Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013

The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946), which was the highest-grossing film in the United States after Gone with the Wind (Fleming, 1939), was instantly praised for its realism by Gen. Omar Bradley and by numerous film reviewers. Justly influential scholars and theorists continue to single out this film as an example of realism, the style for which Andre Bazin commended William Wyler (What Is Cinema, 1967). The present article draws upon evidence of three kinds: the film’s production files, including the film-makers’ correspondence about the script; a specific comparison of the film’s narrative content with that of the novel on which the screenplay is based (Glory for Me (1945) by MacKinlay Kantor); and analysis of the cinematography and artistic composition of the film. The present article suggests that the film reverses some of the polemical novel’s central and recurrent meanings. In the interest of stylistic realism, The Best Years of Our Lives includes critique of the artifices of illusion in the consumerist American culture of the post-war years, even while it exploits that artifice and becomes an outstanding example of it. Like the later postmodern parodies that Linda Hutcheon characterizes as ‘complicitous critique’ (The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) by Hutcheon), The Best Years of Our Lives exemplifies the corporate culture that it criticizes. The film’s extreme artificiality achieves the illusion of realism.

This article considers some of the cultural uses made of Hamlet in Edgar Reitz’s two sequels to Heimat (1984), Die Zweite Heimat (1992) and Die Dritte Heimat (2004). A definining characteristic of the young people on whom Die Zweite Heimat focuses is that they are all deeply uneasy about who their elders really are, both in terms of local and specific uncertainties about their own identities and of the wider and all-besetting question of what the older generation did in the war, and whether or not they were Nazis. In Die Dritte Heimat there is again repeated emphasis on father–son relationships, though this time the focus is principally on the destruction or displacement of ‘natural’, biological fatherhood. In turning to Hamlet, a play that German culture has in many ways appropriated as peculiarly its own, Reitz finds a text and a template associated not only with a country that had fought against Nazi  Germany but, more fundamentally and more therapeutically, one deeply rooted in an older and far less troubled sense of the German national psyche than any the twentieth century had been able to offer.

Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical thriller Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street represents the most recent of a long line of adaptations of the source material. When writing his version, Sondheim constructed the score to function like a horror film and imbued it with other cinematic features. Through the process of hypertexuality, new adaptations (hypertexts) can productively be analysed in relation to their source material (hypotexts), without getting mired in issues of fidelity. Intermediality considers the relationship between two (or more) art-forms, and the interplay that exists between them in a specific text. In this article, I consider the hypertextual relationship between Sondheim’s score (hypotext) and Burton’s film (hypertext) by exploring intermedial aspects of each text. While Burton advanced some of the cinematic attributes of Sondheim’s score, he retained other theatrical conceits that allude to stage aesthetics and are also referents to other mediated genres. In examining these aspects, I consider implications of stage to screen adaptations of musicals.

Directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufmann, Adaptation is a semi-fictitious narrative of Kaufman’s effort to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998) for the screen. Interrelating Barthes critiques of authorship/authority and the readerly/writerly with adaptation theory, this article demonstrates how the film performs an immanent critique of the process of adaptation by laying bare its practical, theoretical, and political implications. I argue that whereas the screenwriter is a traditionally absent figure in adaptation criticism, his self-reflexive presence in the film hijacks both interpretation and critique by deconstructing the filmic adaptation process through writerly praxis. The critical exploration of the binaries of text and adaptation, reader and writer, fact and fiction, work and theory is made possible by the figuration of Kaufmann who, as a Barthesian reader in the throes of the reading and writing processes, writes himself into the story and projects his desires onto the screen, thereby undermining all authoritative claims on the original text and its interpretation.

This article considers instances of scriptwriters (and the protagonist they create) playing with notions of authenticity and revenge tragedy through an episode of the popular murder mystery series Lewis (ITV1, 2011). Parallels between, diversions from and references to the characters, plot structure and setting of Early Modern drama are carefully traced through ‘Wild Justice’. The article argues that authenticity is both established and, to some extent, betrayed by the episode. Its scriptwriter, Stephen Churchett, uses and reinforces Early Modern drama’s cultural and literary value, without being constrained by it. Additionally, by exploring the way in which the programme incorporates the literary into the non-literary, the article extends existing arguments for a positive reconsideration of the sometime-maligned detective genre. Specifically, it adds to previous research arguing that the genre can be regarded as a key source, particularly among television broadcasts and popular fiction, evidencing the continuing cultural value of Early Modern drama.

This article analyses how Shakespearean drama provides the backbone of Un drama nuevo (1867), by the Spanish playwright and academic Manuel Tamayo y Baus (1829-1898). In particular, it considers how characters, themes and dramatic strategies from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Othello are incorporated into Un drama nuevo, set in 1605 England and led by the characters of Yorick and Shakespeare. Special focus is given to the play-within-a-play device, the themes of convoluted love intrigues and jealousies, and the confusing interrelation of play (i.e., fiction) and reality, against the background of a discussion of nineteenth-century Spanish drama and the history of the translation and performance of the aforementioned plays by Shakespeare in nineteenth-century Spain.

The following interview was completed by telephone on 10 September 2012. It focuses on Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The award-winning book tells the story of fifteen-year-old Christopher, who tries to solve the mystery of his next-door neighbour’s dog’s murder. This conversation gives an account of Stephens’ reading of Haddon’s work; his understanding and realization, onstage, of Christopher, who suffers Asperger Syndrome; his changes to the novel’s ending; and the staging of the play in the intimate setting of the Cottesloe at the National Theatre in London. The critically and commercially acclaimed production transferred to the Apollo Theatre in the West End and ran until December 2013, when part of the theatre’s roof collapsed. The play will move to the Gielgud Theatre in June 2014.

Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, Laurence Raw (Ed.) (2012) UK: Continuum, 240 pp., ISBN: 9781441157843, h/bk, £67.50

Martin Sherman: Skipping over Quicksand, Trish Dace (2012) Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 345 pp., Print ISBN: 9780786466627, eBook ISBN: 9780786488131, p/bk, $40

Bleak House (BFI TV classics), Christine Geraghty (2012) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 139 pp., ISBN: 9781844574179, p/bk, £13.99

A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, Deborah Cartmell (ed.) (2012) Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 433 pp., ISBN: 9781444334975, h/bk, £120.00