On Screen

...never a fellow to say no to surefire culture, now gives us the movie version...

...But, on further thought, Knife in the Water could probably not be the modest masterpiece it is (marred only by execrable subtitles), were it adapted from a novel...

...Contributing immeasurably to the film are an able cast, K. T. Komeda's incisive jazz score, Jerzy Lipman's ebullient photography, and Polanski's direction—sheer condensed spontaneity...

...There is one brief sequence in which Bernard, the husband, excellently played by Philippe Noiret, turns away from the dinner he finished almost without conversation, picks up his postprandial pipe and newspaper, and swivels his chair around toward the fireplace...

...Furthermore, Reisman felt obligated to tone down even that play...

...As far as theater is concerned...

...The youth is feckless and reckless, but not without a genuine animal warmth that the husband has lost in himself and all but extinguished in his wife...

...But a great novel has yet to make a great film...

...The husband's chief weapon is a mocking condescension backed up by experience in sailing and living...

...The ads spoke of this "moving" film as being "almost unbearable...

...The very fuzziness of Bernard's face, slightly out of focus, and the sharpness of Thérèse's, on which the furrows deepen and darken in the firelight, speak their pieces...

...The Confessions of Felix Krttll...

...It is the story of a husband and wife who, out for a week-end's sailing, pick up a young beatnik and take him along on a dare...

...In theory, yes...

...if it can be done, it isn't worth it...

...the youth's inexperience in both is compensated for by his vital physicalness, his ingenuous impudence, his skill with a knife—his youth, in short...

...What on earth did Susskind think he had left...

...which provides, as Gide put it...

...the music by the extremely gifted Maurice Jarre, though it is not one of his best scores...

...Indeed, Knije in the Water, the first feature film by a highly talented young Polish director, Roman Polanski, has all the virtues of an intensely psychological, sardonically probing modern novel...

...But two Pulitzers proudly displayed on a property's chest are irresistible— rather like one of those faculty wives who wears her husband's and her own Phi Beta Kappa keys as earrings—and David Susskind...

...Hardly...

...Have not film-makers like Truffaut spoken of their cameras as fountain pens...

...The elite audiences...

...The main difficulty concerns, I suspect, time and space even more than style, for which acceptable equivalents may be found...

...What avails it to observe her sin, even to hear some of her animadversions, when the camera, despite Mlle...

...All the Way Home, was mellifluently mediocre...

...But always either the book or the film is less than absolutely first-rate...

...no corporeal Emma Bovary or Daisy Miller can live up to the one we were made to imagine...

...we may ask, apply also to film...

...Can we not, therefore, expect an efficacious transposition...

...For the kind of creative freshness that has gone into every part of it can most likely exist only in the joy and freedom of creation, not in the comparative subservience of adaptation, translation, recreation—in the imitation of the imitation of an action...

...Some time ago, apropos of theater, 1 enunciated a theorem: "There is a simple law governing the dramatization of novels: if it is worth doing, it can't be done...

...More could have been done...

...She retorts by a silent passivity that is a long, resentful pout...

...The large public...

...We cannot accept substitutes, even good ones, for something we already cherish as our own—try switching perfectly good babies on a mother...

...Neither the foolish jokes and chatter with which a family tries to channel its bereavement, nor little Rufus's hysterica] reveling in the fact that his father is dead, nor the brother-in-law's outburst against God, not even the religious friction between Catholics and Protestants in the family, survives in our fearless script...

...If mere translation from one language into another tends to impoverish a work of art, transportation from one medium to another can be assumed to do graver violence...

...For what kind of happiness can she find in men who will be boys or boys who cannot be men...

...James Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Death in the Family is not, properly speaking, a novel at all, but a series of prose poems, vignettes, short-short stories held together by nothing so much as Agee's enchanting humanity which his prose exudes just as a beloved body gives off its odor di ferrano...

...Plays, moreover, never work on the screen, for these two media are fundamentally antithetical...

...What good are all those brilliantly subdued images of the Landes—of pines, sand, and sea— if the film cannot quite convey Thérèse's attitudes toward them...

...Well, he had the title, straight from its prizewinning (but moneylosing) Broadway engagement, and the prestige of Agee's novel and name...

...Certain arguments would still seem to hold...

...This is an adaptation of François Mauriac's beautiful Thérèse Desqueyroux, made by Mauriac père and his novelist son, Claude, along with Franju...

...for once, Susskind is being modest...

...I shall stick by Simon's Law through sticks and stink-bombs...

...space, on the other hand, can rarely become as subjective in a movie as in a book...

...Moreover, the novel is reasonably short, contains a goodly amount of evil, and is totally absorbing...

...Render unto cinema that which is the cinema's, and unto fiction that which is fiction's...

...Rarely, very rarely, an estimable achievement comes along: The Game of Love (Le Blé en herbe...

...With no sex, no controversial star, no super-spectacle, no suspense—not even that pis aller, a plot—unlikely...

...As such, it was bound to make a poor, unstageworthy play and get the Pulitzer Prize as a particularly heartwarming bit of Americana...

...Against the flowing loveliness of a sailboat expending itself on the water, we get the parched, landlocked pettiness of egos which can make contact with others only by clashing...

...Polanski and his two collaborators on the screenplay, Skolimowski and Goldberg, have fashioned a film remarkable for its ability to make dramatic gestures that are so delicate, words that are so revealingly oblique and fragmentary, silences that arc so sullen and falsely pregnant, that we seem to be confronted not with three people but with three naked—forgive the awkward plural —subconsciouses...

...Certainly when a mediocre novel falls into the hands of a brilliant cinematographer (as in the case of Stanley Kubrick's as yet unreleased masterpiece, Dr...

...So one might expect it to become a good film, particularly since the cast is altogether exemplary, and a more bewitching and haunting Thérèse than Emmanuele Riva could not be found in the Malleus Maleficarum...

...favorite passages must inevitably be altered or omitted...

...The husband is a successful sports-writer approaching middle age, who bullies his young wife for fear of losing her...

...Least of all can the film recreate Mauriac's fascination with evil: his "tormented conscience...

...But whom is this lopsided, aimless, empty film to please...

...Everything about the play, starting with the new, upbeat title...

...We get a reverse shot now, and see behind the cozily complacent face of Bernard the solitary suffering of Thérèse, more bewildered even than reproachful, slowly hardening into despair...

...Both men emerge defeated, but even the victorious female loses out...

...The passage of time in a film seldom becomes as real as in a masterly novel...

...The cinematography is by the outstanding Christian Matras...

...Riva's wordless eloquence, cannot reproduce the texture of her psyche...

...Without wishing it, the wife becomes the audience, the arbiter and, finally, the pawn of this contest...

...but does it...

...Well, this basic ambivalence, which is not only the reader's but also the author's, does not become the camera's...

...Could not better film-making have achieved more of this...

...But is this so when the other medium is not the stage with its obvious limitations vis-a-vis the novel, but the screen with its potential as limitless as that of the page...

...It is a curious, covert, almost subcutaneous battle, only occasionally leading to violence, and ending in a climax unmatched for muted morbidity...

...Great Expectations, George Lampin's version of The Idiot, Outcast of the Islands, Devil in the Flesh...

...Yet the sad truth is that Therese is a dull movie, because the essential flavor of the novel is not rendered...

...These thoughts are prompted by two current motion-picture adaptations, much the worst of which is All the Way Home...

...Philip Reisman Jr.'s scenario makes the big initial mistake of following Tad Mosel's feeble play much more than Agee's book...

...Though 1 had no hopes of joining such eminent company as Boyle and Gresham, certain reviewers and readers—more of them in sorrow, but not a few in anger— did me the dubious honor of dubbing this Simon's Law...

...Strangelove, made out of the potboiler, Reel Alert), this is possible...

...During a day's sailing, there develops a quiet but deadly rivalry between the two men...

...writings that "must be very welcome to those who, holding sin in abhorrence, would be very disappointed if they could no longer take an interest in it...

...A more serious attempt at transmuting a novel into film is Therese, directed by Georges Franju, a man of some talent, neither entirely New Wave, nor entirely conservative...

...A scarcely smaller problem is that of narration, almost inevitable in adaptations, yet harder and harder to sneak convincingly into our progressively more filmic films...