Filmed Fictions

...The Marquise of O certainly did, it was possibly the finest film adaptation of a literary work I have ever seen Perceval, by contrast, requires so much literary knowledge and willful suspension of our modern conceptual framework that it left me wondering why in the world Rohmer chose to undertake such a curious project I had much the same reaction to Francois Truffaut's The Green Room, a loose adaptation of Henry James' The Altar of the Dead, one of the author's poorest nouvelles This story of a man's obsession with the memory of his dead wife is so overwrought, the pathos so unearned, and the intensity of feeling so disproportionate to the slim plot that one can only surmise that James' own morbid preoccupations —particularly with the death of Minny Temple, whom he loved when he was a young man—overwhelmed him The chief structural fault of the story is that the plot is essentially backward-looking The protagonist's total concern with the past makes his present life meaningless—to himself and to the reader It is worthwhile to compare The Altar of the Dead with The Beast m the Jungle, one of James' best nouvelles, where a man's conviction that a great future awaits him rules out any meaningful existence in the present The tale succeeds because the character's "unlived life," a favorite James-lan theme, at least points toward the future, empty as it may be, the element of suspense alone furthers the plot and fuels the reader's interest Possibly in recogmtion of the absence of dramatic motivation in The Altar of the Dead, Truffaut has introduced elements from The Beast in the Jungle in his script In addition, he has supplied the social context missing from the nouvelle The movie protagonist (played by Truffaut) is afflicted with survivor's guilt in post-World War I France, and James' typically unpeopled landscape is filled with credible characters These changes do balance the excessive and obsessive bereavement—but that was precisely the story's point Since Truffaut was aware of this bind, it remains a mystery why he went ahead with the project If we grant the filmmaker "his subject, his idea, his donnee," as James once put it, and consider only the execution of the movie, The Green Room is characteristically well-made The cinematography, by Truffaut's long-time collaborator, Nestor Almendros, is particularly noteworthy By stressing subtle color contrasts rather than value contrasts (l e .qualitative tonal differences rather than quantitative differences of illumination), Almendros floods the movie with a properly creepy atmosphere Nevertheless, an adaptation cannot succeed on the strength of the execution alone, its source must be of value For what is not worth doing is not worth doing well...

...On Screen FILMED FICTIONS by robert asahina Anthony Burgess once contended that film adaptations of good novels are inevitably bad There is a grain of truth to his argument that the better a literary work integrates its formal elements, the likelier it is to resist the alterations required for the screen?especially cutting to fit a comfortable running time and finding the cinematic form for descriptive passages These are problems enough for competent filmmakers, Gianni Amico is not even competent, and his Elective Affinities (he also wrote the script, with Marco Melam and I Ahghiero Chiusano) is a disaster Although the movie is superficially faithful to Goethe's novel about a love quadrangle, Amico has rendered the lengthy stretches of dialogue in the clumsiest possible manner—by awkwardly arranging the actors before the camera and prompting their declamations Particularly graceless is the scene where Edward explains "elective affinities" (in the science of Goethe's day, the mutual attraction of elements already linked to other elements) In the book, the character discusses such contrasting examples as the lmmiscibil-lty of water and oil and the cohesion of mercury In the film, Amico has "dramatized" the dialogue by having Edward literally mix the two liquids and play with globules of quicksilver while he speaks Tonino Nardi's cinematography, which features the garish pink and aqua tones of a cheap picture postcard, and Nicola Samale and Giuseppe Maz-zuca's music, which sounds like a parody of a Nino Rota opus, only aggravate matters In fact, Elective Affimtes is such a mess all around, I was driven out well before the end Another current release—Death on the Nile, based on Agatha Christie's thriller—shows how easy it is to turn a bad book into a bad movie While over 400 million of Christie's 68 mysteries have been sold (doubtless the primary motive for adapting one after another of them for the screen), her large reputation has been a puzzle to me I always thought far more mechanical ingenuity than art was involved in spinning a suspenseful yarn by merely withholding enough information to make each plot disclosure a surprise Christie was a deft mechanic who devoted most of her literary imagination to narrative sleights of hand, leaving little for animating her characters or their impossible stilted speeches The movie picks up these flaws—and adds to them There is, for instance, the incredible climactic showdown, a staple on the Christie mystery menu, where master detective Hercule Poirot explains whodunit to the cast of character and how he cracked the case Peter Ustinov simply cannot manage Poirot's Belgian accent, and John Guillermin cannot manage the direction for this artificial denouement But long before then the English writer's wooden dialogue, rendered reasonably accurately by Anthony Shaffer—so embarrasses the rest of the cast that they succumb to the temptation to ham it up Hence Angela Lansbury does her patented camp number, and Maggie Smith and Bette Davis claw and hiss like a pair of aging alley cats These overwrought performances combine with the horrendously genteel sets?the perfect correlates to Christie's prose —to provide an unintentionally hilarious effect It was, of course, partly in reaction to the limitations of the well-bred mystery story that the hardboiled detective genre arose As Raymond Chandler put it, the idea was to "get murder away from the upper classes and back to the people who are really good at it " A recent novel in this tradition is Roger Simon's The Big Fix, which is at the same time a satire of the tradition Simon's double-edged approach is not entirely successful, but he does give a new twist to the character of the private-eye Rather than a trench-coated loner with a code of honor, estranged from a sleazy underworld, Moses Wine is a blue-jeaned, disillusioned former student activist, a law-school dropout turned gumshoe And as Chandler did in the '40s, Simon uses the mechanics of the murder mystery to expose the bizarre lowlife of Los Angeles—now seen as being populated by aging hippies, former radicals co-opted by "the system,' and other refugees from the '60s who have turned to the human potential movement, Eastern mysticism and Satanism Regrettably, instead of sharing the novel's satirical view of the '60s, the film version of The Big Fix, directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan, adopts a sentimental perspective Thus, while searching for a radical who has gone underground, Wine (Richard Dreyfuss) screens old news broadcasts of the decade's protest demonstrations and is moved to the point of tears Moreover, the screenplay violates all the lone wolf conventions that the book ironically albeit lovingly honored The movie Wine even takes his children along as he is working on the case (and is upset when their lives are threatened) These perversions of the novel cannot be blamed on an insensitive screenwriter, however, for Simon himself wrote the script One is left to speculate that, like one of his co-opted ex-activists, he has sold out to "the system " In addition, it is clear that the screenplay has been tailored as a vehicle for Dreyfuss What is less clear is why Hollywood has been determined to make this blustering clown a star One of his particularly annoying mannerisms here is to sniffle and then to exhale loudly, as if expressing an emotion were somehow akin to an asthma attack Susan Anspach, (Wine's girl friend) is equally poor, reading her lines through her nose as usual On the other hand, Bonnie Bedelia, who has not been seen in a film since her marvelous performance in They Shoot Horses, Don't They...

...plays Wine's estranged wife with an edge that slices away the sentimental glop of the script —but only for the brief minutes she is on screen Unlike Simon's novel, Daniel Ford's Incident at Muc Wa is uninspired Dealing with the early days of the Vietnam war, it improbably mixes combat action with a romance between a soldier and a foreign correspondent for a liberal weekly It also features a cliched cross-section of Army personnel the cynical, passed-over major, the cocky, ambitious adjutant, the idealistic, gung ho lieutenant fresh from ROTC, the shrewd, battle-weary sergeant, and the college-educated corporal whose humanistic perspective is also the authors Yet out ol this meager raw material two Hollywood veterans have fashioned a lean, unsentimental film Go Tell the Spartans (the title is from Simomdes' couplet about Thermopylae) Scriptwriter Wendell Mayes discards the silly romantic subplot and wastes Little time on Ford's unconvincing psychological characterizations He lets the action —the unsuccessful defense of a remote jungle outpost in 1964 —speak for itself And Ted Post (who directed two excellent Clint Eastwood vehicles, Magnum Force and Hang 'Em High) propels the action forward by swiftly and skillfully establishing the geography of the story, by efficiently choreographing the battle sequences, and especially by avoiding any overstatement of the obvious Note the fleeting glimpse that Post permits us of the outside wall of the command post, where a still-visible sign reading "Penang Baptist Mission" expresses a capsule history of American involvement A less intelligent director surely would have lingered on that shot and perhaps repeated it Some good acting also helps In the role of Major Barker, Burt Lancaster is more restrained and therefore better than he has been in a long time, his chest-inflating and teeth-baring are firmly under Post's control Evan Kim conveys an innocent savagery as a brutal South Vietnamese scout/translator, and Craig Wasson as Corporal Cour-cey hits on just the right combination of native pigheadedness and battle-acquired pragmatism The really impressive thing about this movie, though, is that it supplies precisely what is missing from the novel an ambiguous moral/political context In a prefatory note, Ford wrote that Incident at Muc wa "is not intended as a description of combat in South Vietnam' —an otherwise unconvincing claim that gains some credibility from the amount of time he wastes on his sappy love story Maves and Post, by contrast, objectively present all the contradictions that nddled even the earh stages ot the war The South Vietnamese scout is almost oft-handed-K shown (torturing, and summarily executing prisoners but they Vietcong are no less casually pictured as stopping at nothing in their treatment of soldiers and civilians It is expediency rather than ethics that is seen as prevailing on both sides In avoiding the simple-minded antiwar films, Post and Mayes offer as understandable and quite natural the view of the beleaguered soldiers that "the only way we can win this war is to get American combat troops in " By compelling our empathy, they quietly make the point that even those of us who opposed the war were implicated in some of the values—like the faith in American supremacy, moral or military—that led to its escalation Enc Rohmer's Perceval, now playing in Manhattan after a world premiere at the New York Film Festival, is similarly faithful to the historical context of its source material Based on Conte du Graal, Chretien de Troyes' 12th-century Arthurian romance about Perceval's quest for the Holy Grail, the movie exhibits the meticulous antihis-toricism evident in Rohmer s The Marquise of O Once again, the director's intent is to strip away our preconceptions and present the work as it appeared to its original audience The problem with such an endeavor, of course, is that cinema is a 20th-century medium In The Marquise of O Rohmer's solution was to make the film resemble an early 19th-century painting and to direct the actors in a classical manner, thereby turning the viewer toward the external behavior of the characters and the outward manifestations of their moral code, and away from the psychological considerations appropriate to a later, post-Freudian era Rohmer attempts to repeat the strategy in Perceval To counteract the modern inclination toward realism, he has set the movie on a sound stage with painted backdrops and artificial scenery, the highly stylized golden castles and silver trees give Perceval the look of an illuminated manuscript To the same end, a chorus of jongleurs wanders about singing Chretien's octosyllabic rhymed couplets in a modern verse rendition (as tai as 1 can discern with my limited grasp of French, this does not lend itself to translation into English subtitles), following the poet's style, the recitations are in both direct and indirect discourse The principal characters declaim in verse as well, in a variety of modes—sometimes in monologues or interior debates All this does remove Perceval from our modern categories of drama and place it squarely in the middle of the medieval cosmos, at least as Rohmer perceives it Yet m one respect the director has been too faithful to his material The film, like the poem, contains as a subplot a lengthy tale about Ga-wain that has nothing to do with Perceval's adventures But many scholars now believe that Conte du Graal, left unfinished after more than 9,000 lines, was actually two poems, combined only after Chretien's death In another respect Rohmer has not been faithful enough Although Chretien drew upon the tradition of the troubadours and trouveres, his tales were composed as literature to be read, not to be performed in dramatic recitations Even if we grant that this is correct 20th-century form for an Arthurian romance, the esthetic question would remain Does Perceval succeed as art, not solely as a solution to the intellectual problem of historicism...