Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Adaptation
John Huston in Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974).
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in such films as The Letter (1940) and Of Human Bondage
(1934).
Classic American fiction has been less fortunate, on
the whole. Victor Sjöström’s 1926 film of Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s (1804–1864) The Scarlet Letter, starring a
luminous Lillian Gish, is still by far the best version of
that book. Clarence Brown’s (1890–1987) silent version
of Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1920) is much
superior to any later version, while films based on Mark
Twain’s (1835–1910) work, such as The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer (1938, 1968 [TV]) or The Adventures of
Hucklebrry Finn (1939, 1960, 1985 [TV]) have generally
been intended for children. John Huston (1906–1987)
made a brave but doomed attempt at Herman Melville’s
(1819–1891) Moby Dick in 1956; Billy Budd (1962),
based on a much shorter work, directed by Peter
Ustinov (1921–2004) and starring an appropriately
angelic Terence Stamp (b. 1938), was more successful.
The stories of Edgar Allan Poe have provided the basis
for a whole series of films, notably for American
International Pictures in the 1960s and 1970s, with few
having much connection with the stories beyond the title,
yet often, as with The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
providing stylish and sophisticated entertainment. Edith
Wharton’s (1862–1937) The Age of Innocence was,
somewhat unexpectedly, turned into a film in 1993 that
was both very close to its source and yet paralleled Martin
Scorsese’s (b. 1942) more typical world of low-life gangsters
with their own hierarchies, rituals, and penalties for
refusing to conform.
The major figures of twentieth-century American
fiction have also been unevenly treated. Faulkner’s novels
have generally proved remarkably resistant to adaptation,
while Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust (1949), from
one of the author’s less complex works, was an effectively
straightforward treatment. Films based on Ernest
Hemingway’s (1899–1961) fiction have fared best when
they depart drastically from the original, as with Howard
Hawks’s (1896–1977) To Have and Have Not (1944) or
Robert Siodmak’s (1900–1973) expansion of the story
The Killers (1946). John Steinbeck’s (1902–1968) The
Grapes of Wrath provided the basis for John Ford’s classic
but not particularly faithful film in 1940, and East of
Eden (1955) is memorable mostly for the performance of
James Dean (1931–1955) under the somewhat overheated
direction of Elia Kazan (1909–2003), who also
directed (more sedately) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1896–
1940) unfinished The Last Tycoon (1976). Neither the
1949 nor the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby is considered
to be truly successful, despite the meticulous
attention to period detail in the latter. The best films
adapted from American literature, in fact, have come
from works originally considered marginal or beneath
serious literary attention.
CASE STUDY: ADAPTATIONS
OF CHARLES DICKENS
Dickens has been by far the most filmed of English
novelists, with something like one hundred versions in
the silent era alone, and numerous further adaptations for
both film and television, continuing to the present day.
The earliest films could cope only with well-known incidents
or brief character sketches from the books; the
sheer length of the major novels has always proved a
serious stumbling block. It was natural, then, that the
first attempts at full-length treatment would be with
shorter works such as A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two
Cities,orOliver Twist, all filmed several times each before
1920.
Though Dickens has often been called the most
cinematic of novelists, his books are far from easy to film
satisfactorily. The mixture of realism and symbolism,
especially in the later novels, the often larger-than-life
or grotesque characters, the first-person narration of
some books, the pervasive authorial narrative tone and
commentary of others, the sheer scope and variety of
characters, incidents and settings, and the insistent social
and moral analysis of the later works in particular, all
42 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM