AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925)

An American Tragedy brought Theodore Dreiser both popularity and acclaim. It was based on a true story and follows the facts of the case closely, even down to the setting of upstate New York.

Dreiser’s prose style is a sea of sand. But in that sand lies psychological acuity. Dreiser knew people. He is the kind of person you would avoid at a party because a minute after he met you, he would have your number—and probably put you in his next novel.

There are three central characters—Clyde and the two women he is involved with, Sondra and Roberta.

Clyde’s parents are fundamentalist Christian street preachers. It is a poverty-stricken, itinerant existence. His sister runs off with the first man who gives her a line of smooth talk. Like his sister, Clyde is clueless about who he is or how to get anything worth having in life, but unlike her, he catches a lucky break. He ends up working at his wealthy uncle’s factory, the Griffiths Collar & Shirt Company, in Lycurgus, New York.

Clyde meets Roberta, who is hard-working, pretty, and poor. She has a tender heart. When she dreams of a better life, she does not dream of being rich. She dreams of being loved. He enjoys sleeping with Roberta (novel is fairly frank about this), but soon he meets Sondra, who is rich, beautiful, generous, and kind. She is the Other—the dream girl who embodies everything he thinks he wants.

When Roberta becomes pregnant, Clyde tries to arrange an abortion for her. Roberta agrees because she is terrified. But the remedy provided by a druggist only makes her sick. The doctor who performs abortions for his wealthy clients on the side refuses to help her. She then pleads with Clyde to marry her, accepting that he will leave after the baby is born. He puts her off.

Clyde takes her out in a canoe intending to murder her, but he has a last-minute change of heart and cannot go through with it. She stands up and walks toward him. He hits out at her (with a camera, for some reason), and the canoe tips over. Once they are in the water, he does nothing to save her.

Clyde is convicted of murder on partly manufactured evidence. After nine months on death row, he is executed by the state of New York. What happens to Sondra? She just sort of disappears. After Clyde’s arrest, she sends him a kind but bland letter to which she does not sign her name.

Okay, got the picture? Roberta loves Clyde. Clyde loves Sondra. Sondra thinks Clyde is interesting.

A PLACE IN THE SUN does not play the story quite that way.

A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951)

This George Stevens movie was a critical and commercial success. It won six Academy Awards and a Golden Globe Award for best picture. It stars Elizabeth Taylor as rich society girl Angela Vickers and Montgomery Clift as the poor and enterprising George Eastman. They look very much as Dreiser describes Sondra and Clyde, by the way. Sondra is a dark-haired beauty; Clyde is darkly handsome.

Shelley Winters plays Alice Tripp, the girl who becomes pregnant by George. She does not sound or look like Dreiser’s Roberta. Alice is deliberately made unattractive so George’s rejection of her will not seem so bad.

With Clift and Taylor as the leads, the movie plays like Romeo and Juliet. To play it any other way with those two stars would have been crazy. They have spectacular chemistry; this is a story they can tell. Angela does not find George “interesting.” She is passionately in love with him, as he is with her. They reach across the walls of their respective classes.

Alice tries to blackmail George into marrying her. George wants her dead, but does not kill her. That scene plays just as it does in the book.

In the novel, Clyde has a death row conversion. He accepts Christ as his personal savior and writes a farewell letter to the world that exhorts young men to lead good Christian lives. Dreiser plays this scene cynically: the conversion is a measure of how thoroughly Clyde has been destroyed.

It is impossible to imagine the movie ending that way, and a good thing it doesn’t. I like the movie’s ending better. It is simple and straightforward: George takes responsibility for what he did and accepts his fate.

A good story raises questions.

Is movie saying that you need to know your place in life and stay there?

If George and Angela had run off together, would it have worked?

What if George and Alice had married?

What kind of movie would A PLACE IN THE SUN have been if Taylor and Winters had played each other’s roles?

There is an earlier film version from 1931 that seems to have vanished. Josef von Sternberg’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY stars Philips Holmes as Clyde, Frances Dee as Sondra, and Sylvia Sidney as Roberta. Dreiser did not like it.

About chemistry—here is the “Do I make you nervous?” clip from A PLACE IN THE SUN:

Here is the trailer:

________________________________________________

*From An American Tragedy:

So astonished was he that he could scarcely contain himself for joy, but on the instant must walk to and fro, looking at himself in the mirror, washing his hands and face, then deciding that his tie was not just right, perhaps, and changing to another—thinking forward to what he should wear and back upon how Sondra had looked at him on that last occasion. And how she had smiled. At the same time he could not help wondering even at this moment of what Roberta would think, if now, by some extra optical power of observation she could note his present joy in connection with this note. For plainly, and because he was no longer governed by the conventional notions of his parents, he had been allowing himself to drift into a position in regard to her which would certainly spell torture to her in case she should discover the nature of his present mood, a thought which puzzled him, not a little, but did not serve to modify his thoughts in regard to Sondra in the least.

___________

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.

From Print to Screen: THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on October 17, 2013

Posted in: Film, From Print to Screen, History, Movies. Tagged: Charles Laughton, Davis Grubb, fairy tales, Film Noir, Pauline Kael, Robert Mitchum, Roger Ebert, The Night of the Hunter, West Virginia. 4 Comments

FILM CRITIC Pauline Kael called THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER one of the most terrifying movies ever made. A psychotic fundamentalist preacher hunts and tries to murder two orphaned children to get $10,000 they have hidden. The money was stolen from a bank by their father, who killed two men to get it. The setting is rural West Virginia during the Depression.

Surely this was not what moviegoers were expecting in 1955—or ever. Yet the film was adapted from a best-selling, critically acclaimed novel and is faithful to it.

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER spent four months on the The New York Times bestseller list and was a contender for the 1955 National Book Award. (The movie trailer says that it “gripped millions.”) It was selected for the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series—a big deal in the 1950s. The novel had everything going for it when its film rights were sold. Those rights did not go cheap either: they were sold for $80,000 ($677,000 in 2012 dollars).

But audiences stayed away, and reviews were mixed. Its director, Charles Laughton, never directed another movie.

The movie has had its reputation justly rehabilitated. It has an 8.8 rating at Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.2 at IMDb . It is on the National Film Registry. In 2002, Cahiers du cinéma ranked it as the second most beautiful film ever made.

But the fine novel on whose back the movie stands is out of print. Its author, Davis Grubb (1919-1981), has been forgotten. He and his book deserve to have their reputations rehabilitated, too.

To read an excerpt from THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, scroll down to the bottom of the blog. If you know the movie, the scene will be familiar.*

Here are a few facts about Davis Grubb:

He was born in Moundsville, West Virginia.
His father was an architect; his mother, a social worker.
He wanted to be an artist, but had to give up the ambition because he was color blind.
The Night of the Hunter was his first published novel.
Two of his stories were adapted for THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR; one was adapted by Rod Serling for NIGHT GALLERY.
His novel Fools’ Parade was made into a movie starring James Stewart. It was Stewart’s last film appearance.
His definition of sin: to do nothing.

The Book (1953)

The Night of the Hunter is based on a true story. The fictional preacher Harry Powell had a real-life counterpart named Harry Powers, a West Virginia serial killer who murdered two widows and three children before he was caught and hanged in 1932. A lynch mob 3000 strong wanted him for themselves, but the police used tear gas to prevent this.

Harry Powers found his victims by answering and sometimes running ads in lonely hearts magazines. So does Harry Powell. This detail was omitted from the movie because it is backstory, but if you were wondering, that is how he found the other women he murdered,

The book is a true original—a quality it shares with the movie.

The Movie (1955)

Harry Powell using his tattooed hands to enact the fight between LOVE and HATE, Icey Spoon’s comment about thinking of her canning during sex, the horrifying sequence in the cellar—all are in the book, down to the last detail. Think of any iconic scene or memorable line of dialogue. Chances are it was taken almost verbatim from the novel.

The only scene not in the book is the first one, when Lillian Gish reads from the Bible, surrounded by children—all talking heads set in a night sky of stars. That scene gives the movie an otherworldly feeling right from the start. It floats in dreamtime. Roger Ebert called it a “stylized nightmare.”

The movie is a noir fairy tale. (Think of the Grimm fairy tales before they were cleaned up and declawed.) Robert Mitchum, who is phenomenal as the preacher Harry Powell, is a demon in human form. Lillian Gish, who plays the mountain woman Rachel Cooper, is his angelic opposite—just as tough and hard as he is, but on the side of good. The river, which sparkles with unearthly lights (night and day), takes on mystic significance.

One fairy tale-like element in the book that the movie had to omit because there was no way to translate it into black and white is the way the police are described as “the blue men.” As in, “John watched the blue men take his father away.”

Roger Ebert, who called it “one of the greatest of all American films,” thinks that what did it in with audiences was its lack of “proper trappings.” Charles Laughton was not known for directing, Robert Mitchum had a threatening onscreen presence, the children were not cute, and the movie—heavy on German expressionism—looked just plain strange.

If you like the movie, you owe it to yourself to read the novel. It is available from secondary sellers on Amazon and Abebooks.

You will learn things about the characters’ backstory, the world in which they live, and details of the hunt that the film version had to omit. For example, if you’ve seen the movie, you know what happens on Willa Harper’s second wedding night. But you don’t know what happens on her first, when she is with the father of her children.

There are three books about the making of the movie: The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film by Jeffrey Couchman and Heaven and Hell To Play With by Preston Neal Jones, and The Night of the Hunter ((BFI Film Classics) by Simon Callow.

_____________________________________________________________________________

*Leaning, leaning! Safe and secure from all alarms!
Leaning, leaning! Leaning on the everlasting arms!

In the distance John saw him on the road, emerging suddenly from behind a tall growth of redbud half a mile away: a man on a huge field horse, moving slowly and with a dreadful plodding deliberation up the feathery dust of the river road. The figure of the man and horse were as tiny as toys in that perspective and yet, even in those diminished proportions, John could make out each dreadful and evil line of those familiar shoulders. Now in a dozen farms on both sides of the river the hound dogs had come out to bark at the sound of the singing, and a tan beagle bitch emerged suddenly from beneath the porch of the farmhouse just below the barn and raced braying to the gate to herald the singer’s passing. But the singing did not stop and the figure, moving still in that infinitely sinister slowness, passed directly below the house and was obscured again by a tall growth of pawpaws and still the voice continued unabated while John huddled in the hay with thundering heart. And even long after he had passed, faded down the road, lost in the moonbeams of the lower farms, John could still hear the faint, sweet voice and he thought: Don’t he never sleep?

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.

From Print to Screen: THE DEAD

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on June 11, 2013

Posted in: Books, Film, From Print to Screen, History, Movies. Tagged: adaptations, Anjelica Huston, Ireland, James Joyce, John Huston, The Dead, The Dubliners. 8 Comments

SOMETIMES A MOVIE SURPASSES its source material, as PSYCHO does.

Sometimes a movie uses its source material as a launching pad, as CABARET does.

Then there’s James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and John Huston’s movie THE DEAD.

Rarely are a movie and its source material such well-met equals.

My God, this movie is good.

The Book (1914)

“The Dead” is the closing story in a collection by James Joyce called The Dubliners. This collection had a long strange trip to publication, being rejected eighteen times by fifteen publishers. One time it was accepted and then rejected because the printer found one of the stories objectionable and refused to set it. Another printer burned the proofs.

The story starts with guests arriving at a party given by two unmarried sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan, on January 6, 1904—the Feast of the Epiphany. It ends in a Dublin hotel room, where the nephew of Kate and Julia, a college professor named Gabriel Conroy, sees himself suddenly as “a pitiable fatuous fellow.”

His wife Gretta has just confessed a passionate affair in her youth with a boy named Michael Furey, who died for love of her. What stirred Gretta’s memories is a song she heard at the party, “The Lass of Aughirm.” Her lover used to sing it to her.

As he watches Gretta sleeping, Gabriel perceives that he does not know her, this woman with whom he lives and with whom he has had children. He never felt toward any woman the passion that Michael Furey felt toward her.

Snow continues to fall. Gabriel imagines the death of his aunt Julia, who is frail, and the death that comes to all. He feels his soul approaching “that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.”

“The Dead” has the reputation of being one of the finest short stories ever written. It does not seem to be doing anything remarkable as it goes along—it is difficult to pinpoint its artistry. But it builds upon itself and ends in a way that you know is brilliant, even if you cannot explain why.

The Movie (1987)

John Huston directed 37 movies over a 46-year career. THE MALTESE FALCON was the first. THE DEAD was the last. He mostly had to direct the movie from another room, speaking to the actors through a microphone. He strong-armed the angel of death all through filming and did not live to see it released.

John Huston had Irish citizenship and lived in Galway, Ireland, for twenty years. He lived a rich and colorful life. In 1987 he was eighty years old, used a wheelchair, and needed oxygen. All these made him the perfect director to bring this Irish story about passion and death to the screen.

The opening shot is of a Dublin street in blue winter light. There is a soft, welcoming glow in the windows of a tall townhouse—the place where the guests gather. At the party, they have easy, polite conversations, except when the subject of music comes up. Music calls up another life entirely—more emotional, less amenable to reason.

A guest recites a poem called “Broken Vows.” (“You have taken the East from me. You have taken the West from me.”) It brings all conversation to a stop and prefigures Gretta’s encounter with the melancholy song that reminds her of the lover who died.

The movie has a delicate, beautiful score by Alex North.

Where it is going

Toward the end of the film, Gretta Conroy (Anjelica Huston) stands on the stairs listening to a tenor named Mr D’Arcy sing “The Lass of Aughirm.” She listens as if in a trance. Her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) stares at her, not understanding.

Later that night in their hotel, Gretta tells Gabriel about her first love, Michael Furey. The scene, which plays out via two monologues, first hers and then his, is a powerhouse.

Where you can see it

Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu, and YouTube have it for sale or rent. Amazon Prime members can watch it for free.

The story of the movie

YouTube has several clips available, including “The Lass of Aughirm” scene (another powerhouse). Here is the official trailer.

But there is another trailer, a commentary by Dan Ireland. He was head of acquisitions for Vestron Pictures, which produced the movie after initially passing on it. Ireland talks about how the movie got made and why he thinks it is great. (“It’s a tea party, but it’s John Huston’s tea party.”)

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.

The Dead (short story) – By James Joyce (redvinylchair.com)
You (Plural): An Interview with Filmmaker David Vaipan (melodyandwords.com)
Spirit of film: John Huston (hitchcocksvertigo.com)

From Print to Screen: GOODBYE TO BERLIN/CABARET

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on May 15, 2013

Posted in: Film, History, Movies. Tagged: 1930s, Berlin, Bob Fosse, Cabaret, Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, I am a Camera, Julie Harris, Liza Minnelli, Nazi Germany. 7 Comments

print_to_screen_cabaret IN THE MOVIE CABARET, several people get writing credits:

Jay Allen, the screenwriter.
Joe Masteroff, author of the book of the 1966 play CABARET.
John Kander, composer of the music for the play and the movie.
Fred Ebb, the lyricist for the play and the movie.
John Van Druten, author of the 1951 play I AM A CAMERA, on which CABARET (the play) was based.
Based on the stories of Christopher Isherwood.

It is right that Isherwood is mentioned last, because all the others are standing on his back. That collection of stories has a name: GOODBYE TO BERLIN.

If not for Isherwood, Liza Minnelli would not have won an Oscar for her portrayal of Sally Bowles in CABARET in 1972. Bob Fosse would not have achieved a triple crown in 1973: a Tony for Pippin, an Emmy for the TV special Liza With a Z, and an Oscar for CABARET.

Neither would I AM A CAMERA exist. It was a play first (1951), then a movie (1955), just as CABARET was. Both play and movie starred Julie Harris as Sally Bowles.

Isherwood thought Julie Harris was “more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book, and much more like Sally than the real girl who long ago gave me the idea for my character.”

Goodbye to Berlin (1939)

Goodbye to Berlin consists of six semi-autobiographical stories. Judging by his writing, Isherwood did not think life was a cabaret. At least not in the 1930s in Berlin.

A surprise is that Sally is not much of a singer:

She had a surprisingly deep husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people thought of her. Her arms hanging carelessly limp, and a take-it-or-leave-it grin on her face.

What did she look like? Like this:

Her fingernails were painted emerald green, a colour unfortunately chosen, for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained by cigarette smoking and as dirty as a little girl’s. . . . Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white. She had very large brown eyes.

There was a real person behind the fictional Sally Bowles. Her name was Jean Ross, she was English, not American, and she refused all invitations to see CABARET. Her children disputed Isherwood’s portrayal of her, but that is the nature of stories. They may begin with reality, but never end there.

Cabaret (1972)

cabaretposter Although Liza Minelli’s performance is the spectacular one, all the actors are excellent. When I saw the movie again, I noticed how good Michael York is in the difficult role of Brian Roberts, a gay man trying earnestly to deny that he is gay, and failing. Sally catches on faster than he does.

The relationship between Sally and Brian is an invention. In GOODBYE TO BERLIN, she and the narrator, Chris, are not lovers. This is because Chris’s sexual orientation is not in doubt.

The reimagined Sally Bowles resembles a more worldy version of Pookie Adams, a character Liza Minelli played in her first movie: THE STERILE CUCKOO. Like Sally, Pookie overpowers a nice guy (though in THE STERILE CUCKOO he isn’t gay). She has self-esteem issues related to feeling unloved by her father.

None of these qualities belong to Isherwood’s Sally. His Sally has no particular issues with her father or family. She astonishes them—that’s all.

Elements from Goodbye to Berlin that survive more or less intact are: Sally’s emerald green fingernails and her fondness for prairie oysters; her abortion (though the circumstances and the probable father are different); her obsessive desire to be a famous actress and her willingness to sleep with any man who might be a position to make that happen; Brian’s job as an English tutor.

In both book and movie, the Nazis slither around Berlin like poisonous snakes. Isherwood wrote:

People laugh at them, right up to the last moment. . . .

Natalia, book and movie

In CABARET, the decadence of 1930s Berlin is counterbalanced by the love story of Fritz and Natalia. This relationship, which is a play/movie invention, sweetens the movie and makes it poignant in a way it would not be otherwise.

In Goodbye to Berlin, Natalia flees to Paris and marries a French doctor with whom she is very much in love.

Casting

In CABARET, Natalia was played by Marisa Berenson. In I AM A CAMERA, Natalia was played by Shelley Winters. Imagine that.

A Story Turned Loose

There is a theory about stories: that writers do not write them so much as turn them loose. Once committed to print, they develop a life of their own. Readers complete a story in their own way (an unread story is never finished).

The movie CABARET is not Christopher Isherwood’s story. It is Bob Fosse’s story; Liza Minelli’s, Joel Grey’s, and Michael York’s; John Kander and Fred Ebb’s; cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth’s; and the screenwriter’s story, too.

This is as it should be. After watching rehearsals for the play I AM A CAMERA in the 1950s, Isherwood wrote:

Watching my past being thus reinterpreted, revised and transformed by all these talent people upon the stage, I said to myself “I am no longer an individual. I am a collaboration. I am in the public domain.”

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.

From Print to Screen: PSYCHO

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on April 15, 2013

Posted in: Books, Film, History, Hitchcock, Movies. Tagged: Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, Print to Screen, Psycho, Robert Bloch, Saul Bass, shower scene. 4 Comments

print_to_screen_psycho HERE IS SOMETHING you don’t know about Norman Bates if you have seen the movie but not read the book:

Along with his collection of pornography, he owns copies of A New Model of the Universe, The Extension of Consciousness, and Dimension and Being.

Something you don’t know about Sam Loomis, Marion’s boyfriend:

In the back room of his hardware store, he keeps a tiny FM radio to listen to classical music. (“But there was no one in Fairvale who would recognize either the music itself or the miracle of its coming.”)

Something you don’t know about Marion Crane (Mary Crane in the book):

Lowery, the man from who she stole the $40,000, once tossed a hundred dollar bill on her desk and suggested she take a little trip with him to Dallas (“three days’ rental privileges of the body of Mary Crane”). She did not do it.

The Book (1959)

Poor Robert Bloch. His agent sold the movie rights to PSYCHO for $9000. After the publisher, the agent, and the IRS took their share, Bloch got about $5000. For comparison, Bernard Herrmann was paid $34,501 to score the movie; Saul Bass, $3000 to design the title sequence.

It was a blind bid. Bloch and his agent did not know until too late that the buyer was Alfred Hitchcock.

Bloch writes in a monotone: everyone sounds like everyone else. (The exception is Norman Bates, for whom Bloch writes long interior monologues.) But the novel enjoyed good sales and good reviews, and won a major prize in 1960 from the Mystery Writers of America. It has slipped down in status to cheap pulp, a status it doesn’t quite deserve.

Its theme is the unknowability of another human being. This is Sam speculating about Marion:

Once you admitted to yourself that you didn’t really know how another person’s mind operated, then you came up against the ultimate admission—anything was possible.

The Movie (1960)

The movie and the book have the same plot. Even that peculiar coda in the mental institution came from the book, although in the book Sam talks about a conversation he had with the psychiatrist, and in the movie, the psychiatrist speaks for himself. Both book and movie have the same last line: “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.”

However, Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano made two big changes relating to the characters:

They made Norman Bates young and handsome rather than middle-aged and fat.
They turned up the heat under the relationship between Marion and Sam. That opening scene with them in the hotel room is not in the book—one of few places where the movie veers away.

That Shower Scene

The shower scene is not a Hitchcock invention. Marion’s death comes at the same early, disorienting point in both book and movie—and in more or less the same way.

A difference: in the book, Norman cuts off Marion’s head. As we all know, Hitchcock didn’t play it that way.

Another difference: Hitchcock waited, proportionately, almost twice as long as Bloch did to kill her off. In the 175-page paperback copy, the murder occurs on page 41. In the 109-minute movie, the murder occurs 47 minutes in.

Genius vs Talent

Hitchcock was the major talent; Bloch, the minor. That is why PSYCHO the movie made history, and PSYCHO the novel is remembered today mainly because the movie did make history.

The scene where Marion sells her car shows the difference between Hitchcock and Bloch.

In the movie this scene is tense. When Marion’s frightened, defensive behavior makes a highway trooper suspicious and he follows her to the used car lot, his presence symbolizes her guilty conscience. It is at that point that she starts to regret stealing the money. This scene sets up the later one at the motel when she decides to abandon her plan and go back to Phoenix.

Bloch handles this scene dismissively, in a single paragraph. Marion does not appear nervous or frightened. No trooper follows her. There is no emotional payoff. As if bored by the whole thing, Bloch has her trade her car not once, but three times in that single paragraph.

I wonder what Hitchcock saw in the novel. In his book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Stephen Rebello offers various explanations. Hitchcock owed Universal a picture and thought PSYCHO would get the commitment out of the way quickly and cheaply. Hitchcock had competitors who were making scary, successful movies on small budgets and he wanted to show them he could, too.

Rebello speculates that “the fifty-nine-year old suspense maestro felt bullied by his brilliant present and past.”

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.

(photo: bfi.org)

From Print to Screen: A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on December 11, 2012

Posted in: Books, Film, History, Movies. Tagged: Adapations, Alastair Sim, Charles Dickens, Christmas Carol, George C. Scott, Reginald Owen. 15 Comments

print_to_screen_christmas-carol FROM THE BEGINNING, it was a performance piece.

A Christmas Carol was published in December 1843. By February 1844, it had three London stage productions. Charles Dickens himself did 127 readings from it.

There are more than 20 movie versions. The Wikipedia article on adaptions left out the one starring Barbie and the 2012 gay version shot in Chicago. Somewhere in this world there is a mime version starring Marcel Marceau.

The Book

Dickens was a theatrical, highly visual writer who was unafraid of emotion. Social injustice angered him. All these elements are in the book.

He knew what he had in Christmas Carol, judging by this letter to a friend (where for some reason he refers to himself in the third person):

[He] wept and laughed and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition; and thinking whereof he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed. . . . Its success is most prodigious.

The first printing sold out in one day.

Three Movies

With Alastair Sim (1951)

This movie was rejected for a Christmas run at Radio City Music Hall because it was considered too “adult.” It did poorly in the United States, but was a hit in England. Filmed in black and white, it has a shadowy, otherworldly look.

Variations

Fan’s deathbed scene. In book Scrooge makes no promise to look after her son Fred. He is not at his sister’s side when she dies either.

What happens to Scrooge’s former fiancée. In movie she works at a homeless shelter, apparently unmarried. In book she marries happily and has a large family.

Tiny Tim. In movie he is cured of his disability. Dickens just says he does not die.

This clip shows Scrooge’s reconciliation with his nephew Fred:

With Reginald Owen (1938)

This movie was a hit in the United States, but did poorly in England.

When Scrooge gives Bob Cratchit a raise, you might wonder why he needs more money. He and his family look well fed and healthy, and their house seems solidly middle class. This infidelity to Dickens both sweetens and weakens the plot. As a poor family, the Cratchits’ goodness is heroic. When they are well off, the story turns toward sentimentality. The difference is major.

But it is a likable movie, with several fine performances. Its endurance as a holiday classic is easy to understand.

Variations

Marital status of Scrooge’s nephew Fred. In movie he cannot marry his fiancée without Scrooge’s financial assistance. In book Fred is a married man who asks/needs nothing of Scrooge.

Scrooge’s failed romance with Belle. She is not in the movie.

The children named Ignorance and Want. They no longer cling to the Ghost of of Christmas Present. Like Belle, they have disappeared.

This clip shows the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner:

With George C. Scott (1984)

This movie had a theatrical release in England, but was shown only as a TV movie in the United States. Respectful and mostly faithful, it honors the dark side of the tale as well as the light.

David Warner’s Bob Cratchit feels anger he doesn’t dare express. George C. Scott resists the temptation to overplay the big speeches.

Variations

The last scene. Tiny Tim is healed of his lameness. Dickens did not—repeat, DID NOT—ever say Tim was cured.

Scrooge conducting business on Christmas Eve. Scene where he bullies a couple of businessmen into paying a high price for a shipment of corn is a screenwriter’s invention.

The ringing bell that announces Marley’s ghost. Here the filmmakers one-upped Dickens. Dickens doesn’t use that bell to any particular effect. The filmmakers do.

The movie bell is shrouded in cobwebs. It obviously has not rung in years, if ever. Of course not—Scrooge hates people. That unused bell emphasizes his loneliness.

This clip is long—about 10 minutes. At 2:24 is the ringing bell:

What is a bowl of smoking bishop, anyway?

The drink Scrooge promises to share with Bob, smoking bishop, is made with port, red wine, sugar, spices, and roasted lemons and oranges. Here is a virtual mug of this hot, boozy drink.

***

If you’ve seen any of the above movies, what do you think of them? What about other adaptations?

Has anybody read the book? Amazon has a free Kindle edition.

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.

From Print to Screen: WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on November 26, 2012

Posted in: Books, Film, History, Movies. Tagged: Emily Bronte, gothic romance, Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Print to Screen, William Wyer, Wuthering Heights. 9 Comments

WUTHERING HEIGHTS IS THE ONLY NOVEL by Emily Brontë, who died in 1848 at age thirty. It has been adapted for the movies nine times (1920, 1939, 1954, 1970, 1985, 1988, 1992, 1998, 2011) and for television at least four times. Bernard Herrmann wrote an opera based on it.

Its theme: deny the heart at your peril.

The Novel

Wuthering Heights is a difficult read, with two narrators, a tricky timeline, and complicated family relationships. Brontë buries plot points deep within long paragraphs.

It plays like an operatic tragedy. This is the story:

Cathy and Heathcliff have known since childhood that they are soul companions. However, at around age twenty Cathy decides to marry Edgar Linton. He is wealthy, handsome, intelligent, and kind, and he is smitten with her. She believes she can marry Edgar and continue to love Heathcliff. Really.

Ellen, a young woman who is both family servant and friend, subjects Cathy to a “catechism of love.” Cathy breaks down and admits that the marriage would be a mistake.

She marries Edgar anyway.

Cathy dies shortly after giving birth to her and Edgar’s daughter. Edgar’s sister, Isabella, goes after Heathcliff in the long tradition of nice girls throwing themselves at bad boys. He detests her. One of the first things he does is hang her pet dog from the garden gate (Ellen cuts the dog down before it dies).

He marries Isabella anyway.

Isabella wises up fast, flees from him, gives birth to their son, and dies a few years later. Heathcliff, embittered by the great unresolved passion in his life, becomes a monster. He is abusive to his son and cruel to Cathy’s daughter. He is tormented by memories of Cathy and visions of her ghost. Eventually he stops eating and dies.

Passionate, brutal, and darkly mystical—those are some words for Brontë’s novel. It has a fourth quality not always associated with the first three: it is very smart. Emily Brontë obviously was the sort of person who could walk into a room and see straight through everyone in it. She did not keep quiet about what she saw.

The 1939 Movie

William Wyler’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS, with Laurence Oliver and Merle Oberon, is the distilled, purified essence of Brontë’s novel: romantic and beautiful even in tragedy. It has a happy ending that Wyler disowned.

Merle Oberon’s Cathy is passionate. However, it is impossible to imagine her getting into such a rage that her ears turn red, or ripping open a pillow with her teeth—though Brontë’s Cathy does both those things. Olivier’s Heathcliff is angry and tormented, but he is not a monster.

Never are viewers given cause to go out of sympathy with this pair.

The movie leaves out the children. Inconvenient children are often omitted in the translation from print to screen. (For example, GONE WITH THE WIND’s Scarlett O’Hara has three children in the book, but only one in the movie.) However, this omission removes a point Brontë thought important: how unresolved passion blights not only the present but the future (shades of CLOUD ATLAS there).

While browsing the WUTHERING HEIGHTS YouTube clips, I noticed that removing the dialogue punches up the movie’s power. Without words, it becomes more fiery, more like its source material.

Here is a video set to “My Immortal”:

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.

From Print to Screen: CLOUD ATLAS

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on November 5, 2012

Posted in: Movies, Reviews. Tagged: Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, Lana and Andy Wachowski, Print to Screen, Roger Ebert, Sonmi-451, Tom Tykwer. 6 Comments

David Mitchell, author of CLOUD ATLAS, is apparently happy with how the movie turned out. He should be. The movie—faithful in spirit but unfaithful in many details—does something I would have sworn was impossible: it soars like the book.

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote:

On my second viewing, I gave up any attempt to work out the logical connections between the segments, stories and characters. What was important was that I set my mind free to play.

Enjoy the humor, the witty visual transitions, and the glorious writing. Savor the Sonmi-451 narrative—the strongest of the six—which is beautiful, stunning, and powerful (it is in the book, too). Stay for the credits to find out which actors played which roles. I was astonished to see who did what.

The key: life itself

To understand CLOUD ATLAS, look at life. Helpful or harmful actions birth other helpful or harmful actions, which birth other actions, and so on forever. Some you know about; most you will never know.

A casual encounter turns out to be life-altering. A job falls out of the sky. A song gets to you. Some would call these chance encounters. Neither the filmmakers, David Mitchell, nor I would call them chance, but whatever they are, life runs by them.

In the movie, connections go forward, backward, and sideways (this is what drives some viewers crazy). Past acts reverberate in the future. Music sounds familiar to a character who could not have heard it before. An act of kindness or cruelty changes the direction of someone’s life forever, which changes another person’s life forever, and so on. As the movie’s trailer says: “everything is connected.”

The individual CLOUD ATLAS stories move in one direction: forward. But they interlock in ways that sometimes suggest reincarnation and sometimes the simple truth that the present is connected to both the past and the future. Everything matters, which leads to the next point:

Actions matter forever

The central conflict between selfishness/predation and love is a little more obvious in the novel, because Mitchell is explicit about it, but it is fairly straightforward in the movie, too.

The common ground of all six narratives is exploitation of some people by others. All six narratives make the same turn, too: the exploited ones break their chains and reach toward something good (freedom, justice, truth, God, their beloved). They head out into a future either happy or dangerous, but in every case allied with good. For this reason CLOUD ATLAS is a buoyant, hopeful movie.

“If I had remained invisible,” Sonmi-451 says shortly before her death, “the truth would have remained hidden. I couldn’t allow that.”

I love it that Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski made this movie. They must have known from the beginning it was going to ask everything of them and not necessarily pay them back. Their work is heroic that way.

One last bit of advice

If you can bring a drink into the theater, do so. Alcohol will loosen your grip on narrative expectations.

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.

From Print to Screen: The Quiet American

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on October 4, 2012

Posted in: Film, History, Movies. Tagged: graham greene, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Michael Caine, Michael Redgrave, Print to Screen, Vietnam. 6 Comments

AFTER I SAW the 2002 film version of THE QUIET AMERICAN, I read the Graham Greene novel on which it was based. Then I saw 1958 film version. To see both movies is an odd experience—not good, just odd—because they use the same story structure, the same characters, and sometimes the same dialogue to tell opposite stories.

The Book (1955)

The Quiet American was published in 1955. Greene based it on his experiences as a Saigon-based war correspondent in Vietnam from 1951 to 1954. At that point the French were fighting the First Indochina War. The American government was starting to take an interest in the place.

The plot concerns a clash of world views: the cynical, burned-out, middle-aged British journalist Thomas Fowler versus the idealistic, Harvard-educated young American Alden Pyle. It is implied that Pyle works for Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. Pyle makes Fowler crazy with exasperation, not least because Pyle is in love with Fowler’s beautiful young Vietnamese mistress Phuong—an enigmatic character.

Because Pyle and his ideals cause a lot of harm, the book was widely and unsurprisingly perceived as anti-American. After its publication Greene—a British citizen—was watched by US intelligence agencies for about 35 years.

One wonders what Greene thought was going to happen when he sold the rights to MGM. Did he really believe they would film his book as written? Whatever his motives, he hated the finished product, saying that it was “deliberately made to attack the book and the author.”

The First Movie (1958)

Filmed in Saigon, the first version of THE QUIET AMERICAN conveys a strong sense of place (its cinematographer, Robert Krasker, also shot THE THIRD MAN). It features a brilliant performance by Michael Redgrave as Fowler.

Pyle is a private citizen on a mission for good. He is honorable, brave, and always right. Fowler is an adulterer and an atheist. Worse, he is a bad reporter who is easily duped.

The clash of world views and the love triangle are the same as in the book. The difference is that writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz gave Pyle the last word, every time. Even after Pyle is dead, he manages to get the last word: Fowler loses Phuong for good (in the book he gets her back).

The Second Movie (2002)

The 2002 remake of THE QUIET AMERICAN is more faithful to Greene’s characterization of Pyle. How faithful? Although the movie was completed in 2001, US distribution was held up more than a year because of fears of seeming anti-American after the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

The filmmakers simplified the plot and turned up the heat a bit under the main characters: Pyle is more obviously up to no good, and Fowler is more sympathetic.

Like its predecessor, this movie has at its heart is a brilliant performance: Michael Caine was justly nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Fowler. The book’s sensuality, drained out of the 1958 version, was restored. The 2002 version is more graphic than the 1958 version; this too represents fidelity to the book.

I like the 2002 version because it uses the power of Greene’s story rather than working against it. “Isms and ocracies,” Fowler says wearily to Pyle. “Give me facts.”

in 2002 Michael Caine talked about his role in THE QUIET AMERICAN in this interview.

The Quiet American is available in several editions, including one that includes essays by Greene, historical writings, and reviews.

Unfaithfully Yours

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on September 24, 2012

Posted in: Books, Film, Movies, Reviews. Tagged: Alexander Korda, Carol Reed, film, graham greene, movies, Nelson Gidding, orson welles, Print to Screen, Robert Wise, Saint Exupéry, Shirley Jackson. 9 Comments

WHEN I FIRST SAW Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING, which was adapted from Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, I had a writerish reaction: how dare they change her book so much? It wasn’t until I saw the movie the second time that I realized how brilliantly the novel had been adapted for the screen. If screenwriter Nelson Gidding had been faithful to every detail of the book, the result would have embarrassed everybody.

For this guest blog, I decided to write about the rocky road from print to screen, using the examples of NIGHT FLIGHT, THE THIRD MAN, and THE HAUNTING. (If anyone wants to know the alternate ending to THE THIRD MAN, just ask.)”

Night Flight

I don’t remember why I recorded NIGHT FLIGHT, but when I got around to watching it, I was surprised to learn that it had been kept out of circulation for more than 70 years because the author of the book on which it was based, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, hated it.

How Saint Exupéry was able to suppress this film for so long is a mystery. Why he did it is less of a mystery, at least to me. The movie makers were unfaithful. His book Vol de nuit was not on the screen. In its place was a good movie—smart, emotional, and tough, with spectacular aerial photography. But Saint Exupéry did not see the movie. He saw the book that wasn’t there.

The Third Man

Graham Greene wrote THE THIRD MAN as a movie treatment in response to a specific request by British film producer Alexander Korda. When director Carol Reed changed the ending, Greene could have been offended. Instead, he recognized that Reed was right and thanked him publicly:

One of the very few major disputes between Carol Reed and myself concerned the ending, and he has been proved triumphantly right.

The Haunting

Nelson Gidding’s screenplay for the 1963 movie THE HAUNTING is a masterpiece of adaptation. Gidding was not all that faithful to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, although Jackson was a major author and the novel was a best seller. He knew when to stay true to her intentions and when to ignore them.

What Was Kept

The House as the Star. Hill House is the source of the terror and the mystery. If you read the book, you will find elements that do not match up with the movie, but you will recognize that spectacular house in every detail.

Eleanor, the Main Female Character. Eleanor is the most tormented visitor to Hill House. She and the evil presence in the house are drawn to each other. If Gidding changed her, he would also have had to rethink the house. He left her alone.

What Was Changed

All the Characters Except Eleanor. Theo morphed into a lesbian. Luke became a character meant to provide comic relief. Dr Montague—a bookish scholar in the novel—became the charming, handsome, and witty Dr Markway. Dr Montague’s wife, too, underwent a major transformation (more on that below).

The Event That Pushes Eleanor Ever the Edge. In the novel both Eleanor and Theo pursue Luke. In the movie Eleanor falls for Dr Markway, who is married but keeps quiet about it and sees through her as if she were made of glass. When he rejects her, the humiliation is intense. By making Eleanor’s pursuit of Dr Markway delusional, Gidding sets up the scene where she loses her grip on reality entirely.

The Funniest Part of the Novel. This really is a loss, although Gidding had no choice. In the book Mrs Montague blazes into the house with a ouija board and an assistant named Arthur, ready to give the spirit inhabitants of Hill House perfect love and compassion. She has a session with the ouija board where the spirits definitely communicate and she definitely misunderstands them (the other people in the house understand perfectly, and are terrified). In the movie Mrs Markway is a no-nonsense debunker of all things ghostly.

If you watch THE HAUNTING this October, there is another change to appreciate. The novel takes place in June. Gidding moved the time to just before Halloween.

Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, computers, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.