Pardon me: I.II

I suppose what I was saying in my previous post is that you cannot take a poached egg and turn it into an omelette. What they have in common is the egg. What the film and the book have common is an idea, a story, a concept, a purpose.

I think it was Nick Hornby's hero, in High Fidelity, who said that Merchant and Ivory make films for people who don't like movies, but can't be bothered to read the book. In earlier times, Anthony Asquith was a highly regarded British film director, precisely because he took safe, theatrical projects and transferred them to the screen. No doubt they were useful for schoolchildren studying Pygmalion or French without Tears. While I am forever grateful to him for preserving Edith Evans and her handbag for posterity, as well as Michael Redgrave in The Winslow Boy. But he's still an anonymous technician. So was John Cromwell, described by David Thomson as 'a deft, self-effacing director who was especially sensitive to women and respectful of novels and plays.' Ever heard of him?

I presume you have heard of Howard Hawks. If not, then goodbye and farewell, you fair Spanish ladies. His approach to adaptation was a little different. For example, as the story goes, he went on a hunting trip with Ernest Hemingway and Gary Cooper. In the evening the three men sat round the campfire, drinking whisky and swapping manly yarns. Hawks boasted that he could take Hemingway's worst book and turn it into a great film. I have a feeling that Hemingway would have been reluctant to nominate any of his works as bad, let alone the worst, but Hawks had his own nomination to hand. To Have and Have Not became the quintessential Hawks film when he kept the title and the location and threw out the rest.

It's common complaint of authors that Hollywood defiles and prostitutes the beloved offspring of their pen and soul. Mind you, I expect the man who wrote Everybody Comes to Rick's had no complaints about its transformation into Casablanca. Depends on his contract, I suppose. And I can't but feel that Old Will would have loved the the credit on 1929's The Taming of the Shrew, which says, 'By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.'

Adaptation is not confined to the cinema. Shakespeare stole most of his plots and Verdi adapted Shakespeare into opera. Pride and Prejudice was rewritten for the stage in the nineteenth century and it is this dramatisation which formed the basis for Olivier's film.

Think about Pygmalion. Once upon a time there was a Greek myth. Like all Greek myths it is one of the basic plots: boy meets girl, opposites attract, boy loses girl, etc. It gave Bernard Shaw the idea for a play and he gave the educated members of his audience the pleasure of recognising the meaning of the title. The Coen Brothers did something similar by announcing that Oh, Brother, Where art Thou? was based on Homer's Odyssey. Can you spot the references? As for Pygmalion, it became a film, complete with happier, Hollywood ending. the film was adapted as a stage musical, renamed My Fair Lady (an improvement) and that musical into a film. Recently, Mel Brooks' The Producers was revamped as a stage musical, and now inevitably it's a movie again.