Print to Screen

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From Print to Screen: PSYCHO

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on April 15, 2013
Posted in: Books, Film, History, Hitchcock, Movies. Tagged: , , , , , , . 4 Comments

print_to_screen_psychoHERE 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:

  1. They made Norman Bates young and handsome rather than middle-aged and fat.
  2. 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: WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Posted by Lindsay Edmunds on November 26, 2012
Posted in: Books, Film, History, Movies. Tagged: , , , , , , . 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: , , , , , , . 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: , , , , , . 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: , , , , , , , , , , . 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.)”

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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.

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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.

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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.