Novels Into Films
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen NOVELS INTO FILMS BY ROBERT ASAHINA The Europeans, one of Henry James poor novels, has been made into an even poorer film by James Ivory and Ismael Merchant, the director-producer team...
...I do have some quarrels with the direction and with Benedict Fitzgerald's screenplay...
...she had a thick nose...
...An even more serious mistake was Ivory's allowing the fall foliage to dominate the outdoor sequences...
...Unlike the two movies discussed above, Wise Blood, another work premiered at the Festival, has yet to find a distributor despite its being the best "literary" film of the three...
...Remick is so appealing in every way that Acton's rejection of Eugenia seems positively perverse...
...James described her as "not pretty...
...No amount of directorial prestidigitation can disguise the bareness of the material...
...Such pragmatic Philistinism is the trademark of our cultural commissars, who labor under three unexamined assumptions...
...On the other hand, the movie might not have benefited, for the indoor sequences are badly done, too...
...then Dracula suddenly emerges from the shadows, fangs bared and claws ready to strike...
...There are a few consolations...
...First is the belief that medium and content can be easily separated-that it is not difficult to transpose the plot and characterizations of, say, a novel into a film...
...As Robert Acton, an American cousin, the English actor Robin Ellis looks and sounds wrong...
...Their first mistake was the casting...
...Next is the conviction that the resulting package can be marketed to acquaint the ignorant masses with Quality Literature-the same notion advanced in defense of Classics Illustrated comic books 25 years ago...
...Two years ago, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) rejected Ivory and Merchant's application for support to make their adaptation...
...A later scene is practically a direct quote from Murnau...
...Murnau's 1922 film classic, with its stark lighting, grotesque scenery, accelerated motion, and sequences shot in negative, Murnau's film was one of the triumphs of German expressionism...
...In addition, most of the Enoch Emery sections in the book have been compressed or eliminated, thereby unbalancing the narrative and making the character appear occasionally unmotivated...
...just as O'Connor described him, he is always behaving as if "something inside . . . was winding up, although he didn't move on the outside...
...Dourif (who played Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is letter perfect as Hazel...
...On Screen NOVELS INTO FILMS BY ROBERT ASAHINA The Europeans, one of Henry James poor novels, has been made into an even poorer film by James Ivory and Ismael Merchant, the director-producer team responsible for Rose-land, Shakespeare Wallah, and other movies...
...Although I have no use for the type of fiction known as "Southern Gothic," Huston's honestly religious depiction of anguished faith and existential loneliness caused me to reread and, more important, rethink the novel...
...What he offers are mere superficial trappings...
...Only Amy Wright strikes a too familiar note as Sabbath Lilly, the degenerate teenager-a part Wright seems to specialize in...
...The resultant film-now in a commercial run after making its debut at the New York Film Festival-resembles one of those boring Masterpiece Theater programs that NEH and other foundations are continually importing from England for American public television...
...Shor is equally good as Enoch, and there are some marvelous supporting characterizations by Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton and especially Mary Nell Santacroce, as Hazel's landlady...
...the browns, blues and grays of the sand, sky and water merge in an almost palpable haze of pale colors...
...But Kinski's performance is so determined to avoid camp that the staging seems artistically sound...
...And Tim Woodward is unexpectedly good as the roguish Felix...
...Adapted from Flannery O'Connor's first novel, of the same title, it was directed by John Huston, who hasn't directed since The Man Who Would Be King (1975...
...Enoch is his first disciple, the possessor of "wise blood": "I know things I ain't never learned," he proclaims...
...In one scene, Lucy Harker (Is-abelle Adjani) walks along the seaside in the fog...
...Herzog's latest effort, though, is more than simply another variation of the vampire legend...
...Herzog, a member of the generation now revitalizing German film, was deeply conscious of his heritage when he made this movie...
...Unfortunately, these bright spots are hardly enough to redeem a project as misguided as The Europeans...
...according to the New York Times, the Endowment reviewers argued that because The Europeans is one of James' weakest novels, "it would not be the best introduction to the general public of James' literary accomplishments...
...The filmmakers share O'Connor's strangely sympathetic view of these bizarre characters, and their sympathy pays off...
...the coach with brass lamps, the cut crystal, the canopied four-poster beds, the rustling silk dresses, the lace caps, the pewter cups and candlesticks, the marble busts...
...The screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (who has collaborated with Ivory and Merchant on several other productions), is reasonably faithful to the book, except for the insertion of a climactic scene at a ball that warps James' understated sequence of events...
...By contrast, the novel is set in the spring and begins with an untimely and symbolic May snowstorm that heralds the arrival of Eugenia and her brother Felix in Boston...
...Herzog has also used fast motion, but with a twist...
...This is most obvious in the cinematography...
...Yet if this film may be a feast for the eyes, it is dreary for the mind...
...The story revolves around the pathetic attempts of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) and Enoch Emery (Daniel Shor) to find some comfort in the empty universe of the small-town South...
...Their lonely world is peopled by fake blind preachers, teenage sluts, lonely widows, men in monkey suits, and guitar-strumming evangelists...
...For the director was primarily influenced by F.W...
...Last is the belief that cinema is the handmaiden to literature in an enterprise of this kind...
...A feeling of subtle horror practically oozes from the screen -a remarkable achievement, considering that the director managed it with techniques and imagery (the soft-focus pastels) not normally associated with horror films...
...Assuming production schedules dictated shooting in autumn, Ivory could have emphasized closeup or mid-range rather than long-range shots outdoors, or interior rather than exterior settings...
...I hope Wise Blood attracts some distributor soon, for it is a film worth the time of both serious readers and serious viewers...
...But there is no reason to believe that these particular filmmakers would have done any better with The Princess Casamassima...
...We first see an archway leading to a black corridor...
...Views about the relationship between film and literature, it should be noted, differ...
...In any case, the British National Film Finance Corporation-which apparently shares the same assumptions about culture-did ultimately give Ivory and Merchant a grant for their project...
...Indeed, Herzog's Nosferatu is an esthetic triumph...
...if anything, it is she who should be rejecting him...
...Hazel is a young Army veteran driven by the demons of his past to preach a new gospel-of the Church of Truth Without Christ...
...Hazel's brief flashbacks, garishly illuminated, are jarringly out of synch with the film's otherwise thoroughgoing naturalism...
...One wishes that Herzog had chosen a more worthy vehicle for his talents...
...he was trying both to acknowledge his debt to Murnau and to transcend it...
...This film, however, is an example of the deleterious effects of hackneyed source material-Specifically, Bram Stoker's Dracula, a book worth reading today only for the light it sheds on popular Victorian fiction...
...The worst selection was Lee Remick to play Eugenia, the scheming Continental adventuress...
...All those red and brown and gold leaves make the film look like a travelogue sponsored by the New England Vacation Center...
...Lisa Eichhorn, an intelligent and careful performer who made her screen debut in the unfortunate Yanks, is quite pleasing as Gertrude, the rebellious younger Wentworth daughter...
...her mouth was large, her lips too full, her teeth uneven, her chin rather commonly modelled...
...At first, I thought it was a mistake for Herzog to introduce such an alien, expressionistic element...
...The problems have been created by Ivory and Merchant...
...This staging is almost identical to Murnau's, and the homage is underscored by Kinski's appearance?white face, bald head, hooded ears, and overgrown fingernails-which closely resembles Max Schreck's in the original...
...The implication was that one of James' best novels would have made for a better movie -I.e., a good "introduction" for the public, and therefore would have been considered worthy of being underwritten by the NEH...
...The effect is appropriately eerie-and totally nonexpressionistic...
...Still, these are comparatively minor flaws...
...And, as I have mentioned before ("TeutonicTedium," NL, October 23, 1978), the German cinema has not since reached the heights attained in those early years...
...You may think you are watching James (or Trollope or whomever), but you are really viewing a soap opera designed for upper-middle-class post-literates who like their esthetic experiences predigested...
...When Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) climbs the Carpathians toward Dracu-la's castle, the clouds rapidly swirl overhead in a combination of real-time motion and time-lapse photography...
...While Harker is sleeping during his first night at the castle, the Count (Klaus Kinski) pays him a visit...
...Went-worth, the patriarch of the New England clan whose relations with its European cousins form the story of the novel, but instead of acting, Addy lets his craggy features do all the work...
...Werner Herzog's Nosferatu is another film that premiered at the Festival and has gone on to acommercial run...
...Wesley Addy looks right for the part of Mr...
...In place of the nightmarish black and white of the original, Herzog has chosen soft-focus pastels...
...The scene where Felix asks Wentworth for his daughter's hand, for example, is clumsily arranged: the principals are posed before the camera awkwardly, as if the director were filming a badly blocked stage play...
...Ivory simply lacks the imagination to find the visual equivalent of James' textured prose...
...The effect is to turn a comedy of manners into a shopping catalogue for jaded urban dwellers who fantasize about the elegant life in old New England...
...How would the Endowment have reacted to a proposal to "novelize" a great film...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 21
