Showing papers in "Literature-film Quarterly in 1984"

The Uncanny and the Fairy Tale in Kubrick's the Shining

Abstract: Most critics of Stanley Kubrick's latest film, The Shining, seem to feel that he has provided so much psychological motivation for the events in the movie that he has rendered unnecessary the presence of the supernatural and extrasensory perception, thereby draining the horror from what was heralded as "the ultimate horror film." Jack Kroll says that "The sight of Torrance's endlessly repeated sentence chills you with its revelation of a man so clogged and aching with frustrated creativity that his desire to kill doesn't need to be explained by his seizure by sinister and suppurating creatures from a time warp of pure evil."l Pauline Kael asks, "Do the tensions between father, mother, and son create the ghosts, or do the ghosts serve as catalysts to make those tensions erupt? It appears to. be an intertwined process. Kubrick seems to be saying that rage, uncontrollable violence, and ghosts spawn each other-that they are really the same thing." She concludes that while the film's theme is "the timelessness of murder," "the picture seems not to make any sense."2 Both these critics go wrong in focussing on Torrance's transformation from troubled father to axe-murderer. Both Torrance's son and wife who are not characterized by rage or uncontrollable violence also see ghosts- ghosts he never sees. Like Torrance's wife, Wendy, we are torn between two people possessed, a father and a son. Kubrick places us at the very fulcrum of their opposing but related perspectives. The source of this balance can be traced to the two books Kubrick and Diane Johnson reportedly read while writing the script- Freud's essay "The 'Uncanny' " (1919) and Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (1976). 3 Pauline Kael recognizes that Kubrick may have structured his film in terms of Freud's essay (i.e., the use of doubles, deja vu, a maze),4 but she completely ignores not only Bettelheim's book as an influence but elements in Freud's essay directly related to Bettelheim's topic. If Kubrick's intention was to focus solely on the father, it is understandable why he might read an essay about the nature of an adult's feeling of horror. But why read a book concerning the importance fairy tales have for children if the son's view of the events is not equally important? Understanding the complementary nature of both works clarifies the theme and parallel structure of the film and helps to explain the seeming contradictions even positive reviewers have criticized. Freud's essay and Bettelheim's book are complementary not merely because both explore the mind in terms of psychoanalysis but because both discuss man's relation to an animistic universe- Freud from the perspective of the adult whose beliefs have supposedly "surmounted" it or the madman who has become trapped in it and Bettelheim from the perspective of the child who begins life very much within it. Freud characterizes the animistic universe by the belief that spirits, good and bad, inhabit all things and that thoughts and wishes are all-powerful over physical reality. Primitive man thus "transposed the structural conditions of his own mind into the external world." As Freud emphasizes, each of us has padded through a stage in our development corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive man, but "none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves . . . [so] that everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfills the conditions of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression (XVII, 24041)." But as Freud mentions and as Bettelheim more extensively examines, the child still inhabits an animistic universe, and the fairy tales which reflect that universe may be frightening but are not "uncanny." The themes of the uncanny which Freud lists are all concerned with the "phenomenon of the 'double' " and are all found in The Shining: characters thought to be identical because of their similar appearance, telepathy, identification of one character with another to the extent that he forgets his own nature or substitutes the other self for his own. …

American Horror: The Shining

Abstract: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (Warner, 1980) in many ways resembles a conventional horror film With a little cutting, in fact, it can be made to look almost exactly like one The 16mm print currently distributed by Swank, Inc runs 120 minutes, deleting 23 minutes from the 1980 theatrical release print The Swank print cuts several long scenes of thematic exposition in their entirety and shortens other ones with the cumulative effect of streamlining the film's narrative component in conventional generic terms For example, the house call to the Torrance apartment in Denver by the woman doctor after Danny's first shining is completely cut, so that the audience has no sense of the relationship between the boy's telepathic powers and his father's past history of child abuse and alcoholism (and his mother's passive acceptance of both pathologies) Other sequences are shortened to eliminate thematically important but dramatically irrelevant material, like that part of the Overlook tour in which Stuart Ullman tells the Torrances that the hotel was built on the site of an Indian burial ground, and some of Jack's later remarks to Lloyd the bartender which reveal his nearly primordial sexism This "revised version" of The Shining, with its emphasis on narrative action and conventional genre motifs constitutes a perfectly acceptable, if sometimes confusing, horror film which persons unfamiliar with the original can accept as just that and nothing more There is, then, unquestionably a horror film somewhere inside of The Shining, just as there is a science fiction film inside of 2001 and an historical costume drama inside of Barry Lyndon But, as in those earlier films, the conventional genre film exists within the larger work only to provide a comment on the true subject of the genre itself as Kubrick understands it True science fiction, Kubrick seems to say in 2001, would show how the future is contained in the past, and in Barry Lyndon that true historical reconstruction would render time past as time present, which it certainly was to those who lived it In The Shining I think we're being told that true horror is not extraordinary but surrounds us every day and, as Auden wrote of evil, "sits with us at the dinner table" From this perspective, The Shining is less about ghosts and demonic possession than it is about the murderous system of economic exploitation which has sustained this country since, like the Overlook Hotel, it was built upon an Indian burial ground that stretched quite literally "From sea to shining sea" The Overlook, Ullman tells the Torrances on Closing Day, has been a "stopping place for the jet set even before anybody knew what a jet set was" and a haven for "all the best people," but we soon leam that beneath its proud exterior the hotel contains a terrible secret: "Redrum," as Danny first discovers it, the anagram for "Murder" This secret is not very well con- cealed to those who see clearly, or, in the film's metaphor, "shine," but it is a secret which most Americans choose to overlook; for the true horror of The Shining is the horror of living in a society which is predicated upon murder and must constantly deny the fact to itself We committed genocide on the American Indians to build it (one of Hitler's most admired models, by the way, for the Holocaust), and we have murdered ever since to maintain it; when there's no one else to murder, we murder each other at the highest per capita rate in the civilized world Much of this murder is economically motivated and is the by-product of crimes of property But much more of it is economically motivated in a subtler sense and results from the frustrations built into an economic system that demands the exploitation of its weakest members In crimes of rage, neighbors murder neighbors; spouses murder spouses; parents murder children We have all heard a lot recently about how the incidence of wife and child abuse rises dramatically in times of high unemployment …

Pistols and Cherry Pies: Lolita from Page to Screen

Abstract: It is a commonplace of criticism that good novels often make bad movies, and that cheap "action" books make good ones. The paradox derives from the contrast between pictures and words. "With the abandonment of language as its sole and primary element," says George Bluestone, whose well-known study Novels Into Film is a springboard for this essay, "the film necessarily leaves behind those characteristic contents of thought which only language can approximate: hopes, dreams, memories, conceptual consciousness. In their stead, the film supplies endless spatial variation, photographic images of physical reality, and the principles of montage and editing .... That is why a comparative study which begins by finding resemblances between novel and film ends by loudly proclaiming their differences."l "How did they ever make a movie from LoIUaV screamed the posters. And the critics screamed back, "They didn't!"2 Many early reviews of the film range in tone from petulant to hysterical. The New York Times called the movie garbled, 3 Time magazine dismissed it as a victim of the adaptation fad;4 Films in Review labeled "Lolita" tripe and suggested that it bordered on a national disgrace.5 Especially disappointed were Nabokov's admirers, who pronounced the movie unfaithful to the book. Andrew Sarris complained that "Nabokov's literary wit has not been translated into visual wit, with the result that the film is leaden where it should be light."6 "If the film has Nabokov's ear and voice," grumbled Arlene Croce, "it has not his eye."7 And Bosley Crowther declared, simply, "This is not the novel Lolita.''^ Much of the disappointment seems to stem from the fact that Nabokov himself is credited with having written the screenplay, adapting it from his own highly successful novel. "He had such incomparable material to work from," one critic noted, "that he could be expected to have done better. "9 But Lolita, in Hollywood jargon, was difficult to lick. Alfred Appel, Jr., who has compared the novel with the screenplay in some detail, identified the dilemma when he said that "Perhaps not even the most stylized of productions could have solved the basic aesthetic problem of Lolita, a novel whose effects depend on a richly rhetorical first-person narrator."10 As time went by, however, the critics became more respectful of the film. Three years after it was released, John Thomas proclaimed that "LOLITA the movie violates Lolita the book only if you think that Nabokov's novel is about sexual perversion, or even about Lolita. "1 1 Ten years later Dennis Delrogh praised the motion picture, remarking that it runs on "colossal wit, intelligence, verve, and technique. "1 2 Pauline Kael declared that "the arthouse audience is missing out on one of the few American films it might enjoy. "13 Finally, Vladimir Nabokov himself, though he protested after the Hollywood premiere that only "bits and pieces" of his screenplay had been used, nevertheless called Kubrick "a great director." Years later, after recovering from an attack of "aggravation and regret," he declared that the film was "absolutely first rate."14 "Lolita," in short, has worn well. How do we account for this fact? The answer may challenge our assumptions about cinematic adaptation. "The perfect novel from which to make a movie," says Kubrick, "is not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book's psychological content."15 If "Lolita," in spite of the difficulties, is indeed an absolutely first rate film, its genius lies in the dramatic compression that Kubrick has achieved in restructuring the novel through his use of objective correlatives. Part of Kubrick's achievement is in finding a new, economical form which would allow the film to play in a reasonably short time. …

A Sense of Magic: Reality and Illusion in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast

Abstract: The medium of cinema, allied with the technology of the camera, contains a curious paradox in what it projects. As a camera recording objectively, it has the impact of reality; as film, it has a certain dreamlike quality and can be the agent of innumerable illusions. A talented director can make use of this marriage of reality and illusion, especially if the theme is fanciful in nature. In his film Beauty and the Beast, Jean Cocteau uses the illusion of film to create magic, while the camera itself gives validity to what appears on the screen. The combination of orchestrated effects and the immediate presence of the filmed image creates just the type of atmosphere Cocteau desires: Belief in the reality of miracles, a fairytale dimension in which anything can happen. Cocteau announces his intention quite plainly, not in the complex image of cinema, but in writing on the screen itself: Children believe what they are told and doubt it not. They believe that a rose that is picked can bring on trouble in a family. They believe that the hands of a human beast that kills begin to smoke and that this beast is ashamed when a maiden dwells in his house. They believe a thousand other very naive things. I am asking of you a little of this naivete now, and, to bring us all good fortune, let me say four magic words, the veritable "open sesame" of childhood: Once upon a time. . . .1 In requesting naivete from his audience, Cocteau is asking for a regressive belief in magic, a belief in the improbable so necessary to the fairy tale. "The rhythm of the film is one of recitation," writes Cocteau in his Diary of a Film; later, he notes, almost as counterpoint, "A film must distract the eye with its contrasts, with unrealistic effects."2 The filmed magic, then, is counterpoint to what otherwise might be a simple tale: A despised younger daughter sacrifices herself for her father, survives hardship, and eventually marries a handsome prince. Of course, this summary makes no mention of the powerful scenes of the castle in moonlight. Cocteau, sensitive to the fact that a tear turned into a diamond does not alone make a film work as a fairy tale, talks of an entire magic aura: . . . fairy-like atmosphere means more to me than the fairy element itself. This is why the episode, among others, of the sedan chairs in the farmyard, an episode which does not spring from any fantasy, is, in mv opinion, more significant of this fairy quality than any artiface in the castle.3 Understandably, Cocteau is reluctant to credit trick shots as possessing any poetry, preferring to dwell on more natural compositions. Actually, the magic of the film is complex; for the purpose of analysis, it may be broken down into three types, all integral to the film. The simplest form of magic in the film is all trompe l'oeil dematerialization, animation of inanimate objects, and transformation, as, for example, a magic necklace which turns into bumed rope in the hands of the wrong person. These tricks may merely grace a scene, though they usually add powerfully to the atmosphere.4 A second type of magic comprises the ordinary effects of the cinema: a breeze's blowing leaves when there is no real breeze, or an eerie glare from an arc lamp. A picture-book air hovers around even the house of the merchant, showing what period clothing and sedan chairs can do to enhance belief in a certain time, a certain place. The third sense of magic is a vague middle ground of cinematic effects and cinematic tricks, scenes that might be staged theatrically but would then lose most of their presence. The Beast himself is a good example of this form of magic: on stage, he would be a man in a beast suit, whereas in Cocteau's film, he is huge, fearsome-and believable. By extension, the magic functions as metaphor man as a beast, man's beastly nature. Many of the effects in the Beast's castle are also semimagical, wherein the reality of film creates belief in, for example, a human-arm candelabra. …

"More Than Meets the Eye" in Singin' in the Rain and Day for Night

Abstract: When Betty Comden and Adolph Green were introduced to Francois Truffaut in Paris in the 1960s they listened in "total disbelief as the French director informed the writers oi Singin' in the Rain "that he had seen the film many times, knew every frame of it, felt it was a classic, and that he and Alain Resnais, among others, went to see it regularly at a little theatre called the Pagoda where it was even at that moment in the middle of a several-month run." 1 Subsequently, Truffaut has said in print that one of the movies he remembered affectionately as being "on the same subject" (i.e, a movie about making movies ) when he began to film his Day For Night was Singin' in the Rain, directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.2 I think that there is indeed evidence in Day For Night that Truffaut knows the classic Hollywood musical well and that the links between it and his film are more than casual; in effect, indications are that the earlier film (1952) considerably influenced the later one (1975) and that, although they treat the same subject, they cannot be described as simply "movies about making movies." Of course, both films do center on the business of making motion pictures but are set in different times and places. Singin' in the Rain takes place in the Hollywood of 1927 whereas Day For Night presents conditions of filming in contemporary France. Singin' in the Rain begins with the premiere of a costume romance, The Royal Rascal, a silent film starring Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) and comes full circle, after ninety minutes or so, to a second premiere, that of an early sound musical, The Dancing Cavalier, starring the same performers. In between, the audience witnesses the tribulations of players and technicians at the fictional studio, Monumental Pictures, coping with the "new" sound medium after the initially silent The Dueling Cavalier is turned into a disastrous talkie, salvaged when it is reshot as a musical in which Line's strident talking and singing voice is dubbed by a young, unknown player, Kathy Seiden (Debbie Reynolds), with whom Don has fallen in love. Truffaut's film concentrates on the making of only one film, Meet Pamela, on a large, outdoor set and on the sound stages of Victorine studios in Nice. Meet Pamela is a romantic drama in which Pamela, the newlywedded wife of a young Frenchman, falls in love and elopes with her fatherin-law. This love quadrangle is played by Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) as Pamela; Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) as Alexandre, the father-in-law; Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud) as the young husband; and Severine (Valentina Cortese) as Alexandre's spouse. Throughout both films, audiences see films in the making and view rushes or portions of completed films. On the whole, Day For Night conveys a much stronger sense of the daily work on a film than does Singin' in the Rain. But both, by no coincidence, develop their most mirth-provoking scenes from the actions that occur on sound stages during the filming of scenes requiring repeated takes. The comic effect arises from basic action which inevitably leads to calamitous conclusions, recurrence with change in one case and change with recurrence in the other. In Singin ' in the Rain the repeated action begins as Lina Lamont speaks the line "Oh, Pierre, you shouldn't have come" and continues as cast, director, crew, and sound engineer cope in inventive but ultimately futile ways with the cumbersome equipment, particularly the static microphone. At first, acting in a florid, silent manner, Lina turnes her head left and right, the sound waxing and waning. When the director urges her to speak directly into the microphone hidden in a clump of greenery in the foreground, she replies angrily, "I can't make love to a bush!" "All right," says the director, "Well have to think of something else." Resourcefulness includes sewing the microphone into Lina's decolletage where it picks up her heartbeat, and then into a large corsage on her shoulder. …

The Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman: Personification and Olfactory Detail

Abstract: lngmar Bergman's screenplays are remarkable for their extraordinary vitality and curiously suggestive atmosphere. Reading like short stories and plays, their extensive stage directions are replete with qualitative adjectives and verbs, metaphors, similes, examples of personification, interior monologues, and other non-cinematic features which are not normally found in a genre noted mostly for its terse language, technical information, and line-by-line dialogue. While most directors use cinematic tools such as lighting, camera angle, and soundtrack as a matter of course to emphasize the points of view in their films, Bergman's screenplays, with their exact language and original verbal images, offer an additional, new angle from which to observe his work. Unless the carefully chosen words and phrases of the stage directions are injected into the dialogue of the films, only the reading public will benefit from their information. Therefore, the Bergman film viewer who is also armed with his screenplays may be better alerted to the precise tone and message of the work than the film viewer alone. The fact that a visual artist like lngmar Bergman spends much creative energy on literary descriptions which will rarely be transferred to the screen raises some intriguing questions about his working methods. Why is the literary aspect of Bergman's work of such great importance to him that he embellishes the screenplays at length and in astonishing detail, even though the writing causes him much agony?1 What is the function of this type of dramatic literature, and how has it arisen? After an outline of Bergman's use of personification and olfactory detail outside of the dialogue, and a discussion of the development of his screenplays over the years, my analysis will focus on two factors which can explain the raison d'etre for this unusual kind of screenplay: Bergman's close relationship with his actors, and his philosophy of films as "consumer articles." Two non-visual devices favored by Bergman, yet largely unobserved by the critics,2 are personification and olfactory information. By endowing nature and objects with human qualities and by specifying the scents that surround many situations, Bergman's screenplays manage to create a haunting atmosphere that exactly reflects the psychological dilemmas of the characters and the oppressive nature of various parts of their lives. The characters and their surroundings appear to be tragically interconnected in suffering and pain, a mutual dependency fed by the sadly human characteristics of objects and by the melancholy fragrance of nature and rooms. The reader is confronted with an enormously persuasive, sometimes tragicomic, portrayal of an ailing universe where human beings, by necessity, must be unwell too. Bergman's personifications can be divided into two major areas. First, there is nature personified, such as the sun and moon, forests, the sea, and the sky. Nature in Bergman's screenplays is a somber backdrop, heaving and sighing in sorrow, bellowing and moaning gloomily, all the while displaying the same pain and cares as the protagonists. The sea becomes an enormous living entity, muttering, mumbling, and trembling; trees whisper and moan; clouds are meekly silent or obstinately marching forward.3 In The Seventh Seal, introducing the knight Antonius Block's harrowing religious quest, the sun "wallows up from the misty sea like some bloated, dying fish" (p. 138), while the forest "sighs and stirs ponderously" (p. 197). The sun in The Silence "roars over walls, steel, and window-panes" (p. 139), stressing the nervous pitch in the two sisters' emotional tug of war. The wind, in Winter Light, competing with Pastor Eriksson's flu for effect, "presses out a pained sound" (p. 89), and the winter day in The Touch "sinks, roving uneasily" (p. 138), parallelling the uneasiness of Karin and David's relationship and foreshadowing its imminent breakup. In Smiles of a Summer Night the trees "stand quiet and waiting" (p. …

Eric Rohmer's "Marquise of O." and the Theory of the German Novella

Abstract: Eric Rohmer's: Marquise of O. and the Theory of the German Novella As a classical philologist and professor of film, Eric Rohmer is eminently suited for the task of giving cinematic expression to Kleist's Marquise of 0. It was his intention to be painstakingly true to the text.l and for this purpose, he even learned the German language. In directing the film, he wanted to get a sense of the period. From the novella, we gather that this must have been the era of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe.2 There was a prerequisite that the novella deal with real events, that is, contemporary events, and thus be "news" to the audience. 3 For this reason, we must assume that the events of the Marquise coincide with the time during which Kleist "records" them. It is assumed that Kleist wrote the novella while he was a prisoner of war of the French and brought it with him on his return to Germany in 1807, submitting it to the literary magazine Phoebus in 1808.4 It is important to remember that the novella was originally narrated for a contemporary audience and that the norms by which that audience lived were in contrast to the extraordinary events of the novella, so that a certain tension was created by the opposition of the two. If one posits the origin of the novella in the Renaissance period,5 a time of increasing individual consciousness, the crisis situation as the central event of the novella6 takes on special significance. By confronting stress situations in which the security of the self is jeopardized, the individual learns to assert himself against a fate which in surprising, unexpected, unpredictable, and incomprehensible form has entered his life, thus growing in self-awareness and attaining greater self-consciousness. The norms by which the Patricians of Toscany lived gave them a certain secure position from which the events of a novella could be judged, and it provided them with a certain distance towards those events. This distance derived from the conviction that the central event was, after all, out of the ordinary and the fate which was operative in the novella could not touch the audience.7 As the social and religious order changed with the course of history, such confidence was no longer possible. In the late eighteenth century, the social frame was often omitted, 8 as is the case in Kleist's Marquise of O. The tension then, no longer exists explicitly between the novella and the audience of the frame in which it is narrated,5' but implicitly between the novella and Kleist's reading audience, or in Rohmer's case, between the audience and the film. The moral frame of reference provided by a narrative frame with possible commentary on the content of the story has fallen away and must be replaced by the individual moral code of the viewer, more than 170 years removed in time from Kleist's novella. When Pauline Kael objects to Rohmer's "even-toned method," which "precludes animal passion,"10 she is criticizing his style, which by its distance is entirely appropriate for the novella: Objectivity of presentation was one of the main prerequisites.1 · What she considers a lack of passion because of Rohmer's own concerns actually is a conscious effort on Rohmer's part to maintain the objectivity of the narrative style of the novella. If Rohmer, like Kleist, as a critic of his own society, intends to tell a moral tale, it is necessary for him to create a certain distance between the events of the narrative and the movie audience. The Marquise of O., as Pauline Kael observes, is a story about passion, but one must not forget that it is a story of illicit passion, whether by Kleist's standards, those of his audience in his own time, or by our own. The claim that the story is archaic or irrelevant today12 misses the point: that the events of the novella are as disturbing today as they must have been to the Marquise when they were happening to her. It is the story of her pregnancy, her anguish and her victory over her mystifying situation when in spite of all adversity, she finds her center within herself and: "Having learned how strong she was . …

Film into Story: The Narrative Scheme of Crossfire

Abstract: However popular or celebrated American post-World War II "problem" films may have been on their first appearance, they have generally not worn well. Brute Force (1947), Smash-Up (1947), and Canon City (1948)-all of which dealt exploitively or melioristically with matters of social consciousnessturn up occasionally on the late show but ultimately interest insomniacs more than historians. Films about the "returning soldier," a sub-genre, were even more time sensitive. Despite the fanfare that surrounded their initial engagements, Pride of the Marines (1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Tomorrow Is Forever (1946), and Till the End of Time (1946) seem curiously dated. An unusual exception is RKO's Crossfire (1947). An apparently simple mystery about a group of soldiers on terminal leave, one of whom murders a Jew, Crossfire retains its considerable force even today. Surprisingly, no one has yet clearly defined the reason for its endurance. The film's critics to date have been preoccupied with surface characteristics, particularly its film noir style and its prominent statement against anti-Semitism. As a result, they have missed not only the film's controlling themethe veteran's search for identity in post-war Americabut also its unique use of the idea of narrative as a strategy to solve the veteran's problem. It is this elaboration of the problem of identity and, more important, the suggestion of a solution through storytelling that lend Crossfire its timeless quality. The plot of Crossfire may easily be capsulized. In a bar in post-war Washington, D.C., a troubled corporal named Arthur Mitchell (George Cooper) meets Joseph Samuels (a Jewish veteran, played by Sam Levene). When Samuels is later found slain, Mitchell becomes the prime suspect. Neither Peter Keeley (Mitchell's roommate, played by Robert Mitchum) nor Captain Finlay (the police detective, played by Robert Young) believes that the soldier is guilty, but, as Finlay says, Mitchell's is "the only story I've got." Finally , a trap laid for Montgomery (Robert Ryan), the real killer and an anti-Semite, results in his tacit admission of guilt, his attempted escape, and his death by the detective's pistol. This strongly told, deceptively straightforward narrative impressed contemporary critics. James Agee called Crossfire "a gruesomely exciting story . . . the best Hollywood movie in a long time." Bosley Crowther praised its makers for "lacing this exceedingly thoughtful theme through a grimly absorbing melodrama."1 And the film went on to win several accolades, including Best Social Film at the Cannes Film Festival, the Film Daily Award for Best Picture and Direction, and five major Academy Award nominations. In spite of its auspicious debut, Crossfire attracted little scholarly attention during the next three decades. In most film histories, it was simply paired with Gentleman's Agreement (also released in 1947) and referred to as Hollywood's initial effort to confront American anti-Semitism.2 In the late 1970s, however, the film witnessed a revival. Subjecting Crossfire to intensive study, contemporary critics recognized in the film much more than an unembellished statement against religious bigotry. Yet they continued to overlook the film's central themes. In two cases, the critics' myopia may have derived from their use of Crossfire as a device to make broader statements about the inadequacies of current film scholarship. In 1977, Colin McArthur employed Crossfire to chide Anglo-American writers for focusing on film dialogue rather than images. This emphasis, McArthur argued, had caused otherwise intelligent viewers to see only Crossfire's social statement and miss the deeper meaning carried in its "bleak and pessimistic film noir" images. In McArthur's reading, Crossfire's murder becomes less a condemnation of anti-Semitism "than a characteristic symptom of the dark and monstrous world constructed by the film noir."3 Similarly, in 1978, Keith Kelly and Clay Steinman used Crossfire to advocate a complex "dialectical" system of film analysis that related the intellectual perspectives of those responsible for shaping film content to the broader social, political, and economic climate of the era. …

The (Sex) Symbol: Marilyn, Prime Time, and the Nielsens

Abstract: In 1947 Alvah Bessie was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer whether he was a member of the Communist Party and the Screenwriters Guild. Along with nine others (the group known as "The Hollywood Ten"), he stood on the first amendment and refused to answer the committee's questions. All ten were sentenced to prison terms; Bessie served his (one year) in a jail in Texarkana, Texas. The HUAC investigation, which resulted in a blacklist, effectively ended Bessie's career as a screenwriter. (Ironically, his last film before his subpoena, Objective Burma (1945), had earned him an Academy Award nomination.) His only real contact with the industry since the blacklist was occasioned by the made-for-television film (released theatrically in Europe in a longer, more sexually explicit version) of his novel The Symbol (1966), which appeared on television in 1974 as The Sex Symbol. Both novel and film were surrounded by controversy, which has been Bessie's constant companion throughout most of his career. Upon its publication, the book was unfairly attacked by most critics as a cheap rehash of the life of Marilyn Monroe, an exploitation of her personal suffering and of her sexual history. Only a few critics, notably Martha Gelhorn of the Kansas City Star and Wirt Williams of the New York Times Book Review, were perceptive enough to judge the novel on its own merits, which are considerable, instead of playing who's who games with its characters and then castigating Bessie for fictionalizing some real-life figures (a common enough novelistic device). Probably because of the unnecessary abusive criticism, the hardcover edition of the book, published by Random House, did not sell well. However, the paperback, issued in 1968 and again in 1973, has sold nearly a million copies, which makes The Symbol the best known of Bessie's novels. The television movie made from the novel also became a Hollywood cause celebre. The project was announced amid great fanfare, its controversial subject matter and the explicit nature of some of its scenes making it quite a daring project for television. The casting, too, generated considerable publicity: all the roles were described in various trade magazines, and Connie Stevens was finally chosen for the lead after Dyan Cannon and Ann-Margret had turned it down. The film was scheduled to air on March 5, as an "ABC Movie of the Week", but then was suddenly canceled. ABC claimed that it needed more work, but this did not prevent much gossipy speculation: some suggested that the Kennedy family had forced the network to cancel (the producers had spiced up Bessie's story by adding the character of a prominent senator who has an affair with the actress), while there were also rumors of lawsuits by Joe DiMaggio and by Arthur Miller (whose 1964 play After the Fall was also being prepared for televison release in 1974); perhaps, after all, the whole incident was merely a publicity stunt, calculated to excite further interest in the show. Finally, 77ie· Sex Symbol was broadcast on September 14, and although it won sixth place in the Nielsen ratings for the week, it was damned by TV critics from coast to coast. Bessie's own part in the adaptation of his novel for the home screen was accompanied by some bitter, if less public, contention as well. Faced with the problem of turning his 300-page recreation of a woman's life into a workable TV script, he repeatedly asked his executive producer, Douglas Cramer, to persuade the network to allow him a two-hour format, but this request was rejected, and he found himself restricted to 74 minutes' running time (to fill the standard 90-minute time-slot). Still, Bessie strove to preserve the depth and complexity of his narrative technique, alternating between scenes from Wanda Oliver's life, occasional monologues, and her dialogues with a psychiatrist. The version he submitted, though a strong and potentially powerful drama for television, was inexplicably scrapped, and the script substantially revised by Bud Baumes, an assistant producer. …

Why Measure for Measure

Abstract: It remains a puzzle for some viewers that BBC-TV's Measure for Measure, one of the first productions in the Shakespeare Series, remains one of the best. I would suggest that it is not merely because subsequent productions, including Dr. Miller's Taming of the Shrew and Antony and Cleopatra, have been, to put it unobscenely, less than satisfactory. Assuming good casting and intelligent direction-warranted assumptions in the case of Desmond Davis' BBC-TV-production-the script per se proves excellent for television. Before glancing at some of the excellencies of this particular version, I wish to examine some of the generic reasons why Measure for Measure seems almost to have been written for television. Measure for Measure has been labelled a "problem play," of course, a convenient category that critics have invented to solve their problems. The problem play is unlike a comedy such as As You Like It in that the problems the problem play raises run deeper than the "folly" and myopia that get resolved at the end of the comedy. The problems of the problem play- in this case, illicit sexuality, radical abuse of political office, oath-breaking, attempted murder, and so on- are potentially tragic issues. Yet at the end of Measure for Measure, no Hamlet dies (Hamlet has been called a problem play, of course), no Othello kills himself, no Macbeth is struck down by Macduff, no Octavius gives orders for the funeral of Antony and Cleopatra. The Duke has power to save. The play ends "happily," with the multiple marriages endemic to the comic ending. Many feel, however, that nothing really has been solved beneath the imposition of Vincentio's politics, and that the "comic ending" is "coerced," rather than springing from new awarenesses within characters, awarenesses that society is ready to incorporate within its widened frame. If society is a better place at the end of a Shakespearean comedy it is because most of the characters have learned something about themselves during the course of their dramatized careers. Is Vienna a better place as a result of all we have witnessed? Desmond Davis' BBC-TV production might answer with a craftily qualified "yes." But one must be careful, for the production, like the script, invites the subjective response of the individual auditor, and Measure for Measure finds itself high on the list of plays that evoke radically divergent views, along with Hamlet and Henry V. The problem play tends towards melodrama, a mode that may seem to raise profound issues but does not pretend to solve them. If it does pretend to solve them, the pretense shows through, as in the case, I would argue, of the celebrated Equus and, possible, of Measure for Measure. Television is a medium for melodrama, and the best shows, "The Waltons," for example, are often the ones where the "solutions" are the most muted and ambiguous. It is true that the "situation comedy," a genre akin to farce, has been standard tube-fare for years. That means that Love's Labour's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew should be excellent on television. Our expectations for the medium form a large component of our response and also tell us something of the built-in limitations of the medium. It is a question, to paraphrase Robert Frost, of making the most of a diminished thing. Certainly television is not a medium for tragedy, nor is the "modern world." Nameless, faceless, sexless leaders, for all the world-shattering power at their fingertips, seem simply to have lost the stature of the Oedipus, King Lear, or Marc Antony, whose fate is the world's fate. Perhaps that is a good thing. Derek Jacobi, a fine Hamlet a few seasons ago at the Old Vic, will be a very different Hamlet this fall on television. Not only must he accommodate himself to microphone and camera, but we will see a ten-inch figure mechanically reproduced within a frame. We will not be inhabiting the space where Hamlet is happening. The distinction between mechanical reproduction and living space is less important when we talk of melodrama: first, because melodrama accommodates itself so neatly to the dimensions of television, and second, because there is something mechancial about melodrama anyway, as in the way Duke Vincentio assigns parts to everyone at the end of the play, even designating a tiny cameo role to the head of the dead pirate, Ragozine. …

Made in U.S.A.: The American Child in Truffaut's 400 Blows

Abstract: For it seems to us that these works were the expression of a new current in the French cinema ... a current animated by a common problematique (however differently that problematic was worked out by different individuals) which could be characterized most simply as a reaction to the discovery of a new form of society being born, a society not quite recognized by its own citizens. Annie Goldmann1 In this sense, our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile. . . . This is partly what we mean when we talk about the incapacity of the American novelist to develop; in a compulsive way he returns to a limited world of experience, usually associated with his childhood, writing the same book over and over again until he lapses into silence or self-parody. Leslie Fiedler2 Anyone who pretends an interest in film history knows the story of the New Wave's first great success. In 1958 Francois Truffaut and Monsieur Favre-Lebret, the head of the board of directors of the Cannes Film Festival, exchanged registered letters threatening libel. Truffaut, banned by Favre-Lebret from covering the Festival for Arts, attended without a press pass. The next year he was back at Cannes-as the director of the official French entry, Les Quartre Cents Coups, which won the competition for best direction. In the ensuing euphoria for the New Wave in French cinema, producers who had once despised the writings of the Cahiers group fell over one another in their eagerness to back first films by ex-critics. Chabrol, who began the wave with Le Beau Serge (1958), soon released his second feature, Les Cousins (1959). That same year Rivette made Paris Nous Appartient, Rohmer shot Le Signe de Lion, Doniol Valcroze, the editor of Cahiers after the death of Bazin, filmed L 'Eau a La Bouche, and, most importantly of all, Godard finished Breathless, whose success in 1960 equaled that achieved by The 400 Blows the previous year. In the next two years some sixty-seven journalists, academics, writers, and students would direct their first feature films in France.3 Most of these neophytes soon sank back into the printer's ink out of which they had emerged, but the Cahiers group-Godard, Rohmer, Truffaut, Rivette and Chabrol-launched careers which have continued to the present day. Despite an assertion that the unifying principle behind this group was the fact that they "all came to the screen by detesting French cinema and admiring the Americans,"4 Truffaut's first feature was not a conscious imitation of any American genre. His decision not to shoot an American style film for his first full length movie seems to have been due to several factors. On the most personal level, Truffaut confessed that the subject of childhood interested him because his own youth had not been a happy one. After an adolescence which included several minor arrests, desertion from the army and a discharge for being "medically" unfit for service, Truffaut had been rescued from aimlessness by an offer to write for Cahiers from Andre Bazin. When his first film won world-wide acclaim, Truffaut credited his success to the fatherly attitude Bazin took toward him. The scars of his painful growing-up were never to leave him, however, and he once told an interviewer that he had made The 400 Blows becasue he "was more at home with children than with adults."5 On the level of professional strategy Truffaut seems to have postponed his implementation of the pro-Hollywood critical position he had evolved at Cahiers until he felt more at ease as a filmmaker. He did not try that difficult melange of French settings and American genre he was to attempt in Shoot the Piano Player (1960), The Soft Skin (1964), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and The Bride Wore Black (1968) until his second feature. His decision to wait may have been motivated by the experience he had gained several years earlier when he co-authored with Rivette and Chabrol Les Quatres Jeudis, a script which was, according to Denby, greatly influenced by the American cinema of the Nicholas Ray school. …

A Very Narrow Path: The Politics of Edward Dmytryk

Abstract: On September 21, 1947, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), J Parnell Thomas (R-New Jersey), subpoenaed forty-three members of the Hollywood film community to answer charges about communist infiltration in the movie industry Among the forty-three were powerful producers like Louis B Mayer, Jack Warner, and Samuel Goldwyn; successful writers like Clifford Odets, Howard Kotch, and Morrie Ryskind; popular actors like Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan, and Charles Chaplin; and prominent directors like Leo McCarey, Sam Wood, and Lewis Milestone HUAC began its formal hearings on October 20, 1947, and Thomas opened the proceedings by reading a prepared statement His Committee's hearings would be "fair and impartial," he declared, adding that HUAC members were interested in finding out "the facts" about communism in Hollywood Though these hearings lasted only ten days, they ripped apart the thin fabric of civility that shrouded America's dream merchants and divided the industry into vitriolic political factions that remain to this day The dream factory was suddenly in the midst of a political nightmare Nineteen of the forty-three called to testify were well-known leftists Eventually, eleven of the nineteen so-called "unfriendly witnesses" appeared before HUAC One, German poet and playwright Bertold Brecht, responded to the Committee's questions, denied he had ever been a communist, and then returned to his homeland Citing constitutional guarantees of personal freedoms under the First Amendment, the other ten witnesses refused to answer the Committee's questions about their political affiliations and were cited for contempt by Congress on November 24, 1947 All ten unsuccessfully appealed these charges and served from six months to one year in prison These men became known as the "Hollywood Ten": Alvah Bessie (writer), Herbert Biberman (director), Lester Cole (writer), Edward Dmytryk (director), Ring Lardner, Jr (writer), John Howard Lawson (writer), Albert Maltz (writer), Samuel Ornitz (writer), Adrian Scott (producer), and Dalton Trumbo (writer) Historical circumstances have conspired to link these ten men together, even though their political ideals, professional status, and individual temperaments often placed them at odds with each other At the time of the HUAC hearings, Lardner, Trumbo, Scott, and Dmytryk stood at the highpoints of their respective studio careers Lardner, the son of popular author Ring Lardner, had won an Oscar in 1942 for his co-authorship of Woman of the Year By 1945, he commanded a salary of $2,000 per week Trumbo's even more lucrative contract at MGM guaranteed him $75,000 per script, a figure which made him the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood Dmytryk, a prolific director, made twenty -five pictures at this point, including box-office winners such as Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941), Back To Bataan (1944), and Till the End of Time (1946) At the time they were called to testify, Scott and Dmytryk had just released what was to be their most successful film collaboration, Crossfire (1947), one of the first Hollywood films to deal with American anti-Semitism Two other members of the Hollywood Ten, Albert Maltz and Lester Cole, had what might be described as successful careers on the eve of the HUAC hearings As a freelance writer, Maltz had won an Academy Award in 1942 for Moscow Strikes Back and a special Oscar in 1944 for The House I Live In, a documentary about intolerance Lester Cole's thirty-six screenplays included such hits as None Shall Escape (1944) and Objective Burma (1945) In 1947, his salary at MGM was $1,350 per week Three other members of the Hollywood Ten had been far less successful than these six A popular screenwriter in the early thirties, Herbert Biberman had degenerated into a mediocre author, director, and producer of low-budget films like One Way Ticket (1936) and The Master Race (1944) Alvah Bessie's work in the forties, which included The Very Thought of You (1944) and Hotel Berlin (1945), failed to generate much studio enthusiasm or popular interest …

Double Indemnity: Billy Wilder's Crime and Punishment

Abstract: Double Indemnity (1944) is generally regarded as a classic of film noir, distinguished by the special acerbity of Billy Wilder's best efforts. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, it has not received the close critical attention reserved for such Wilder films as Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. Although film scholars often praise its tight structure, visual brilliance, and corrosive wit, Double Indemnity has, in effect, been relegated to that special category of "landmark" films, more interesting historically than cinematically.1 Perhaps the reason for the neglect of Double Indemnity is that wherever it is discussed, two persuasive and widely accepted interpretations seem to preclude further analysis; briefly, they are: first, that the film's major focus is on the sexual-financial relationship between Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson; and second, that the Keyes-Neff relationship, characterized by a "sexual underpattem" of rivalry linked with a surrogate father-son conflict is the film's central concern.2 Yet reviewer Manny Farber, in The New Republic, was dissatisfied (and rightly so I think) with the Neff-Phyllis story as lacking in the necessary intensity to make their extreme deeds more credible ("there are not enough of the baser passions- sex, jealousy, hatred, fear of the other's deceit").3 And James Agee, in The Nation, also criticized Wilder's failure to bring to life "the sort of freezing rage of excitation which such a woman presumably inspires in such a fixer as Walter Neff. This sort of genre love-scene ought to smell like the inside of an overwrought Electrolux. Wilder has not made much, either, of the tensions of the separateness of the lovers after the murder, or of the coldly nauseated despair and nostalgia which the murderer would feel."4 Other commentators view Keyes as important, notably as a "paternalistic boss . . . representative of normality," but most would agree that "there is little sense in Wilder of human potentiality . . . only a sense of more or less acquiescence to the rottenness of life."5 Although both approaches to the film are valid, neither offers, in my view, a wholly satisfactory reason for its power and fascination. Like all of Wilder's films, Double Indemnity transcends its genre; just as Some Like It Hot uses the gangster-film tradition of the 1930s to illustrate that the cops-and-robbers games of that decade may ultimately have been less threatening to the social fabric than the pleasure -games wealthy and powerful Americans were playing, Double Indemnity uses the basic structure of the crime-detective formula to offer a commentary on American values and American society during the World War II years. Superimposed on the money-sex-death story of Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson and on the Keyes-Neff father-son rivalry is Wilder's statement about the potential for social disintegration- even fascism-that exists in America. Specifically, Wilder makes Neff, his ordinary salesman, an American embodiment of Nazi ideology, the world-be Superman, and on a smaller, modern scale, a version of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, trying to defeat a tawdry, life-defying society through the only means available to him: murder. That is a large claim for the film, but Billy Wilder has always used classic popular genres, particularly Hollywood traditions, to explore important subjects: youth, age, disillusionment, failure, fame, fading beauty, and the exercise of power. Throughout a fifty-year career, he has tackled openly subjects other directors have handled obliquely: prostitution, fraud, transvestism, adultery, the cold war, greed and exploitation, on both the individual and social level. Double Indemnity as a film about sex and money is disappointing; as a surrogate father-son rivalry, it is somewhat more interesting, but ultimately unimportant. However, as a picture of its era, and a glimpse at the darker side of America- released when any overt criticism of American life was out of the question- Double Indemnity is a major film for that time and for ours. …

Visualization and Signification in John Huston's Wise Blood: The Redemption of Reality. . .

Abstract: (For Ronald Campisi 1937-81 who understood the world of Flannery O'Connor in which caritas and the grotesque often co-existed.) "Wise Blood ... I can see signs . . . It's a gift like the gift of the Prophets." (Wise Blood) One property of film and drama alike is that narratives are performed, are spatialized, are seen. They are situated in a tangible world which in itself possesses certain signifying properties. Marshall Brown in an article titled "The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach" has recently argued that "silhouetting" or the juxtaposition of "dramatic action" with background is an essential aspect of the realist aesthetic, a method of establishing "context and representative significance"1 in which the sources of signification are naturalized or historicized. We may note that in the case of the stage, the background or set, however naturalistic, retains a certain degree of artifice. However, in film, especially films made on location and which have a certain documentary-like quality, the background-landscape, cityscape, and a host of artifacts that have signifying properties-often effectively interacts with, overdetermines, or strongly characterizes key aspects of the dramatic action. Thus if we view film as a configuration of signs, we may say that narratives are silhouetted in relation to the material and cultural environment (i.e., culture congealed or instantly transformed into artifacts as well as present in the form of prevailing codes, values, and ideas). Flannery O'Connor, in stating that the serious artist must "have the ability to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation,"2 was articulating an Aristotelian realism characteristic not only of her theological perspective, but of social and aesthetic philosophies (including Marxist cultural studies) which see larger patterns manifested, congealed, or signified in surface reality. O'Connor's metaphors for understanding are visual: the artist should possess "anagogical vision. "3 Elsewhere she cites Conrad's dietim-also the creed of Griffith and Eisenstein-"before all to make you see,"4 vision being awareness, simultaneous perception of levels of reality in art and in the world. Thus it is hardly surprising that after reading an early version of Wise Blood Caroline Gordon wrote to Flannery O'Connor, praising the novel's visual and signifying qualities: You . . . provided a firm Naturalistic ground-work for your symbolism. In consequence one of the things I admire about the book is the fact that all the passages are symbolic, like life itself. . . . (They go on exploding, as it were depth on depth. As . . . E.M. Forester would say: You have more than one plane of action.5 "More than one plane." "Depth upon Depth." Or, to refer to the terminology of the critical appendices of Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate's House of Fiction: "scene and panorama," "incident" and "enveloping action" or "milieu."6 Once again the notion of visualisation incorporates a significant meaning, creating relation between foreground and background, or by extension between context and event. In her letter to Flannery O'Connor, Caroline Gordon praises Wise Blood as "the most original book I have read in a long time,"7 and compares it to the works of Kafka, Proust, Chekhov and Flaubert. However, she also offers criticism: Any scene in a play takes place on some kind of set. I feel that the sets in your play are quite wonderful but you never let us see them.8 She cites fourteen or fifteen scenes in the ms of the novel that, she argues, could have been more successful had they been more effectively visualised. (Some were revised by Flannery O'Connor before the final version of Wise Blood was published in book form.) It is especially interesting that they are the source of some of the most effectively realized scenes in John Huston's film of Wise Blood, in part because the inherent potential of the camera eye for mimesis silhouettes dramatic action in relation to the background of milieu, but also as a result of a shift of emphasis or interpretation. …

Chaplin's Labor of Performance: The Circus & Limelight

Abstract: "My whole anxiety is for myself as a performer," writes Robert Frostl His words befit Chaplin's tramp, who seeks at critical moments to assert or recreate himself directly before an audience, and who often comes to depend on the opinion of an audience As Calvero in Limelight, the tramp performs in a theater, but he can perform anywhere His Dionysian dance in the factory of Modern Times tran fixes his fellow workers and paralyzes the assembly line As Hynkel in The Great Dictator he harangues the masses in a stadium, commands them to cheer and applaud, then confides to an aide his doubts about the strength of his performance More oblique impulses toward theatrical gesture and attention emerge as Hynkel, alone in his office and conceiving himself to be a fugitive from an audience, climbs up and down the curtains and blushingly cavorts with the balloon globe The exiled king in A King in New York provides another instance of performance as he struggles in a variety of forums to adjust his conduct and appearance for the hidden, ubiquitous audience created by television technology The demand or need to perform is felt throughout Chaplin's work In addition, it is the subject of two full-length films, The Circus and Limelight; they are devoted entirely to the anxious labor of performance Throughout Chaplin's cinema, the tramp remains an isolated figure despite any labor he undertakes When he joins the upper class at the end of 7Vie Gold Rush, his good fortune seems out of place, even incredible For his identity is that of the outsider, rejected rather than admired by the community inside his films, even though his fans in the movie theater roundly applaud him The tramp's very isolation seems to make him wish for an audience 2 But his performance usually confirms the absence of an audience In The Gold Rush he appears to transform a table into a stage and rolls into slippers in order to create a dance for Georgia and her friends Yet the dance of the Oceana rolls is only a dream, and the tramp awakes to find himself alone Equally sad is the outcome of his rebellious dance in the factory of Modern Times- he is locked up in a mental hospital Sometimes the tramp has slightly better luck As an escaped prisoner posing as a minister in The Pilgrim, he rouses at least one member of the congregation with his spirited pantomime of the battle of David and Goliath; the tramp narrates the tale and assumes both roles Furthermore, in the nightclub at the end of Modern Times, his song of romance wins an ovation Yet moments later he and the gamin are forced to flee Even when the tramp's performance succeeds, it rarely affords him more than momentary release from his isolation Nonetheless, he perseveres, perhaps because performance remains his best chance for community Slight evidence of the tramp's gift for performance, however, appears in The Circus, Chaplin's first long film to occur almost exclusively in a theatrical environment Here the tramp fails to mold the forum of his performance, just as he fails to recast himself and to open a satisfying channel to his audience At the time, Chaplin was undergoing a divorce and his mother was dying Talking motion pictures were posing an immense challenge to his silent art Yet there was no doubt of his sovereignty as a performer when he made this film about the utter futility and indignity of performance Lack of creative intent and imagination marks the tramp's career in the circus from the start He enters on the run, chased by a policeman Neither individual misses a step as he races to the rapidly turning platform at the center of the ring, jumps on it, and keeps running As the two men are borne haplessly around, the tramp eases his own efforts by locking the handle of his cane over the policeman's shoulder ahead of him The audience cheers the two men who are displacing the lumbering clowns The tramp leaps from the platform and momentarily disappears inside the apparatus of a vanishing act which includes a small stage, a chair, a closet, and a curtain …

Three Adaptations of the TRIAL

Abstract: Kafka's The Trial presents an intriguing challenge to adaptation study because of its ambiguous and mysterious qualities. Kafka seems unadaptable. His style is so personal, his vision so intense that any paraphrase is suspect. Yet The Trial has been adapted more than once, and by distinguished artists. This essay will deal with three adaptations: the play by Jean-Louis Barrault and Andre Gide (1947); the film by Orson Welles (1962); and an educational film entitled The Trials of Franz Kafka (1973). Let us begin by proposing two essential features of Kafka's novel, ambiguity of meaning and an uncertain, anxious tone. The Trial isa frustratingly ambiguous work because it appears to be a relatively simple allegory or parable, but the allegory's referent remains stubbornly unclear. The book invites psychological, philosophical, religious, sociological, and political interpretations and resists all of them. As Ihab Hassan writes, "Kafka's fiction madly provokes the exegete in us"1; it provokes, but also defeats. The referent to the allegory is ultimately a very private and personal response that can be described in two ways-as the experience of reading Kafka, and as an unspecific but highly perceptive response to modern life. Kafka's refusal to limit the scope or import of his fictional world actually heightens its relevance. A second crucial element in The Trial is the uncertain tone of the work. Line by line and passage by passage The Trial suggests several distinct readings. Anxiety is the dominant tone. Each contradictory impulse, each bit of tortured logic, each decision leading nowhere causes Joseph K. enormous anguish. His world contains no certainty, no rest; existence is a torture. But there are other levels of tone. The book can also be seen as a brilliantly sustained piece of black humor. It is often bleakly amusing to follow the protagonist's vain strivings within an apparently traditional framework. Hope is never quite absent, either. Throughout the book, K. is looking for a way out, not necessarily a solution but a "circumvention"2 of his case. He retains this hope until the very moment of his execution. The reader shares K.'s anticipation of a way out, often suspecting that one can simply step away from the book's nightmare. Of course we, the readers, can step away from the book. A final level of The Trial's uncertain tone is the book's quotidian, everyday quality. There is nothing fantastic about The Trial. Its conceptual richness is rooted in the everyday.3 People are arrested; uncles come from the country; a sensitive young man is wracked by self-doubt. What could be more banal? How, if at all, are these characteristics of Kafka's novel The Trial reproduced in the various adaptations? The Gide-Barrault play4 is the only adaptation that starts from a professed fidelity to the novel. Gide says, "Rarely did I add to the 'heart of the work,' suppressing my own voice entirely in deference to Kafka, all of whose intentions I was anxious to respect."5 Despite Gide's disclaimer, the playscript is not a respectful transcription of Kafka, but an interesting blend of the novelist's and the adaptors' voices. The great achievement of Barrault and Gide is to have preserved something of Kafka's thematic ambiguity. The play, like the novel, suggests several interpretations of the meaning of life and affirms none of them-but the interpretations have changed! For example, whereas Kafka's oppressive bureaucracy is never given an historical context, Gide and Barrault use the Court to present issues closely tied to the Occupation of France and to Existentialism. The play poses the issue of freedom in terms far more explicit than Kafka's: "I feel I'm free, but I know I'm under arrest,"6 muses K. The play also states issues of responsibility and collaboration in an Existentialist idiom: K., addressing the Court, says that each individual is responsible for oppression, and that an oppressor is less free than his victim. …