 Belle de Jour (1967) 260 Beowulf (2007) 351 Big Sleep, The (1946) 234 Billy Liar! (1963) 268 Birth of a Nation, The (1915) 71, 77, 89, 90, 92, 396 Black Beauty (1933) 183 Black Cat, The (1934) 169 Blackenstein (1973) 285 Blacula (1972) 285 Blob, The (1958) 242, 243 Blow-up (1966) 268 Blue Angel, The (1930) 157, 163 Bluebeard (1901) 60 Body Snatcher, The (1945) 239 Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 269 Born on the Fourth of July (1989) 325 Bostonians, The (1984) 342 Bourne [franchise] (2002–2012) 333 Boyhood (2014) 355 Boys from Syracuse, The (1940) 250 Boyz in the Hood (1991) 329 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) 331 Breakfast Club, The (1985) 329 Breaking Bad (TV show, 2008–2013) 355 Bride and Prejudice (2005) 365

Bride of Frankenstein, The (1935) 23–26, 168, 169, 171, 261, 284 Brides of Dracula, The (1960) 282 Brideshead Revisited (TV, 1981) 343 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957) 236 Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) 374 Brief Encounter (1945) 214, 223 Brighton Rock (1947) 223–24, 226, 286, 405 Brighton Rock (2010) 341 Broken Blossoms (1919) 115, 124, 397 Broken Lance (1954) 242, 251 Bromo and Juliet (1926) 145 Browning Version, The (1951) 227 Brutality (1912) 37, 42 Burlesque on Romeo and Juliet (1902) 69 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1920) 125 Cabiria (1914) 71, 89, 90 Caesar and Cleopatra (1946) 227 Canterbury Tale, A (1944) 5, 215–19, 222, 271, 405 Canterbury Tales, The (1972) 267, 304–306, 316, 412 Canterville Ghost, The (1945) 239 Captains Courageous (1937) 179, 184 Carry On [franchise] (1958–92) 269 Casino Royale (1967) 287 Casino Royale (2006) 138, 332, 333–35 Cast Away (2000) 332 Cavalcade (1933) 185 Charge of the Light Brigade, The (1912) 203 Charge of the Light Brigade, The (1914) 203 Charge of the Light Brigade, The (1936) 184, 202–203 Charge of the Light Brigade, The (1968) 304, 315 Chariots of Fire (1981) 269, 323, 339, 343 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) 138 Charlie Bubbles (1967) 291, 293

INDEX OF FLIMS

Cheese Mites, The or Lilliputians in a London Restaurant (1901) 64 Chelovek-Nevidimka (1984) 360 Chicken Rice War (2000) 360 Chimes at Midnight [Falstaff] (1966) 262, 307–308, 316 Chinatown (1974) 301 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) 277 Christmas Carol, A (1938) 277 Christmas Carol, A (1951) 277 Christmas Carol, A (2009) 327, 328 Chronicles of Narnia, The [franchise] (2005–) 320 Cinderella (1899) 34–35, 60 Citadel, The (1938) 158, 198 Claim, The (2000) 364 Cleopatra (1963) 298, 320 Clive of India (1935) 201 Clockwork Orange, A (1971) 20, 267, 269, 311–14, 316, 413 Cloud Atlas (2012) 374 Clueless (1995) 146, 329, 330, 340, 356, 368 Clueless (TV show, 1996–99) 330 Collector, The (1965) 296 Comedians, The (1967) 286 Company of Wolves, The (1984) 374 Conformist, The (1971) 409 Count Dracula (1970) 285 Count of Monte Cristo, The (1933) 157, 175 Countess Dracula (1971) 282 Crash (1986) 374 Cricket on the Hearth, The (1909) 29 Crimes at the Dark House (1940) 169 Cruel Intentions (1999) 330 Cry of the Children, The (1912) 99–101 Curse of Frankenstein, The (1957) 174, 281–83 Cymbeline (1925) 123 Dangerous Paradise (1930) 160, 165, 183 Dao Ziran Qu (1936) 159 Dark City (1998) 319 Darling (1965) 268 David Copperfield (1913) 76, 98–99, 100 David Copperfield (1922) 121

439

David Copperfield (1935) 179–83, 184, 191, 279, 402 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (1951) 243 Days of Heaven (1978) 302 Deadly Affair, The (1966) 286 Death of Nancy Sykes (1897) 5, 28, 30, 32, 37–45, 49, 383 Death of Poor Joe, The (1901) 54 Death on the Nile (1978) 288 Deathly Hallows, The (2010–2011) 335 Decameron, The (1971) 304 Decline and Fall … of a Birdwatcher (1968) 296 Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The (1936) 169 Desperadoes (1943) 407 Devils, The (1971) 269 Devotion (1946) 212–13 Die another Day (2002) 333–34 Dil Farosh (1927) 133–34 Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The (1972) 260 Doctor Jekyll’s Hyde (1932) 168 Dolly Varden (1906) 69, 387 Don Quixote (1915) 96 Don’t Look Now (1973) 269, 409 Double Life, A (1947) 241 Doubling for Romeo (1921) 144–45 Downton Abbey (TV show, 2010–) 19, 233, 356 Dr. Doolittle (1967) 267, 277 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908) 103 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912) 85 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920; Paramount) 102, 103–113, 145, 152, 351, 392 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920; Pioneer) 103, 111–113, 145 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) 113, 141, 169, 172, 351 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) 239 Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) 284 Dr. No (1962) 236, 286, 287, 288, 333 Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride (1925) 145–46 Dracula (1931, Spanish-language version) 166–67

440

INDEX OF FLIMS

Dracula (1931) 166–69, 171, 173, 174 Dracula (1979) 331 Drácula contra Frankenstein (1972) 285 Dracula has Risen from the Grave (1968) 282 Dracula, A.D. 1972 (1972) 282 Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) 282 Dracula’s Daughter (1936) 168 Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1903) 64, 385 Dresser, The (1983) 339 Drum, The (1938) 201, 203 Duel Scene from Macbeth, The (1905) 69 Duellists, The (1977) 275, 315 East Lynne (1903) 69 East Lynne (1913) 391 East Lynne (1922) 395 East of Eden (1955) 234 Easy A (2010) 330 Easy Rider (1969) 269, 409 Ebb Tide (1937) 185 Edward II (1991) 348, 410 Elephant Boy (1937) 201 Elisa, das Blümenmädchen (1935) 159 Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1992) 287 Emma (1996) 340 Enamorada (1946) 255 Encore (1951) 213, 227 End of the Beginning, The (TV, 1938) 229 Enfants du Paradis, Les (1945) 255 England Made Me (1973) 286 Enoch Arden (1911) 70, 91–94, 101, 102, 104, 203 Entertainer, The (1960) 290 ER (TV show, 1994–2009) 355 Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, The (1972) 285 Europeans, The (1979) 342 Evil of Frankenstein, The (1964) 282 Face at the Window, The (1939) 169 Fairyland or Kingdom of the Fairies (1903) 60

Fall of the House of Usher, The (1928) 281 Falstaff Chimes at Midnight (1965) 307–308, 262 Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) 273–75 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) 329 Faust (1926) 115, 123, 131–32, 395 Fearless Vampire Killers, The (1967) 301 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) 329 Fire Over England (1937) 190 Fish Tank (2009) 377 Flashdance (1983) 353 Food of the Gods, The (1976) 288 For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) 234 Forbidden Planet (1956) 244–45, 251 Forever and a Day (1943) 211 Four Feathers, The (1939) 201 Fox Follies (1929) 155 Fox, The (1967) 296 Frankenstein (1910) 85, 105 Frankenstein (1931) 167–71 Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) 282 Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) 282 Frankenstein must be Destroyed (1969) 282 Frankenstein Unbound (1990) 370, 415 Frankenweenie (1984) 332 Frankenweenie (2012) 332 Frau ohne Bedeutung, Eine (1936) 159 Freaks (1932) 172 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The (1981) 366–367 From Hell (2001) 371 From Here to Eternity (1953) 234 From Russia with Love (1963) 286 Fu-er-mo-si Zhentan An (1931) 159 Gandhi (1982) 323, 339 Gaslight (1940) 227 Gaslight (1944) 234 Gay Shoe Clerk, The (1903)

32

INDEX OF FLIMS

Ghost Goes West, The (1935) 189 Ghost of Frankenstein, The (1942) 168 Ghoul, The (1933) 168 Gnomeo and Juliet (2011) 327 Godfather, The (1972) 287, 362, 368, 413 Godzilla (2014) 319 Golden Bowl, The (2000) 342 Goldfinger (1964) 286, 287 Gone with the Wind (1939) 176, 234, 379, 390, 402, 404 Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) 158, 198–200 Gothic (1986) 370 Graduate, The (1967) 269, 297 Grand Hotel (1932) 176 Grapes of Wrath, The (1940) 234, 235 Graue Dame, Die (1936) 159 Great Expectations (1922) 121 Great Expectations (1946) 213, 214, 226, 235 Great Expectations (1998) 371 Great Train Robbery, The (1903) 32, 58 Greed (1925) 96, 116 Gulliver’s Travels (1939) 247 Gulliver’s Travels among the Lilliputians and the Giants (1902) 30, 60, 61–65, 385–86 Gunga Din (1939) 185, 201, 202, 203–204, 403 Guru, The (1969) 342 Guys and Dolls (1955) 298 Haggard’s She, see Pillar of Fire Haider (2014) 365 Hamlet (1904) 69 Hamlet (1907) 69 Hamlet (1910) 78 Hamlet (1913) 76 Hamlet (1920) 123–31, 132, 133, 137, 139, 143, 363, 395 Hamlet (1948) 226–27, 230, 259, 261, 263, 405 Hamlet (1969) 297, 304 Hamlet (1990) 340, 356 Hamlet (1996) 340, 359 Hamlet (2000) 309, 369, 418

441

Hamlet 2 (2008) 330 Harry Potter [franchise] (2001–2011) 320, 326, 335–38, 355, 415 Hathili Dulhan (1932) 134 Haunted Curiosity Shop, The (1901) 37 Haunted Honeymoon (1940) 198 Headless Horseman, The (1934) 175 Heat and Dust (1983) 342 Heaven’s Gate (1980) 270, 317 Heiress, The (1949) 234 Henry V (1944) 150, 151, 215, 219, 220–22, 227, 236, 259, 361 Henry V (1989) 339, 367 Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) 4 High Fidelity (2000) 9, 374 Hihintayin Kita Sa Langit (1991) 360 Hobbit, The [trilogy] (2012–2014) 5, 338, 356, 415 Hobbit, The: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) 338 Honey Pot, The (1964) 300 Horror of Dracula, The (1968) 283 Horror of Frankenstein, The (1970) 282 Hotel (2001) 368 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (1920) 123 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (1939) 239, 252 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (1959) 284 House of Strangers (1949) 241 House of Usher (1960) 281 Householder, The (1963) 342, 344, 416 How Green was My Valley (1941) 234 How He Lied to Her Husband (TV, 1937) 200 How Molly Malone Made Good (1915) 41 Howard’s End (1992) 342, 346 Huapango (2004) 360 Huckleberry Finn (1920) 96–97 Human Factor, The (1979) 286 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1939) 157 Hurlevent (1985) 360 “Hyde and Hare” (Looney Tunes, 1955) 247–48

442

INDEX OF FLIMS

I Walked with a Zombie (1943) 146, 238–40 I, Claudius (1937) 190 Il Piccolo Sherlock Holmes (1909) 148 Importance of Being Earnest, The (1952) 213, 227 Importance of Being Earnest, The (TV, 1937) 200, 299 Importance of Being Earnest, The (TV, 1946) 230 Importance of Being Earnest, The or Al Comps de tu Mentira 255 In Iredu (2013) 360 Inception (2010) 319 Indecent, or, The Private Life of Becky Sharp (1932) 183 Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 339 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) 403 Inferno, L’ (1911) 72, 86–87, 89, 95, 96, 104, 109, 320, 390, 391 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) 242 Invisible Man, The (1933) 168 Ipcress File, The (1965) 268 Ironman 3 (2013) 417 Island of Dr. Moreau, The (1977) 288 Island of Lost Souls (1932) 169–70, 174 Isle of Fury (1936) 184 It’s Never Too Late (1953) 255 Italian Job, The (1969) 268 Ivanhoe (1952) 236 Jack and the Beanstalk (1901) 57–60 Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980) 345–46 Jane Eyre (1910) 78 Jane Eyre (1934) 175, 183, 184 Jane Eyre (1943) 212, 236–37, 254, 273, 279, 307, 404 Jane Eyre (2011) 341 Januskopf, Der (1920) 103, 113, 123, 131 Jaws (1975) 270, 317, 326, 335 Jazz Singer, The (1927) 160 Jewel in the Crown (TV, 1984) 343 Joe Macbeth (1955) 241

Joseph Andrews (1977) 304 Jubal (1956) 251 Jude (1996) 341, 364 Judith (1969) 296 Julius Caesar (1908) 85 Julius Caesar (1953) 298 Julius Caesar (TV, 1938) 200, 229 Jungle Book, The (1967) 246, 277, 279, 410 Justine (1969) 274, 296 Kandukondain or I have Found It (2000) 365 Kanske en Gentleman (1950) 255 Kean (1924) 133 Khoon Ka Khoon (1935) 159 Khoon-e-Nahak or Murder Most Foul (1928) 134 Kidnapped (1938) 179, 185 Kill Bill (2003) 23 King Kong (1933) 70, 152 King Lear (1916) 90, 126, 381 King Lear (Brook, 1971) 267, 297, 381 King Lear (Kozintsev, 1971) 267, 297 King Lear (TV, 1983) 339 King of Loving, A (1961) 290, 294 Kiss in the Dark (1904) 69 Kiss Me Kate (1953) 250 Kiss of the Vampire, The (1963) 282 Kleptomaniac, The (1905) 32 Kohlheisel’s Töchter (1920) 123 L’Age d’Or (1930) 260 L’Amant de Lady Chatterley (1955) 254 La Fille de Dracula (1972) 285 Lady Audley’s Secret (1912) 102 Lady Godiva (1920) 123 Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) 134, 153 Lady Windermeres Fächer (1935) 159 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1898) 37, 45–48 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1926) 133 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1935) 175 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 236, 267, 272–73, 403, 410 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The (2003) 371–72

INDEX OF FLIMS

Leonard-Cushing Fight (1894) 28 Les Misérables (1935) 175, 182 Les Misérables (2012) 141 Lesson Faust (1994) 360 Letter, The (1929) 160, 163–65, 166, 183, 400 Libel (TV, 1938) 229 Liebe, Scherz, und Ernst (1932) 159 Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby, The (1947) 227 Life at the Top (1965) 291 Life Drama of Napoleon Bonaparte, The (1909) 74 Life of an American Fireman (1903) 386 Life of Moses, The (1909) 74 Light that Failed, The (1939) 185 Lion King, The (1996) 327–28 Little Dorrit (1924) 121 Little Dorrit (1988) 341 Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) 179 Little Nell (1906) 69 Little Red Riding Hood (1901) 60 Little Robinson Crusoe (1924) 397 Little Women (1933) 157, 177–79, 180, 183, 190, 401 Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The (1935) 201, 202 Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The (1962) 290, 294, 295, 302, 303 Long John Silver (1954) 245 Look Back in Anger (1958) 290, 294, 302 Looking Glass War, The (1969) 286 Lord High Executioner, The (1906) 69 Lord of the Flies (1963) 267, 296 Lord of the Rings, The (1978) 350 Lord of the Rings, The [trilogy] (2001–2003) 320, 326, 337, 338, 350, 359 Lorna Doone (1922) 138, 141, 150 Lost Horizon (1937) 201 Lost World, The (1925) 115, 152–53 Loved One, The (1965) 296, 304 Lu Binhua (1928) 134 Lust for a Vampire (1971) 282

443

Macbeth (1948) 261–62, 307 Macbeth (1971) 297, 301 Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942) 234 Magus (1968) 296 Mahal (1949) 254 Makibefo (1999) 360, 362–63 Maltese Falcon, The (1941) 234 Man at the Top (1970) 291 Man for All Seasons, A (1966) 267 Man Who Changed His Mind, The (1936) 400 Man Who Could Work Miracles, The (1936) 194–95 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1934) 195 Man with a Flower in His Mouth, The (TV, 1930) 228 Mann der Sherlock Holmes War, Der (1937) 159 Mansfield Park (1999) 340 Maqbool (2003) 362, 364, 368 Martin Chuzzlewit (1912) 84 Mary Poppins (1964) 267, 276, 277–78 Mary Reilly (1996) 370 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) 332 Masque of the Red Death, The (1964) 281 Matrix, The (1999) 368 Matter of Life and Death, A aka Stairway to Heaven (1946) 1–4, 26, 219, 226, 379 Maurice (1987) 339, 342, 343, 346 Merchant of Venice, The (1923) 123 Merchant of Venice, The (1927) 161 Merchant of Venice, The (2004) 304 Merchant of Venice, The (TV, 1969) 307 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (1935) 184, 191 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (1999) 340 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (TV, 1968) 267 Mindscape of Alan Moore, The (2008) 418 Misdirected Kiss, The (1904) 387

444

INDEX OF FLIMS

Moby Dick (1956) 234 Modern Portia, A (1912) 101 Moonstone, The (1909) 98 Moonstone, The (1934) 183 Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (1903) 60 Mr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1975) 285 Mr. Bumble’s Courtship (1898) 37, 48–49 Mr. Pickwick’s Christmas at Wardles (1901) 37 Mrs. Dalloway (1997) 341 Mrs. Miniver (1942) 210, 212 Much Ado about Nothing (1993) 340, 349 Much Ado about Nothing (2012) 351–52, 357 Much Ado about Nothing (TV, 1937) 200 Mummy, The (1932) 168 Muppet Christmas Carol, The (1992) 328 Muppet Treasure Island (1996) 328 Murder on the Orient Express (1974) 269, 288 Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) 169, 173 My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) 323–24 My Darling Clementine (1946) 251, 259 My Fair Lady (1964) 250, 267, 277, 279 My Own Private Idaho (1991) 348 Mystery of Edwin Drood, The (1935) 169 Narrow Corner, The (1933) 184 Never Been Kissed (1999) 330 Never Let Me Go (2010) 374 Nicholas Nickelby (1903) 69 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1956) 228 Nineteen Eighty-Four (TV, 1954) 232–34 Nishiddha Nadi (2000) 418 Nosferatu (1922) 70, 115, 123, 131–32, 167, 332, 395 Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) 267, 331 Notes on a Scandal (2006) 374

O (2001) 330–31, 368, 415 O Cravo e a Rosa (2001) 360 Odio (1940) 255 Odyssey (1912) 78, 320 Of Human Bondage (1934) 185 Of Mice and Men (1940) 113 Old Dark House, The (1932) 168, 186 Old English (1930) 184 Oliver Twist (1906) 387 Oliver Twist (1909) 41 Oliver Twist (1922) 115, 138, 143, 150 Oliver Twist (1933) 183, 184 Oliver Twist (1948) 213, 214, 225, 226, 237, 277 Oliver Twist (2005) 341 Oliver! (1968) 250, 267, 277, 279 Omkara (2006) 365 On the Beach (1959) 243 Orlando (1992) 341 Othello (1909) 97 Othello (1914) 97 Othello (1922) 123 Othello (1952) 261, 262, 307 Othello (1995) 340 Othello (TV, 1955) 231 Our Betters (1933) 185 Our Man in Havana (1959) 286, 287 Our Mutual Friend (1921) 121, 143 Out of the Inkwell (1918–29) 147 Oxbow Incident, The (1943) 398 Pacific Rim (2013) 319 Painted Veil, The (1934) 184 Paradise in Harlem (1939) 248–50 Paradise Lost (planned 1911 film) 319 Paradise Lost (planned 1960s film) 320 Paradise Lost (planned 2000s film) 319–321, 350, 413 Passage to India, A (1984) 339 Peter Pan (1924) 150–52, 397 Peter Pan (1953) 246–47, 397, 398, 407 Philadelphia (1993) 349 Pickwick Papers, The (1952) 227 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (1945) 237–38 Pied Piper of Hamelin, The (1903) 60, 61

INDEX OF FLIMS

Pied Piper of Hamelin, The (1907) 60, 70 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (TV, 1939) 200 Pillar of Fire or Haggard’s She (1899) 37, 51–55 Pippa Passes (1909) 76 Pit and the Pendulum, The (1961) 281 Plucked from the Burning (1900) 45 Possession (2002) 9, 374 Prem Granth (1996) 418 Pride and Prejudice (1940) 19, 21, 381 Pride and Prejudice (2005) 340, 381 Pride and Prejudice (TV, 1952) 231 Pride and Prejudice (TV, 1995) 340 Prince of the Himalayas (2006) 360 Private Life of Don Juan, The (1934) 190 Private Life of Henry VIII, The (1933) 19, 190, 214, 280, 402 Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The (1970) 288 Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The (1939) 190 Prospero’s Books (1991) 347–48, 368, 416 Public Life of Henry the Ninth, The (1935) 280 Purgatorio (1912) 82 Pygmalion (1930) 277 Quartet (1948) 227 Queen Was in the Parlour, The (1927) 400 Quiet American, The (1958) 286, 298–300, 411, 412 Quo Vadis (1913) 71 Railway Children, The (1970) 269 Railway Collision, A (1900) 45 Rake’s Progress, The (1945) 227 Rakujo no Uta (1924) 135 Rambo First Blood Part 2 (1985) 325 Ran (1985) 241, 309, 360, 363 Raven, The (1912) 78 Raven, The (1935) 169 Razor’s Edge, The (1946) 236, 398 Rebecca (1940) 236, 238, 254

445

Rebecca’s Daughters (1992) 341 Rebel without a Cause (1955) 329 Reckless Romeo, A (1917) 144 Red Kingdom Rising (2014) 357 Red Planet Mars (1952) 243 Red Road (2006) 375 Red, White, and Zero (1967) 291, 293 Remains of the Day, The (1993) 342, 346, 347 Rembrandt (1936) 190 Resurrection Man (1998) 374 Return of the Jedi, The (1983) 339 Return of the King, The (2003) 338, 350 Return to Treasure Island (1954) 245 Revenge of Frankenstein, The (1958) 282 Rhodes of Africa (1936) 201 Rich Man’s Folly (1931) 166, 185 Richard III (1955) 228, 259 Richard III (1995) 340, 368 Right to Live, The (1935) 184 Rip van Winkle (1896) 37, 56, 383 Rise of Catherine the Great, The (1934) 190 Rob Roy (1954) 246 Robin Hood (1922) 115, 145 Robin Hood (1973) 277 Robin Hood [Pathécomedy short] (1922) 145 Robinson Crusoe (1902) 60, 69, 387 Robinson Crusoe (1910) 98 Robinson Crusoe (1954) 259 Robinzon Kruzo (1946) 253 Rocking Horse Winner, The (1949) 223–25, 405 Romeo ⫹ Juliet (1996) 97, 329, 340, 353–54, 368, 370 Romeo and Juliet (1911) 84 Romeo and Juliet (1916) 96 Romeo and Juliet (1920) 144 Romeo and Juliet (1936) 184 Romeo and Juliet (1968) 267, 297, 329 Romeo and Juliet in the Snow (1920) 123 Romeo and Juliet in Town (1910) 101 Romeo Turns Bandit (1909) 144

446

INDEX OF FLIMS

Room at the Top (1958) 290–92, 294, 295 Room with a View, A (1985) 339 Rope (1948) 259 Rope (TV, 1947) 231 Rope (TV, 1950) 231 Roseland (1977) 342 Rosemary’s Baby (1968) 301 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990) 370 Rough Sea at Dover (1895) 405 Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (1942) 246 Sabotage (1936) 196 Sacred Flame, The (1929) 165, 184 Salomé (1910) 88, 89, 109, 397 Salomé (1918) 140 Salomé (1923) 115 Sanders of the River (1936) 201, 203 Sangdil (1952) 253, 254 Sanji Goto: The Story of the Japanese Enoch Arden (1921) 134–35 Saturday Night & Sunday Morning (1960) 290, 291, 294 Savages (1972) 345 Scarlet Pimpernel, The (1934) 191, 195 Scars of Dracula (1970) 282 School for Scandal, The (TV, 1937) 175, 200 Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973) 285 Scrooge (1935) 191, 385, 277 Scrooge (1951) 228, 277 Scrooge (1970) 277 Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost (1902) 30, 56–57, 64, 69 Sea Hawk, The (1924) 115 Secret Agent (1936) 196–97, 403 Sense and Sensibility (1995) 340, 365 Serpentine Dance, The (1899) 53 Severed Head, A (1970) 296 Shakespeare in Love (1998) 138, 340 Shakespeare Must Die (2012) 361–62, 364 Shakespeare Wallah (1965) 344 Shao Nainai de Shanzi (1939) 159

She (1965) 284 She’s all That (1999) 330 She’s the Man (2006) 330 Sherlock Holmes (1916) 149 Sherlock Holmes (1922) 149 Sherlock Holmes (1932) 185 Sherlock Holmes (2009) 351 Sherlock Holmes (TV, 1951) 231 Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942) 208–210 Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) 252 Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900) 37, 69 Sherlock Holmes en Caracas (1991) 360 Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943) 252 Sherlock Holmes, Jr. (1911) 148 Sherlock (TV show, 2012–) 149 Sherlock, Jr. (1924) 115, 148 Shipotianqing (1937) 159 Silas Marner (1916) 392 Silas Marner (1922) 143 Singin’ in the Rain (1952) 313, 314 Six Feet Under (TV show, 2001–2005) 355 Sixteen Candles (1984) 329 Skin Game, The (1931) 195 Skyfall (2012) 335 Sleuth (1972) 300 Slings and Arrows (TV show, 2003–2006) 355 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) 246 Solomon and Gaenor (1999) 341 Son of Dracula (1943) 168 Son of Frankenstein (1939) 168 Son of the Sheik, The (1926) 156 Song of the Shirt, The (1979) 269 Sons and Lovers (1960) 267 Sopranos, The (TV show, 1999–2007) 355 Sorrows of Satan, The (1926) 139 Sound of Music, The (1965) 320 Sporting Life, The (1963) 290–291 Spray of Plum Blossoms, A (1931) 134, 159

INDEX OF FLIMS

Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The (1965) 286 Squeeker, Der (1931) 159 Stanley and Livingstone (1939) 201 Star Wars (1977) 138, 270, 326, 337, 368 Star Wars [episodes 1–3] (1999–2005) 138 Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, The (1952) 246 Strange Illusion (1945) 241 Strawberry and Chocolate (1994) 364 Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951) 234 Studio Troubles or, Wicked Willie (1899) 50 Study in Scarlet, A (1933) 185 Study in Terror, A (1965) 288 Sun Never Sets, The (1939) 201 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) 153 Superman Returns (2006) 319 Sürtük (1942) 255 Sword and the Flute, The (1959) 344 Sword and the Stone, The (1963) 279 Synechdoche, New York (2008) 368 Tale of Two Cities, A (1907) 70 Tale of Two Cities, A (1917) 140 Tale of Two Cities, A (1958) 271–72, 292 Tale of Two Cities, A (1936) 184 “Tale of Two Kitties, A” (Looney Tunes, 1942) 247 Taming of the Shrew, The (1929) 154, 166 Taming of the Shrew, The (1967) 297 Taste of Honey (1961) 290, 292, 293, 294, 295 Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) 282 Tempest, The (1905) 69 Tempest, The (1979) 269, 297, 347–348, 416 Tempest, The (2010) 340, 351 Tempest, The (TV, 1939) 200 Ten Commandments, The (1956) 245 Ten Little Indians (1974) 288 Ten Nights in a Ballroom (1926) 248 Tenant, The (1976) 301

447

Terminator 2 Judgment Day (1991) 350 Terror is a Man (1959) 288 Tess (1979) 275, 301–302 Tess of the Storm Country (1914) 148 Tess of the Storm Country (1922) 148–49 Theatre of Blood (1973) 284 Thelma (1910) 85 Them! (1954) 243 Thief of Baghdad, The (1940) 246 Thing from Another World, The (1951) 242 Things to Come (1936) 192–94, 403 Third Man, The (1949) 286 This Gun for Hire (1942) 286, 242 Three Musketeers, The (1921) 116, 140 Three Musketeers, The (1933) 157 Throne of Blood or Kumonosu-jô (1957) 135, 262–264, 298, 309, 363, 408 Thunderball (1965) 286 Time Machine, The (1960) 288 Time Machine, The (TV, 1949) 230 Titus (1999) 340 To Sir, with Love (1967) 291 Tobacco Road (1941) 235 Tom Jones (1963) 302–304 Top Gun (1986) 353 Trainspotting (1996) 9, 374 Travels with My Aunt (1972) 286 Treasure Island (1912) 84 Treasure Island (1920) 95, 143 Treasure Island (1934) 184, 246 Treasure Island (1950) 245 Treasure Island (1965) 307 Trial, The (1962) 307 Trio (1950) 227 Trip to the Moon, A (1903) 30, 53 Trishna (2011) 364, 365 Tristram Shandy A Cock and Bull Story (2005) 320, 341, 368–369, 383 Tromeo and Juliet (1996) 86, 370, 371, 390 Tron (1982) 350 Tudors, The (TV show, 2007–2010) 356

448

INDEX OF FLIMS

Tugboat Romeo, A (1916) 144 Twelfth Night (1910) 96 Twelfth Night (1996) 340, 360 Twelfth Night (TV, 1937) 200 Twelfth Night (TV, 1939) 200 Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, The (1961) 284 Under the Greenwood Tree (1929) 160, 166 Under the Skin (2013) 374 V for Vendetta (2005) 372 Vampiresas 1930 (1962) 285 Vampyros Lesbos (1971) 285 Vanity Fair (1911) 83–84, 102 Vanity Fair (1935) 185 Vengeance of She, The (1968) 284 Vertigo (1958) 13 Victory (1919) 88–89, 109 Victory (1940) 185 Viola (2012) 369–70 Virgin and the Gypsy, The (1970) 296 Wallander (TV show, 2008–) 355 War of the Worlds, The (1953) 243–44, 406 War of the Worlds, The (2005) 351 Warm Bodies (2013) 330 Watchmen (2009) 372 Waterland (1992) 374 We Are Not Alone (1939) 184 Wee Willie Winkie (1937) 185 Weekend (1967) 23 West Side Story (1961) 250, 267, 278–279, 328, 329, 353 Whatever it Takes (2000) 330 Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991) 339

Whisky Galore! (1949) 227 White Countess, The (2005) 342 White Heat (1949) 368 Wide Sargasso Sea (1993) 370 “Witch’s Tangled Hare, A” (Looney Tunes, 1959) 247 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) 269 Winner (1977) 296 Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966) 279 Winslow Boy, The (1948) 227 Woman in White, The (1948) 235 Woman Lawyer, The (1927) 134 Woman of No Importance, A (1935) 159 Women in Love (1969) 267, 274, 296 Wrath of the Gods, The (1914) 135 Wuthering Heights (1939) 185–89, 377, 402, 408 Wuthering Heights (1970) 274 Wuthering Heights (1992) 287 Wuthering Heights (2011) 20, 341, 375–77 Wuthering Heights (TV, 2003) 330 Wuthering Heights (TV, 1953) 230 Yank at Oxford, A (1938) 158, 198 Yellow Sky (1948) 251 Yijian Mei or A Spray of Plum Blossoms 159 Young Frankenstein (1974) 284 Young Mistress’s Fan, The (1928) 134 Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) 398 Zastrozzi (1986)

339

General Index 1492 Pictures 335 20th Century Fox 155, 185, 236, 252, 279 3D 251, 253 5.1 Channel sound system 353 “A British Bank” (song) 278 Abbot and Costello “Meet” series 239 Abbot, Bud 239, 280 Abbott, Mary Allen 181, 402 Abel, Richard 71, 388, 395 Abela, Alexander 362, 363, 418 Academy Award 220, 234, 237, 244, 246, 259, 281, 307, 338, 352, 353, 354, 388 Acts of Union 27 actualities 42, 43, 405 Adams, William Davenport 399 Agincourt, battle of 220 AIDS (HIV) 349, 362, 428 Ainsworth, Harrison 389 Akass, Kim 417 Albee, Edward 318 Albright, Ivan le Lorraine 251 Alexander Korda Films, Inc. 246 Alexandria Quartet 288 Alexandrov, Grigori Vasilyevich 175, 413 Ali, George 164, 165 Alice in Wonderland (musical) 81, 400 Allégret, Marc 268 Allen, Robert C. 86, 388 Allen, Woody 270, 278, 287 Allied Pictures 197 Almar, George 43, 397 Almereyda, Michael 323, 383, 432 Altman, Rick 30, 34, 43, 381, 382 Altman, Robert 270

“Always True to You in My Fashion” (song) 251 Alwyn, William 225 Ambrosio 82 “America” (song) 278 American International Pictures 285 American Motion Picture Association (AMPA) 118 American Mutoscope (and Biograph Co.) 36, 37, 51, 70, 383, 397 American Occupation of Japan 309 American Pathé 75, 89, 117 American Zoetrope 332 Amis, Kingsley 290 Anderson, Lindsay 258, 290, 408 Anderson, Michael 228, 232 Anderson, Wes 353 Andress, Ursula 333, 334 Andrew, Dudley 6, 94, 103, 380, 391, 392 Andrews, Julie 278 Andriyesvsky, Aleksandr 253 Anglo-American relations see also “special relationship” 150, 212, 278, 379, 396 animation 144, 147, 152, 245–48, 268, 276, 279, 347, 387, 397 Annakin, Ken 286 Anstey, F. 389 Antandroy tribe 362, 363 Antonioni, Michelangelo 268, 308 appropriation, concept of 5, 9, 32, 47, 51, 53, 55, 97, 104, 126, 146, 148, 168, 169, 189, 209, 215, 217, 236, 247, 249, 259, 265, 278, 296, 298, 310, 329, 331, 341, 361, 369, 370, 372, 374, 379, 380, 391, 392, 397, 407

450

GENERAL INDEX

Archers, The (production company) 379 Aristotle 89 Armour, Robert A. 73, 383, 387, 388 Armstrong, Louis 277 Arnold, Andrea 20, 341, 375 Arnold, Matthew Culture and Anarchy 15 art-house cinema 17, 213, 268, 269, 270, 272, 276, 289–97, 298, 301, 304, 311, 312, 326, 339, 347, 355, 415 Ascham, Roger 14 Ashby, Hal 270 Ashby, Justine 402, 416 Asher, Jack 280 Asquith, Anthony 158, 213, 227, 277 Asta Films Inc. 127 Astruc, Alexandre 256, 407 Atherton, Gertrude 139–40 Atlantic Monthly 337, 415 Attenborough, Richard 224 Auden, W. H. 229 Aurenche, Jean 257 Austen, Jane 5, 208, 233, 276, 321, 329, 340, 361, 365, 372, 374, 410 Emma 329, Mansfield Park 340 Pride and Prejudice 19, 175, 179, 276, 340 Sense and Sensibility 340 Sir Charles Grandison 345, 416 “Auteur adaptation” 17, 31, 255–65, 268, 272, 273, 275, 289, 297–317, 330, 317 auteur cinema 227, 268, 255–65, 270, 273, 276, 277, 278, 289, 408 auteurism 256, 257, 258, 297, 311 Autorenfilm 75, 76, 116 Badham, John 331 BAFTAs 226, 338, 339, 374 Bakshi, Ralph 350 Balcon, Michael 158, 203 Balderston, John 168, 170 Balio, Tino 176, 177, 398, 401, 405

Ball, Robert Hamilton 123, 395 Ballard, J. G. 374 Balliet, Thomas 65, 386 Balzac, Honoré de 176 Bara, Theda 140 Bardem, Javier 335 Barker, Adam 384 Barker, Will 69 Barlow, John D. 129, 130, 395 Barnes, Alan 410 Barnes, John 384 Barnum, P. T. 40 Barr, Charles 196, 197, 403 Barrie, Sir James M. 13, 140, 141, 156 The Admirable Crichton 159 Peter Pan 150, 151, 152, 247 Barron, Charles 41 Barrymore, John 103, 104, 106, 107, 139, 145, 148 Barrymore, Lionel 180 Barstow, Stan 290 Basinger, Jeanine 178, 401 Baudry, Jean-Louis 381 Baxter, Anne 251 Bazin, André 113, 393, 411 BBC Radio 281 BBC Television adaptations 149, 200, 228–34, 337, 340, 351, 351, 355, 415 BBC Television Shakespeare Series (1978–85) 86 Beacham, Stephanie 280 Beatty, Warren 270 Beckett, Samuel 312 Beddington, Jack 379 Beethoven, Ludwig van 312, 313 Symphony no. 5 312 Behlmer, Rudy 401 Behrman, S. N. 401 Belasco, David 89, 90, 391 Bellweather Studios 352 Benjamin, Walter 42, 147, 356, 397, 417 Benn, Tony 325 Bennett, Arnold 140, 156, 381 Bennett, Tony 15 Benshoff, Harry 410 Benson, George 280

GENERAL INDEX

Bentley, Thomas 98, 99, 100 Benton, Robert 270 Berg, A. Scott 396, 142 Bergman, Ingmar 308, 312 Bergner, Elisabeth 191, 192, 403 Bernard, James 280, 283 Bernstein, Leonard 278 Berry, Halle 334 Bertolucci, Bernardo 409 Beveridge Report (1942) 223 Bharadwaj, Vishal 362 Bible 74, 396 Biograph 49, 50, 89, 104 Bioscope, The 73, 84, 388 Biró, Lajlos 192 Biskind, Peter 269, 409 Bitzer, G. W. 69 blacklist, Hollywood 222, 231, 235, 252 see also House Un-American Activities Committee Blackmore, Susan 381 Blackton, J. Stuart 55, 82, 85 Blackton, Marion 82 Blair, Tony 14, 373 Blanc, Mel 247 Blandeau, Agnés 412 Blandford, Steve 373, 380, 418 Blaxploitation and Brit-Lit adaptation 285, 410 Bliss, Arthur 194 blockbusters, see also high concept film 5, 288, 314, 319, 325, 333, 352, 356 Bloom, Abigail Burnham 108, 109, 393 Bluestone, George 6, 378, 382 Blu-Ray 354 Bock, Hans-Michael 400 Body film 371 Bogarde, Dick 271 Bogdanovich, Peter 270 Bohra, Sunil 364 Boileau, Pierre 13 Bollywood 362, 364, 365 Bolton, Robert 273 Bond films xiv, 269, 286–88, 289, 320, 326, 332, 333, 334, 335, 411 book illustration 37, 61, 65, 70

451

Book as object in film adaptations 180, 184, 212–14 Booker, M. Keith 15, 381 Booth, Robert W. 30 Booth, Walter R. 30, 55, 56 Bordwell, David 10, 21, 71, 75, 89, 117, 119, 121, 136, 289, 382, 388, 389, 390, 391, 393, 394, 395, 396, 404, 407, 411, 415, 416 Bosch, Hieronymous The Garden of Earthly Delights 306 The Last Judgment 306 Bosetti, Romeo 144 Bost, Pierre 257 Boston Daily Journal 43, 383 Bowie, Les 280 Bowser, Eileen 30, 71, 75, 80, 82, 89, 382, 383, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392 Boyle, Danny 9, 374 Braine, John 290, 291, 292, 293 Braithwaite, E. R. 291 Branagh, Kenneth 96, 332, 339, 340, 359, 367, 369 Brando, Marlon 298, 362 Bray Studios 280 Breen, Joseph 173, 175 Brenon, Herbert 115, 150, 151, 152, 398 Brewster, Ben 387 Brian, Mary 151 Bridges, Robert 2, 4 Brighton Conference (1978) 30 British Biograph 49, 50 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 118, 159, 172, 174, 191, 199, 272, 394 British Broadcasting Company (BBC) 149, 200, 228–34, 281, 337, 340, 351, 351, 355, 415 British Empire 14, 51, 115, 156, 201, 210, 265, 316, 346, 399 British Film Institute (BFI) xiii, 55, 379, 381, 382, 384, 386, 387, 388, 393, 399, 400, 403, 404, 405, 409, 411, 414, 416 British International Pictures 158, 161, 189 British New Wave 268, 273, 290–95, 374, 409, 411

452

GENERAL INDEX

“British” films made by American producers 17, 158, 189, 198, 207, 210 Brit-Lit (term), use of 12 Britton, Andrew 324 Britton, John 414 Broccoli, Albert 286, 287, 411 Brokaw, Tom 368 Bromfield, Louis 168 Bronson, Betty 150 Brontë, Charlotte 200 Jane Eyre 78, 175, 183, 184, 236, 237, 238, 240, 253, 245, 273, 279, 307, 341, 370, 402, 404 Brontë, Emily 271 Wuthering Heights 12, 20, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 230, 254, 260, 261, 273, 274, 287, 330, 341, 360, 375, 376, 377, 402, 408 Brook, Peter 267, 296 Brooke, Warren F. 169 Brooks, Louise 144 Brooks, Mel 284 Brosnan, Pierce 332, 333 Brown, Eric C. 320, 413 Browne, Hablot Knight 121 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett “The Cry of the Children” 99–101 Browning, Robert 61, 74, 76, 79, 389 Browning, Tod 166 Brubeck, Dave 296 Bruce, Nigel 209, 251 Bruce, Virginia 184 Brughel the Elder, Pieter 301 “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (song) 251 Bryant, Charles 115, 397 Brysac, Sharon Blair 410 Buchan, John 196, 197, 286 Buchanan, Judith 9, 50, 75, 81, 90, 380, 384, 388, 390, 391, 395 Buchowetzki, Dmitri 123 Buckstone, J. C. 385 Bulldog Drummond 288 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 13, 45, 46, 175, 191 Buñuel, Luis 253, 258, 259, 260, 264, 265, 369

Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress, The 379 Burgess, Anthony 311, 312 Burkan, Nathan 123 burlesque 40, 41, 43, 44, 69, 144, 387 Burnett, Hodgson 389 Burnett, Mark Thornton xiii, 360, 363, 413, 417, 418 Burt, Richard xiii, 330, 415 Burton, Richard 294 Burton, Tim 86, 327, 332, 353, 390 Buruma, Ian 410 Bury & Norwich Post 384 Buscombe, Edward 257, 408 Bush, Douglas 212, 404 Bush, Stephen 78, 84, 86, 96, 390 Butler Education Act (1944) 223 Byatt, A. S. 374 Byron, Lord George Gordon 23, 24, 25, 71, 211, 370 cable television 17, 321, 325, 336, 354, 355, 356, 414 Cadorette, Guylaine 415 Cagney, James 368 Cahiers du Cinema 105, 257, 381 Caine, Hall 156 Caine, Michael 268, 328 Calder-Marshall, Anna 274 Cameron, James 350 Campbell, Eddie 372 Campbell, Martin 334 Canby, Vincent 348, 416 Cannes Film Festival 262 Caton, Stephen Charles 410 Capra, Frank 201 Carlson, Veronica 280 Carné, Marcel 255, 407 Carnegie Medal 337 Carradine, Keith 274, 275 Carreras, James 280 Carroll, Lewis 386 Alice in Wonderland 66–69, 105, 147, 210, 246, 357, 360, 364 Through the Looking Glass 147 Cartelli, Thomas xiii, 418 Carter, Angela 374

GENERAL INDEX

Cartier, Rudolph 230, 231, 232, 233, 406 Cartmell, Deborah xiii, 19, 21, 152, 154, 379, 380, 381, 391, 397, 398, 413 Cassavetes, John 270 Castle, Egerton 156 Castro, Fidel 364 Catholic Church 173, 175, 320, 337, 413 Catholic Legion of Decency 175 Caughie, John 256, 257, 258, 408 Cavalcanti, Alberto 227 CBS News 413 censorship 17, 35, 74, 87, 116–18, 150, 156, 157, 159, 172, 173, 174–77, 224, 255, 383, 387, 388, 398, 403 Central Office of Information (COI) 223 Cervantes, Miguel de 96 Chadha, Gurinder 365 Chakrabarty, Bidyut 418 Chaney, Lon 88 Channel 4 323 Chaplin, Charlie 306 Chapman, James 201, 287, 403, 411 Chapman, Mary 36, 382, 383 Chase, Charley 145 Chaucer, Geoffrey 5, 85, 208, 215, 216, 217, 219, 305, 306, 383, 412 Cherchi, Paolo 121, 394 Cherotte, Batiste 47 Cherry, Brigid 167, 400 Chibnall, Steve 158, 190, 399, 402, 403 Child, Ben 417 children and literary adaptation, see also teenpics 30, 60, 61, 64, 65, 152, 174, 176, 185, 224, 231, 245–48, 276–79 China, box office in 359 Christianity, see also religion 259, 319, 328 Christie, Agatha 288 Christie, Ian 379, 385 Christie, Julie 268, 274 Chronophone sound system 387 Churchill, Winston 212

453

Ciment, Michael 412 Cimino, Michael 270 Cinecom 323 Cineguild 213, 214 cinema of attractions 16, 31, 32, 36, 37, 55, 382 CinemaScope 272 Cinematograph Films Act (1927) 17, 158, 323 Cinematograph Films Act (1938) 17, 197 Cirillo, R. 297, 411 Clair, René 189 Clampett, Bob 247 Clarke, Arthur C. 311 Clarke, Henry Savile 386 class issues 4, 15, 21, 35, 43, 61, 72, 73, 80, 86, 94, 116, 117, 145, 148, 175, 177, 182, 189, 211, 217, 219, 222, 223, 225, 226, 234, 255, 278, 279, 284, 288, 290, 291 classical Hollywood style 32, 36, 68, 71, 89, 90, 91, 104, 208, 279, 284, 382, 388, 391, 393, 396, 404, 415 Clayton, Jack 269, 290 Clayton, Susan 269 Cline, Edward F. 397 Coates, Victoria C. Gardner 395 Cobain, Kurt 369 Cocteau, Jean 261 Coen, Ethan 368 Coen, Joel 368 Cold War 243, 244, 286, 396, 406 Cole, Kai 352 Coleman, Ronald 241, 271 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 2 Collier, John Milton’s Paradise Lost Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind 320, 413 Collins, Alf 69 Collins, Wilkie The Woman in White 169, 235 colonialism 168, 277, 315 Colored Players 248 Columbia Pictures 241, 280 Columbine shootings 330, 415 Comolli, Jean-Luc 381

454

GENERAL INDEX

computer-generated imagery (CGI) 17, 60, 321, 350, 351 Conan Doyle, Arthur 13, 148, 149, 159, 159, 252, 389 “A Scandal in Bohemia” 149 “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” 208 “The Final Problem” 49 Hound of the Baskervilles 123, 239, 252, 284 A Study in Scarlet 185 conglomeration 17, 321, 326, 338, 341, 353, Connery, Sean 333 Conrad, Joseph 140, 156, 271 The Duel 274, 275, 410 Heart of Darkness 314–16 The Secret Agent 196 Victory 88, 160, 165–66, 185 conservatism of adaptation 4, 21, 50, 72, 89, 127, 137, 144, 150, 222, 227, 230, 231, 233, 235, 237, 243, 245, 252, 257, 258, 277, 287, 294, 320, 322, 324, 325, 330, 339, 341, 344, 345, 346, 361, 370, 371, 347, 397 continuity editing 32, 53, 56, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 83, 89, 90, 99, 121, 122, 140, 142, 143, 156, 181, 218, 392 Coogan, Jackie 138, 143, 397 Coogan, Steve 369 Cook, David A. 265, 270, 284, 317, 409, 410, 413 Cooper, Bradley 319, 413 Cooper, Gary 201 Cooper, Ian 410 Coppola, Francis Ford 265, 270, 281, 298, 304, 314–16, 317, 331, 332, 413 Coppola, Roman 331 Coralli, Jean 386 Corelli, Marie 85, 139 Corman, Roger 281, 370, 415 Cornell, Julian 244, 406 Corrigan, Timothy xiii, 10, 12, 13, 380, 414 Costello, Lou 239, 280

Coventry Evening Telegraph 386 Coward, Noel 13, 166, 185, 287 Cowles, Hookway 34 Craig, Cairns 343, 416 Craig, Daniel 319, 332, 333, 334 Craig, Stuart 336 Crain, William 285 Crimean War 203 Crippen, James B. 77, 389 Crofts, Stephen 364, 393, 418 Cromwell, John 166, 185 Cronenberg, David 374 Cronin, A. J. 198, 200 Crowther, Bosley 225, 247, 263, 264, 405, 407, 408 Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) 401 Cruikshank, George 34, 40, 49 Cruise, Tom 351 Cuarón, Alfonso 371 Cukor, George 177, 179, 184, 185, 234, 241, 274, 279, 286, 296 Cull, Nicholas J. 201, 403 Culture Wars 325 Curtis, Richard Skinhead Hamlet 360 Curtiz, Michael 184, 190, 277 Cushing, Peter 232, 280, 282 Czinner, Paul 191 Daily Boston Globe 401 Daily Inter Ocean, The 41, 383 Dalle Vacche, Angela 395 Dalleck, Matthew 325, 414 Dalton, Timothy 274, 332 Daly, Nicholas 47, 384 Dante The Inferno 72, 86, 87, 89, 95, 96, 104, 109, 320, 390, 391 Darling, Jean 184 Darwin, Charles 18, 42, 244 Daudet, Alphonse 77 Dauth, Brian 411 Daves, Delmer 251 Davies, Andrew 340 Davies, David Stuart 252, 407 Davies, John Howard 225 Davis, Bette 185 Davis, Virginia 147

GENERAL INDEX

Dawkins, Richard 18 de Limur, Jean 165 Deane Hamilton 167, 168 Deane-Balderston Dracula (1927) 168 De Blasi, Philip 319 DeBona, Guerric 9, 380 deconstruction 368 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe 60, 69, 98, 133, 150, 253, 259, 332, 387, 397 del Toro, Guillermo 319 Delaney, Shelagh 13, 290, 291 de Leon, Gerardo 288 Dell, Ethel M. 156 The Way of the Eagle 156 Demme, Jonathan 349 Demory, Pamela 276, 410 Denham Studios 197, 219, 245 de Palma, Brian 270 Derrikson, Scott 319 Desmond-Hurst, Brian 228 Destruction of Herculaneum, The (play) 33 Dev, Navin 357 devolution 13, 14, 373 dialoguers (early sound films with spoken dialogue) 160–62 Diawara, Manthia 407 Dibbets, Karel 399, 400 Dickens Fellowship 179 Dickens, Charles 12, 29, 70, 74, 79, 80, 81, 85, 91, 121, 122, 157, 189, 200, 208, 209, 218, 223, 230, 231, 233, 235, 271, 291, 356, 370, 374, 382, 389, 391, 396 Barnaby Rudge 387 A Christmas Carol 56, 327, 328, 385 David Copperfield 121, 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 402 Dombey and Sons 166, 185 Great Expectations 121, 226, 235, 371 Little Dorrit 121 Mystery of Edwin Drood 169 Oliver Twist 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48

455

Our Mutual Friend 121, 143 A Tale of Two Cities, 70, 140, 182, 184, 247, 271, 272, 291 Dickinson, Desmond 226 Dickinson, Margaret 409 Dickinson, Thorold 227 Dickson, Andrew 417 Die Brücke group 132 Diem, Ngo Dinh 300, 412 Dieterle, William 191 digital sound 353 digital technologies 16, 17, 60, 319, 320, 321, 327, 347, 350–53, 356, 357, 368, 373, 375 Dis, Sisir Kumar 135, 395 Disney, Walt 146, 147, 245, 247, 397, 410 Disneyland 189 Disney Studios 246, 247, 277, 322, 327, 328, 350, 352, 407 Dissanayake, Wimal 119, 358, 393, 394, 395, 417 divestiture 252 Dixieland jazz 277 Doane, Mary Ann 402 Dogme 95 375, 377 Doherty, Thomas 328, 414, 415 Dolby Surround sound 353 Donat, Robert 189, 199 Donne, John 2 Doors, The 353 Doré, Gustave 86, 390 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment 196 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887 play) 104 Dracula (1924 play) 167 Dracula (character) 168, 240, 283, 331 Dreamworks 65 Drury Lane Theatre 133 Dryden, John 2 du Maurier, Daphne 196 du Maurier, George 389 dubbing, emergence of 161–62, 163, 261, 399–400 Duffell, Peter 286 Dulles, John Foster 412

456

GENERAL INDEX

Dumas, Alexander 19, 77 The Three Musketeers, 140 Dumbrell, John 396 Dundee Courier 384 Dupont, Ewald André 245 Duras, Margaruite 304 Durgnat, Raymond 223, 226, 405 Durrell, Lawrence 274, 296 Duyu, Dan 159 DVD 325, 330, 339, 354, 356 Dwan, Allen 115, 145 Dyer, Frank 74, 388 Eady Levy (1957) 323 Eagels, Jeanne 164, 165 Ealing Studios 227 Éclair (film company) 78 Edison Studios 29, 53, 57, 58, 60, 80, 84, 85, 105, 385, 388 Edison, Thomas A. 27, 28, 53, 161, 381, 382 educational curricula and film, links between 14, 141, 178, 181 Edward, Prince of Wales (Edward VIII) 136 Edwards, Gareth 319 Edzard, Christine 341 Ehle, Jennifer 340 Eisenstein, Sergei 29, 42, 91, 147, 161, 253, 308, 377, 382, 391, 399 Eliot, George 91, 389 The Mill on the Floss 255 Silas Marner 143–44 Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men” 314 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 314 “The Waste Land” 314–15 Elliott, Kamilla 7, 379, 413 Elliott, Michael 339 Elsaesser, Thomas 10, 116, 382, 384, 393, 395 EMI Industries, Ltd. 323 Eminent Authors Incorporated 139, 140 Emson, Frank E. 48, 384 Engels, Erich 159 Era, The 48, 384

Erens, Patricia 410 Essanay (film company) 80, 149 Evans, Joyce A. 242, 406 Evans, Marc 374 Evening Standard, The 408 event films 236, 270, 326, 335, 337 Excelsior Film Company 135 Exceptional Photoplays 124 Exeter Theatre 386 exploitation, see also marketing 50, 137, 141, 142, 156, 254 Eyre, Richard 374 Ezra, Elizabeth 393 Faber, Michael 374 Fabio Romani (play) 32 Fairbanks, Douglas 140, 145, 154 Fairservice, Don 388 fairy tales 16, 58, 60, 123 Famous Players in Famous Plays 75 Famous Players-Lasky 139 fantasy genre 104, 105, 246, 249, 326, 335, 336, 338 Farnol, Jeffrey 156 Fawkes, Guy 47, 372 Federal Theatre Project (FTP) 249 Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) 382 “feerie” films 60, 385 Fellini, Federico 308, 312 Fenton, Mabel, see also Ross, Charles 40, 41–44, 383 fidelity to text 12, 18, 36, 70, 83, 84, 94–98, 103, 108, 143, 144, 178, 225, 300, 332, 346, 386 Fielding, Helen 374 Fielding, Henry The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling 267, 302–304, 316 Fields, W. C. 179–180 Figaro (production company) 299 Figgis, Mike 368 Film d’Arte Italiana 75, 88, 116 Film Daily 90, 160, 162, 179 395, 399, 400, 401 Film Index 80 film noir 223, 227, 240–42, 406 “Film on Four” 323, 339

GENERAL INDEX

Film Weekly 175 FilmGroup 281 Film-Kurier 122 Fine, Richard 140, 141, 396 Finney, Albert 277, 291, 303 Firth, Colin 340 Fisher, Terence 280 Fitch, Walter M. 79, 389 Fithian, Tod 173 Fitzmaurice, George 115 Flaherty, Robert 201 Fleet Air Arm (Royal Navy) 220 Fleischer, Dave 247 Fleischer, Max 147 Fleming, Ian 286, 287, 335, 411 Casino Royale 286, 333, 335, 411 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 277 Fleming, Victor 239 Flynn, Errol 203 Fontaine, Joan 236 Ford, John 185, 234, 251 Forest, Karl 159 Forster, E. M., 339 Fortnightly Review, The 384 Foulkes, Richard 386 Fowles, John 13, 271, 296, 366, 367, 418 Franco, Jesús 285 Frankenstein’s creature (character) 25, 281, 332 Frayling, Christopher 192, 403 Frazer, James George The Golden Bough 315 Frears, Stephen 370, 374 Free Cinema movement 290, 291 Freleng, Friz 247, 248 French Impressionism 125 French New Wave see New Wave Cinema 20, 255, 267, 276, 290–91, 408, 411 Freud, Sigmund 112, 113, 226, 405 Friedkin, William 270 Friedman, Michael xiii, 331, 415 Friedrich, Caspar David 275 Frohman, Charles 149 Fuest, Robert 274 Fukunaga, Cary 341 Fulkerson, Richard P. 39, 383

457

Fuller, Graham 219 Fussell, Paul 389 Gabbard, Krin 312, 413 Gade, Sven 123, 127, 128, 143, 395 Gainsborough Studios 158, 163, 189, 196, 400 Gallone, Carmine 133 Galsworthy, John 184, 195 Gance, Abel 159 Garbo, Greta 157, 400 Gardiner, Michael xiii, 14, 380 Garland, Alex 374 Gaudreault, Andre 30, 31, 53, 55, 382, 384, 385, 388 Gaumont (film company) 69, 75, 387 Gaumont Movietone newsreels 200 gay rights 347, 348, 348, 349 gaze, see male gaze Gehring, Wes D. 400 Geist, Kenneth 300, 412 genre films 17, 60, 70, 105, 152, 159, 166, 167, 169, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197, 234, 237, 245, 253, 268, 276–289, 335, 336, 338 genre, adaptation as 19–21 Geraghty, Christine 9, 19, 380 Gerhards, Vanessa 363 German Expressionism 124, 127, 131 German Romanticism 132 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 36 Geronimi, Clyde 407 Gibbons, Dave 372 Gibbs, Philip 156 Gibson, Mel 340, 356 Giesen, Rolf 387 Gielgud, John 347 Giest, Kenneth L. 411 Gilbert and Sullivan 39, 387 Gilbert, Arthur 69 Gillett, Philip 405 Gillette, William Sherlock Holmes (play 1899) 149, 252 Gilpin, Charles 248 Glancy, H. Mark 158, 198, 210, 212, 278, 380, 399, 403, 404, 405, 406, 410

458

GENERAL INDEX

Glave, Solomon 375 Glazer, Jonathan 374 Glenville, Peter 286 globalism; see also transnational cinema 119, 343, 358, 360, 362, 394, 408 Globe Playhouse 220 Gloucester Citizen 384 Glyn, Anthony 140, 141, 142 Glyn, Elinor 397 Godard, Jean-Luc 23, 265, 381, 411, 418 Godfrey, Peter 235 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 126 Faust 132, 360 Goetz, William 236 Gokulsing, K. Moti 395 Goldbeck, Willis 150 Goldie, Grace Wyndham 229 Goldsmith, Oliver She Stoops to Conquer 175, 389 The Vicar of Wakefield 389 Goldwyn Corporation 139, 140, 141, 142, 172, 185, 397, 402 Goldwyn, Samuel 139, 185, 397 Gorky, Maksim 253 Gorris, Marleen 341 Goulding, Edmund 236 Gounod, Charles 132 Grammaticus, Saxo Gesta Denorum 126 Graphic (magazine) 51 Gray, Mike 415 Great Depression (USA) 173 Great Northern (film company) 98 Great Recession of 1920 (Japan) 135 Green, Guy 226, 296 Greenaway, Peter 269, 347, 368, 416 Greene, Graham 13, 286, 374, 411 Brighton Rock 223, 226, 286, 341, 405 A Gun for Sale 242, 286 The Living Room 231 Our Man in Havana 286, 287 Quiet American, The 286, 298–300, 411, 412 Greene, Richard 372 Greenwich Village 345

Greiff, Lovisk 407 Griffin, Charles 296 Griffith, D. W. 16, 29, 37, 42, 76, 89, 91, 92, 93, 115, 121, 124, 135, 139, 265, 382, 387, 388, 391, 396, 397 Gross, Michael Joseph 413 Grossman, Lev 418 Guest, Val 287 Guinness, Alec 279 Gulf & Western (corporation) 322 Gunning, Tom 30, 31, 32, 53, 55, 91, 382, 384, 388, 391, 392 Guntner, Lawrence 395 Gyllenhaal, Stephen 374 “H” Certificate (UK) 174 Hagen, Julius 190 Haggard, H. Rider 191 She: History of an Adventure 34, 51–54, 191, 384 Haire-Sergeant, Lin 402 Haldane, Bert 391 Hall, Peter 267 Hall, Stuart 360, 417 Hamilton, Cosmo 156 Hamilton, Guy 386 Hamilton, Patrick 227, 231 Hammer Film Productions 174, 280, 284, 289, 410 Handmade (film company) 323 Hanks, Tom 332 Hannay, Richard (character) 288 Hansen, Mariam 397 Hanson, Bruce K. 397 Hardy, Oliver 145, 162, 400 Hardy, Thomas 91, 211, 271, 365, 389 Far from the Madding Crowd 273–75 Jude 364 Mayor of Casterbridge, The 364 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 148, 149, 301–302, 316, 364, 365 Under the Greenwood Tree 160 Harfleur, battle of 220 Harper, Sue 190, 191, 211, 212, 214, 223, 379, 403, 404, 405

GENERAL INDEX

Harris, Elmer 138 Harris, Mark 409 Harrison, Rex 279 Harry Potter xiv, 320, 326, 335, 336, 337, 338, 415 Hartford Courant 178, 401, 402 Hartl, Karl 159 Harvard University 212 Haskin, Byron 243, 245, 246 Hasso, Signe 241 Hatch, Robert 214 Hawke, Ethan 369 Hawkins, Joan 390 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 176, 396 The Scarlet Letter 330 Hay, Ian 156 Haydon, Charles 111 Hays Code, see Production Code Hays, Will 118, 172, 175, 191, 197, 401 HD (high definition) 355 Hearn, Michael 284, 410 Heath, Gordon 231 Hecht, Ben 185, 186, 188 Heckerling, Amy 20, 146, 329, 356 Heffernan, Carol Falvo 412 Heller, Zoe 374 Henderson, Brian 328, 381 Hepburn, Audrey 279 Hepburn, Katharine 177 Hepworth Company 30, 69, 76, 98, 99, 104, 105, 121, 214, 233 Hepworth, Cecil 30, 66–69, 98, 99, 214, 385, 386 Her Majesty’s Theatre (London) 50 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 126 heritage cinema 4, 20, 75, 90, 99, 157, 172, 207, 212–15, 222, 223, 227, 228–34, 267, 276, 324, 340, 341, 342–47, 355, 356, 404, 405, 415, 416 Herzberg, Max J. 181 Herzog, Werner 331 Hess, John 257, 408 Hewison, Robert 342, 415 Heyday Films 335 Heylin, Clinton 408 Heyman, David 336

459

Hicks, Seymour 191, 277, 385 high-concept film 325, 326, 338, 356, 359, 414, 415 Higson, Andrew 99, 136, 153, 213, 214, 269, 293, 294, 295, 343, 344, 346, 386, 391, 396, 398, 402, 404, 405, 409, 411, 416 Hill, John 10, 290, 323, 339, 411, 414 Hilpert, Heinz 159 Hilton, James 184, 198, 200, 201 Hinds, Tony 280 Hinds, William (Will Hammer) 280 History of World Literatures on Film, The (book series) xiii, 5, 10, 11 Hitchcock, Alfred 13, 158, 161, 195–97, 236, 254, 259, 265, 286, 298, 308, 399, 403, Hitler, Adolf 1, 212 Hjort, Mette 393, 396 Hoberman, J. 253, 407 Hoffman, Michael 340 Holderness, Graham 221, 360, 405, 417 Holinshed’s Chronicles 307 Hollingshead, John 38, 39, 383 Holt, Jennifer 322, 413, 414 Home Box Office (HBO) 355 Home Rule (Northern Ireland) 13, 269 Hood, Thomas 269 Hooper, Tom 141 Hope, Anthony The Prisoner of Zenda 156 Hopkins, Anthony 331 Hopkins, David G. 339 Hopper, Dennis 269, 270, 315 Horak, Jan Christopher 132, 395 Hornby, Nick 374 Hornsung, E. W. 156 horror film 17, 24, 70, 104, 152, 159, 166–74, 186, 204, 224, 225, 231, 237, 238–40, 261, 268, 276, 280–85, 288, 289, 301, 325, 326, 338, 351, 357, 370, 395, 400, 401, 410 Horton, William Ellis 44, 383 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 222, 235 Houseman, John 236 Howard, Leslie 185, 191

460

GENERAL INDEX

Howson, James xii, 375 Hoyt, Harry O. 115, 152 Huddersfield Chronicle 384 Hughes brothers 371 Hughes, Albert, see Hughes brothers Hughes, Allen, see Hughes brothers Hughes, John 329 Hughes, Ken 241, 287 Hughes, Rupert 139 Hugo, Victor 74, 77, 175 Hull, E. M. The Sheik 141, 156 Hulu 354 Hunt, Helen 332 Hunt, J. Roy 240 Hunter, I. Q. 403 Hunter, Kim 1 Hussey, Olivia 297 Hutcheon, Linda 7, 8, 18, 19, 149, 379, 380, 381, 397, 416 Hutchins, Peter 284 Hutchinson, A. S. M. 156 Huxley, Aldous 236, 246 “I Think I’d Better Think it Out Again” (song) 279 “I Want to Be Like You” (song) 277 Imp Company 102 imperial film 51, 201–205, 316, 343 Ince, Thomas 135 independent production 17, 75, 76, 99, 169, 183, 185, 207, 235, 252, 253, 267, 269, 280, 281, 319, 321, 323, 326, 338, 339, 344, 348, 350, 415 Internet 325, 354, 356, 357 Inter-Ocean Film Corporation 119 intertitles 67, 108, 111, 122 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 269 Irons, Jeremy 366 Irving, Washington 37 Isaacs, Jeremy 339 Isherwood, Christopher 229 Ishiguro, Kazuo 342, 374 Ishioka, Eiko 331 Italian neorealism 267, 291, 411 ITV 233, 356 Ivory, James 20, 344

Jack the Ripper 372 Jackson, Peter 5, 320, 337 Jackson, Russell 403, 412 Jackson, Wilfred 407 Jacobi, Derek 367 Jacobs, Christopher P. 393 Jacobs, Jason 229, 230, 232, 406 Jacobs, Lea 387 Jacobs, W. W. 389 Jaffrey, Saeed 344 James I 13 James, Henry 342 Jarman, Derek 269, 297, 347, 348, 349 Jarre, Maurice 273 Jarvie, Ian 190, 393, 399, 403 Jeffers, Jennifer 9 Jefferson, Joseph 383 Jeffries, Lionel 269 Jennings, Peter 368 “Jersualem” (song) 295 Joffe, Rowan 341 Johnson, Tom 400, 401 Johnston, Eric 235 Jones, Ernest 405 Jonson, Ben “To Celia” 407 Volpone 300 Jonze, Spike 18, 368 Jordan, Neil 374 Jorgens, Jack J. 263, 390, 408 Jowett, Garth S. 385 Joy, Colonel Jason 172, 173, 401 Joyce, James 312, 356 Junger, Gil 330, 331 Justice Department (USA) 322 Kafka, Franz 307 Kalamazoo Gazette 382 Kalem 80 Kanjanavanit, Ing 361, 364 Kant, Immanuel 76 Kapoor, Rajiv 418 Karloff, Boris 186, 240 Kathak dance 136 Kaufman, Charlie 18, 368 Kaufman, Lloyd 370 KBS Productions 185 Keaton, Buster 115, 148

GENERAL INDEX

Keats, John 2 Keighley, William 184 Keitel, Harvey 274, 275 Kellner, Douglas 324, 414 Kennedy, Dennis 120, 394 Kenton, Eric C. 169 Kenworthy, Joseph 118 Kerr, Charles H. M. 52 Kerr, Philip (Lord Lothian) 211 Keystone Cops 306 Kiel, Charles 71 Kineto (film company) 396 King, Basil 140 King, George 169, 191 Kipling, Rudyard 140, 156, 157, 200, 396 Captains Courageous 179 “Gunga Din” 201, 202, 204 Jungle Book, The 246 Toomai of the Elephants 201 Wee Willie Winkie 185 “The White Man’s Burden” 202 Kishi, Tetsuo 309, 310 Kiss Me Kate (Broadway musical) 250 Kit, Borys 413 Kitchen sink realism, see British New Wave 290, 411 Klinger, Barbara 417 Kloves, Steve 415 Knapp, Raymond 410 Kneale, Nigel 232, 233 Knickerbocker Theatre 96 Knight, Arthur 255, 407 Knight, G. Wilson 211, 404 Knoblock, Edward 140 Knowles, Sheridan 43, 383 Koleskinov-Jessop, Sonia 417 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen 387 Korda, Alexander 19, 158, 188, 190–94, 201, 202, 203, 214, 246, 272, 277, 280 Korda, Vincent 194 Korda, Zoltan 201, 246 Kozarksi, Richard 388 Kotwal, Kaizaad Navroze 403 Kovács, Katherine Singer 385 Kovacs, Lee 402 Kozintsev, Grigori 265, 267, 297, 413

461

Kraft, Robert T. 163 Kubrick, Stanley 269, 270, 275, 298, 304, 308, 311–14, 413 Kumar, Dilip 253 Kurihara, Kisaburo¯ 134, 135 Kurosawa, Akira 120, 135, 241, 253, 258, 262–65, 276, 298, 304, 308–11, 312, 317, 360, 363, 364, 369, 408, 413 Labour Party (UK) 223, 325, 373 Labute, Neil 374 Lacayo, Richard 418 Lachman, Harry 160 Ladd, Alan 242 Ladies’ Home Journal 177 Laemmle, Carl 166 Laemmle, Carl, Jr. 166 Lafayette Theatre 249 Laing, Stuart 409 Lake, Veronica, 242 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 42 Lanchester, Elsa 23 Land of the Midnight Sun (play) 33 Langella, Frank 331 Langley, Noel 227 Lanier, Douglas xiii, 249, 407 Lapatin, Kenneth 395 Lardner, Ring Jr. 231 laser-disks 354 Lasky, Jesse L. 141 Lassally, Walter 295 Last Days of Pompeii, The (theatrical versions) 47–48 Laughton, Charles 179, 190 Laurel, Stan 145, 146, 162, 140 Lawrence, D. H. 407 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 254–55 “The Rocking Horse Winner” 224–26 Women in Love 258, 296 Lawrence, T. E. 202, 272 Seven Pillars of Wisdom 272 Laws of Wales Acts (1532 and 1542) 14 Lazenby, George 333 Le Carré, John 286 Leakey, Philip 280

462

GENERAL INDEX

Lean, David 213, 214, 258, 272, 277, 339, 371, 403, 410 Leavesden Studios 335 lectures (accompanying silent films) 64, 73, 82–83, 90 Ledger, Heath 319 Lee, Ang 340 Lee, Christopher 280, 283 Leech, John 56 Legendary Pictures 319, 413 Lehmann, Courtney xiii, 413, 415 Leider, Emily W. 402 Leitch, Thomas xiii, 7, 9, 19, 67, 83, 102, 161, 195, 212, 379, 380, 381, 390, 392, 397, 399, 402, 404, 406 Lejeune, C. A. 222, 231, 405 Lement, Dick 296 Leonard, Andrew 354, 417 Leonard, Robert Z. 234 Lerner (Alan J.) and Loewe (Frederick) 279 Leslie, Esther 397 Lester, Richard 270 Lev, Peter 242, 252, 280, 406 Levinson, Jerrold 416 Levitow, Abe 247 Lewin, Albert 237 Lewis, Sheldon 103, 111, 112, 146 Lewton, Val 238 Li, Pingquian 159 Liaisons Dangereuses , Les 330 Library of Congress xiii, 245, 387 Library of Congress Paper Print Collection 387 Life magazine 207, 210 Lim, Song Hwee 393, 417 Linklater, Richard 355 Lionsgate (film distributor) 352 literary canon/canonicity 1, 5, 12, 13, 15, 22, 44, 137, 166, 175, 191, 195, 200, 212, 215, 223, 247, 252, 276, 278, 289, 296, 298, 305, 340, 341, 356, 357, 373, 374 Livesey, Roger (character) 1 Livy (Titus Livius Patavinus) 383 Llewellyn, Richard 234

Lloyd, David 372 Lloyd, Frank 115 LoBrutto, Vincent 413 Locarno Dance Hall 291 Locke, William J. 156 Lofting, Hugh 277 London Assembly 373 London Films 158, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194 London Studios 139 Looney Tunes 247 Lorre, Peter 247 Los Angeles Times, The 402 Loughrey, Bryan 360 Low, Rachael 73, 76, 77, 98, 158, 388, 389, 391, 399 Lower, Cheryl Bray 299, 412 Lowndes, Belloc 196 Lowry, Edward G. 396 Loy, Myrna 183, 402 Lubin Manufacturing Company 101 Lubitsch, Ernst 123, 144, 153 Lucas, George 270, 315, 350, 352, 353 Lugosi, Bela 168, 283 Luhr, William 395 Luhrmann, Baz 97, 329, 340, 353, 354, 371 Lumet, Sidney 269, 286 Lumière brothers 53, 385 Luske, Hamilton 407 Lux Film 78 Lyndon, Barré 243 Macaulay, T. B. 14, 15, 380 MacGuire, John 165, 400 MacKenzie, Scott 393, 396, 399 MacKinnon, Kenneth 325, 414 MacLean, Alistair 286 Madden, John 340 Madhubala 253, 254 Maggi, Armando 412 magic (stage) 31, 55, 60, 104, 347, 350, 385, 392 Magna Carta 50, 211 Magny, Claude-Edmonde 408 Maguire, Sharon 374 Makino (film company) 16, 137

GENERAL INDEX

male gaze, the 36, 52, 88, 334, 383 Malick, Terence 270, 302 Maltby, Richard 173, 174, 176, 385, 398, 401 Mamet, David 371 Mamoulian, Rouben 109, 113, 169, 185, 400 Man Booker Prize 342 Manchester Evening News 386 Mankiewicz, Joseph 241, 286, 298–300, 304, 411, 412 Mann, Heinrich 157, 163 Manners, J. Hartley 156 Manvell, Roger 399 Marceau Films 262 March, Fredric 240 marketing, see also exploitation 50, 67, 72, 141, 155, 168, 178, 181, 239, 252, 288, 322, Marlowe, Christopher Doctor Faustus 132, 360 Edward II 348, 410 Marshall, William 285 Marvel Studios 352 Marvell, Andrew 1 Marxism 226 mashups 280, 357 Mason, A. E. W. 201, 238, 239 Massey, Raymond 1, 194 Masterpiece Theater 33, 233 Maugham, W. Somerset 13, 140, 141, 156, 160, 213, 286 Ashenden 196, 197, 403 The Letter 31, 163–66 The Painted Veil 184 The Razor’s Edge 236 Maunder, Andrew 383 Mayer, David xiii, 30, 42, 382, 383, 397 Mazursky, Paul 270 MCA/Revue (film company) 322 MacCabe, Colin 103, 391 McCabe, Janet 417 McCaffrey, Donald W. 393 McClellan, George B. 73, 85 McEwan, Ian 374 McFarlane, Brian 391, 399 McGilligan, Patrick 399, 403

463

McGoohan, Patrick 296 McGrath, Douglas 340 McGuire, John Thomas 165, 400 McKay, Sinclair 282, 410 McKellen, Ian 340, 368 McNamee, Eoin 374 McTeigue, James 372 Meissner, Paul 122 Melford, George 166 Méliès, George 30, 34, 37, 51–55, 60, 61–65, 68, 69, 87, 104, 243, 265, 385, 386, 393 memes 18, 19, 381 Menzies, William Cameron 192 Mercer, Jack 247 Merchant, Ishmail 344 Merchant-Ivory Productions 4, 20, 99, 233, 276, 326, 339, 342–47, 416 Meredith, George 91 Mérimée, Prosper Carmen 8 Meyer, Karl E. 410 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) 20, 158, 163, 168, 172, 177, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 191, 197, 199, 210, 236, 239, 245, 250, 271, 279, 281, 399 MGM Britain 158 Micheaux, Oscar 248 Milano Films Company 72, 78 Miles, Christopher 296 Milestone, Lewis 113 Milius, John 270, 315, 316 millennials 356 Milne, A. A. 156 Milton, John 2, 211, 212, 319 Paradise Lost 185, 319, 320, 413 Miners’ Strike (1984) 342 Mingus, Charles 296 Ministry of Information (MoI) 4, 211, 215, 223, 379 minstrelsy 249 Miramax (film distributor) 331 Mirren, Helen 340 Mitchell, David 374 Modi, Sohrab 159 Monaco, James 288, 406, 409, 411, 414

464

GENERAL INDEX

Monaco, Paul 324 Monk, Claire 343, 404, 415, 416 Monnier, Albert 386 Monogram Pictures 20, 183, 191 Moody, Ron 279 Moore, Alan 371, 418 Watchmen 372 Moore, Roger 333, 335 More, Thomas 14 Morgan, Kenneth O. 325, 406, 414 Morning Post 386 Morrison, Jim 353 Morrison, Paul 341 Moss, Robert F. 386 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 118, 235, 359 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) 74, 75 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) 156, 173, 175, 180, 181, 182, 197, 398 Motion Picture World, The see Moving Picture World Motography (magazine) 77 Mottram, Ron 394 Moulin Rouge 155, 160, 398 Movie Mirror, The 140 Moving Picture World, The 73, 78, 84, 98, 105, 110, 115, 139, 143, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 399 Moyne Committee 197 MPPA, see Motion Picture Association of America MTV 262, 330, 353, 418 multilingual films 162, 163, 16, 400 Mulvey, Laura 88, 383, 391 Mumford and Sons 376 Munich Conference 199 Muppets 328 Murch, Walter 353 Murdoch, Iris 296 Murnau, F. W. 70, 103, 113, 115, 123, 131, 132, 153, 167, 265, 331, 332, 377, 395 Murphy, Audey 300 Murray, Kathleen 391, 392 Murray, Simone 6, 94, 391

Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) 382 musicals 29, 43, 155, 160, 248, 249, 250–51, 253, 268, 276–79, 288, 298, 328, 353, 364, 385 Musser, Charles 10, 29, 30, 31, 32, 53, 58, 59, 68, 81, 89, 382, 384, 385, 386, 387 Mussolini, Benito 192 mutation, adaptation as 18–19 mystery 156, 208, 251, 288 Nabokov, Vladmir 304 Nagib, Lúcia 417 Napoleon Bonaparte 74, 80, 275 Napoleonic Wars 275 Narboni, Jean 381 Narcejac, Thomas 13 Naremore, James 379, 392 narrative film, development of 81, 82, 83, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 100, 104, 105, 106, 108, 113, 122, 135, 138, 178, 185, 197 National Assembly for Wales 14, 373 National Board of Review of Motion Pictures 74, 124 national cinema (concept) 11, 16, 45, 77, 116, 117, 119, 124, 132, 137, 149, 153, 159, 163, 255, 268, 323, 363, 373 National Council of Public Morals 394 National Council of the Teachers of English (NCTE) 181, 394 National Education Association 181 National Film Registry (USA) 152, 245 National Health Service (1948), introduction of 223 National Heritage Act 342 National insurance system (U.K.) 223 national literature (concept) 11, 12, 22, 54, 72, 116, 149, 157, 330 NBC 355 Neame, Ronald 213 Negro Theatre Project 249 Neill, Roy William 208 Nelson, Tim Blake 330, 331, 415 neorealism 267, 290, 291, 296, 411 Netflix 325, 354, 356, 358, 417 Neve, Brian 406

GENERAL INDEX

New Deal 249 New Hollywood 269, 270, 281, 317, 339, 409 New Line Cinema 336, 337, 350 New Orleans jazz 277 New Wave cinema 17, 20, 255, 267, 268, 273, 276, 290–96, 303, 344, 374, 407, 408, 409, 411 New York American (newspaper) 381–82 New York City theater closings (1907) 76 New York Herald 32, 382 New York Magazine 409 New York Times, The 72, 76, 81, 89, 95, 96, 103, 124, 152, 163, 165, 175, 179, 225, 247, 319, 348, 384, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 400, 401, 402, 407, 408, 413, 416 New York University (NYU) film school 344 Newland, Paul 268, 409 Newman, Vincent 319, 413 Newman, Widgley 161 Newton, Michael 277, 410 Newton, Robert 245, 246 Niblo, Fred 116 Nichols, Mike 269, 270 Nickelodeon (magazine) 82, 390 Nickelodeon era 28, 44, 69, 70, 71, 76, 83, 116, 341, 383, 385, 387, 388, 390 Nickless, Will 34 Nielsen, Asta 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 137, 363, 395 Niven, David 1, 287 Noh theater 263, 298 noir, see film noir Nolan, Christopher 319 Nordisk 16, 121, 122, 123, 137, 394 Normandy, invasion of 221 Norrington, Stephen 371 Norris, Frank McTeague 96 Northern Ireland Assembly 373 Nouveau Roman 312 Novels in a Nutshell (Gaumont series) 75

465

Nugent, Frank 247, 407 Nunn, Trevor 340 O’Brien, Charles 400 O’Brien, Willis H. 152, 153 O’Casey, Sean Juno and the Paycock 195 O’Connor, T. P. 118, 394 O’Leary, Niamh 418 O’Neil, Kevin 372 O’Neill, Eugene 163 O’Sullivan, Maureen 180 Oates, Joyce Carol 260, 408 Oberon, Merle 185 Obscene Publications Act (1959) 255 Oedipus 405 Oldman, Gary 331 Oliver Twist (play) 34, 43, 383 Olivier, Laurence 150, 185, 227, 229, 258, 403, 405 on-demand movies 17, 325, 330, 339, 355 One Inch Punch 354 Oppenheim, E. Philips The Great Impersonation 156 Orczy, Baroness Emma 191, Oriental Production Company 135 Orion Pictures 323 Orwell, George Animal Farm 227 Nineteen Eighty-Four 228, 232, 233 Osborne, John 290, 303 Osbourne, Lloyd 143 Oscars, see Academy Award 227, 242, 279, 339 Osgerby, Bill 409 Otis, Elisa Proctor 40, 41 Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé) Under Two Flags 156 OutRage (activist group) 348 Owen, Seena 88 Paget, Sidney 397 Pagnol, Marcel 159 Pains Fireworks 47 Pakula, Alan 270 Palace, The (music hall) 50 Palm d’or (Cannes) 262

466

GENERAL INDEX

Palmer, R. Barton 197, 403, 412 Palmer, William J. 324, 368, 414, 418 Paltrow, Gwyneth 340 Panavision 270, 409 Panavision adaptations 17 20, 268, 270–76, 295, 296, 301, 311, 409 Paramount Pictures 75, 103, 109, 140, 150, 163, 165, 169, 170, 172, 174, 185, 202, 240, 244, 246, 247, 351, 400, 401, 402 Paramount anti-trust case (1948) 235, 236, 322 Paramount-Joinville 163 Parents’ Magazine 177 Parker, Albert 149 Parker, Gilbert 156 Parker, Gillian 259, 408 Parker, Oliver 340 Parkinson, David 411 Parrill, William B. 410 Parsi theater 135, 254 “part-talkers” (dialogue films) 160 Pascal, Gabriel 227 Pasolini, Pier Paulo 258, 265, 304–306, 316, 412 Pathé (film company) 16, 75, 117, 137, 140 Pathé, Charles 133 Paton, Stuart 392 Paul’s Animatograph Works 56 Paul, Robert W. 37, 45, 47, 48, 56, 60, 64, 69, 104, 385, 386 pay-per-view 354 Pearl Harbor, attack on 212 Pearson, Rebecca 72, 74, 81, 90, 388, 389, 390, 391 Peck, Gregory 251 Pelissier, Anthony 223, 225 Penguin Books 255, 405 Penn, Arthur 269, 270 period film 19, 20, 101, 102, 133, 135, 144, 178, 179, 183, 214, 215, 223, 225, 227, 252, 270, 271, 297, 339, 367, 370 Petley, Julian 406 Philadelphia Inquirer 33, 41, 382

Phillips, Gene D. 315, 413 Phoenix, River 348 Phonoscope, The 27, 381, 382 Photoplay Studies 181, 182 Pickford, Mary 148, 154 Pidgeon, Walter 244 Pierce, Jack 281 Pierson, Frank 286 Pinero, Arthur Wing 156 Pinewood Studios 271 Pinter, Harold 366 Pinto, Freida 364 Pioneer Pictures 185 Pirandello, Luigi 228 Pitt, Ingrid 280 Pixar Animation Studios 65, 327, 350 Platonism 328 Poe, Edgar Allen 169, 281 Pointer, Michael 56, 385 Poitier, Sidney 291 Polan, Dana 208, 404 Polanski, Roman 86, 265, 275, 297, 301–302, 304, 341, 361, 390, 412 Polyscope Films 61, 385 Pommer, Erich 122 Pope, Alexander 2, 211 Popeye the Sailor Man 247 Porter, Cole 250 Porter, Edwin S. 32, 57–60, 64, 148, 294, 385, 386 poster art 34, 35, 90, 170, 171, 180, 186, 187, 188 Postmodernism 366 Potter, Sally 341 Powell and Pressburger, see Powell, Michael and Pressburger, Emeric 4, 217, 219, 226, 271, 405 Powell, Michael see also Powell and Pressburger 258, 405 Prana Film Company Prawer-Jhabvala, Ruth 342, 344 pre-code film 172, 183 Preminger, Otto 286 Pressburger, Emeric see also Powell and Pressburger 405

GENERAL INDEX

prestige films 17, 20, 36, 76, 84, 102, 105, 116, 141, 144, 158, 159, 168, 174–88, 190, 191, 192, 198, 204, 220, 234, 236, 237, 245, 268, 269, 270–76, 409 “Pretty Piece of Flesh” (song) 354 Price, Vincent 284 Priestley, J. B. Benighted 168 Prima, Louis 277 Prince (musician) 353 Prince, Stephen 321, 324, 354, 413 Princeton University 300, 412 product differentiation 119, 137, 222, 338 Production Code 17, 74, 157, 159, 172, 174–76, 398, 401 Production Code Administration (PCA) 175 Promethean myth 370 “proto-heritage” cinema 17, 207, 214, 223 Proyas, Alex 319 Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich 161, 399 Pullman, Philip His Dark Materials 415, 336, 337 Puzo, Mario 287 Pyramus and Thisbe (myth) 249 quality films 16, 20, 22, 74, 75, 76, 79, 82, 90, 116, 152, 176, 190, 197, 233, 257, 271, 289, 319, 339, 340, 388 Queen’s Theatre (Manchester) 386 queer theory 347 quota quickies 17, 158, 189, 197, 399, 402, 403 race films 248–250 race, see racism and race films 79, 118, 119, 189, 202, 203, 253, 277, 294, 296, 315, 331, 414 racism 51, 202, 375–76, 397 Radford, Michael 340 Radiohead 354 Rafelson, Bob 270 Rains, Claude 277

467

Raleigh, Walter 1 Ralston, Esther 398 Rank Organization 271, 323 Rathbone, Basil 149, 208, 251, 252 Rather, Dan 368 Rattigan, Terence 227 Raw, Laurence 416 Ray, Satajit 416 Reade, Charles 389 Reagan, Ronald 322, 324, 325, 413, 414 Reardon, Basil 296 reboots, see also remakes 332, 333 Received Pronunciation (RP) 190 reception, study of 18, 71, 103, 116, 137, 154, 228, 246, 258, 293, 297, 325, 341, 344, 349, 356, 361 Red Scare 252, 299 Reed, Carol 277, 279, 286, 287, 386 Reeves, Keanu 331, 348 reflexivity see self-reflexivity Reinhardt, Max 184, 191 Reisz, Karel 290, 291, 366 Reith, John 228 religion 118, 320 remakes, see also reboots 152, 228, 234, 251, 277, 281, 285, 332, 351, 355 Renoir, Jean 159 Republic Pictures 261 Revere, Paul 144 Reynolds, David 137, 396 Rhys, Jean 370 Ricciardi, Alessia 411 Rice, Elmer 140 Richards, Jeffrey 157, 192, 203, 399, 402, 403, Richardson, Ralph 192, 195, 229, 307 Richardson, Samuel The History of Sir Charles Grandison 345 Richardson, Tony 231, 290, 296, 297, 302–304, 315, 411 Richert, William 349 Richie, Donald 263, 408 Rinehart, Mary Roberts 142 Ritchie, Guy 351

468

GENERAL INDEX

Ritt, Martin 286 Rivette, Jacques 265, 360 RKO Pictures 177, 178, 179, 185, 203, 235, 403 Roach, Hal 145 Robbins, Jerome 278 Robbins, Jonathan 418 Robertson, John S. 70, 103–12, 152 Robinson, Edward G. 241 Robinson, Gregory 385 Rockerfeller Center 218 Roeg, Nicholas 269 Rogers, Will 145 Romanek, Mark 374 Romanticism 312 Rosin, Hanna 415 Ross, Charles (see also Fenton, Mabel) 40, 41–44, 383 Rossini, Gioachino 312 “The Thieving Magpie” 313 Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac 175 Rothwell, Kenneth S. 23, 262, 347, 369, 381, 405, 408, 416, 418 Rowden, Terry 393 Rowe, Katherine xiii, 418 Rowling, J. K. 335, 336, 337, 415 Royal Cornwall Gazette 384 Royal Court Theatre 290, 303 Rozema, Patricia 340 Rumble, Patrick 412 Russell, Ken 258, 267, 269, 274, 296, 348, 370 Ryan, Henry Butterfield 396 Ryan, Michael 324, 414 Rydell, Mark 296 Sabu 246, 277 Sade, Marquis de 412 Saint George 211 Saint Paul 412 Sales, Roger 228, 406 Salt, Barry 392, 406 Saltzman, Harry 286, 287, 411 Sandberg, A. W. 121, 122 Sanders, George 279 Sanders, Julie 7, 146, 397 Sandford, Christopher 412

Sangster, Jimmy 280, 282, 283, 410 Sargeant, Amy 268, 291, 293, 409, 411 Sarris, Andrew 298, 411 Saturday Evening Post 140, 396 Saturday Review 255, 407 Saunders, Thomas J. 122, 394 Saville, E. F. 39 Sayers, Dorothy 198 Sayre, Nora 243, 406 scenario writing (see also screenwriting) 138, 142, 146, 152, 178, 179, 202, 213, 242, 399, Schall, Heinz 123, 128, 143 Schatz, Thomas 3, 10, 235, 255, 279, 406, 407 Schlesinger, John 269, 273, 274, 275, 290, 410 school shootings 330, 415 Schrader, Paul 270 science fiction (sci-fi) 27, 70, 152, 169, 191, 192, 232, 242, 243, 244, 245, 281, 288, 311, 326, 336, 338, 381, 392 Sci-Fi Network 336 Sconce, Jeffrey 212, 404, 418 scores (see also soundtracks) 116, 162, 246, 225, 249, 250, 259, 271, 273, 295, 314, 345, 353, 354, 365, 371 Scorsese, Martin 270, 281 “Scotland the Brave” (song) 189 Scott, Ridley 274, 275, 315, 410 Scott, Sir Walter 13, 236 Scottish independence vote 13 Scottish Parliament 13–14, 373 Screencraft Pictures 183 screenwriting (see scenario writing) 137, 138, 141, 156, 160, 170, 185, 193, 219, 243, 244, 286, 303, 315, 320, 340, 374, 398, 415 Scrooge (character) 56, 57, 277, 328, 331 second negatives 117 Seidler, Joseph 248

GENERAL INDEX

self-reflexivity 4, 6, 13, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 37, 144, 150, 171, 200, 241, 250, 247, 332, 362, 364, 365, 366, 370 Selig Polyscope Company 98, 101, 387 Selig Catalogue 387 Sellers, Peter 287 Selznick, David O. 20, 176, 177, 179, 198, 236, 238, 401, 402 Semenza, Greg M. Colón 308, 394, 398, 412, 415 Serkis, Andy 350 Seven Arts Pictures 322 Seydl, Jon L. 395 Shaffer, Anthony 300 Shail, Robert 269, 303, 409, 411 Shakespeare, William 2, 5, 12, 13, 20, 23, 50, 51, 70, 74, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 86, 90, 91, 97, 120, 123, 125, 126, 127, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 145, 150, 154, 157, 159, 161, 176, 190, 192, 200, 208, 208, 210, 211, 218, 219, 220, 221, 227, 230, 233, 241, 244, 245, 247, 249, 250, 250, 251, 255, 258, 259, 261–65, 278, 284, 289, 291, 296, 297, 298, 300, 304, 307, 309, 310, 311, 327, 329, 330, 339, 340, 341, 344, 347, 348, 349, 352, 354, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 367, 368, 369, 371, 372, 374, 380, 381, 384, 388, 390, 391, 394, 395, 396, 398, 403, 404, 405, 407, 408, 412, 413, 415, 416, 417, 418 As You Like It 191, 330 The Comedy of Errors 250 Hamlet 9, 22, 69, 76, 78, 120, 123–35, 137, 139, 143, 159, 226, 227, 241, 251, 259, 261, 263, 297, 308–311, 327, 328, 330, 340, 356, 357, 360, 363, 365, 370, 395, 405, 418 Henry IV 307, 348 Henry V 150, 151, 215, 219–22, 227, 236, 259, 307, 339, 348, 361, 367

469

King John 28, 37, 49–51, 136, 277 King Lear 90, 126, 241, 251, 267, 297, 339, 341, 360, 363, 381 Macbeth 69, 86, 135, 241, 249, 261–63, 297, 298, 301, 307, 360–64, 390 The Merchant of Venice 123, 133, 134, 135, 161, 307, 340 The Merry Wives of Windsor 307 Much Ado About Nothing 200, 340, 351–53, 357, 359 Othello 97, 123, 231, 249, 251, 255, 261–64, 296, 300, 307, 330, 340, 360, 365, 415 Richard III 136, 228, 259, 340, 368 Romeo and Juliet 69, 80, 84, 97, 101, 102, 123, 144, 145, 184, 267, 278, 297, 27, 329, 330, 341, 360, 387, 411 The Taming of the Shrew 123, 134, 297, 330, 398, 415 The Tempest 69, 139, 200, 244, 245, 251, 269, 297, 340, 347, 348, 251, 416 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 134, 159 Shakumi mask 263 Sharma, Shailja 312, 413 Shaw, George Bernard 13, 159, 200, 227, 229, 255 Pygmalion 255, 330 Shelley, Mary 23, 25, 168, 200, 281, 370 Frankenstein 24, 25, 167, 169, 171, 282, 332 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 23, 24, 25, 171, 339, 370 Shepperton Studios 241, 367 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 175 Rivals, The 175, 229 School for Scandal, The 175, 200 Sherry, Jamie 314, 413 Shinawatra, Thakson 361 Shinawatra, Yingluck 361, 362 Shiro, Nakagawa 135 Showtime (TV network) 356 Shulman, B. P. 172 Sidney, George 250

470

GENERAL INDEX

Sillitoe, Alan, 290, 291 Sim, Alastair 228, 277 Sim, Sheila 219, 405 “Singin’ in the Rain” (song) 313, 314 Singleton, John 329 Siodmak, Curt 238 Skal, David J. 167, 400 Sketch, The (magazine) 50, 384 Sklar, Robert 339, 415 Slaughter, Tod 169, 191, 282 Slave Market, The 36 Smiley, Jane Thousand Acres, A 241 Smith, George Albert 30, 54, 60, 59, 386 Smith, Laurajane 416 Smith, Maggie 298 Smith, Mamie 249 Snyder, Zack 372 Société Film d’art, La 75, 76, 116 Solomon, Matthew 55, 384, 385 Sondheim, Steven 278 sound, arrival and impact of 155–66 soundtracks see scores Southam, B. C. 416 special effects 30, 33, 86, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 152, 244, 248, 280, 283, 331, 332, 337, 350, 351, 371 “special relationship” see also AngloAmerican relations 11, 212, 136 Spielberg, Steven 243, 270, 336, 351, 403, 415 Springfield Republican, The 33, 382 spy film genre 191, 208, 252, 276, 286–88, 289 Sragow, Michael 415 St. Pierre, Paul Matthew 387 Staiger, Janet 10, 71, 89, 382, 388, 391, 393, 396, 404, Stalin, Joseph 253 Stam, Robert 7, 18, 23, 103, 137, 170, 367, 380, 381, 384, 392, 396, 401, 406, 411, 418 Stamp, Shelley 71, 388 Star Films 34, 69, 382, 385 Star Films Catalog 382 Star-Universal films 144

Steel, Dawn 326 Steinbeck, John 113, 234 Steinhoff, Hans 159 Stereokino (theater) 253 Stern, Gladys B. 178, 401 Sterne, Lawrence The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 320, 341, 368, 369 Stevens, George 201 Stevenson, Robert (director) 212, 236, 253 Stevenson, Robert Louis 168, 185 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 70, 72, 85, 102, 103–14, 123, 141, 145, 146, 152, 168, 239, 284, 285, 351, 370, 372, 392 Kidnapped 185 Treasure Island 84, 95, 143, 184, 245, 246, 307, 328 Stiles, Julia 330 Stockton, Elias Boudinet 95, 391 Stoker, Bram Dracula 131, 166, 166, 168, 169, 171, 174, 240, 281–84, 285, 331, 332, 400 Stokes, Melvyn 385 Stone, Oliver 325 Stonehill, Brian 255 Stoppard, Tom 340, 370 Storey, David 290, 291 Storm, J. P. 387 Stow, Percy 66, 67–69, 70 Stradling, Harry Sr. 237 Straueuen, Wanda 382 Streep, Meryl 366 Street, Sarah 190, 402, 403, 409 String of Pearls, The (penny dreadful) 169 Stuart, Mel 269 Studio Relations Committee (SRC) 118, 172, 173, 174, 175 Sturridge, Charles 339 subtitles, emergence of 82, 161, 162, 170, 400 Suez Crisis (1956) 272, 290 Sullivan, Thomas Russell 104 surrealism 260, 312, 316

GENERAL INDEX

Svankmajer, Jan 360 Svetov, Marc 240, 406 Swann, Paul 214, 404 Sweet, John 219 Swift, Graham 374 Swift, Jonathan Gulliver’s Travels 61–66, 175, 247, 385, 386 Swinging London 268 Sydney Morning Herald 395 Sykes, Peter 280 tableaux vivants 35, 36, 58, 70, 121, 122, 382, 383 “Talk Show Host” (song) 354 Talwar, R. C. 253 Tarantino, Quentin 23, 368 Tarkington, Booth 176 Tarrant, Richard 296 Tate, Sharon 301 Taylor, B. F. 409, 411 Taylor, Sam 154, 166, 398 Taylor, William Desmond, 96 Taymor, Julie 340, 351 Technicolor 177, 185, 220, 228, 237, 245, 251, 259, 407 teenpics 326, 328–331, 414, 415 television 17, 19, 200, 207, 228–234, 245–246, 252, 265, 269, 271, 272, 280, 283, 321, 322, 323, 325, 328, 336, 349, 352, 354–356, 373, 377, 399, 406, 415, 417 Temple, Shirley 185 Tenniel, John 66, 364, 386, 387 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 2, 70, 91, 123, 134, 135, 144, 201, 203, 211, 304, 332 “The Charge of the Light Brigade” 201 “Enoch Arden” 135, 203, 332 “Lady Godiva” 123, 144 Tessier, Max 301 Thackeray, William Makepeace 91, 175, 183, 185, 200, 219, 311 The Luck of Barry Lyndon 311 Thammasat University Massacre 361

471

Thanhouser Film Corporation 75, 78, 84, 85, 90, 99, 100, 101, 104, 121, 126, 233, 392 Thatcher, Margaret 4, 268, 322, 324, 325, 341, 342, 343, 404, 415, 416 “The End” (song) 353 “The Enemy” (song) 376 theater, relationship of film to 16, 17, 27–70, 150, 151, 154, 160, 161, 166, 167, 169, 191, 192, 200, 220, 221, 228–32, 245, 249, 261, 263, 284, 285, 290, 296, 298, 298, 303, 304, 309, 314, 361, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 386, 387, 405, 417 Third Cinema 364 Thomas, Bob 407 Thomas, Dylan 341 Thomas, Ralph 271 Thompson, Emma 340 Thompson, Kristin 10, 71, 75, 89, 117, 119, 136, 382, 388, 389, 390, 391, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 404, 407, 416 THX 352 Time (magazine) 372 Tobis-Klangfilm sound process 163 Today’s Cinema 400 Tolkien, J. R. R. 337, 338 The Lord of the Rings 337 Tolstoy, Leo 77 Tomkie, Kate 363, 418 Tony Awards 250 Torres, Daniel Díaz 364 Touchstone Pictures 327 Tourneur, Jacques 146, 238, 240 Tourneur, Maurice 88, 89, 95, 138, 141, 143 “tradition of quality” 22, 254, 257, 291–292 translation, adaptation as 13, 78, 79, 95–96, 97, 104, 111, 137, 138, 391, 392 transnational cinema, see also globalism 117, 119, 120, 153, 268, 363, 393, 394, 417, 418 Travers, P. L. 277 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 37, 49–51

472

GENERAL INDEX

Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry 222 trick films 16, 30, 35, 53, 55–69, 70, 104, 384, 385, 387 Trollope, Anthony 91 Troma Entertainment 86, 370–371 Trotti, Lamar 156, 157, 172, 175, 398, 401 Truffaut, François 22, 195, 225, 254, 255–257, 290, 308, 312, 408 “Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma” 254, 255–257 Tushingham, Rita 293 Tuttle, Frank 242, 286 Twain, Mark 77, 96 Tweedie, James 408 tweens, see also teenpics 325 Twickenham Studios 189, 190, 191, 402 Two Cities Films 213 Tykwer, Tom 374 Udvadia 135 UFA 16, 122, 132, 137, 153, 163, 400 UFA-Aubert 153 UK Film Council 365 Ulff- Møller, Jens 399 Ulmer, Edward G. 241 Underhill, Harriette 143 Unione Cinematographica Italiana 133 United Artists 185, 220, 246, 262, 299 Universal Studios 24, 144, 150, 166–171, 173, 174, 208, 238, 239, 240, 250, 252, 280, 281–284, 322, 332, 351, 392 universal film, fantasy of 16, 116–117, 118, 132, 137, 139, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 165, 325, 338, 352, 359, 361 Universal horror 24, 166–171, 173, 174, 238, 239, 240, 280, 281–284, 332, 351 University of Southern California (USC) 344 uplift movement 16, 28, 30, 71, 72–94, 116, 320 Urban, Charles 69

Urrichio, William 72 US Production Code 17, 74, 157, 159, 166, 172–173, 175, 183, 320, 398, 401 Usai, Paulo Cherchi 121 Ustinov, Peter 277 Van Dyke, Dick xi, 278 Van Sant, Gus 348–349 Vardac, A. N., 383, 387 Variety 122, 394, 405 Vasey, Ruth 393 vaudeville 29, 31, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 65, 69, 386 Vaudeville Theatre (London) 386 VE Day 223 Venice Film Festival 261 Verma, Rajiva 135, 395 Vermeer, Johan 275 Verne, Jules 33, 243 Around the World in Eighty Days 33 Vertov, Dziga 161, 399 VHS, see video video 322, 325, 353, 356, 385, 393, 408, 414, 418 video games 357, 373 Vidor, Charles 407 Vidor, King 139, 198 Viet Minh revolt 299 Vietnam War 299, 300, 314, 315, 320, 409, 412, 414 Villarias, George 166 Vining, Edward P. 126, 127 Viscount Mersey 214 Viswanathan, Gauri 15, 380 Vitagraph Studios 41, 74, 82, 83, 84, 85, 96, 101, 117, 233, 319, 320, 386, 388, 392 Vitali, Valentina 393 Vitaphone 116, 162 VJ Day 234 Voights-Virchow, Eckart 418 Volkoff, Alexandre 133 Voltaire 126 Von Stroheim, Erich 96, 116, 119 “Voodoo Macbeth” (play) 249 Vylenz, DeZ 418

GENERAL INDEX

Wachowski, Andy, see Wachowskis Wachowski, Lana, see Wachowskis Wachowskis 372, 374 Waldman, Harry 400 Wallace, Edgar 159, 166, 201 The Informer 159 Wallace, Inez 238 Walpole, Hugh 179, 402 Walsh, Raoul 368 Wan, William 417 Wancang, Bu 159 Warde, Earnest 392 Warde, Frederick 392 Warner Brothers 162, 166, 174, 184, 190, 212, 247, 279, 311, 319, 320, 322, 335, 337 Warner, Jack 162 Warner, Rick 391, 392 Warren, F. Brooke 169 Warwick Trading Company Catalogue 384 Washington Post, The 417 Wasserstein, Bernard 404 Watson and Webber 116 Watt, A. P. 149 Waugh, Evelyn 296, 304 Webling, Peggy 168, 170 Webster, John 368 The Duchess of Malfi 368 Weidman, Jerome 241 Weimar Cinema 122–132 Weinstein, Joshua I. 399 Weitz, Chris 337 Welles, Orson xi, 236, 249, 258, 259, 261–262, 263, 264, 265, 304, 307–308, 310, 316, 369, 408, 413 Wellman, William A. 251 Wells, H. G. 168, 169, 170, 192–195, 243, 288, 360, 406 The Island of Dr. Moreau 169, 288 The Shape of Things to Come 192 The War of the Worlds 243–244 Welsh, Irvine 374 Weltzel, Edward 110, 145 Wenzler, Franz 159 Westall, Claire 14, 380

473

Western Times 386 westerns 19, 80, 183, 201, 242, 251, 261, 270, 407 Weston, Jessie 315 Whale, James 23–25, 168, 171, 282, 284 Wharton, Edith 175 Whedon, Joss xii, 351–352, 357 Whelehan, Imelda 379, 380, 391, 397 White, Grace Miller 148 Tess of the Storm Country 148 Whitechapel murders 104 Whiting, Leonard 297 Whitman, Walt 396 Whittington, Dick 384 “Why Can’t You Behave” (song) 251 Wid’s Film Daily 90, 395 Wiene, Robert 125 Wilcox, Fred 244 Wilde, Oscar 88, 159, 219, 229, 237, 239 The Importance of Being Earnest 159, 229 Lady Windermere’s Fan 134, 159 The Picture of Dorian Gray 237 A Woman of No Importance, 159 Wilder, Billy 288 Wilder, Gene 284, 288 Wilder, Thornton 234 Willemen, Paul 393 Williams, Linda 390 Williams, Tennessee 234 Williamson, A. M., see also Williamson, C. M. 156 Man without a Face 156 Williamson, C. M., see also Williamson, A. M. 156 Willinger, Byron 319 Wills, Martin 401 Wilson, Frank H. 249–250 Wilson, Rob 119, 358, 393, 394, 417 Winterbottom, Michael 341, 364–365, 368–369, 418 Wise, Robert 239 Wollen, Tana 343, 416

474

GENERAL INDEX

“women’s films” 19, 20, 185, 341, 374, 414 Wood, Linda 190, 409 Wood, Robin 324, 414 Woodbridge, George 280 Woodfall Film Productions 302 Woodward, John 414 Woolf, Virginia 341 Worcester Daily Spy, The 33, 382 Worcestershire Chronicle 386 Wordsworth, William 2, 211, 404 “It is not to be thought of” 211 Working Title Films 323 World War 1 16, 77, 117, 121–133, 136, 137, 139, 153, 338, 358 World War 2 1, 4, 5, 17, 159, 194, 199, 200, 205, 207–222, 223, 226, 227, 229, 231, 234, 235, 236, 246, 247, 252, 253, 255, 258, 259, 265, 268, 271, 290, 298, 309, 374 Wray, Ardel 238 Wright, Joe 20, 276, 340, 374

Wuxia 365 Wyatt, Justin 338, 339, 414, 415 Wyler, William 20, 185–188, 210, 258, 273, 296, 375, 376, 377 Xiang, Adrian Song 399 Xiaogang, Feng 365, 418 Yordan, Philip 241, 242 Young, Harold 191 Young, Roland 195 Youth films, see teenpics YouTube 356 Yu, Sun 159 Zangwill, Israel 156 Zeffirelli, Franco 267, 297, 329, 340, 356, 371, 411, 413 Zeiger, Susan 379 Zemeckis, Robert 332, 351 Zemka, Sue 42, 43, 383 Zola, Émile 77 Zuckor, Adolph 75