Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2015

While a plethora of research exists examining the 1953 musical starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as well as the bestselling novel from which it is adapted, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), very little exists regarding the silent film adaptation produced by Paramount in 1927 and released in 1928. Presumably, this absence is due to the fact that the film is now considered lost. The script survives, however, and a close reading of the novel contrasted against the 1927 scenario exposes the social and censorship forces under which the American screenwriter Anita Loos labored as she altered the characterization of the protagonist, Lorelei, to make her more palatable for the tastes of 1920s film audiences, censors and studio executives alike.

Despite the outsize presence of pornographic adaptations in the adult movie market (in the form of parodies) and fan fiction (in the form of het and slash), the genre remains largely under-theorized in the field of adaptation studies. This article suggests that such stories and films may expand the field’s boundaries by encouraging scholars to consider the non-hermeneutic effects of adaptations. Drawing on theories of intertextuality, intermediality and interactivity, the article asks how adaptation and pornography function for their audiences, taking up the case of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey – a pornographic adaptation that became a pornographic source text – to offer some provisional answers to that question. The article closes with a call for adaptation scholars to turn from interpretation to the more private pleasures of adaptation.

By considering two of Radio 4’s most recent adaptations (2011), this article analyses how director Claire Grove recreates the noir aesthetic characteristic of post-1945 radio and film adaptations of Chandler’s work. She achieves her task through various means – subverting Marlowe’s role as the omniscient narrator, challenging our understanding of him as a hard-boiled hero, and creating deliberately discordant soundscapes denoting the corruption pervading Marlowe’s world. The experience of listening to Grove’s adaptations not only reminds us of the importance of noir in the past but also comments on corruption in the present day. Nonetheless this is not the end of the story, as Grove asks us to reflect on Marlowe’s behaviour and consider whether there are other alternatives to viewing the world through perpetually cynical spectacles.

This article focuses narrowly on sonic content in matching scenes from various non-English films and their adaptations, made relatively soon after their success in regional markets, by Hollywood. It makes the case that whereas the most memorable scenes in the ‘translation’ remakes typically look very much like their models, often they do not sound the same. Based on close comparisons of matching iconic scenes in Nikita and The Assassin, Infernal Affairs and The Departed, Ju-On and The Grudge, and Låt den rätte komma in and Let Me In, the article suggests that even when differences in sonic content are subtle they might still be substantial, so much so that they perhaps influence how the films in their entireties are read.

Justice Performed: Courtroom TV Shows and the Theaters of Popular Culture, Sarah Kozinn (2015) Bloomsbury: London and New York, 206 pp., ISBN: 9781472527844, e-book, £13.99; h/bk, £45.50

Adapting Graham Greene, Richard J. Hand and Andrew Purssell (2015) London and New York: Palgrave, 150 pp., ISBN: 9780230579040, h/bk, £45.00