2. What is your favorite movie adaptation of a work of literature? Why? If you want, briefly consider the generic imperatives of each medium and the meaning of such terms as "faithful translation" and "true to the original."

JONATHAN FRANZEN: There are plenty of bad movies from bad books and bad movies from good books and good movies from bad books. But really good movies from really good books? My list, which is almost vanishingly short, is topped by Paul Mazursky's Enemies: A Love Story and John Huston's Wise Blood. You can tell in each case that the director deeply got the novel, and that’s all any writer can ask for. The rest is mostly luck.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: A lot of terrific movies are adapted from books, but the books aren’t necessarily "literature,” e.g., the Philip K. Dick novels from which Blade Runner and Total Recall were quarried. Or Gone with the Wind. Or Dr. Strangelove, from Peter George’s non-funny Red Alert. Bad movies from great books are also legion—David Copperfield, Moby Dick, The Bible. Two cases that spring to mind of very good books being made into very good pictures are The Wizard of Oz and I, Claudius—though the latter, admittedly, was a BBC television series, not a theatrical movie. Maybe very, very high-end hackwork suits the movies better than outright literary greatness.

BROOKS HANSEN: Lolita, the first one—the Kubrick (1962). I like it because there are so many respects in which it grossly distorts all the basic features of Nabokov’s book. (Nabokov, it should be noted, is credited with having written the screenplay, but don’t be fooled: His overlong script was largely trashed by Kubrick.) The structure of the story, the age of the girl, and Peter Sellers’s scene-stealing presence throughout are but a few examples of the nearly unforgivable and wanton abuse of what was in the original, and one can certainly understand the author’s apparent dismay at the result.

And yet and yet and yet, somehow the movie does manage to capture the spirit of Nabokov’s prose—credit to Kubrick, of course, but also and more principally to James Mason, whose performance as Humbert Humbert succeeds miraculously in doing what the book did, too, which is to make me laugh out loud at a situation and a character that I should otherwise have found revolting (and, having disarmed me with humor, is able then to touch me fairly deeply).

By contrast, the 1997 Adrian Lyne version was actually quite faithful to the book, at least in all the superficial ways. It tracks the plot scene for scene, and sweats like hell to make me see the girl through Humbert’s eyes (here played as Victim by a sweaty, twitchy Jeremy Irons). And yet by straining so hard to honor all the ostensible elements and perceived “intent” of the original, the Lyne version comes off as dull and tendentious, occasionally pornographic, not sexy, and most crippling of all, absent all the belly laughs which are the essence, the genius, and the real scandal of Nabokov’s creation.

SCOTT HIGHTOWER: Visconti’s Gattopardo and Death in Venice, Fellini’s Satyricon, Martin Ritt’s Hud, Michael Curtiz’s The Egyptian, and several embodiments of Chekhov’s Three Sisters all come to mind. But my all-time favorite movie adaptation of a work of literature is hands down Pasolini’s 1970 reworking of Euripides’ Medea.

Medea (played by Maria Callas) breaks with the pagan culture of the landlocked vineyards of her ancestors and runs off to her destiny with a modern explorer/rascal, a suspicious stranger in a philosopher/king-led city-state. Pasolini uses Turkish topography and then rocks east and west. He stirs in primeval notions of holiness, sacrifice, romantic love, an epithalamium, a chorus, the dull primal howl of Nepalese horns. Medea’s ultimate demand for reciprocity leaves her not just as a tragic figure of filicide in the modern sense but also as a classical heroic figure that makes it through riddles and ambivalences to a state of formal self-possession. In a literary sense, she transcends her status and takes on heroic proportions.

MINDY ALOFF: La Belle et la Bête (Jeanne Marie-LePrince de Beaumont, 1756 [trans. into English 1757]; Jean Cocteau, 1946): Madam LePrince de Beaumont, an author of seventy books, is now remembered only for this one. Although the motifs of her story probably originated in the remote past and can be found in folktales around the world, her fine literary rendering—intended as a kind of moral education for young ladies—was based on a 1740 story collection by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbet, Dame de Villeneuve. The subjects of Beauty and the Beast are obsession, curiosity, and renunciation, dramatized in an erotic context.

Jean Cocteau, a man of the theater and himself an experienced scenarist for the ballet, consulted with peerless ballet designer Christian Bérard to turn the story into a parable of reality’s need for the imagination, which, in this brilliant black-and-white movie, becomes a tribute to both balletic ceremony and silent film. In Cocteau’s kingdom for the Beast (played with hoarse agony and smoking claws by Jean Marais), objects are alive, and the space created by Henri Alékan’s camera is deep, dark, and visceral. The lovers pass through it in slow motion, as if underwater, to the richly textured and frequently choral score of Georges Auric. It is a tragic world in which the characters renounce their pride—“I am the monster,” proclaims the Beauty of Josette Day—and find themselves in a comedy. The joy, however, is only terrestrial for a moment. This is France in 1946. Lying in one another’s arms, Beauty and her Beast float into the sky like smoke.

JEANNE MARIE BEAUMONT: One of my favorite adaptations is the 1995 film of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, directed by Roger Michell. It neither sentimentalizes the past nor compromises Austen’s austere but amused views of the social fabric. Of the many adaptations of Austen novels I’ve seen, this one most successfully sidesteps a Laura Ashley over-prettiness by creating a sense of nineteenth-century true grit. The coats look worn and soiled at the edges, the interior lighting is accurately dim, and complexions do not appear smoothed or glossed with twentieth-century cosmetics. The acting, particularly by the complicated Amanda Root in the role of Anne, is nearly faultless. Root communicates a bruised soul yet loyal friend; a passion roils deep in her eyes, but her rather plain surface is all calm duty and quiet resourcefulness. She’s the type of woman most around her take for granted but Austen never did. The supporting cast hits all the right gossipy, frivolous, conflicted, and baffled notes. The set scenes, where the characters are gathered in claustrophobic rooms and much transpires in the slightest nods and looks, are perfectly choreographed to communicate the tension of almost unbearably suspended outcomes that keeps one flying through an Austen novel. There’s nothing flashy here, no glamour. Yet the heat underneath, which manages by the end to melt just a bit of the formal surface, leaves me feeling warm and enlightened. Because that stimulation of feeling and thought seems true to the pleasures of reading Austen, this film “keeps faith” with its source material in a most basic and satisfying way.

MARTHA SOUTHGATE: This will sound funny but my favorite book into movie is Kramer vs. Kramer. I think this actually has to do with the imperatives of each medium. Books that are clear, not deeply textured, and more plot driven than not often make superior movies because the actors and screenwriter can bring the nuance that is lacking on the page to the film, whereas the interior life of a great novel can never be captured the same way on film. Kramer vs. Kramer is in no way a great novel but it made a solid, extremely moving mainstream film because of the extraordinary performances of Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and young and now forgotten Justin Henry.

BENJAMIN BARBER: Like a typical cantankerous writer, let me quarrel with rather than answer the question about my “favorite movie from a work of literature.” I tend to think that film and literature are two radically disparate media, and that for the most part, the great movies come either from lesser literature (Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Rear Window, The Bridge on the River Kwai, the Rawlings series) where “epic” cinematography heightens literary reality and substitutes spectacle for imagination, or from original screenplays (Going My Way, The Apartment, Chinatown, most of the films of Ingmar Bergman) where the script is subordinate to or arises directly out of the director’s vision. A few cases, such as All Quiet on the Western Front and The English Patient, involve a sensitive transfer of literary sensibility to film, and the English have specialized in turning significant period literature (Thackeray, the Brontës, et al.) into moving movie melodrama. But for the most part, great films and great literature are and ought to be regarded as alternative forms of art that get in one another’s way when one tries to marry them. The Accidental Tourist and Catch-22 were both badly mauled on the way to turning them into less than compelling films. The most successful transfers from literature probably do the novel even more serious harm on the way to effective filmmaking. After all, who can be satisfied with a director’s vision—however brilliant—once an author has evoked the reader’s own imagination? Showing us the “picture show” version of a story we have fully conjured in our own heads must disappoint. The autonomy of film should probably be the first principle of the filmmaker, especially when she starts with somebody else’s literary work. In short, PEN’s query is misconceived: No comparisons, please!

JOHN S. MAJOR: My favorite film adaptation of a literary work is Throne of Blood (1957), Akira Kurosawa’s version of Macbeth. Never have the weird sisters been so spooky or Lady Macbeth so coldly malevolent; never has Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane with such spine-chilling menace. The scene that everyone remembers, of course, is the film’s ending, with Toshiro Mifune’s Macbeth riddled with arrows, looking like a puzzled, defiant porcupine.

Kurosawa’s genius here was in recognizing not only how well the action scenes of Macbeth would work within the conventions of the popular “historical epic” genre of Japanese film but also how perfectly the moral dilemmas of the play mesh with the real historical circumstances of Japan’s sixteenth-century Warring States Era. At a time when samurai and daimyo struggled constantly with issues of loyalty and treachery, Macbeth and his court would have fit right in. At the same time, Kurosawa was right, I think, to make Throne of Blood as a free adaptation of Macbeth rather than as a simple transcription of the play into Japanese. He thus gave himself the artistic freedom to use the conventions of Japanese “historical epic” film with new depth and psychological insight.

Kurosawa returned to Shakespeare with Ran (1985), his dazzling take on King Lear—one of the most visually stunning films ever made. Yet, in the end I prefer Throne of Blood, perhaps because in that film Kurosawa’s notorious perfectionism, married to a tight budget and minimalist sets, resulted in a work that remains close to its roots in the stage.

TONY HISS: All-time favorite: the 1951 British version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (in England its original title was Scrooge). In effect, the no-words-wasted screenplay is by Dickens himself, with most of the dialogue taken directly from his 1843 novella, and even the voiceover narration borrows heavily from Dickens’s best descriptive passages. This movie is an unqualified triumph. Alastair Sim reaches deep into his own uncertainties to capture the essence of Ebenezer Scrooge, and to show us his two transformations: the young man’s descent into bitterness followed by the older man’s remorse and reclamation of his humanity. Sim indelibly defines the sneering voice, the shrinking posture, the searing pain, and the liberated humor in Scrooge. The superb supporting cast includes Patrick Macnee as the young Jacob Marley.

All-time runner-up: The Heiress, adapted in 1949, via a Broadway play, from another novella, Henry James’s Washington Square (maybe novellas make better screen treatments than novels). The movie title is in some ways an improvement, because the story is about what Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland, who won an Oscar) inherits from her stubborn father (Ralph Richardson) and her hard-hearted suitor (Montgomery Clift). Riveting acting by all three, and a heartbreaking, Oscar-winning score by Aaron Copland. This movie has only a single grim transformation, and it’s completely believable when young, sweet, innocent Catherine becomes the kind of person who can say (in the movie’s most famous lines), “I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters.”

ROBERT DEMARIA: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Burgess once told me how bitter he was about selling off the film rights to A Clockwork Orange for almost nothing at a time when he needed the money. Later the rights were re-sold for much more and Stanley Kubrick made the film, which was a big success. Burgess did not approve of the film version, and yet it captured the kind of future that he intended. He felt that the treatment was exploitative, and that the central incident of the attack on the writer and his wife was not serious or sympathetic enough. The attack was actually based on a true incident involving Burgess and his wife. In spite of all these disputes, there emerges an excellent film that lingers permanently in the viewer’s mind. I have been told that when the film rights are sold, the writer should take his money to the bank and get out of the way because a new work of art is being created.

ELLEN POSNER: Goodbye, Columbus, the 1969 film based upon one of Philip Roth’s early short stories, is my favorite translation of literature into film—never supplanted. Because the film is based upon a short story rather than a novel, the film/literature chronology problem is mitigated. And because the language in the film is taken right from the page, the emotional states of the highly verbal narrator are (while not “seen”), to a large extent, revealed. It is a film that does not elicit mourning for the short story. And it is a wonderful story from that early brilliant collection.

FRAN MANUSHKIN: Guys and Dolls, because Marlon Brando was such a great Sky Masterson, and the first movie star I fell in love with. I have been faithful to him ever since and have adapted my memories of the original book by Damon Runyan to match my memories of Marlon.

HARRY SMITH: I can think of no great novel or play that became an equally great movie, but good novels have been made into great movies. My favorite example is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, an engaging but stylistically ordinary novel that benefited from the screenwriting of Horton Foote, a skillful playwright. The synthesis of talent in the film with superior acting and directing is a work surpassing the individual abilities of either the novelist or playwright.

Other examples of good books/great movies: B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Van Tilburg Clark’s The Oxbow Incident.

CONSTANTINE CONTOGENIS: Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight is my favorite translation of Shakespeare’s Falstaff plays (Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor)—and of any work of literature—into film. Welles shows that the use of the phrases “faithful translation” and “true to the original” mistake the nature of artistic translation, whether from language to language or artistic medium to artistic medium.

The process of artistic translation does call for loyalty, but loyalty is deserved by works of both art and media, in this case English Renaissance drama and twentieth-century American film. An artistic translation cannot transfer to itself the artistic effects of the original. It must solve creative difficulties in its own medium that are analogous to those solved by the original.
The two loyalties will likely conflict. But if the filmmaker/translator is permitted some moral ambiguity, a hierarchy of loyalties toward each side can be ascertained. Betraying (being disloyal toward) a lesser value of drama, or of a particular play, can betray (reveal) a loyalty to a more fundamental value of drama, or of a particular play. And so with film values.

Example: Truthfulness to the plays would have required—apart from the entirety of the plays—relevant details of political maneuvering at the expense of additional Falstaff scenes. But faithfulness to the capacities of film would have called for close-ups of Falstaff at the expense of additional political background. Welles chose more up-close Falstaff. His disloyalty toward a fuller political reality is more than counterbalanced by his loyalty in the Henry IV plays to personal meanings of political power and the overwhelmingly individual reality of Falstaff.

MARK ALAN STAMATY: My favorite movie adaptation of a work of literature is the movie Adaptation because the original premise is so preposterous and the resulting script and movie are so brilliantly conceived and brought to life. I love the way screenwriter Charlie Kaufman works intuitively and tirelessly to come up with a fresh and original approach and result. And I think he is very successful in this effort, even in the ending, which some people think doesn’t work. I think it works wonderfully. I particularly like the way he makes the imagined real, makes written words instantly real, and plays with the question of what is reality.

PRISCILLA COGAN: It would have to be The English Patient. The novel by Michael Ondaatje was full of extraordinary images and language but poorly plotted. The movie translated that poetry into a visual feast of images and produced a story with a more compressed and coherent narrative. It added to the novel, rather than detracted from it, while understanding the difference between the printed word and the visual image.

ROBERT LIMA: The reader of a novel projects images of characters and settings onto a mental screen. In point of fact, the reader becomes a co-creator with the author. This is a highly personal involvement of an individual reader with the written work.

A film adaptation from a novel is always the interpretation by another’s imagination or by a collaborative group. Although no film adaptation of a novel can fully capture the individual reader’s images of characters and settings, I find the experience of seeing an adaptation from novel to film to be valuable as it presents another point of view that can be compared to my own.

A favorite translation to film is Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea. I liked Spencer Tracy’s performance and the moving portrayal of the quest for the marlin. Yet, I found it difficult to accept Tracy as a Cuban fisherman and the nondescript setting as Cuban waters. He was not the Santiago I had imagined. Nonetheless, I put these quibbles aside and learned to love the film version of a favorite work of fiction.

I could make similar assessments of other Hemingway works adapted to film: The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, A Farewell to Arms. I liked the film adaptations but they cannot replace the personal “film” of the prose fiction that I projected in my mind’s screen.

C. W. SMITH: I’ve always admired Harold Pinter’s adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The mock-Victorian novel utilizes an author-narrator who intrudes (as in the Victorian tradition) but his intrusions frequently mention twentieth-century events, situations, or alterations in the novel’s Victorian settings. And the narrative “novelist” tinkers with endings to the story on the fly, offering, as the story runs its course, alternatives to how the story of Charles and Sarah might conclude—Charles might marry his fiancée Tina; he might never find her; he might find her and win her, or find her and be rejected. Pinter chose to frame the film as a play-within-a-play, with the two principal “actors,” Mike and Anna (Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep) playing Charles and Sarah. During the filming of FLT, Mike and Anna, both married, have an affair in the contemporary English setting while they play out the story of Charles and Sarah in the Victorian setting. The film brings Charles and Sarah together at the conclusion of the Victorian setting but ends the affair (unhappily for Mike) in the contemporary setting. Pinter’s nesting the stories faithfully utilizes Fowles’s alternate endings while posing the novel’s underlying questions about the relationship between art and life; it also handily dramatizes the authorial narrator’s allusions to a contemporary world by setting the frame story in modern England. While “Mike” and “Anna” are characters entirely invented for the film, their story nonetheless embodies the narrator’s metafictional spirit in a way that is cinematically satisfying and yet faithful to the original.

SUSAN THAMES: The film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion was a wonderful contrast to the usual adaptation fare, maybe because the production/direction team of Ivory-Merchant didn’t get their hands on it. So we got the kind of visual verisimilitude that brings a period to life—in this case, cramped rooms, soiled hems of women’s gowns, and characters portrayed by actors of less-than-centerfold appeal. The physiology of the film also echoed the rigorous social constraints to which the characters were subject.

WARREN ADLER: Hollywood has bought or optioned ten of my twenty-seven novels. Three have been adapted to film: The War of the Roses, Random Hearts, and The Sunset Gang, which became a trilogy on the PBS network. The War of the Roses and The Sunset Gang were faithful adaptations. The War of the Roses became a worldwide phenomenon and, of course, gave a great boost to my career. Random Hearts was a mess and I felt compelled to vent my dissatisfaction in a piece for The New York Times. As a novelist dealing with Hollywood, take the money, but always expect the worst. Film and television production is an argument-, ego-, and finance-driven operation that can offend the delicate sensibilities of novelists used to being masters of their own destiny. Aside from the financial benefits, which can be considerable, an adaptation can only help a novelist if the film or television production retains the original title, is cast by major stars and is a hit with legs, meaning its afterlife is considerable through worldwide media. It is pure blind luck. My experience has been that Hollywood screenwriters and producers are intimidated by novelists who they refer to as “real writers.” I have heard that some novelists have had wonderful experiences dealing with these people but I haven’t met any. Hemingway was right when he said go the Nevada border, throw your book over the border fence and spend the money they throw back. By the way, they are immune to insult, and continue to purchase my material.

BARBARA ADAMS: The Sweet Hereafter, the 1991 novel by Russell Banks, was translated into a film version in 1997 by Atom Egoyan. I saw the film before I read the book, the reverse of my usual practice, simply because I didn’t know Banks’s work at the time. The film moved me so deeply, its characters so wounded and human in their flawed nature, that I decided to use it—along with the novel which I read immediately—in my course on the contemporary American novel at Pace University.

When I discovered that Banks had not included Browning’s famous poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” in his novel, I was stunned: It had been integral to the movie, I thought, so well suited to the loss of many children because of selfish parents.

At a writers’ conference at Skidmore some years later, Russell Banks and two other novelists discussed the film versions of their books. All of them had opted out of writing the screenplay, or having any say in the process of transformation into a film. I asked Banks what he thought of Egoyan’s inclusion of the Pied Piper poem, narrated by Nicole, the only survivor of the school-bus accident but paralyzed for life and a victim of incest. Banks thought it worked well—it had never occurred to him at all. He trusted Egoyan, he added, who had his own vision of the novel. Each of us has our own vision of a book, as does each director. Egoyan melds his vision so well, it seems true to the original while enhancing it.

DAPHNE ABEEL: I guess my favorite adaptation of a novel for film is Gone with the Wind. I know that is terribly corny, but it is just such a wonderful movie, and in many ways, it sticks pretty closely to the book. Gone with the Wind offers so much to enjoy, history, a great romantic story, a beautiful but selfish heroine, a handsome, tough-minded hero. Great secondary characters, even the sets. I just think David O. Selznick did a great job, and it’s a movie I could see almost once a year. I think I have actually seen it about five times.

MITALI PERKINS: Call me a curmudgeon but I don’t like movie adaptations. When journeying to a place, I lose three of my senses. I can’t smell or taste or touch the way my imagination enables me to when I’m reading. Scenes communicating nuances of character are cut lest what delights the reader becomes excruciating for the viewer. And finally, movies don’t give the reader or the plot freedom to slow down.

Case in point: the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Reading the book, I finger the thick, green vines in Fangorn Forest, smell the evil reek in the valley of Mordor, and taste the hearty flavor of simmering mushrooms—thanks to the dialectic between Tolkien’s words and my imagination.
One of my favorite scenes is when Aragorn’s self-denial extinguishes the simmering bitterness between Legolas and Gimli. This pivotal, revelatory interaction between three major characters doesn’t appear in the movie. There’s simply no room for it.

As reader, I journey with Frodo and Sam through arduous, frightening passages, knowing that we will rest in places like Tom Bombadil’s candle-lit dining hall. We will feast, bathe, sleep, and steel ourselves for the next episode of fear or battle. In the movie, I’m rushed with the characters from one adrenaline-inducing scene to the next. No time for reflection or recovery in a screen hero’s journey.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the dimming of lights, the big music, the rustle of popcorn—these cues herald the relaxing experience of expert entertainers drawing me into their stories. I even enjoy watching movies based on books. Just don’t commandeer a book and claim you’ve squeezed it into the tight space of a film. Movie adaptations should come with a warning: “The story could not be been edited to fit your movie screen.”

NORMAN MACAFEE: I am sending a poem, “The Greatest Movie Ever Made,” about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew from 1964. It ties with Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (the last sentence of this poem is taken from the Welles, as homage), though Sergei Bondarchuck’s War and Peace and Visconti’s The Leopard are up there.

THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE

Stuck in Roman traffic
for the funeral of Pope John
at a moment when the whole world
was in his hands
Pier Paolo Pasolini thought to do
"Christ plus 2,000 years of mythologizing,"
The Gospel According to Matthew,
which means from Bach to Missa Luba,
Eisenstein's Nevsky soldiers in the same
shot as Piero della Francesca's pharisees.
Finally a genius
is telling the story of Jesus
a poet
a "never orthodox Marxist"
a homosexual.

There are moments when you simply must accept
the author's decency, the dignity of his subjects:
cutting away as Mary great with child
maneuvers herself
onto the donkey...
it is a miracle, cutting--
Does she simply appear on the donkey in a puff?
the camera cuts away to two
boys looking intently, sadly,
two objects of desire,
belief and doubt,
everything being montage,
as Eisenstein said.

Jesus is before us in the form
of a Spanish economics student,
surrounded by a Jewish fishmonger
from the Roman slums as Peter,
Pier Paolo's mother as the old Mary,
poets and writers and professors
and semiologists and whores
and communists and boys from the slums
and old women who believe.
Who is my mother, who are my brethren?

Sartre knew when he saw.
Sartre had written a play,
his first, in a German POW camp
about the birth of Jesus
and seeing The Gospel
22 years later
embraced the Italian
as his brother
retrieving Jesus
for the Marxists.

PPP lived in a miraculous era
before AIDS,
before the VCR,
age still of movie house communion,
time of the major deaths,
Pope John, JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King,
Robert Kennedy so like Pasolini in so many ways--
Bobby went into filthy hovels
and embraced sickly babies--
then
Pound, Allende, Neruda
then Pasolini,
the saviors of our century
then Sartre and Beauvoir,
seeking salvation for the century, the millennium.
Pasolini made the film of the millennium,
The Gospel According to Matthew.

Sartre and Beauvoir agree to see him after the Paris premiere.
He is very late to the cafe. But they are there.
S: “How could you think we wouldn’t wait for you?”
In those days, not so far
from ours, they had all the time.

ROBERTA ALLEN: The Lover is my favorite movie adaptation. It created a “world” that may not have been, strictly speaking, the one Marguerite Duras intended—the screen version seemed too colorful, “too Hollywood” for that—but it captured the tension and eroticism between the two lovers in their closed worlds. The understated and moving performance of Tony Leung Kar-Fai, in particular, who played the Chinese lover, seemed “close” to the character in the book and stands out in my memory.

THOMAS C. LEWIS: I think the title “Metamorphoses” is too grand for the topic.

JAYNE LYN STAHL: Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo, as Anna, and Fredric March, as Vronsky, is my favorite adaptation of a novel. While I know that there may be better adaptations of a work of literature, for me, great art changes our lives, transforms us, and Anna Karenina changed mine.

At twenty, I went to see Anna Karenina with my professor and class at the local movie theater. This was my first encounter with passion, and a parallel universe in which desire must coexist with decorum. So it was that one of my all-time favorite novels sparked, in me, metamorphosis from a schoolgirl into a fully developed woman.

Anna’s passion was my passion and, like Anna, I could no more imagine living a life seduced by custom, and narcotized by routine. Watching Anna and Vronsky together, arousal started to gnaw at me. Anna’s hunger became my hunger, her betrayal my betrayal, as it was not so much lust, or infidelity, but daring to escape the ordinary that sparked her silent impulses, and urgings. Like Anna, I, too, wanted to give myself up to my yearnings. But, in Anna’s day, for a woman to want was unseemly. Has anything changed really? The scarlet letter may have faded, but the cloth is in tact. Had Princess Diana survived that car wreck, would she have remained royalty, or is it that, only through death, could she be transformed from a fallen princess into a sacred icon. Isn’t the fall what must, of necessity, come to those women who dare to want; how can their demand to live life on own their terms result in anything other than death.

So there I sat at the movies, on a cold day in Buffalo, watching Anna Karenina, wondering—is this what affirmation must cost me, is this the lesson that desire, for women, comes with a stiff price tag. What was poor Anna’s crime? That she abandoned her role of mother and housewife, or that she found, in Vronsky, the reflection of her own ubiquitous sexuality?

Indeed, the film version of Anna Karenina succeeds better in being faithful to the novel than Anna succeeds in her fidelity to Karenin but, in both cases, this is fidelity without passion. Still, this remains one of the few films in which a person’s inner life is palpable, and in which transfer from page to screen is powerful enough to suggest transformation in the audience.

PETER H. TEN HOOPEN: To me, the best adaptation of a novel, or at least the most memorable, is Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, directed by John Huston, after a screenplay by the author himself, starring Stacy Keach, the young Jeff Bridges and Susan Tyrrell. The movie is every bit as stark as Gardner’s novel and gives a heart-rending depiction of both a young boxer’s struggle to make it in the ring, and a declining boxer’s struggle to come back. Its main attraction to me is that there is no attempt to romanticize what is the bleak existence of men who see their best chances for advancement in fighting others for monetary gain, such as it is. What moves me most, perhaps, is its appeal to compassion, which not just survives the transfer from paper to celluloid, but seems the stronger for it.

ELIZABETH SPENCER: Dickens’s Great Expectations, though filmed so long ago (1946), lingers in vivid memory as the best by far of film adaptations. Dickens novels turn so naturally into movies one would think he had the visual medium in mind. No, he had it in his head. Magwitch’s pursuit of Pip in the cemetery; Miss Havisham decked in bridal gown for the marriage which never occurred; a grown-up Pip, dressed up as gentry, sporting out with walking cane, sure his money came from gentry. English actors know how to deliver these roles. The writing had already given them their appearance, their precise flavor and depth. Director David Lean ran with the current that was already speeding before him on the page. With actors like John Mills, Martita Hunt, Jean Simmons and the rest, how could he go wrong? And for one of the few times, a great book became an equally great movie.

SUZANNE JILL LEVINE: When I think of successful cinematic “translations” of novels I think of the late 1972 BBC serial productions of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl or Tolstoy’s War and Peace—which reproduce effectively for the spectator the reader’s experience of traveling thoughtfully through these novels, the former with its intricate interior meanderings and the latter with its larger than life canvas of drama, romance, and historical events. The recent commercially released Golden Bowl—even with such finely nuanced actors as Nick Nolte, Uma Thurman, and Jeremy Northam—does not match that TV series’ excellent “fidelity” to James’s brilliantly woven psychological oscillations and gradual revelations. One other partial success story is the mid career Ken Russell’s vivid interpretation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969) but still it was too overstated, which is often the problem with film adaptations. I could go on infinitely about the honest attempts by filmmakers with the novels of E. M. Forster (David Lean’s 1984 Passage to India, Merchant-Ivory’s 1987 Maurice and 1992 Howards End); indeed the short novel would appear to have a better chance than its ambitiously long relatives, as in the case of Henry James The Bostonians (1984) also by the Merchant-Ivory duo. Maybe novels which aren’t classics—of which we already have clear indelible ideal images that can never be matched translate better?

I would like to briefly dissert on an adaptation which is not my favorite (maybe Alastair Sim’s neurotic 1951 portrayal of Scrooge, i.e. Dickens’s Christmas Carol—written by Noel Langley, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst—is my favorite because I watched it one hundred times as a kid; but then again I watched Gone with the Wind a hundred times, too) but which I’ve thought a lot about: Hector Babenco’s film version of Argentine Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1984) for which William Hurt won an Oscar playing the very unlikely character of a frivolous homosexual in a prison cell with a Marxist revolutionary.

When I first saw this film I was horrified: How could William Hurt, this tall blond athletic American, play the role of a slight Latin gay man (for me the principal character Molina was an avatar of the Manuel Puig I knew): Molina, charming, light, ironic becomes a heavy-handed somber caricature in the hands of Hurt. How could the novel’s density—in which the narration of six movies occurs—possibly be faithfully rendered by this movie which inserts only one of the cited movie texts? The answer is: Fidelity is impossible, at least in the literal terms we might conceive it. This film, like a translation, stands beside the novel like a comment, an interpretation emphasizing some of its elements—its political and didactic message, its universal humanity—and inevitably compromising some of its formal inventions and—the hardest thing of all—tone.

For Puig, the cinema was a synthetic genre like dreams; the novel an analytical vehicle, like psychoanalysis. I think there is a certain fundamental truth in his view of these generic incompatibilities.

BONA FLECCHIA: Manji is the 1964 film version of the homonymous novel by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki written in 1930 while revising the final version of his masterpiece Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters). The two novels were to cross their paths once again when, after having worked as an assistant director to the great Kon Ichikawa on the set of the flowed adaptation of Sasameyuki, (flowed because of a tragic decision on the part of the director to change the function of one of the main characters to deal with a textual ambiguity and, therefore, betraying the very nature of Tanizaki’s style as a writer) the young director Yasuzo Masumura was to brilliantly bring to the screen the wonderfully tactile, complex and sensual world created by Tanizaki in Manji.

The intimate nature of the book is mirrored spectacularly in the cinematography that, to keep the characters close to us and to each other, restrains the beautiful compositions always strictly within medium and close-ups; and reflecting the longing and desires of the protagonists through a luscious and sensual use of color. What makes this film version of Manji remarkable is the ability of the director to transpose rather than interpret what is masterfully laid out on the page by the great Tanizaki.

I don’t believe literature, film, or any other form of expression can be subject to any particular set of imperatives. When a system is created to deal with a particular art form the art form itself decays into mediocrity. The restrains imposed by studios on directors and screenwriters, the ability of producers to substantially modify contents or the choices of many editors within the publishing world are crippling originality in favor of a marketable product.
A literary text is a complex piece of work which holds within itself a series of conventions (grammatical, structural, anthropological, social, and historical just to mention a few). One of these, at least, will necessarily be betrayed during the translation process. The term “faithful translation” is therefore a paradox. “True to the original” is what a translator would wish to be, while Joyce rightfully reproaches “traduttore traditore” (traitor translator). However, my favorite term for appropriating and intimately manipulating somebody’s work would be “version”; as this kind of work is the original vision of an individual conveyed through somebody else’s eyes.

DRAKE STUTESMAN: This is a difficult question. Adaptation suggests a good relationship between the original literature and film that interprets it but this relationship often fails. The original may be great and the film may be great but they rarely reflect each other’s purpose.

The Swimmer strikes this balance. By not mimicking the story’s emphasis and yet staying close to its narrative, the film mirrors what the story tries to do. Frank and Eleanor Perry’s 1968 film was made from John Cheever’s 1964 short story of the same name about an affluent man, in Westchester County, who decides to “swim home” through his neighbors’ pools. As he walks across their properties in his swimsuit, he’s greeted with less and less affection and then with contempt. His strong body tires. All that happens baffles him and it becomes apparent, to us, that he is “swimming” through his life’s delusions. This is made obvious when, finally, cold and crippled, he arrives at his house only to find it long deserted.

This surrealism could be expositional but both writing and movie avoid it—the story through allegory, such as seasonal changes, and the film by omitting allegory, because what deepens the reader’s attention would distract the viewer’s. The movie, like the story, unfolds, without explanation, as if the Swimmer is normal. But the film expands the story’s sketchy conversations and takes reactions as metaphors so that Cheever’s “seasonal” changes appear in the Swimmer’s denial and in the slow freezing of his once impressive charm.

Both film and story end in the same way and, in each, the effect is powerful—though you’ve been led to expect it, the Swimmer’s self-deception is crushingly piteous, something that Cheever achieved by making the story fantastic and ending on a factual sentence—“saw that the place was empty”—and which the film achieved by making the story realistic and ending on a nightmarish last scene.