New films from old books

Edinburgh University Press, #25 (pp 183).

THE cinema has always relied on successful fiction to provide it with

the material for its greatest hits. The golden age of Hollywood consists

mainly of great and not so great books or plays reworked for the screen,

as any random list of favourite films will show. When there was a

British film industry the bulk of its output was also based on books and

plays.

That being so, is what gets paraded as ''the film of the book'' what

it claims to be? There is, of course, no such thing, statement of the

obvious although that may be. But there are films which, while changing

facts, shifting the order of incidents, and even deleting or

amalgamating characters, remain true to the spirit of the original

novel.

There are also, of course, films which so transform the source that

the film should be viewed on its merits rather than in terms of how

faithful it is to its inspiration. The fact is, original screenplays are

far rarer than is often imagined, although in some cases so little

survives of the source that the resulting screenplay might as well be

regarded as original material.

This collection of essays by several Scottish academics takes a

fascinating and illuminating look at the whole mysterious process of

changing one thing into something completely different, although it

seems surprising there is not even a passing mention of the work of Ruth

Prawer Jhabvala, a novelist and also one of the finest screen writers

around. Perhaps her work for Merchant Ivory fell outside the book's

remit. But if it can look at Orson Welles's version of Kafka's The Trial

or Volker Schlondorff's Proust film, Swann in Love, then her scripts for

the E. M. Forster novels filmed by James Ivory would surely have repaid

examination.

Howard's End is too recent, unfortunately, because it is a superb

instance of how to remain faithful to the novelist's intentions, while

reshaping his material. On the other hand the films of Jim Thompson's

novels surely transcend their source. His books could come as a

disappointment to those who ''found'' him first through films like The

Grifters.

This study comes out just as the third attempt to make a movie out of

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is about to be revealed. It is possible

to argue that Anne Devlin's script wreaks havoc on the book and the film

fails to honour the contract between film-maker and the book's begetter

-- to be faithful to its spirit. This may not matter when the original

is trash fiction, because the cinema may be using the sow's ear to

create a silk purse. What is not acceptable is the reverse.

The films covered are The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Blade Runner,

Dune, The Year of Living Dangerously, 1984, Alien, Empire of the Sun, To

Kill a Mockingbird, A Dry White Season, The Tin Drum, and The Shining, a

nicely varied bunch, some being successful translations from one medium

to the other, others less so.

Academic film criticism has a tendency to take itself terribly

seriously. Given the collaborative nature of the film-making process,

really more of a chapter of accidents reaching some sort of conclusion

than a carefully crafted progress coming to a predestined end, it is

worth taking some verdicts with caution. Things may have ended up like

that, but how they got there is not necessarily how it may look to those

passing judgment from the fastnesses of Academe.

It is perfectly possibly to regard the film of The Unbearable

Lightness of Being as soft porn for the chattering classes rather than a

serious attempt to recreate Milan Kundera's complex novel for the

cinema, or Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as a bad horror film carelessly

made by a director who is slumming and a star overacting as usual. That

is not how Catherine Fellows and John Brown respectively see them, but

that is part of the book's considerable appeal -- it provokes, which is

as it should be.