Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

the Garbo vehicle A Woman of Affairs, the situation is
very different with an acknowledged literary classic,
where readers tend to have fixed, and widely differing,
views of the appearance of the characters or setting—not
to mention the meaning or interpretation of the work as
a whole—and naturally wish to see these perceptions
respected on the screen.
There are many other problems too. Even a relatively
short novel cannot be filmed word for word within the
confines of the two- to three-hour limit of the average
film (though Erich von Stroheim [1885–1957] claimed
to have done so with his original cut of Greed [1924]
from Frank Norris’s [1870–1902] novel McTeague).
Selection, omission, and condensation of some kind is
inevitable. This normally involves suppression of minor
characters and subplots, though these may be among the
aspects of the book most cherished by readers. More
seriously, although a ten-second shot in a film can often
replace pages of description of character, landscape, or a
house interior, it is rarely possible for a film to convey the
detailed analysis of character psychology or motivation
crucial to much of the finest fiction without resorting to
lengthy stretches of dialogue. Dialogue itself is also a
problem, for even the most apparently ‘‘naturalistic’’
speech on the printed page can appear stilted on the
screen, and the complex sentence structure of a Henry
James (1843–1916) or William Faulkner (1897–1962) is
almost impossible to reproduce successfully. Point of
view is another difficulty, especially with first-person
narration in a novel; film, by its very nature, tends to
employ shifting viewpoints throughout and seem to be
objective and external rather than internal. Few of
these obstacles are ultimately insuperable; they involve a
thorough rethinking by the scriptwriter and director
and a readiness to substitute techniques appropriate to
film for those less suited to it—for example, Harold
Pinter’s (b. 1930) and Karel Reisz’s (1926–2002) film
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) after John
Fowles’s (1926–2005) novel.
Adaptations of short stories, on the other hand,
present almost exactly opposite problems, for even a long
(twenty- to thirty-page) story has to be expanded to fit
the minimum ninety minutes of screen time. As a result,
incidents barely referred to in the story may be expanded
or others invented, new characters may be introduced,
plot elements concocted, and brief conversations may be
lengthened or new ones created. Though few classic
stories can survive this treatment without severe distortion
of the original work, some authors have occasionally
been better served by adaptations of shorter works than
by the treatment of their novels. The Fallen Idol (1948),
directed by Carol Reed (1906–1976) from Graham
Greene’s (1904–1991) story ‘‘The Basement Room’’;
The Rockinghorse Winner (1950), directed by Anthony
Adaptation
Pelissier (1912–1988) from the D. H. Lawrence (1885–
1930) story; Tomorrow (1972), directed by Joseph
Anthony (1912–1993) from the William Faulkner story;
and The Innocents (1961), directed by Jack Clayton
(1921–1995) from Henry James’s ‘‘The Turn of the
Screw,’’ are all at least the equal of the often more
pretentious feature-length films made from the novels
of these authors.
The work of almost every classic English novelist
from Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) onward has been filmed
at least once, and the same is true in America from James
Fenimore Cooper’s (1789–1851) The Last of the
Mohicans and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–
1849) onward. In France, Stendhal (1783–1842),
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Gustave Flaubert
(1821–1880), Victor Hugo (1802–1885), and Zola have
been constant favorites. Possibly the finest adaptations of
French literature have been from the novels of Georges
Bernanos (1888–1948), where Robert Bresson (1901–
1999), in Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a
Country Priest, 1950) and Mouchette (1967), has provided
the perfect equivalent in cinematic terms of the
mood, theme, and characterization of the originals, while
Maurice Pialat’s Sous le soleil de Satan (Under Satan’s Sun,
1987) delivers great emotional power. The inherently
‘‘cinematic’’ novels of Georges Simenon (1903–1989)
have been frequently filmed, in France and elsewhere,
with Les fiançailles de M. Hire directed strikingly well
by both Julien Duvivier (1896–1967) in Panique (Panic,
1946) and Patrice Leconte (b. 1947) in Monsieur Hire
(1989).
Adaptations of classic Russian literature during the
Soviet period tended to be hampered by excessive respect
for the originals, though Sergei Bondarchuk’s (1920–
1994) version of Tolstoy’s Vonya i mir (War and Peace,
1968)—like King Vidor’s (1894–1982) American production
in 1956—provided a certain degree of visual
interest. Anna Karenina has also been frequently filmed,
usually in simplified form, and used as a Garbo vehicle in
1935. Iosif Kheifit’s film of Anton Chekhov’s (1860–
1904) story ‘‘The Lady with the Little Dog’’ (Dama s
sobachkoy, 1960) was well received abroad. Most films of
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s (1821–1881) fiction—including
even Akira Kurosawa’s (1910–1998) Hakuchi (The
Idiot, 1951)—have been unmemorable, with the striking
exception of Bresson’s Quatre nuits d’un rêveur (Four
Nights of a Dreamer, 1971), from the story ‘‘White
Nights’’ (also filmed by Luchino Visconti [1906–1976]
as Le notti bianche in 1957; restored version 1997) and,
especially, Une femme douce (1968) from the story
‘‘A Gentle Creature,’’ both of which, despite updating
the settings, are typically near-perfect re-creations of
mood, character, and theme, while being thoroughly
‘‘Bressonian’’ throughout.
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 39