Topic 61 – The influence of
cinema in the spread of literary
production in english language
1 INTRODUCTION
2 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CINEMA IN THE EXTENSION OF THE LITERARY
PRODUCTION IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE
2.1 Film versus literature
2.2 The adaptation of literature in cinema
2.3 Importance of the novel as a source
2.4 Attitude towards literary adaptations
2.5 Film adaptation
A Elision and interpolation
B Interpretation as adaptation
C Theatrical adaptation
D Television and other theatrical adaptation
E Comic book adaptation
F Adaptations from other sources
G Reverse adaptation
H Other adaptive processes
2.6 Historical outline of adaptations
A Silent Era
B Early sound cinema
C Conventional Hollywood approach
D Independent film-makers
3 ENGLISH LITERATURE ON SCREEN
3.1 Shakespeare on screen
4 FILM NOIR: THE HARD-BOILED SCHOOL ON SCREEN
5 STUDY GUIDE
6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 INTRODUCTION
Let´s begin this topic with two quotations:
“My task … is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is
before all, to make you see“ (Joseph Conrad ,1897); and “the task I’m trying to achieve
above all is to make you see.” (D. W. Griffith ,1899)
Cinema should by now have attained some measure of cultural respectability. But many
literary critics still view film at worst as the illegitimate offspring of theatre and
photography, and at best as a vulgar, commercial medium, capable very occasionally of
achieving its own aesthetic identity; while film theorists tend to value work that is the sole
creation of writer-director. But both revere the same pantheon of film-makers and disdain
film adaptations of novels, especially when those novels are much-loved classics.
Films adapted from novels typically invite unfavourable comparison with literary originals,
from film critics, newspaper reviewers and audiences alike. Critics see film adaptations of
novels as fundamentally flawed, as they are not original, cinematic conceptions; journalists
and audiences react with disappointment at superficial dissimilarities, dismayed by casting
decisions, inevitable compression and the loss of favourite characters or incidents. Such
films are often judged by the degree to which they adhere to or diverge from their literary
source material – the film seen either as ‘a remarkably faithful adaptation’ or one that ‘fails
to capture the spirit of the original.’ But what is it that they are supposed to be faithful to? If
there are potentially as many readings of a text as there are readers, then might not film
adaptations be regarded in the same light, as ‘readings’ of or ‘essays’ on their source texts?
Cinema began just over 100 years ago with the Lumière Brothers’ film of workers leaving a
factory. This revelation was rapidly followed by the first fictional mini-narratives. The first
proto-genre to emerge, then, was realism. By 1905, Georges Meliès, in Le Voyage dans la
Lune, had initiated the cinema’s alternative, carnivalesque tradition, using the technical
capabilities of the medium to realise dreams and fantasies. At that moment it might have
seemed that it was realism which would be the dead end and that the cinema’s power to
represent the imaginary would give rise to the mainstream. Yet realism has remained the
dominant mode: for every Matrix or Mission Impossible, every year hundreds of films are
produced which go on reflecting the real world, or recreating real worlds of the past. And it
is the realist tradition of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel that has most
frequently provided source material for film-makers, particularly in British and European
cinema. Film-makers continue to plunder the library for novels that have not yet been
adapted, or that might profitably be remade. Realist novels, rich in plot and strong in
characterisation, have been the model for a cinema with literary aspirations. Modernist
fiction might seem more resistant to adaptation, but few novels are regarded as ‘unfilmable’
and the tradition persists, with film-makers queuing up to acquire the film rights for the
latest best-sellers.
The novelists most consistently preferred by the moviemakers from the 1930’s are those
who have sometimes chosen to work within clearly defined narrative genres. From the
19 century the list includes Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins,
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Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells and, of course, Dickens. In the 20 century they have
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been Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham and a host of other popular
writers. However, the last three decades of cinema have also seen some ambitious attempts
by talented filmmakers to follow a middle course between the approach of Godard and
other members of the avant-garde and simple plot-lifting. Films like Death in
Venice and The Go Between, the Granada television series Brideshead Revisited, or those
movies based upon E.M. Forsters´s novels (Maruice, A Passage to India, Howard’s
End and A Room with a View) are comparatively true to their originals.
In the first part of this topic we will study the influence of the cinema in the extension of the
literary production in English language, dealing with the issues of film versus literature, the
adaptation of literature in cinema, the importance of the novel as a source, the different
attitudes towards literary adaptations and the historical outline of adaptations. In the second
part of the topic we shall analyze the presence of the English and American literature on
screen, providing the best examples.
2 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CINEMA IN THE EXTENSION OF THE LITERARY
PRODUCTION IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE
2.1 Film versus literature
We are used to regarding narrative sound film as a vivid two-dimensional representation of
reality, and therefore as a lazier, more passive experience than reading, the process of
absorbing it seems almost too easy. In spite of devices like flashbacks the temporal line in
the cinema is overwhelmingly present, what we see on the screen is on the act of happening,
we are given the gesture itself, not the account of it. Like other arts, motion pictures have
developed a rich language of communication, central to which is the ability to rearrange
images of space and time to produce a totally new reality.
Both film and print surround us everyday of our lives and can hardly be avoided in modern
society. As a result they are tremendously important forces in our culture. Their role can
indeed be dangerous, since they can communicate lies and distortions as easily as truth and
wisdom. But while print can be a potentially malign force, it can also be a major liberating
one, for literacy and the popularity of literature have been among the most significant
democratic and egalitarian forces in the history of humanity in the last five or six centuries.
Film, which does not even demand that its audience have so complex a skill as the ability to
read, is even more anti-elitist.
Confronted with today’s mass audience films, which create a high sensory impact by using
an extremely elaborate and expensive battery of special visual effects, we are inclined to
forget that watching a film –even narrative entertainment films like the Indiana
Jones trilogy– is in certain respects as sophisticated a process as reading. Audiences, it
seems, have to be educated in the disciplines of “reading” film rather as they are taught their
letters. Film is not simply an easy, direct representation of reality, it involves subliminal
processes of mental self-discipline –in particular the ability to see visual shapes as symbols–
quite comparable to the deciphering of linear type. The various similarities that
psychologists have found in the way we read film and read books may go some way
towards explaining why the early filmmakers turned with such enthusiasm to the novel as a
source of inspiration. Both cinema and the novel originated as entertainments, together they
unrivalled in their abilities to create private enclosed worlds for the spectator or reader.
Ever since film arose as story telling art, there has been a tendency by filmmakers, writers,
critics and audiences to associate it with literature, as well as an insistence by many people
that the association is false or deceptive. Not the least fascinating aspect of making such a
connection is that it is so controversial. The assumption that there are fundamental
relationships between narrative film and written narrative literature that are worth pursuing
is not one that everyone shares, certainly not every filmmaker or writer. Ingmar Bergman or
Norman Mailer, for example, claim that film has nothing to do with literature, yet numerous
filmmakers from Griffith and Eisenstein to Resnais and Fellini have talked about the literary
ramifications of their films. Many writers have either openly acknowledged their attempt to
adapt cinematic approaches or techniques to their own work or have agreed with the
novelist Graham Greene that “there is no need to regard the cinema as a completely new art;
in its fictional form it has the same purpose as the novel, just as the novel has the same
purpose as the drama”. Dealing with the similarities between cinema and literature critics
also refer to the opinions expressed by the novelist Joseph Conrad and the filmmaker D.W.
Griffith. In the Preface to The Niger of the “Narcissus” Conrad said: “My task which I am
trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel –
it is, before all, to make you see. That, and no more, and it is everything”. This passage is
cited in studies of film and literature because it closely parallels a remark made almost two
decades later by Griffith: “The task I am trying to achieve is above all to make you see”.
2.2 The adaptation of literature in cinema
The central topic of this theme is the adaptation in film of material from another medium
such as literature, composed of works like novels, short stories and plays. Through the
cinema, and especially through the Hollywood pictures, the world audience has been
introduced to the major woks of British and American literature. Actually, almost the all the
works of the classical English and American literature, as well as modern 20 century
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literature, both that considered serious and popular fiction, have been adapted to movies at
some stage. From Shakespeare and Dickens, whose plays and novels respectively make
them the most adapted authors, to 20 century authors which have achieved almost more
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popularity in the cinema than in the print such as Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler and
Ian Fleming, literature is profusely represented in films, and the plots and characters from
English and American literature has become part of the world’s popular culture through
them.
More significant perhaps has been the influence of cinema on prose fiction: from Joyce to
Graham Greene to Robert Coover, modernist and post-modernist writers have
acknowledged, and sometimes borrowed from, the vocabulary of film, employing literary
equivalents of montage, cross-cutting, flashbacks and so on. But remarkably little has been
written on the problematic issue of the film adaptation, perhaps because the filmed novel is
such an awkwardly hybrid genre.
In adapting a novel, the screenwriter is always faced with difficult choices: what to
include/exclude, how to compensate for necessary excisions, how to conflate characters and
incidents, how to show what the writer tells. Underlying these decisions are the contrasting
circumstances of reading and watching. It is worth reminding ourselves – and our students –
that a novel will take many hours to read; that unless we are impelled to stay up all night to
finish it, the novel will be read in chunks, over a period of days or weeks; that reading is an
intimate experience, usually undertaken in private; and that the reader is always at liberty to
re-read, to skip, to jump ahead and generally to control the experience. The experience of
watching a film, on the other hand, is concentrated into two or three hours at most; it takes
place on a single, uninterrupted occasion in a darkened auditorium in the company of
dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of strangers; and the viewer is a captive audience, with no
choice but to follow the relentless progress of the action on the screen. Of course, the
circumstances of watching a film on video or DVD offer the viewer – and the teacher – a
measure of control, but even freeze-frame and rewind facilities can do little to impede the
headlong advance of film.
Both narrative fiction and narrative film give their audiences a strong sense of place,
making use of recognisable, often actual, locations. As well as places, we like to feel that
we recognise characters, and in both novel and film we measure the success of their
representation according to the psychological consistency of their behaviour. Both novel
and film tell stories: we go on watching, as we go on reading, to find out what happens next,
or when we are familiar with the conventions of the genre, to find out how it happens.
Novels, it seems, are adapted for the screen in three ways, which might be described by
analogy with modes of literary translation. The first is comparable to literal translation,
where the film-maker tries to render the novel as faithfully as possible in a different
‘language’ (e.g. Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies or Kenneth Branagh’s tellingly titled Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein). Though viewers familiar with the novels will lament the omission
of particular scenes or characters, they will tend to approve of the way in which such films
have stayed close to their source material. The second category resembles the kind of
translation which seeks to reinterpret, or at least to comment on the original work (e.g. Mike
Nichols’s Catch-22 or Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu). Here the reader attached to the original
work is likely to be disappointed, not just by superficial changes, but by the added layers of
interpretation. The third kind of adaptation is more like an imitation than a translation,
where the novel provides a springboard for a film that may be only very loosely based on it
– say, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, inspired by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or
Amy Heckerling’s transposition of Jane Austen’s Emma to an American high school setting
in the movie Clueless.
While all three types of adaptation can be used in different ways to complement students’
reading of a novel, it is perhaps the first, the ‘faithful translation’, which lends itself most
readily to exploitation in the classroom, and yet which poses the most problems. The
adaptation that ‘sticks close to the original’ is actually performing a kind of sleight of hand,
since the similarities are likely to be quite superficial – ‘sticking close to’ the story and the
setting – while what it seems must be ‘lost in translation’ is most of what makes reading a
novel such a peculiar and peculiarly personal experience – the one-to-one relationship
between narrative voice(s) and reader, and all the effects produced through the use of
language.
2.3 Importance of the novel as a source
Some of the important impulses to adaptations have not been literary at all, but they have
been financial or derived from the sheer need to come up with material to be filmed. In any
case, the impulses have exerted a major impact on motion picture history, since most
movies are adaptations of material from other media, not productions of original
screenplays. And far and away the single most important medium has been the novel.
Studies have produced varying figures, but it seems probable that for most years the
production of American movies based on novels is around thirty percent. Actually, the
figures would be higher if we counted only major or prestige productions. If the Academy
Awards tell us anything about the American film industry, it is interesting that since their
creation in 1927 more than three-quarters of the awards for best picture have gone to
adaptations. And the box office has also traditionally favoured novels. The list of the twenty
most successful films of the 1950’s –according to statistics– featured fifteen adaptations of
novels, from both classic novels like Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea and contemporary best-sellers like Peyton Place and From Here to Eternity.
By the 1960’s this figure dropped as low as nine out of twenty (Thunderball, Mary
Poppins) and in the 1970’s the twenty most popular films included only six novel
adaptations. However, during the 1980’s and the beginning of the 1990’s there has been a
recovery of literature back on the screen. It is also worth remembering that today’s major
films like Star Wars, Close Encounters or E.T. do not start life as a novel, but they usually
end up as paperback novelisations, or some of them are novels at first, but from the very
beginning they were written to end up as films, such as Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.
Those figures make the interest of filmmakers in works of fiction quite understandable:
producers assume that a successful or famous novel will have a substantial audience who
will want to see the movie too. For example, in the US in the last fifty years, about 80
percent of the best-selling novels for each year have been made into films. But other
considerations also explain that interest. Especially during the days of the prime of the
Hollywood studios in the 1930’s and 1940’s movies were being turned out by the hundreds
each year, and there did not seem to be all that many good original story ideas available.
Therefore they resorted to literature, where novels, short stories and plays have produced
over the last few centuries an untold number of works on which filmmakers could base
movies. Furthermore, those stories had already been tested for public acceptance in the
printed form, unlike original scripts.
2.4 Attitude towards literary adaptations
Novels are frequently adapted for films. For the most part, these adaptations attempt either
to appeal to an existing commercial audience (the adaptation of best sellers and the
“prestige” adaptation of works) or to tap into the innovation and novelty of a less well
known author. Inevitably, the question of “faithfulness” arises, and the more high profile
the source novel, the more insistent are the questions of fidelity.
However, motives of profit or rationales in terms of need do not necessarily coincide with
questions of artistic value, questions asking not merely why one might adapt a work of
written literature, but also whether doing so is either legitimate or worthwhile.
Those who have argued against the practice include prominent filmmakers such as Ingmar
Bergman, writers such as Virginia Woolf and numerous critics, who cite all the profound
differences in the media entailed in transferring a given story from an art to another. The
French director Alain Resnais has said that for him adapting a novel for one of his films
would seem “a little like reheating a meal”, since the writer of the book has already
“completely expressed himself”. But a similar comment might have been made to
Shakespeare by one of his contemporaries convincing him of the impropriety of adapting
stories from other media for his plays. Had such an attempt been successful we would not
have Hamlet, As You Like It, King Lear and many others of his plays.
We cannot in the same way avoid the recognition that important filmmakers have in fact
adapted novels into films which are themselves valuable and distinguished, and
occasionally masterpieces. Presumably, people who decry the practice of adaptation do not
reject some of the most artistically successful films of some of the foremost filmmakers in
movie history such as Von Stroheim, De Sica, Ford, Welles, Wyler, Hitchcock, Bresson,
Kubric and many others. For their part, prominent writers have also worked on attempts
either to adapt their own novels (as Steinbeck, Greene, Fowles and Nabokov) or to write
honourable screenplays based on the works of other novelists (as Fitzgerald, Huxley,
Capote and Pinter).
2.5 Film adaptation
Film adaptation is the transfer of a written work to a feature film. Adaptation introduces
complications in audience perception and aesthetics. The most obvious and common form
of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a film, but film adaptation includes
the use of non-fiction (including journalism), autobiography, comic book, scripture, plays,
and even other films. From the earliest days of cinema, adaptation has been nearly as
common as the development of original screenplays.
A Elision and interpolation
Erich von Stroheim attempted a literal adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague in
1924 with his film, Greed. The resulting film was over sixteen hours long. A cut of the film
only eight hours long, then one running to four hours, appeared. Finally, the studio itself cut
the film to around two hours, resulting in a finished product that was entirely incoherent.
Since that time, few directors have been foolish enough to attempt to put everything in a
novel into a film. Therefore, elision is nearly mandatory.
In some cases, however, film adaptations will also interpolate scenes or invent characters.
This is especially true when a novel is part of a literary saga. Incidents or quotes from later
or earlier novels will be inserted into a single film. Additionally, and far more
controversially, film makers will invent new characters or create stories that were not
present in the source material at all. Given the anticipated audience for a film, the
screenwriter, director, or movie studio may wish to increase character time or invent new
characters. For example, William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Ironweed, had a
very small section with a prostitute named Helen. Because the movie studio anticipated a
female audience for the film and had Meryl Streep for the role, Helen became a significant
part of the film. However, characters are also sometimes invented to provide the narrative
voice.
As Sergei Eisenstein pointed out in his landmark essay on Charles Dickens (“Dickens,
Griffith, and the Film Today”, Film Form), films most readily adapt novels with
externalities and physical description: they fare poorly when they attempt the Modern novel
and any fiction that has internal monologue or, worse, stream of consciousness. When
source novels have exposition or digressions from the author’s own voice, a film adaptation
may create a commenting, chorus-like character to provide what could not be filmed
otherwise. Thus, in the adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the
director created a contemporary Englishman in a romance with a woman to offer up the
ironic and scholarly voice that Fowles provided in the novel, and the film version of
Laurence Sterne’s “unfilmable” novel, Tristram Shandy had the main actor speak in his
own voice, as an actor, to emulate the narrator’s ironic and metafictional voice in the novel.
Early on, film makers would rely upon voice over for a main character’s thoughts, but,
while some films (e.g. Blade Runner) may self-consciously invoke the older era of film by
the use of voice over, such devices have been used less and less with time.
B Interpretation as adaptation
There have been several nominees for non plus ultra of inventive adaptation, including the
Roland Joffe adaptation of The Scarlet Letter with explicit sex between Hester Prynn and
the minister and Native American attacks on Salem (changes introduced, according to Joffe,
to increase the market and to make an entirely new morality tale out of the novel). At nearly
the same time, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders was creatively adapted to make it a romance.
A television mini-series of Gulliver’s Travels changed the sexes of characters, made some
vanish, and changed the character of Master Bates from a single 3 sentence obscene pun
into a villain. The Charlie Kaufman and “Donald Kaufman” penned Adaptation was an
intentional satire and commentary on the process of film adaptation itself. All of these cases
of “outrageous” or “unfaithful” adaptation were interpretations of the source work. Joffe
argued that his changes were a recasting and revitalizing of Hawthorne’s point. The creators
of the Gulliver miniseries interpolated a sanity trial to reflect the ongoing scholarly debate
over whether or not Gulliver himself is sane at the conclusion of Book IV. In these cases,
adaptation is a form of criticism and recreation, as well as translation.
Change in adaptation is essential and practically unavoidable, mandated both by the
constraints of time and medium, but how much is always a balance. Some film theorists
have argued that a director should be entirely unconcerned with the source, as a novel is a
novel, while a film is a film, and the two works of art must be seen as separate entities.
Since a transcription of a novel into film is impossible, even holding up a goal of
“accuracy” is absurd. Others argue that what a film adaptation does is change to fit
(literally, adapt), and the film must be accurate to either the effect (aesthetics) of a novel or
the theme of the novel or the message of the novel and that the film maker must introduce
changes where necessary to fit the demands of time and to maximize faithfulness along one
of these axes.
C Theatrical adaptation
In addition to adaptation from novels, films frequently use plays as their sources. William
Shakespeare has been called the most popular screenwriter in Hollywood. Not only are
there film versions of all of Shakespeare’s plays, but there are multiple versions of many of
them, and there are films adapted from Shakespeare’s plays very loosely (such as West Side
Story, Kiss Me Kate, O, and 10 Things I Hate about You, as well as Akira Kurosawa’s
adaptations in Throne of Blood and Ran). Similarly, hit Broadway plays are frequently
adapted, whether from musicals or dramas. On the one hand, theatrical adaptation does not
involve as many interpolations or elisions as novel adaptation, but, on the other, the
demands of scenery and possibilities of motion frequently entail changes from one medium
to the other. Film critics will often mention if an adapted play has a static camera or
emulates a proscenium arch. Laurence Olivier consciously imitated the arch with his Henry
V (1944), having the camera begin to move and to use color stock after the prologue,
indicating the passage from physical to imaginative space. Sometimes, the adaptive process
can continue after one translation. Mel Brooks’s The Producers was a film that was adapted
into a Broadway musical and then adapted again into a film.
D Television and other theatrical adaptation
Feature films are occasionally created as a full and (usually) uncensored version of a
television series or television segments. In these cases, the film will either offer a longer
storyline than the usual television program’s format or will offer a greater set of production
values. In the adaptation of The X Files to film, for example, greater effects and a longer
plotline were involved. Additionally, adaptations of television shows will offer the viewer
the opportunity to see the television show’s characters without broadcast restrictions. These
additions (nudity, profanity, explicit drug use, explicit violence) are only rarely a featured
adaptive addition (film versions of “procedurals” such as Miami Vice are most inclined to
such additions as featured adaptations). Because the film makers are adapting established
characters with expected behaviours, introducing obviously non-broadcast elements may
alienate a core audience, and therefore nudity, drug use, and violence for the main
characters may be increased from broadcast standards, but they are unlikely to be a
significant film element. Instead, films will try to offer a “real” story, as if commercial
television were inherently censored for complexity. Some adaptations of television shows
are nostalgic and usually ironic. Films about television shows of the audience’s childhood
(e.g. Scooby-Doo) play up television conventions and will sometimes exploit the distinction
between movie and television possibilities for comedic effect.
At the same time, some theatrically released films are adaptations of television mini-series
events. When national film boards and state controlled television networks co-exist, film
makers can sometimes create very long films for television that they may adapt solely for
time for theatrical release. Both Ingmar Bergman (notably with Fanny and Alexander, but
with other films as well) and Lars von Trier have created long television films that they then
recut for international distribution.
Even segments of television shows have been adapted into feature films. The American
television variety show Saturday Night Live has been the origin of a number of films,
beginning with The Blues Brothers, which began as a one-off performance by Dan Aykroyd
and John Belushi. The most recent of these Saturday Night Live originated films is a case of
double television origin: Fat Albert, which began with an impression of another television
show based on the comedy routine of Bill Cosby. Rowan Atkinson has starred in three
British films that originated on television: Mr. Bean, Johnny English, and Mr. Bean’s
Holiday.
Radio narratives have also provided the basis of film adaptation. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy, for example, began as a radio series for the BBC and then became a novel
which was adapted to film. In the heyday of radio, radio segments, like television segments
today, translated to film on several occasions, usually as shorts. Dialog-heavy stories and
fantastic stories from radio also adapted to film (e.g. Fibber McGee, Life with Father and
Superman, which was a serial on radio before being adapted to film).
E Comic book adaptation
Comic book characters, particularly superheroes, have long been adapted into film,
beginning in the 1940s with Saturday movie serials aimed at children. Superman (1978)
and Batman (1989) are two later successful movie adaptations of famous comic book
characters. In the early 2000s, blockbusters such as X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002) )
have led to dozens of superhero films. The success of these films has also led to other comic
books not necessarily about superheroes being adapted for the big screen, such as Ghost
World (2001), American Splendor (2003) and Sin City (2005).
The adaptation process for comics is different from that of novels. Many successful comic
book series last for several decades and have featured several variations of the characters in
that time. Films based on such series usually try to capture the back story and “spirit” of the
character instead of adapting a particular storyline. Occasionally aspects of the characters
and their origins are simplified or modernized.
Self-contained graphic novels, many of which do not feature superheroes, can be adapted
more directly, such as in the case of Road to Perdition (2002) and V for Vendetta (2006). In
particular, Robert Rodriguez did not use a screenplay for Sin City but utilized actual panels
from writer/artist Frank Miller’s series as storyboards to create what Rodriguez regards as a
“translation” rather than an adaptation.
Furthermore, some films based on long-running franchises use particular storylines from the
franchise as a basis for a plot. The second X-Men film was loosely based on the graphic
novel X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills and the third film on the storyline Dark Phoenix Saga.
F Adaptations from other sources
Documentary films have been made from reportage, as have dramatic films (e.g. All the
President’s Men, and, most recently, Miracle (film), which was adapted from a deadline
written book after the 1980 “miracle on ice”). An Inconvenient Truth is Al Gore’s
documentary film about climate change. It is a film adaptation of a Keynote multimedia
presentation and is an adaptation, therefore, of a lecture. Some films have been made based
on photographs (e.g. Pretty Baby, directed by Louis Malle), and movies have adapted
movies (e.g. Twelve Monkeys deriving from La Jetée). Many films have been made from
epic poetry. Homer’s works have been adapted multiple times in several nations. Finally,
both Greek mythology and the Bible have been adapted frequently. In these cases, the
audience already knows the story well, and so the adaptation will de-emphasize elements of
suspense and concentrate instead on detail and phrasing. The specifics of the acting take
precedence over cinematic techniques.
G Reverse adaptation
Popular films have been adapted into both novels and plays. Many movie studios
commission novelizations of their popular titles or sell the rights to their titles to publishing
houses. These novelized films will frequently be written on assignment (i.e. hack writing),
and will sometimes be written by authors who have only an early script as their source.
Consequently, novelizations are quite often changed from the films as they appear in
theatres. These differences are not, properly speaking, adaptations, but rather accidents of
production. Further, novelization authors can frequently use the extended time available on
the printed page to build up characters and incidents for commercial reasons (e.g. to market
a card or computer game, to promote the publisher’s “saga” of novels, or to create
continuity between films in a series); these are introductions of alien matter rather than
adaptations necessitated by form. There have been, however, a few instances of novelists
who have worked from their own screenplays to create novels at nearly the same time as a
film. Both Arthur C. Clarke, with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Graham Greene, with The
Third Man, have worked from their own film ideas to a novel form (although it is worth
noting that the novel version of The Third Man was written more to aid in the development
of the screenplay than for the purposes of being released as a novel, and that 2001’s
novelization was written in parallel with the screenplay). Both John Sayles and Ingmar
Bergman write their film ideas as novels before they begin producing them as films,
although neither director has allowed these prose treatments to be published.
Finally, films have inspired and been adapted into plays. John Waters’s films have been
successfully mounted as plays; both Hairspray and Cry Baby have been adapted, and other
films have spurred subsequent theatrical adaptations. The most recent incidence of this
is Spamalot, which is a Broadway play based on Monty Python films. In a rare case of a
film being adapted from a stage musical adaptation of a film, in 2005 the film adaptation of
the stage musical based on Mel Brook’s classic comedy film The Producers was released.
H Other adaptive processes
Although not truly a case of artistic adaptation, there have been rare examples of films
inspiring or creating religions, such as the new emphasis on Jedi religion coming from
the Star Wars films, which themselves adapted other films (notably The Hidden Fortress).
Also, films have inspired and been adapted into journalism (e.g. The Thin Blue
Line inspired journalistic investigations resulting in the freeing of a death row inmate, and
Harlan County, USA inspired investigative reports that aided in labor conflict resolution in
the US).
2.6 Historical outline of adaptations
A Silent Era
In its early days cinema went to the music hall and the stage for its plots and performers.
But then some extraordinary silent movies came such as Griffith’s adaptation of Thomas
Dixon’s The Clansman under the title of Birth of a Nation (1915) and Eric Von Stroheim’s
adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague under the name Greed (1923). Both
filmmakers are considered the true pioneers of narrative filmmaking, especially Griffith,
who experimented with narrative techniques that helped to develop Hollywood’s classical
narrative style while adapting literature, such as cut ins from long shots to full shots,
combinations of multiple camera perspectives and parallel editing for simultaneous actions.
More films based on novels like Wallace’s Ben Hur, Blasco Ibañez’s The Four Men of the
Apocalypse and adaptations of Zola in France and Dickens in England were produced,
although for today’s standards they seem very simplistic and theatrical versions of their
originals.
B Early sound cinema
The first effect of the introduction of sound to the movies was a temporary return to the
stage as source of material. One of the earliest important novel adaptations after the
introduction of sound was Universal’s 1931 version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Few plots
could be more ideally suited to the spatial freedom of the cinema, and this film’s elements
would be seen again in the versions of the 1960’s and 1970’s of the same book, whose spirit
was betrayed because almost the whole story is reduced to a banal series of drawing room
conversations. A year later the same studio adopted a much more imaginative approach
with James Whale’s version of Mary Shelley’s Frankestein. Although Shelley’s monster is
transformed from an eloquent but ill-used primitive into a beast-like mute, the change
worked so well that the film’s portrayal of Frankestein effectively replaced the original
character in the public imagination, confirming that radical alteration has a greater chance
of success and the movie is able to become “another story”.
C Conventional Hollywood approach
The conventional Hollywood approach to literature is typified by David O. Selznick, whose
work dominated the first two decades of sound. Selznick grasped more quickly than any
other producer the commercial advantages of making relatively faithful paraphrases of
famous best-selling novels and using Hollywood stars to enhance the portrayal of major
fictional characters. His approach was to chose which stars best fitted a celebrated novel,
and then to build the story as conscientiously as possible around them, reconstructing the
exterior action of the plot with a few set-pieces. The result was, among others, Greta Garbo
in a lush but truncated Anna Karenina (1935), Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone with
the Wind (1939) and Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontain in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1944). As
his choice of novels shows, Selznick was aware of the cinema’s enormous capacity for
generating emotional involvement, and he therefore preferred epic love stories, frequently
even increasing the high romantic interest of his originals. He was expressly concerned that,
like the great popular characters of fiction, his leading characters should be larger than life.
So, as this suggests, Selznick’s treatment of fiction reflects vividly the kind of vulgar
energy he was able to inject into his literary adaptations, he would extract the commercial
juice from a book while making every attempt to preserve its “integrity” (one of his
favourite words).
That approach is still used to the present day in many Hollywood films producing the
interesting case of remakes. Remakes is the name given to new productions of classical
films. Cinema copies itself, readapting successful productions from the past, many of which
are in turn literary adaptations. The reasons for this are various, but at the centre of it is the
idea mentioned about classical Hollywood films where the main attraction was to join well
known characters of literature with the image of the popular actors of the day. Furthermore,
the cinema has an important aspect of temporariness. Once a film has been shown in the
cinemas, it loses some of its appeal, caused by the novelty, and becomes part of the stock of
film history, which no matter how big an impact it may have had, or how it is regarded in
terms of cinema artistry, it can only be exploited commercially through TV and video
watching. However, an old story with a new director and new actors becomes a new film,
which can be more or less successful than its predecessor. Some examples of stories
adapted more than once are Dickens’s Oliver Twist or Great Expectations,
Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights,
Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, etc..
Furthermore, adaptations also respond to the time period when they are made. Classical
movies from the 40’s and 50’s where made at a time when the movie industry was much
concerned about morality. Hollywood had a strict production code, which actually worked
as a censorship code, for films to adapt them for as wide an audience as possible. This
means that controversial topics were eluded, often mutilating the plots of novels and plays.
This is well known for example in cases such as the adaptation of Tennessee Williams
plays A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where central elements such as
rape and allusions to homosexuality were respectively eliminated. On the other hand, more
recent films, responding to modern expectations, include controversial topics and even
sexually explicit scenes which seem distanced from the original literary works from which
they were adapted, such as in the case of The Scarlet Letter, where both things are done,
presenting Hester as a more sexually conscious character, and as a prototype of early
feminism. This film exemplifies as well another very controversial aspect of adaptations:
the substantial alteration of the plot, especially in the ending, to produce the typical
Hollywood “happy ending”, since whereas in the novel Dimmesdale dies and Hester goes
back to Europe, in the film they both run away further west becoming a prototype of
American pioneers.
D Independent film-makers
But the studios’ treatment of novels inevitably differed from the approach of more
independent filmmakers that flourished in the 60’s, specially after the fall of the Hollywood
studio system. Apart from those who rejected adaptations such as Resnais and Bergman,
there were other directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, who took a more pragmatic view. In
one typical example, he took a thriller called Obsession by Lionel White and turned it into
the extraordinary fragmented odyssey Pierrot le Fou, which compares more closely to the
great modernist works of the 20 century than to a crime story. He preferred to adapt novels
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with conventional plots. His attitude echoes the familiar argument that “the worse the book,
the better the movie”, and it has a sound basis in the difference between literature and the
cinema. Films can deal as well as books with external action and narrative, but not with
subjective description and commentary. To a bare plot, however, a clever director may add
a substance as meaningful as that of a serious novelist by adding a series of strictly
cinematic devices (montage, counterpoint between sound and vision, music, voice-over). In
this respect, the most avant-garde and artistically ambitious cinema only bears some
resemblance to the most serious fiction, whereas popular cinema can reproduce popular
fiction relatively faithfully.
3 ENGLISH LITERATURE ON SCREEN
The first short one-shot films demonstrated by the Lumière brothers in 1895 were
necessarily simple records of actual events. They were essentially moving photographs: a
train arriving at a station, workers leaving a factory. But as filmmakers developed the
process of linking shots together, it became evident that film had a great potential as a
medium of storytelling. It was at that point that they began turning to literature and the
theatre for subjects.
At first, there was little attempt to adapt in its entirety a work of fiction or drama. Thus,
Biograph’s adaptation of King John (1899), the first known screen Shakespeare, strung
together a few unconnected scenes without developing a continuous narrative. The pleasure
for the audience lay in witnessing a favourite scene from a popular work ‘brought to life’
(around the same time, ‘living tableaux’ – moving renditions of celebrated paintings – were
briefly popular).
As the cinema matured, adaptations – of new and lesser-known works as well as popular or
classic ones – remained a major source of film stories. In Britain, where a certain snobbery
about the new medium proved harder to shake off than elsewhere, the screen has had a
lifelong fascination with the page. Filmmakers are readers too, and a literary heritage that
produced Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen and so many others provides a great deal of
inspiration.
Shakespeare has inspired dozens, perhaps hundreds of films over the years. Laurence
Olivier’s remarkable Henry V (1945) highlighted the play’s propaganda value; he followed
with adaptations of Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955). More recently Henry V was
revived by Kenneth Branagh (1989), who went on to international co-productions of Much
Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1999).
With rare exceptions – Alex Cox’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (2003, from Middleton), Derek
Jarman’s Edward II (1991, from Marlowe) – interest in other playwrights from the
Elizabethan and Jacobean eras has been thin. 19th/20th century theatre has fared better,
however. Pygmalion (1938) began a lengthy partnership between George Bernard Shaw and
producer Gabriel Pascal. Terence Rattigan alternated between writing for the stage and the
screen – chiefly with Anthony Asquith, who directed ten Rattigan works, including The
Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951).
Oscar Wilde’s plays have all been adapted – Fred Paul’s silent Lady Windermere’s
Fan (1916) and Anthony Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) stand out, but
in recent years young director Oliver Parker has offered adaptations of An Ideal
Husband (1999) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002).
Foremost among numerous screen versions of Charles Dickens are David Lean’s Great
Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948); other noteworthy attempts include Nicholas
Nickleby (1947), A Tale of Two Cities (1958), A Christmas Carol (as Scrooge,
1951), Oliver! (1960) and a massive two-part Little Dorrit (1987).
Others writers have had a less enduring appeal. Hall Caine – at the turn of the 20th century
considered ‘Britain’s greatest living novelist’ and a worthy successor to Dickens – was
widely adapted in the 1910s and ’20s; marketing for Alfred Hitchcock’s The
Manxman (1929) featured Caine’s name more prominently than Hitchcock’s own. But
interest in Caine’s work dropped off abruptly in the 1930s, and he is all but forgotten today.
Of course, it’s not just the classics which have been adapted. Penny dreadfuls – cheap
novels with sensational themes – have inspired dozens of B-movies and ‘quota quickies’,
while popular genre fiction, with its pacy, exciting stories, has been particularly well-suited
to the screen. Agatha Christie’s has remained popular, particularly her detectives Miss
Marple – memorably incarnated by Margaret Rutherford – and Hercule Poirot – brought to
life by Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov (three times). Other favoured authors have included
Ian Fleming, whose James Bond character has inspired no less than 20 films (outnumbering
Fleming’s own novels), Arthur Conan Doyle – countless Sherlock Holmes adaptations,
including three silent serials (1921-23) – Sax Rohmer, whose Fu Manchu character was the
subject of two serials in the 1920s and was revived in The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), and
John Buchan, whose The 39 Steps was adapted three times, most famously by Alfred
Hitchcock (1935).
Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) was based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and
Conrad’s rich body of work has often been filmed, notably in Outcast of the
Islands (1951), Lord Jim (1964), The Duellists (1977) and Victory (1997), although
arguably more famous today is Apocalypse Now (US, 1979), a radical interpretation
of Heart of Darkness.
Perhaps the most cinematic 20th Century writer has been Graham Greene, the source
of Brighton Rock (1947), the masterly The Third Man (1949) and countless others. George
Orwell, by contrast, has seen only three significant films of his work – an animated Animal
Farm (1954) and two versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1956 and, appropriately, 1984.
In the 1930s Alexander Korda adapted novels by Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Wallace and
A.E.W. Mason for a series of films championing the British empire, all directed by his
brother, Zoltan – Sanders of the River (1935), Elephant Boy (d. Robert Flaherty/Zoltan
Korda, 1937), The Drum (1938) and The Four Feathers (1939). Much later, Zoltan, long
embarrassed by these gung-ho celebrations, offered as an apology adaptation of Alan
Paton’s liberal attack on South Africa’s apartheid regime, Cry, the Beloved Country (1952).
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the filmmakers of the British New Wave turned to the
‘angry young men’ (and women) of literature and the theatre – novelists like John Braine
and Alan Sillitoe and playwrights like John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney – in their efforts
to bring a fresher perspective to the screen, one that acknowledged modern working-class
realities. The first two films to emerge from the partnership between Osborne and director
Tony Richardson were adaptations of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1959) and The
Entertainer (1960), but they also turned to classic literature, with an Oscar-winning version
of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1967).
During the same period, Hammer studios revived interest in Britain’s gothic tradition, with
lively versions of Mary Shelley (The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957) and Bram Stoker
(Dracula, 1958), each of which inspired sequels.
While Hammer, at least at first, brought new vigour to its adaptations, British filmmakers
have often been accused of failing to do justice to the more passionate works from the
literary canon, like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (adapted in 1920, 1970 and 1992).
Arguably the most satisfying screen rendition of Thomas Hardy’s fiction is Roman
Polanski’s Tess (France/UK, 1979), although Michael Winterbottom has directed a
creditable adaptation of Jude the Obscure (Jude, 1996) and, in The Claim (2001),
imaginatively transposed The Mayor of Casterbridge to 1890s California. Other efforts
include John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). One director who
couldn’t be accused of lacking passion is Ken Russell, who has tackled D.H.
Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969), The Rainbow (1989) and, for television, Lady
Chatterley’s Lover (as Lady Chatterley, BBC, 1993), in versions that, to say the least, are
not to all tastes.
In the 1980s and early ’90s, the adaptation of classic novels became a virtual industry in
itself, not least because it became clear that the films struck a chord with American
audiences. At the forefront of this wave was the director/producer partnership of James
Ivory and Ismail Merchant, who, with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, dedicated
themselves to a series of highly polished adaptations, notably of Henry James – The
Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), The Golden Bowl (2000) – and E.M. Forster – A
Room With a View (1986), Maurice (1987), Howards End (1992). David Lean kicked off
the Forster boom with his A Passage to India (1984), and Charles Sturridge also contributed
with Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991). Henry James remains a popular source for
filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, with other British adaptations including The
Wings of the Dove (1997).
The same period saw a wave of interest in Jane Austen, with every one of her novels
adapted for either film or television – sometimes both – between 1983 and 1998. 1995 alone
saw Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility (US), as well as Clueless (US), an inventive
Hollywood update of Emma, relocating the story in a modern California high school. A
rather more faithful British adaptation (Emma) appeared the following year.
Classic adaptations remain popular today, although contemporary writers are also getting a
look in. Among the most successful are Nick Hornby – Fever Pitch (1996), High
Fidelity (US/UK, 2000) and About a Boy (US/UK, 2002) – Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’
Diary, 2001), and J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter books have become the predominant
screen franchise of recent years.
3.1 Shakespeare on screen
We have decided to study separately the case of one of the most influential authors of the
English literature, that is to say, William Shakespeare, because he is said to be the most
“adapted” on the screen of all times.
In the 1900s when the silent film industry began to develop in Europe and America,
Shakespearean plays became a small part of its repertoire.
In France and Italy at that time cinema was not considered an art form in itself, but as a
medium to present the art of traditional theatre. This idea was named “Film d’Art“.
Shakespearean plays’ “public domain” status have made them attractive to film producers,
who wanted freedom from a “faithful” representation of a theatre play.
In the United States, a couple of thousand cheap and wide-spread “nickelodeons” drove the
film industry. American film makers then began to seek to attract viewers of higher class.
They might also have been influenced by the “Film d’Art” spirit. They set out to shift the
themes of their films from stories of contemporary workers, to classical works. Film makers
were also responding to calls from religious groups, and the authorities, for a reduction of
the amount of brutality displayed in historical films. Film makers chose Shakespearean
plays because they were widely respected by both the higher and lower classes of American
society, and also because their public domain status avoided copyright issues. The
authorities also favored Shakespearean films, since they were suitable tools to construct a
new Anglo-American identity on the vast, mostly immigrant, nation. Vitagraph in New
York was a notable Shakespearean film studio of this time.
Shakespeare movies are so numerous, they form their own sub genre. With over 250
Shakespeare movies produced, Shakespeare film adaptations such as Baz Luhrman’s Romeo
and Juliet, the Shakespeare inspired “Shakespeare in Love” and the more recent Hamlet
2000, prove that Shakespeare films adaptations and movies retain their enduring appeal.
As an example of Shakespeare’s enduring popularity, sixty one film adaptations and twenty
one TV adaptations alone have been made of Hamlet, the earliest being in 1907 and the
latest in 2000. A chronological compilation of the most notable adaptations follows:
The Taming of the Shrew, (1929), featuring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
Romeo and Juliet, (1935). Directed by George Cukor.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (1935). Directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle.
As You Like It, (1936). Directed by Paul Czinner.
Henry V, (1945). Directed by Lawrence Olivier.
Macbeth, (1948). Directed by Orson Welles (War of the Worlds, Animal Farm, 1984).
Hamlet, (1948). Directed. by Lawrence Olivier.
Othello, (1952). Directed by Orson Welles.
Julius Caesar, (1953). Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Romeo and Juliet, (1954). Directed by Renato Castellani.
Richard III, (1955). Directed by Lawrence Olivier.
Othello, (1956). Directed by Sergei Jutkevitsh.
Forbidden Planet (based on The Tempest), (1956). Directed by Fred M. Wilcox.
Throne of Blood / The Castle of the Spider’s Web / Cobweb Castle (1957), (derived
from Macbeth). Directed by Akira Kurosawa.
The Tempest (1960), (TV) starring Richard Burton. Directed by George Schaefer.
Hamlet (1964), starring Richard Burton. Directed by Bill Colleran and John Gielgud.
Hamlet, (1964), directed by Grigori Kozintsev.
The Taming of the Shrew, (1967), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Directed
by Franco Zeffirelli
Romeo and Juliet, (1968), directed by Franco Zeffirelli.
King Lear, (1970), directed by Peter Brook.
King Lear, (1970), directed by Grigori Kozintsev.
Macbeth, (1972), directed by Roman Polanski (Bitter Moon).
Antony and Cleopatra, (1974), starring Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. Directed by
Trevor Nunn and John Schoffield.
Comedy of Errors (1978), starring Judi Dench and Francesca Annis and directed by Philip
Casson and Trevor Nunn.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, (1980), (BBC-TV) starring Patrick Stewart and directed by
Rodney Bennett.
The Merry Wives of Windsor, (1982), (BBC-TV), starring Ben Kingsley and directed by
David Hugh Jones.
The Tempest, (1982), directed by Paul Mazursky.
Ran (1985), (based on King Lear), directed by Akira Kurosawa.
King Lear, (1987), directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Henry V, (1989), directed by Kenneth Branagh.
Romeo and Juliet, (1990), starring Francesca Annis, Vanessa Redgrave and Ben Kingsley.
Directed by Armando Acosta II.
Hamlet, (1991), directed by Franco Zeffirelli.
Prospero’s Books, (1991), (based on The Tempest), directed by Peter Greeneway.
As You Like It, (1992), directed by Christine Edzard.
Much Ado about Nothing, (1993), directed by Kenneth Branagh.
Othello, (1995), directed by Oliver Parker.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, (1996), starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire
Danes. Directed by Baz Luhrman.
Hamlet, (1996), starring Kenneth Branagh, Richard Attenborough, Judi Dench, Billy
Crystal and Kate Winslet. Directed by Kenneth Branagh.
Twelfth Night, (1996), starring Helena Bonham Carter, Nigel Hawthorne, Ben Kingsley,
Imogen Stubbs and Mel Smith. Directed by Trevor Nunn.
Looking for Richard, (1996), directed by Al Pacino.
Shakespeare in Love, (1998), starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Geoffrey Rush and Judi Dench.
Directed by John Madden, written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. Loosely inspired by
Cesario / Viola of Twelfth Night Or What You Will and Romeo and Juliet.
10 Things I Hate About You, (1999), (based on The Taming of the Shrew), starring Julia
Stiles and Heather Ledge. Directed by Gil Junger.
A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, (1999), starring Calista Flockhart, Michelle Pfiffer.
Directed by Michael Hoffman.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, (2000), directed by Kenneth Branagh.
Hamlet 2000, starring Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, Kyle MacLachlan. Directed by Michael
Almereyda.
4 FILM NOIR: THE HARD-BOILED SCHOOL ON SCREEN
If Shakespeare is the main English writer to be adapted on screen, the American novels
known as “hard-boiled” are the most abundant as well.
The origins of this kind of film are found at the end of the 30’s and during the early 40’s. Its
high popularity lasted all along the 40’s and 50’s. This era produced some of the classics of
the genre, and most of the best of them can be still seen today without any loss of interest
Suddenly the screen displayed more realistic stories of crime and detectives, far from the
gangster stories that were distributed earlier.
Flourishing in the B type productions in Hollywood, some of the best film makers of the
time were involved at their cinematographic debuts with hard-boiled mystery films.
Confirmed directors, some of whom were amongst the best Hollywood ever harboured, put
their unmistakable talent in these tough and often tragic stories of corruption in society. As
a consequence, this new breed of film, mostly of a quality well above Hollywood’s average,
rapidly became very popular, and they would have an indelible influence on American film
history, leaving their mark on the following developments of cinema of quality.
Foreign film makers were also deeply influenced, and besides some obvious assimilation by
foreign directors, film Noir is one of the main roots of the French Nouvelle Vague (New
Wave) from the end of the fifties, mainly for its cinema aesthetics and technique.
Some French critics, after WW2, coined the word Noir for these films that had all common
traits in their forms, in their ethics and pessimistic views of the world. Their quasiexistentialist treatment of the plots was also found in cinema genres other than pure
mysteries or crime stories, and Noir could as well qualify for some Westerns, war movies,
Science Fiction, and dramas. But crime, violence and individual rebellion against corrupt
authorities were always the fertile common backgrounds for these pessimistic tales.
From the beginning, Hard-Boiled literature was the backbone of the emerging cinema
genre, either by delivering top novels to be adapted for the screen or by providing talented
mystery writers as scriptwriters for these films. The film genre succeeded in creating its
visual myths and symbols, equivalent to the literary creations of the Hard-Boiled novels of
the time.
Through the years, violence became more graphic in these films and helped to create very
tough visions, supporting the ambiance of Noir by enhancing its nihilistic tendencies.
If we establish a parallel for the timing and development of Noir in literature and cinema,
we have to conclude that cinema was the vehicle that allowed the HB/Noir genre to survive
until the present day. As this type of literature was neglected and voluntarily
underpublished by the major publishing houses during the seventies in America, it
threatened to disappear. The low esteem given to it there by traditional literary critics and
the American view of it as “just entertainment” were two more factors accelerating the
decay.
Crime and gangster films, including films noirs, are also heavily indebted to literary
sources, many of them now gaining belated critical respect. Here, too, a considerable laxity
in transformation from book to film has been widespread, even with major writers such as
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), where only The
Maltese Falcon (1941) has survived intact in its adapted form. Less “reputable” writers
such as James M. Cain (1892–1977), Jim Thompson (1906–1977), Cornell Woolrich
(1903–1968), and David Goodis (1917–1967) have nevertheless provided the basis for
some of the finest of American (and also French) films, once again in the form of loose or
free rather than strict adaptations. Cain’s Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings
Twice (filmed at least four times to date), and Mildred Pierce were turned into 1940s
classics, and a sudden vogue for Thompson produced several adaptations in the 1980s and
1990s, the most successful probably being Coup de Torchon (Clean Up, Bertrand
Tavernier, 1981), based on Pop. 1280, which, despite being set in French colonial Africa
rather than the American South, brilliantly captures the sleaze, cynicism, and nihilism of the
novel. Woolrich, under both that name and William Irish, wrote the original story that
Hitchcock filmed, much altered and expanded, as Rear Window (1954), and also the novels
on which Hitchcock’s admirer François Truffaut (1932–1984) based La marié était en
noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1968) and The Mississippi Mermaid (1969), as well as
providing the source for such films noirs as Phantom Lady (1944). Truffaut also filmed,
with considerable fidelity, Goodis’s despairing Down There as Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot
the Pianist, 1960).
However, for its recent evolution, foreign film Noir had a different fate. In term of
production, American films are still present everywhere and far outnumber films from other
Western countries. It is even more true since the eighties, due to declining numbers of
foreign productions for diverse reasons (one of them being the continuous shrinking number
of spectators in theatres, all over Western Europe). This leads to the spread the modern
American HB/Noir film styles to foreign countries during the recent years, filling the
increasing absence of equivalent foreign productions.
It remains a fact that American cinema continues to be an important vehicle for promoting
the evolution of the genre. We are even inclined, personally, to think that American cinema
shows a better continuity for the genre, today, than the corresponding American popular
literature (especially for the more Hard-Boiled oriented stories). But this could change if
local and foreign HB/Noir contemporary literature finds a better audience in the USA in the
coming years.
Whatever the issue will be, the cross-fertilization between the two media, books and films,
is and will remain an important factor of evolution for the genre. It is impossible to
dissociate them when looking at the present-day achievements of the HB/Noir genre.
Film is here to stay as a major vehicle for the survival of the HB/Noir genre. Early in this
period, the gangster film evolved toward a more realistic presentation of crimes and villains.
At the same time, it slipped from the pure gangster story toward detective and crimefighting plots, to finally be mixed with elements taken directly from the works of the
emerging American hard-boiled writers. Violence had a purpose, and characters leaned to a
more existentialist attitude regarding life, social relations and… crime.
At the time, film technique moved toward a more graphic representation of moods and
ambiance due to light and camera effects, as often seen previously in the Expressionist
cinema of pre-war Germany. During the end of the thirties, the influx of European cinema
technicians, writers and directors into the USA was, on the other hand, bringing Hollywood
a fresh set of approaches to cinema as a technique and as an art form.
It is a fact that, with the development of film Noir, this period is one of the best for
creativity in Hollywood, going beyond the usual escapist pastime their production usually
was. Ironically, the best films of the period were (and still are, with very few exceptions)
those black gems found in stories inspired by popular literatures, giving an account of the
street life in America, but also going deeper in depicting the human weaknesses and the
general corruption than what was usual in films at the time.
A consequence was that the best cineastes of that era came from that arena as well and kept
those qualities in the more mainstream productions they later came to, forming the core of
what America harboured as the best cinema creators of its history. They really shined amid
the ocean of mediocrity and vulgarity that was the daily bread of Hollywood.
5 STUDY GUIDE
The central topic of this theme is the adaptation in film of material from another medium
such as literature, composed of works like novels, short stories and plays. Through the
cinema, and especially through the Hollywood pictures, the world audience has been
introduced to the major woks of British and American literature. Actually, almost the all the
works of the classical English and American literature, as well as modern 20 century
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literature, both that considered serious and popular fiction, have been adapted to movies at
some stage. From Shakespeare and Dickens, whose plays and novels respectively make
them the most adapted authors, to 20 century authors which have achieved almost more
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popularity in the cinema than in the print such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler
and Ian Fleming, literature is profusely represented in films, and the plots and characters
from English and American literature has become part of the world’s popular culture
through them.
More significant perhaps has been the influence of cinema on prose fiction: from Joyce to
Graham Greene to Robert Coover, modernist and post-modernist writers have
acknowledged, and sometimes borrowed from, the vocabulary of film, employing literary
equivalents of montage, cross-cutting, flashbacks and so on. But remarkably little has been
written on the problematic issue of the film adaptation, perhaps because the filmed novel is
such an awkwardly hybrid genre.
In adapting a novel, the screenwriter is always faced with difficult choices: what to
include/exclude, how to compensate for necessary excisions, how to conflate characters and
incidents, how to show what the writer tells. Underlying these decisions are the contrasting
circumstances of reading and watching. It is worth reminding ourselves – and our students –
that a novel will take many hours to read; that unless we are impelled to stay up all night to
finish it, the novel will be read in chunks, over a period of days or weeks; that reading is an
intimate experience, usually undertaken in private; and that the reader is always at liberty to
re-read, to skip, to jump ahead and generally to control the experience. The experience of
watching a film, on the other hand, is concentrated into two or three hours at most; it takes
place on a single, uninterrupted occasion in a darkened auditorium in the company of
dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of strangers; and the viewer is a captive audience, with no
choice but to follow the relentless progress of the action on the screen. Of course, the
circumstances of watching a film on video or DVD offer the viewer – and the teacher – a
measure of control, but even freeze-frame and rewind facilities can do little to impede the
headlong advance of film.
Novels are frequently adapted for films. For the most part, these adaptations attempt either
to appeal to an existing commercial audience (the adaptation of best sellers and the
“prestige” adaptation of works) or to tap into the innovation and novelty of a less well
known author. Inevitably, the question of “faithfulness” arises, and the more high profile
the source novel, the more insistent are the questions of fidelity.
To set a historical outline of adaptation, we will distinguish the Silent Era. In its early days
cinema went to the music hall and the stage for its plots and performers. But then some
extraordinary silent movies came such as Griffith’s adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s The
Clansman under the title of Birth of a Nation (1915) and Eric Von Stroheim’s adaptation of
Frank Norris’s novel McTeague under the name Greed (1923). The early sound cinema
where the first effect of the introduction of sound to the movies was a temporary return to
the stage as source of material. One of the earliest important novel adaptations after the
introduction of sound was Universal’s 1931 version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Few plots
could be more ideally suited to the spatial freedom of the cinema, and this film’s elements
would be seen again in the versions of the 1960’s and 1970’s of the same book, whose spirit
was betrayed because almost the whole story is reduced to a banal series of drawing room
conversations. The conventional Hollywood approach. The conventional Hollywood
approach to literature is typified by David O. Selznick, whose work dominated the first two
decades of sound.
With regards to English literature, at first, there was little attempt to adapt in its entirety a
work of fiction or drama. Thus, Biograph’s adaptation of King John (1899), the first known
screen Shakespeare, strung together a few unconnected scenes without developing a
continuous narrative. The pleasure for the audience lay in witnessing a favourite scene from
a popular work ‘brought to life’ (around the same time, ‘living tableaux’ – moving
renditions of celebrated paintings – were briefly popular).
As the cinema matured, adaptations – of new and lesser-known works as well as popular or
classic ones – remained a major source of film stories. In Britain, where a certain snobbery
about the new medium proved harder to shake off than elsewhere, the screen has had a
lifelong fascination with the page. Filmmakers are readers too, and a literary heritage that
produced Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen and so many others provides a great deal of
inspiration.
Shakespeare has inspired dozens, perhaps hundreds of films over the years. Laurence
Olivier’s remarkable Henry V (1945) highlighted the play’s propaganda value; he followed
with adaptations of Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955). More recently Henry V was
revived by Kenneth Branagh (1989), who went on to international co-productions of Much
Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1999).
In the 1900s when the silent film industry began to develop in Europe and America,
Shakespearean plays became a small part of its repertoire.
If Shakespeare is the main English writer to be adapted on screen, the American novels
known as “hard-boiled” are the most abundant as well.
The origins of this kind of film are found at the end of the 30’s and during the early 40’s. Its
high popularity lasted all along the 40’s and 50’s. This era produced some of the classics of
the genre, and most of the best of them can be still seen today without any loss of interest
Suddenly the screen displayed more realistic stories of crime and detectives, far from the
gangster stories that were distributed earlier.
Flourishing in the B type productions in Hollywood, some of the best film makers of the
time were involved at their cinematographic debuts with hard-boiled mystery films.
Confirmed directors, some of whom were amongst the best Hollywood ever harboured, put
their unmistakable talent in these tough and often tragic stories of corruption in society. As
a consequence, this new breed of film, mostly of a quality well above Hollywood’s average,
rapidly became very popular, and they would have an indelible influence on American film
history, leaving their mark on the following developments of cinema of quality.
6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eisenstein, Sergei. “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today.” Film Form Dennis Dobson,
trans. 1951.
The History of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed.
Clark, Al. Raymond Chandler in Hollywood. London and New York: Proteus, 1982.
Gardiner, Dorothy, and Kathrine Sorley Walker, eds. Raymond Chandler Speaking. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Luhr, William. Raymond Chandler and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982.
Pendo, Stephen. Raymond Chandler on Screen: His Novels into Film. Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow, 1976