From Print to Screen

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY weighs in at a staggering 828 pages. That is because its author, Theodore Dreiser, is in the words of a critic, “endlessly faithful to common experience” (emphasis on “endlessly”). To read a paragraph from the novel, scroll down to the bottom of this blog.*

I did not read the novel cover to cover. I read about one-quarter of it and used online chapter summaries for some of the gaps.

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:

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*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.

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*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.