What Makes an Adaptation Good?
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The recent release of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has turned just about every film critic in America into a classicist, and vice versa. I’m guilty, too, though I plead extenuating circumstances—namely, the unavoidable fact that, despite the scale of the movie’s IMAX images, its aesthetic import is Lilliputian. Take away its Odysseity and it becomes just a fantasy-spiced action film about a battle-weary protagonist gearing up for one final test. Then again, it’s hard to imagine that a filmmaker adapting a literary classic isn’t calling attention to the choices made in the adaptation. In criticism, everything counts, including the obvious, and Nolan’s film positively invites the comparison, dressing itself—in spite of its deference to current mass-market sensibilities—in the dignity of a classic.
As it happens, the questions raised by both the liberties and the fidelity of Nolan’s adaptation have a strong connection to the root of cinematic modernity. A 1954 essay by François Truffaut put so-called auteurist critics, then a minuscule and outlandish fringe, onto the cultural map. Titled “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” and published in the then obscure magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, it’s a wide-ranging screed with a scattershot set of targets, but its opening salvo takes aim at adaptation. At the time, the French film industry was winning international acclaim for films made in what was called the Tradition of Quality, which largely involved adaptations of well-regarded literature: “La Symphonie Pastorale” (1946), based on André Gide’s novel; “Le Rouge et le Noir” (1954), adapted from Stendhal; and a host of others. Truffaut contends that the leading screenwriters of such films—the team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost—relied on “the so-called process of equivalence. This process takes for granted that in the novel being adapted there are filmable and unfilmable scenes, and that instead of scrapping the latter (as used to be done) you had to think up equivalent scenes.” For Truffaut, this premise was manifestly limiting and unambitious: “I am by no means convinced that a novel can contain unfilmable scenes, and even less so that scenes decreed to be unfilmable are unfilmable by any director.”
Truffaut rejected the idea that there were built-in limits to the power of cinema, which he understood as an art form equal to any, and thus he also denied that the aesthetic merit of movies depended on the prestige of their sources. Those assumptions were as old as cinema, whose history can be seen mostly as one of adaptation. As soon as movies could tell stories, their makers started raiding literary classics for material. The works of Charles Dickens were quickly adapted by the dozens, starting with an 1897 excerpt from “Oliver Twist.” There was a 1908 version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”; D. W. Griffith’s 1909 adaptation of Robert Browning’s verse drama “Pippa Passes” was the first movie ever reviewed in the New York Times. Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” was adapted in 1918, “The Age of Innocence” in 1924. In the twenties, the German director F. W. Murnau made an (unauthorized) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” called “Nosferatu,” and he also filmed Goethe’s “Faust” and Molière’s “Tartuffe”; Jean Renoir adapted Émile Zola’s “Nana” (1926); and, in 1926, there was a version, now lost, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” The early sound era featured Renoir’s 1934 “Madame Bovary,” William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt’s 1935 “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” George Cukor’s 1936 “Romeo and Juliet,” Josef von Sternberg’s nineteen-thirties “An American Tragedy” and “Crime and Punishment,” and Frank Borzage’s 1932 “A Farewell to Arms.” It wasn’t only classics that fed the adaptation machine, which was actually far busier with less acclaimed sources: pick a classic movie at random and it may well be adapted from popular or pulp fiction or general nonfiction: “The Philadelphia Story,” from a Philip Barry play; “42nd Street,” from a novel by Bradford Ropes; “Red River,” from a story by Borden Chase that ran in the Saturday Evening Post; “A Letter to Three Wives,” from the John Klempner novel “A Letter to Five Wives,” which was published in Cosmopolitan; “Bigger Than Life,” from a 1955 medical report by Berton Roueché in The New Yorker.
The temptation to make comparisons is strong. When I scored a secondhand copy of Ropes’s “42nd Street” (published in 1932, the year before the film version was released), I found it to be far more complex and scathing in its vision of the lives of New York theatre people than anything Hollywood, even pre-Hays Code, would have put onscreen. Executives and filmmakers alike were unhesitatingly extractive with these commercial sources. Censorship—not just from studios but from government officials, who unhesitatingly banned movies or demanded cuts—was responsible for many softened details. There are major subplots in Ropes’s novel involving gay relationships, and abortion, which was illegal across the country, is treated as commonplace.
An important caveat when discussing the merits of adaptations is that a viewer or a critic may be unacquainted with the works being adapted—or even unaware that a film is an adaptation at all. Many of the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi’s films have literary sources that are relatively unfamiliar to non-Japanese readers: his film “The Life of Oharu” is based on Saikaku Ihara’s 1686 work “The Life of an Amorous Woman,” and “The Crucified Lovers” is adapted from a 1715 play by Monzaemon Chikamatsu. I can’t say whether appreciation of these movies is heightened or diminished by comparisons—only that the films feature some of the most exalted dramas, images, and performances that the cinema has offered.
That said, it’s certainly fun, and maybe even illuminating, to offer a one-handed, five-fingered taxonomy of literary adaptations:
But, if the art of filmmaking is inseparable from that of adaptation, it’s because almost all feature films are made by way of a fundamental form of adaptation: that of a script. Whether it’s written by the director or by another screenwriter, whether a film is made under studio supervision or independently, most dramatic features start on the page, and every subsequent step in production is an effort to translate that text into images and sounds. This method is inherent to commercial filmmaking, in which a script functions both as a contract (getting all the participants on the same page, so to speak) and as a shopping list for locations, costumes, décor, and the like.
The fundamental question of scripts and their adaptations is one of freedom. Filmmakers who survived in the studio system often figured out how to effect changes beyond what their studio minders would grant. There’s a delightful secret history of Hollywood directors whose ruses and stratagems bought them an unusual amount of leeway with their scripts. Howard Hawks, adapting a novel by Edna Ferber for the drama “Come and Get It,” took advantage of his producer Samuel Goldwyn’s sick leave during the shoot and changed the story drastically. Allan Dwan walked off the set of “Trail of the Vigilantes” and, expecting to be fired, demanded to turn the Western drama into a comedy—and then kept his revisions a secret to ward off interference. In film after film, Robert Siodmak leveraged small script tweaks into major revisions. Nicholas Ray closed the set of “In a Lonely Place” and collaborated with three actors—Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, and Art Smith—on an on-the-spot rewrite of the film’s ending. To be sure, there’s a less delightful history, too, of latitude punished: R.K.O. downright massacred Orson Welles’s Booth Tarkington adaptation, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” both slashing the film that he’d made and encumbering it with rewritten scenes shot by someone else. And, far into the filming of “Come and Get It,” Goldwyn returned to work and, incensed by Hawks’s transformations of the source material, replaced him with another director.
I’m even more enamored of the way that one of the less appreciated Hollywood greats, Gregory La Cava, approached screenwriting. On X, the researcher Annabel Jessica Goldsmith has been posting a remarkable trove of archival documents about La Cava, and they reveal that, though he worked in the studio system from the twenties through the forties, he generally operated without a script. Katharine Hepburn, speaking of the comedy-drama “Stage Door,” in which she starred, said as much: “We started shooting with no script.” On the set, she said, “he disappeared. About an hour later he came back with the speech” that she was to deliver in a climactic scene. That’s the same method that’s portrayed in Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” which depicts the shoot of “Breathless.” Still, even these freewheeling movies had scripts, albeit ones written on the fly and handed to actors at the last minute, and there was enough on paper in advance that everyone showed up at the same place at the same time and had a sense of the story that was being told.
For filmmakers, the approach to a script (regardless of who wrote it or when) is akin to the approach to any literary classic: the situations and the characters are givens, and all that matters is one’s own interpretations, extrapolations, intuitions, and visions of them. With Homer’s Odyssey, for example, the readily available text easily allows critics to perceive what Nolan does, or doesn’t, do with the material at hand. Yet just about any movie’s characters and stories offer a vast array of implications and vistas that are equally available to critics, if they just use their own imaginations. No less than for filmmakers, critics’ own approach to the texts of movies—whether literary, popular, scripted, or improvised—is a matter of freedom, not from authorities but from cautious inhibitions and crowd-pleasing conventions, from the facility of literalism and the faux dignity of academicism. ♦