BHD's Open Salon Blog

How Stories Change (5) Chocolat

Mon, 28 May 2012 16:05:00 -0400

5: Chocolat – Acceptable Villains

Chocolat by Joanne Harris. (Black Swan,2007)

Chocolat directed by Lasse Halstrom (Miramax, 2000)

The story, in brief, recounts the arrival of a chocolateliere in a provincial French town. The sensuous indulgence of the chocolate is contrasted with the sullen repression of the townsfolk. In the novel the priest, and in the film the priest acting as agent of the Mayor, resist the influence of Vianne, the chocolate maker, to the point of harassment. A subplot involves the arrival of river gypsies, and the reaction of the townspeople to them, culminating in an arson attack on their boats. The novel ends with ambiguities, and Vianne moving on. The film opts for a tidier, more definitive conclusion, a happy ending to a love story, with Vianne settling down to a conventional family life.

There are many changes, compressions and omissions in the transfer of this book to film, but I intend to concentrate on one element only. That is the creation of the character of the Mayor, and the reconstruction of the character of the village priest, for this surely must be one of the best examples of a story being altered in order not to offend.

The offence being avoided would be to those who could not accept the novel’s repressed, and repressive clergyman. The avoidance is by taking all his negative characteristics and bundling them into a new character, the Mayor. A further twist is added by making the residual clergyman young, and inexperienced, the Mayor, older and embittered. The priest can still be used as part of the campaign against Vianne, but we see him being used as a tool of the secular, and wicked Mayor, not as a man following what he believes to be the dictates of his religion. This enables, at the crisis of the story, the clergyman, throwing off the influences of the Mayor, to become the saviour of the situation, preaching a sermon that gives acceptance to Vianne, and reconciliation within the village.

The other effect of this bi-furcated character is to tip what is essentially a grim story of zenophobic parochialism towards the comic. The secular authority represented by the Mayor may be pilloried in fun. The Roman Catholic Church, presented in the novel, not by a comic coterie as in Father Ted, but as a monolithic power wielded by a damaged individual, is a much more serious matter. By making the priest young and inexperienced the film clothes him in an innocence through which his innate goodness will eventually appear, and the struggle between him and the Mayor is comic rather than epic. The Mayor’s own repressive tendencies do not represent the nature of secular power, it is made plain, but his own private issues. His wife has left him, and he is struggling already against the temptations of the flesh, represented at first by the offerings of his secretary, and later by Vianne’s chocolate. In the film it is he who succumbs to the orgiastic delights of Vianne’s shop window, and it is a comic, cathartic renaissance for him. In the book it is the priest who falls. The comedy is less apparent, and it leads to no re-birth. Where Mayor Reynaud gets to enjoy the delights of the Easter chocolate festival, Curé Reynaud ‘ran off into Les Marauds without a word.’ (Harris, p315)

There is another significant difference in the ‘telling’ of the story, for in the book there are two narrators. One is Vianne herself, and the other is the priest, Reynaud. The film, of course, is told from the ‘third person’ perspective of the camera.

Above all the pairings that I have looked at up to now this is the one that makes me question if the written word, playing upon our imagination, can afford to be more searching in its exploration of any theme, than the movie, playing upon our powers of observation. Of course, there are many serious films, and many serious adaptations of serious novels. This one though, is made of a lighter chocolate than the original.

How Stories Change (4) The Lord of the Rings

Sun, 20 May 2012 10:05:47 -0400

4. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – The Internationalisation of story and the updating of the Hero

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, (Unwin Paperbacks, 1979. [1954-55])

The Lord of the Rings, (Dir.) Peter Jackson. (Newline, 2001,2002,2003)

One difference between Peter Jackson’s showing of Lord of the Rings, and J.R.R.Tolkien’s telling of it is in the presentation of the character of Aragorn. Towards the climax of the story Aragorn confronts the “mouthpiece of Sauron” outside the Black Gates. In the book he overcomes the emissary by his moral authority. In the film he strikes the head from the creature to end the parley. It would have been inconceivable to Tolkien, I believe, that Aragorn might have done such a thing. For Peter Jackson it must have been inconceivable that this action would undermine our sense of Aragorn as the hero.

Tolkien’s Aragorn is sure of himself and his destiny. He has devoted his life to the slow, painstaking achievement of his goal. He has worked with stealth and patience, waiting until the time is right, but always aware of, and anticipating his final struggle. Peter Jackson’s Aragorn is full of self doubt, uncertainties, and reluctance. Events, and those around him, propel this Aragorn towards the final denouement, and his acceptance of the part he must play in it. The storyteller, and the picture shower inhabit different worlds, in which different expectations are current. Between the two some basic assumptions about the character of the heroic leader have changed.

Peckforton and Beeston Castles glimpsed in the distance, in silhouette on their respective skylines from the A49 never fail to evoke for me the image of Tolkien’s two towers. The Barrow Downs are grazed by contemporary sheep. Fangorn and The Old Forrest spring to mind when we encounter those odd corners of woodland that have survived, because they are too steep or rocky, the depredations of modern agriculture. The shire, with its low roofed thatched cottages lives on in picture postcard rural England. It’s no accident. The words he chooses are the words that describe Old England: heath, down, and marsh. There are plenty of other words he might have used. Plains, bluffs, creeks, canyons, and so on, but he did not. Tolkien described an English landscape in English and Brythonic words when he was creating Middle Earth, and especially when he described the green and gentle heartland of the Shire.

Peter Jackson’s film, opening in its first landscape shot, does not. The mill and bridge of Hobbiton are not quite Old England; more New England; the rounded Hobbit Holes not Cotswold thatch. The fences are New World, the fenceless vegetable plots, not the three-field agriculture of pre-enclosure England, but something indefinably foreign. The long vistas of Middle Earth, the Marshes, The woods of Lothlorien, the Great River, The Emyn Muil, and the plains of Rohan; the ridges along which Aragorn and Legoals and Gimli pursue the Orcs, the snowy mountains leading to Caradrhos: they are all demonstrably not English.

This is perhaps the most significant difference between the trilogy of books, and the trio of films. The books are parochial and fixed in their time. They give a view of England from the perspective of a patrician observer, conscious of the passing of an era. Arguably less well written than conceived, the great achievement of The Lord of The Rings is the manifestation and presentation of Middle Earth itself. I believe that this is a specifically English landscape. This trilogy, published in the mid fifties, is an elegy for the England that Tolkien saw destroyed by World War One, and World War Two. It offers us a hero, in Aragorn, who brings the qualities of the old world into the new.

The Radio Drama, produced by the BBC in the 1980s, was made by people who had benefited from the social revolution of the nineteen sixties. The world that was fading then, but which has still not entirely disappeared thirty years later, was the world of the English class system.

The Peter Jackson films, made at the fin de siecle of the C20th, post Cold War, post globalisation, in an atmosphere of pax-Americana, and the victory of Free Market Capitalism, internationalise the story, but they too are perhaps fixed in their own time. The attack on the twin towers of the New York World Trade Centre happened just before The Two Towers was released, and the actor who played Sam Gamgee, it is said, even suggested that the title be changed!

The films create a world in which western style values are pitted against a demonised and inhuman enemy from which no quarter can be expected, and to which no quarter is given. The defenders of Helm’s Deep, in the film, are warned specifically of this, but no such statement is made in the book. Their enemy is aided and abetted by traitors within, notably Saruman, who betrays his council of wizards, and by Wormtongue, who betrays his fellow men. This element of betrayal features in the book too, and is played out even within Hobbit society, through Bill Ferny and the Quisling like, collaborationist Hobbits. Bill Ferny is dropped from the film, but Saruman is not!

The films depict a hero riddled with self doubt, who has to be driven to take up his role as saviour of the world. This is in stark contrast to the book, in which the Aragorn is always conscious of his destiny, and has no qualms about embracing it. The Aragorn of the book has plotted long and secretly for this moment. He may have doubts about victory, but not about his commitment. He does not, as Aragorn in the film does, wonder if he might attempt to restore the world, but only ponders how he must go about it. The Strider that the Hobbits meet at Bree, in the book, is not running from his destiny, but clandestinely working towards it.

The Radio Drama follows the book, in sticking to an English setting. In fact it deepens if anything the class structure of the story, by carefully distinguishing the voices of the characters and groups depicted. As a sound only medium this is perhaps not surprising.

In book and Radio Drama, but not to any great extent in the films, it is the voice of Saruman, rather than his special effects, his staff, that presents the danger to those who encounter him, and the voice he is given is that of the English Establishment. Gandalf specifically warns against that voice, and in the confrontation at Orthanc those who hear it fear that it will win over their comrades, not by what it says, but by what it sounds like. The Orcs, by contrast, are given proletarian English accents. When Theoden, in the film, echoes the words of the book, and says, ‘he will go up’, it is not the quality of Saruman’s voice he fears, but his arguments. I sense a fundamental difference here between Jackson’s and Tolkien’s understanding of the world. Tolkien expects the ‘lesser’ people of his world to be swayed by Saruman’s voice, speaking with the class accent of their betters. Jackson expects them, as men ‘born equal’, to be swayed by what he is saying. In the former case they are at risk because they know their place, in the latter because they have their desires, for wealth and power. The very title of his third volume reminds us that Tolkien is not offering us a democratised world as the fruit of victory, but one in which the ‘rightful’ king has returned. Aragorn is king by right of lineage, not as a reward for his personal qualities, yet he needs those qualities to assert that right. In Jackson’s Middle Earth it is Aragorn’s qualities as an individual that justify his seizure of the throne, though his lineage makes him eligible. I’m not suggesting the case is black and white, but the change of emphasis is palpable, and significant.

The Hobbits bridge several classes, being one of the ‘peoples’ of Middle Earth, but they are conscious of, and refer to, the bandwith of their society falling short of that of their betters.

(Merry & Pippin reunited after battle discuss their experiences, and situation)

“…..We Tooks and Brandybucks, we cannot live long on the heights.

‘No,’ said Merry. ‘I can’t. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher, and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not.” (The Return of the King, The Houses of Healing p174).

To me this sings an authorial desire for the lower orders to know and accept their place, as my parents’ generation often did. After the two world wars it was harder to see the patrician establishment as the protectors of the majority, for the universal conscription required by the ‘people’s war’ showed clearly that it was the majority who were doing the protecting. The enormous slaughter of WW1, which was borne largely by the working class had implied this, but the proportionately higher losses among the ‘officer class’ had somewhat muddied that water. In the second war, officers were recruited from lower down the social scale, and war memoirs write of officers deferring to specialists from the ranks in matters of applied technology, like Radar and Sonar.

Compare the Hobbits’ talk with Sam Gamgee’s passionate exposition of what is being fought for in Peter Jackson’s film, in the created scene at Osgiliath. This speech had to be written for the film. It could not be lifted or adapted from one in the book, because there is nothing remotely like it in Tolkien.

Sam Gamgee has the voice of a rustic fool, Bilbo Baggins of a yeoman, Merry and Pippin, of Oxbridge undergraduates. Gandalf plays the Dean of the Faculty to all of them, and of course to Saruman eventually. He is deferential to Aragorn as king however, when they have passed through War into the ‘days of the king’. The radio version emphasises these differences of English class accents.

Barliman Butturbur’s fatuous ignorance is exaggerated in the radio drama, as he wonders about Strider having ‘a golden cup’ and ‘a throne’, but it is his cowardice that is brought out in the film. A different point is being made about how and why he is overwhelmed by events.

Tolkien’s patrician world does not expect people to achieve things out of their reach. Peter Jackson’s democratic one does. What motivates the actors in these two worlds is shown best by what rewards they receive. Theoden wishes to face his forefathers ‘unashamed’. Someone asks that their actions ‘may be worth a song’. On the Field of Cormallen, after the victory over Sauron, we see the Ringbearers win their reward, and Sam’s reaction to it is described for us.

“Long live the Halflings! Praise them with great praise!”

“And then to Sam’s surprise and utter confusion he bowed his knee before them; and taking them by the hand, Frodo upon his right and Sam upon his left, he led them to the throne, and setting them upon it, he turned to the men and captains who stood by and spoke, so that his voice rang over all the host, crying:

‘Praise them with great praise!’

And when the glad shout had swelled up and died away again, to Sam’s final and complete satisfaction and pure joy, a minstrel of Gondor stood forth, and knelt, and begged leave to sing, And behold! He said:

‘Lo! Lords and knights and men of valour unashamed, kings and princes, and fair people of Gondor, and Riders of Rohan, and ye sons of Elrond, and Dunedain of the North, and Elf and Dwarf, and greathearts of the Shire, and all free folk of the West, now listen to my lay. For I will sing to you of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom.’

And when Sam heard that he laughed aloud for sheer delight, and he stood up and cried: ‘O great glory and splendour! And all my wishes have come true!’” ( The Two Towers,The Field of Cormallen p279).

Frodo’s response, as befits his higher standing, is modestly unreported. In an echo of E.M.Forster’s writing to ‘win the respect of those’ he respects, someone refers to the value of praise from the ‘praiseworthy’. The desire for a pat on the head from their betters is a left over from the world of deference that the 1960s swept away (we are told), and it is played down in the film.

The qualities of the king are different too. In Tolkien’s world ‘the hands of the king are the hands of a healer’, literally. Like English Kings, he has the power to cure by touch. This is played down in the film version. There is reference to his knowledge, rather than his power. In the book it is the king’s power to transform athelas into a healing plant, and ‘that is how he is known’. There is none of this in the film. Aragorn is king because he has earned it, not because he is appointed to it.

Aragorn is the most changed of the major characters between book and film, and this reflects the changes between the maker of the book and the maker of the film. The difference is not so great with the radio drama, because it was made by a Reithian BBC, not by an antipodian entrepeneur.

The most obvious and revealing difference is in the parley scene at the Black Gates towards the crisis of the story. In the book the Mouth of Sauron’s fear of being assaulted is groundless, and shows how little he understands the morality of ‘the free peoples’.

(Outside the Black Gate the leaders of the West confront the Mouth of Sauron)

“Is there anyone in this rout with authority to treat with me? He asked. ‘Or indeed with wit to understand me? Not thou at least!’ he mocked, turning to Aragorn with scorn. ‘It needs more to make a king than a piece of elvish glass, or a rabble such as this. Why, any brigand of the hills can show as good a following’

Aragorn said nought in answer, but he took the other’s eye and held it, and for a moment they strove thus; but soon, though Aragorn did not stir nor move hand to weapon, the other quailed and gave back as if menaced with a blow. ‘I am a herald and ambassador, and may not be assailed!’ he cried.

‘Where such laws hold,’ said Gandalf, ‘it is also the custom for ambassadors to use less insolence. But no one has threatened you. You have nought to fear from us, until your errand is done.’” (The Return of the King, Ch.10, Book Six, The Black Gate Opens, p197)

In the film he is decapitated without warning by Aragorn. I do not believe that Tolkien would have expected to keep the respect of his audience for the character of Aragorn had such an action been depicted in the book. Peter Jackson shows us no white flag of truce, and expects his audience to retain their respect because of, rather than despite, this precipitous slaughter.

In the book, we have already seen Aragorn, at Helm’s Deep, overawe the besieging army, even though it stands on the brink of victory.

So great a power and royalty was revealed in Aragorn, as he stood there alone above the ruined gates before the host of his enemies, that many of the wild men paused, and looked back over their shoulders..(The Two Towers, Helm’s Deep, p178)

In the book it is Gandalf who dominates the scene at the Black Gates. Aragorn says nothing, and is only mentioned once. The battle is not intercut with Frodo’s final attempt on the Cracks of Doom. There is no stirring speech from Aragorn, and in that final battle, which occupied only a few lines, it is Pippin who confronts and falls beneath the troll. Tolkien has achieved his objectives already. Peter Jackson has not.

[then follows the negotiation concerning Frodo, and Gandalf closes the debate by snatching Frodo’s belongings, warns the Mouth of Sauron of his impending doom and the messenger gallops away]

But as they went his soldiers blew their horns in signal long arranged; and even before they came to the gate Sauron sprang his trap.

Drums rolled and fires leaped up. The great doors of the Black Gate swung back wide. Out of it streamed a great host as swiftly as swirling waters when a sluice is lifted.

[a paragraph continues the description of the enemy movement]

Little time was left to Aragorn for the ordering of his battle. Upon the one hill he stood with Gandalf, and there fair and desperate was raised the banner of the Tree and Stars. …

[Aragorn is not mentioned again in this chapter.]

Perhaps the character least changed, in all three versions, is the putative villain, or perhaps victim, of the story: Gollum. Representing not any of the free peoples, nor any particular class, but the self loathing, self seeking, lustful and remorseful, frail and fallen personification of human nature, irredeemably under the spell of desire for the ring.

The making, or re-making, of books into radio drama, into films, the re-making of films, the making of book-of-the-films and so on, is perhaps analogous to the retelling of myths, and folk tales, and fairy stories. In that sense it represents tradition, and a link with the past, even though it may appear to be innovative, and to show a departure from it.

How Stories Change (3): Miss Pettigrew

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:05:20 -0400

3: Miss Pettigrew Lives for A Day - A Matter of Hindsight.

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson. Persephone Classics, 2008.(1^st edition Methuen, 1938).

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Bharat Nalluri (dir.), Focus Features, 2007.

This is essentially a simple story. An impoverished and unsuccessful governess in late nineteen thirties London, mistakenly gets a job with a young actress and girl-about-town. From a puritanical and repressed background, and having lost the love of her life in the First World War, she is plunged into a world of cocktails, clubs and multiple boyfriends. The life she has seen on the silver screen explodes around her.

Her down to earth wit and common sense, plus a deal of misunderstanding and luck, make her seem like a guardian angel to the actress, whom she guides through the pitfalls of the high life, to the shores of safety in marriage. Winifred Watson, apparently, was writing from her imagination, and had never been in a nightclub. The story has an innocence. The bad guys are not vicious, the drinking and smoking are not really harmful, and the promiscuity seems to hurt no-one. It was written at a time when people longed to escape the consequences of the Great Depression, were still moving away from the huge losses of the First World War, and when another war, though threatening, was not upon them. It was written before the advent of feminism, and the author, interviewed in the early years of the twenty-first century, spoke of having had a happy life, in reference to her successful marriage.

The film, though picking up these themes, and making few changes to the story, could not avoid some affects of hindsight. In the film war has broken out, and the party goers not only dash outside to see warplanes overhead, but later, are subjected to the terror of an air-raid warning. In the novel the pressure of time is not absent, but that hindsight has lent it much greater urgency. Another factor for the film, is that the shadow of the First World War has to be spelled out, to the modern audience. To Winifred Watson’s generation, the middle-aged widows and spinsters needed no explanation; no more did the solitary men, who had lost all their friends in the trenches. The fear that the past would be repeated was present, but the knowledge that it would, was not.

The other theme that hindsight could not overlook was that of the feminist agenda. The heroine of the book is not driven by a desire to succeed ‘in a man’s world’, but to survive. This book was written before the creation of the welfare state. Delysia is well aware that as an actress she is surviving in a man’s world, and she confesses as much, in film and novel, but the novelist does not show it as a victim’s strategy. Other social attitudes have changed since the writing. Joe Blomfield is a corset designer in the novel, sexed-up to a lingerie designer in the film, but when he becomes a partner for Miss Pettigrew, in the film, he has to declare that he will go back to making socks. Are there issues here of straight middle aged men designing women’s lingerie to appeal to, well, straight middle aged men? In both tellings though, the happy ending involves her settling with him.

Significant changes are made to several of the characters. The Joe of the film seems much more upper class than the Joe of the book. In the book he comes over as a more down to earth, un-intellectual character, though well aware of his situation as a rich man clung to by younger gold-digging women. In the film he has been upped a class, I think, and is made more reflective about himself, and about the wider world. In both cases, he sees and values the genuineness of Miss Pettigrew.

The greater change is in the character of Miss Pettigrew, who in the book is downcast, almost defeated, and at her last throw of the dice. She has no handle on her life, but lives through the vicarious pleasures of the cinema, which she has to sneak in to. In the book she is much more assertive, as when she steals Miss la Fosse’s card from the employment agency, rather than being given it. The Miss Pettigrew of the book is dowdy, mousy, timid, and sexually un-awakened. She is shocked by the kisses of Miss La Fosse and her lovers; she is entranced by Miss La Fosse’s deshabillé. In the film she is surprised, but only mildly, by the erection that Phil kindly shows her from the bed.

Of course, both Miss Pettigrews are worthy heroes, and beneath the initial timidity of the book version a heroine is poised, but not an early twenty-first century one. For us to accept her as a heroine in a modern film, we have to have her as a modern heroine.

A similar case is Michael, who in the book is a rather bumptious, though sincere, man of private means. His role will be to take Miss La Fosse, marry her, give her financial security, and love her: not a bad thing perhaps, but it is not a twenty-first century woman’s ideal, nor of course what a twenty-first century man aspires to be (although I wouldn’t mind the private income). So, he is made into a musician, poor but talented; romantic, and with the potential to become rich and famous, an aspiration suited to the thirties and the noughties. Instead of offering her the chance to settle down in a nice house (with Miss Pettigrew as housekeeper, in the book) and raise a family, the film Michael offers her the adventure of leaving with him for America, where they will try for fame and fortune. Look at the contexts: a world on the verge of one war, still smarting, and mourning, and poor, from the last, and a world with the highest levels of employment, income, affluence and peace (despite Iraq, Afghanistan, & the Credit Crunch), than has ever been known in all human history. What seems attractive to the insecure is security, what to the secure: adventure. Interestingly, Michael the book, limits his offer by saying he’ll only make it this one last time (demanding a belief in constancy and determination to make it stick), whereas Michael the film, limits his by showing the tickets for New York, valid for the next day only! Perhaps we find contractual black and white more convincing than the word of a gentleman these days.

If the pressure of expiring tickets is greater than that of expressed will, then the pressure of an actual war must be greater than that of a feared one. It is amid the chaos of the air raid warning, which Winifred Watson did not have in her book, that Miss Pettigrew, in the film, urges Delysia to seize the day.

The film is faithful to the book. It tells of a middle aged woman finding true love, financial security, and herself, within the traditional framework of heterosexual monogamous marriage to an older, wealthier man. Her story is paralleled by that of the young society girl who also finds her man. The changes wrought by hindsight are subtle. The type of men they find have been changed to feel more comfortable to a twenty-first century audience, and so have the women. The men are less in control, less competent, less articulate, less empowered, and the women are the reverse. The strengths of the men in the book are shown to be in their characters, rather than in their wealth. In the film their weaknesses are individual. With the women, their strengths are shifted from their sexual attractiveness, especially in the case of Delysia, to their cunning, their intelligence, and their determination. To settle down with a family would not have been recognised as anything other than a success by Winifred Watson. She did it successfully. She was also an astute business woman, having sold the rights to the book three times, twice to the same studios (!), and a successful writer. Two generations on we would not generally see it that way, I suspect. In another generation, who knows which will seem the less convincing story? Who will be the more acceptable hero and heroine?

How Stories Change (2) - First Blood

Sun, 6 May 2012 03:05:38 -0400

2: First Blood – Changing the Agenda

First Blood, by David Morrell, Pan, 1973 (1^st ed.Barrie & Jenkins 1972)

First Blood, Ted Kotcheff (dir) Studio Canal 1982.

We make presumptions about the intentions behind the stories that are told to us. We base these as much upon our attitudes to life as we do upon what we find in the stories, yet without those presumptions the stories would have no meaning. It is through the lens of what we know that we interpret what we think we are being told. Insiders will find faults that outsiders are oblivious too. Outsiders may find unnatural, and therefore unconvincing, what insiders know to be true.

When stories are changed we may feel that it is because the intentions behind the telling have changed. It seems to me that the changes between the book and the film of First Blood offer an example of this.

The UK edition of David Morrell’s novel was first published in 1972. The Ted Kotcheff film was released ten years later. Attitudes to the Vietnam War had changed considerably during that decade, or to be more precise, the dominant public attitude had changed. In 1972 doubts about the wisdom of the war were present, and the anti-war movement was strong, but the ‘official’ public perception was that it could, and would be won, and that it was fundamentally a ‘good’ war. By 1982 not only had the war been lost, but the belief had grown that the loss had been avoidable, and had been the result of incompetence by the US Government. Public revulsion at the war was often expressed in negative reactions to Vietnam Vets, and in turn this led to a backlash on their behalf. First Blood the novel predated this whole cycle. First Blood, the film, rode its crest. In The War Film (Barnes & Co, NY1974, p44) Ivan Butler makes the point that ‘past wars were damnable, disgraceful, and unnecessary, but the contemporary one is always just.’ In the case of First Blood this truism is given a curious twist.

One might imagine that a comparison between book and film would be a matter of following the parallel stories until they diverged. Here it is a matter of following until they converge. The differences are present right from the beginning, and set up different trajectories on their way to different targets.

First Blood the book begins with the main character, Rambo, waiting for a lift at a petrol station. The opening sentence locates the story in time and space, and sets out an agenda:

‘His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky.’

Neil Jackson, in his chapter ‘Rambo’s Rampage’ (ch.10, in Search & Destroy, ed J.Hunter, Creation Books, 2003.) cites this description as one from which Rambo quickly moves on in the film series. Jackson’s essay picks up some of the comparisons with the novel, but is more interested in tracing the development of Rambo, and the political views he represents, through the series of movies, and in relation to other Vietnam movies.

There’s a good deal of information about the story in this opening sentence. ‘Kentucky’ gives us the backwoods setting. ‘kid’, and ‘gas station’ give a clue to the period. More importantly ‘for all anybody knew’ alerts us to the fact that Rambo is not ‘just some nothing kid’. Morrell goes on to describe him, for it is what he looks like that precipitates the action, in film and book. ‘He had a long heavy beard, and his hair was hanging down over his ears’. He wears a buckskin jacket; significantly different from the combat jacket, with flag, that he wears in the film. A few lines down we are reminded he is ‘ragged and dusty’, and the theme of the book is re-iterated: ‘you could never have figured the kind of kid Rambo was’.

The next paragraph is explicit. ‘Rambo knew there was going to be trouble’, it begins. ‘Then the police car pulled out of traffic towards him and he recognised the start of the pattern again’ it continues, and it ends on his statement of intent: ‘This time I won’t be pushed.’

When you consider that we have already been told that, ‘by Thursday he would be running from the Kentucky National Guard and the police of six counties and a good many private citizens who liked to shoot’ you realise that this is not a story about what happens next, but about how, and why it happens.

The third paragraph of the novel introduces Teasle, his main antagonist. We see Rambo through Teasle’s eyes: ‘mud-crusted boots, the rumpled jeans ripped at the cuffs and patched on one thigh, the blue sweat shirt speckled with what looked like dry blood, the buckskin jacket.’ It is Teasle’s impression of Rambo, what his looks mean about what sort of person he is, that precipitates the action. Teasle’s prejudices kick off this story. ‘He lingered over the beard and long hair. No, that’s not what was bothering him. It was something else.’ This series of seemingly simple sentences contains a lot of information. I read them as meaning that Teasle would have been bothered by the appearance, but that he senses there is something else too, and it is that ‘not just some nothing kid’ quality that we have already been alerted to. Teasle invites Rambo to ‘hop in’, but Morrell tells us, ‘Rambo did not move.’

It is at this point that the two tellings converge, but the film arrives here by a very different route.

The film begins as the opening credits, initially shown over a black screen, draw to their conclusion. We see a rural track, curving around a run down shack in heavily wooded country. Into sight, in the distance, striding down that road towards us is a figure. If we know who it is, it is because of the film’s promotional material, not because of the storytelling. Rambo, coming into close shot, pauses and looks down at what we realise, as the camera pans, is a homestead by a lake, with mountains in the background. He is not heavily bearded, merely unshaven. He is long haired, but not ‘ragged and dusty.’ He is wearing jeans, but they are not ripped, and instead of buckskin, he is wearing a military style combat jacket upon which the stars and stripes is prominently displayed. The camera swings to follow him as he goes down to the homestead, running, as if eager. As we get closer, we see it is the home of a black family. A woman is hanging out washing. She greets him in an unfriendly way. He asks for Delmar Barry, and ‘proves’ he is a friend of his, by showing a photograph from Vietnam, naming the members of his unit. The woman tells him that Delmar has died. He is shocked, and asks how. ‘Cancer. Brought it back from Nam. All that orange stuff they spreaded around’ she tells him.

He turns away, leaving the photograph with her, and we cut to him walking along a highway, being passed by trucks. He does not try to get a lift. We see him pass beneath the sign welcoming us to ‘Hope, gateway to holidayland’.

There is a cut here to Sheriff Teasle coming out of the door of the sheriff’s office. He belches, and hoists his trousers, then passing across the street, greets several people by name. He gets into his patrol car and pulls out into the traffic, making a personal remark to another passer by. We cut back to Rambo, still walking into town.

It is now that Teasle encounters him. ‘Morning’, he says. ‘Are you visiting somebody around here?’

The obvious difference in our journey to this point is that we have travelled a lot further in the film. There has been an encounter between Rambo and the black woman in which several issues have been subtly introduced. The issue of Agent Orange and its possible effects has been raised. The issue of the treatment of Vietnam Vets has also, by this same fact, been raised. The fact that Rambo is a Vietnam Vet has been made explicit, and reinforces the flag on his jacket. The point has been made, both by the reference to Delmar, and by the naming of other members of the ‘team’, that the effects of the war touch all the ethnic strands of American society.

In the book, Rambo encounters only the petrol station attendant, who laughs at him, and an unnamed car driver who nearly runs over his foot. The film lets us hear Rambo speak, politely and respectfully, and shows him looking for an old army buddy. This humanises him, and makes him less of a loner than the book.

The introduction of the sheriff too is handled differently, and with a similar effect, showing him as friendly to the point of being over familiar, and also as a bit of a rough diamond. His greeting to Rambo, though interrogative is not immediately negative. It soon becomes so however. He points out that Rambo is risking ‘trouble’, ‘wearing that flag and that jacket’. This is a critical difference with the book, and bears comparison with another scene, further into the story.

In the scene where Rambo is washed down in the cells the deputy Shingleton exclaims, ‘Good God! Where did you get all the scars on your back?’ Rambo answers, ‘In the war.’ The response is ‘Oh sure. Sure you did. In which army?’

This exchange is important for what it tells us about the deputy’s attitude to the war, and to soldiers. In the film Teasle, and Galt show disrespect to Rambo because they know he is a soldier. In the book they disrespect him because they think he is not. My guess is that when the book was written it would have been unconvincing to show members of the establishment being disrespectful to an ex-soldier, even if he was living as a hippy. For the situation to get out of hand the way it does, they have to be unaware of this until it is too late. In the book, Rambo actually kills one of the deputies, in the cells, and cripples others.

In the film, Galt in particular, but Teasle too to some extent, is mistreating his prisoner because he is associated with Vietnam. The point is driven home by Rambo wearing the jacket, wearing his dog tag, and being addressed as ‘soldier-boy’. Galt’s ‘old Harry here’s a soldier’, also quoted in Jackson (p167), derides him for what the deputies in the novel would have respected. The scars are in film and novel, but whereas the novel’s Shingleton cannot believe someone who looks like a hippy could have been in an army, the film’s Galt, already knowing that Rambo was, says ‘who gives a shit?’

In the book Rambo uses the razor with which they are attempting to shave him to kill a deputy during his escape. In the film he kills no-one, and this is a pattern of divergence that continues throughout the two tellings of the story. The pursuit by the sheriff’s posse in the book turns into a massacre, as Rambo lures them into an ambush, and kills them one by one. This leads to a pursuit of Teasle which loses Rambo his best chance of almost certain escape. In the film he demonstrates that he could have killed the posse, but chooses not to. There is also a scene, not in the book, where he shows himself to the posse, and says he wants no more killing, if they will let him go. Galt, falling from the helicopter, dies by his own folly, rather than by Rambo’s design. This also enables Rambo to get hold of a weapon, without the need for the illicit whisky still scene from the book.

The book tells the story of two war veterans, of different generations, of different wars, who fight a battle of wills. They are both aware of what they are doing, and examine their own motives, as they weigh each other up. The trajectory of the book’s story ends with both of them dying, Rambo shortly before Teasle, both having come to an understanding of themselves and of each other.

The film has a different destination. Rambo survives. Teasle does not. Is Rambo intended to represent the Vietnam Veterans’ case, and Teasle that of the ‘citizens’? Certainly, at the climax of the film, after Teasle’s death, and as he plans to make his last stand, in a confrontation with Trautman, his one time trainer and mentor (and who, in the book, kills him), Rambo, makes the great statement of the film, about how the war was fought, why it was lost, and who is to blame. There is nothing remotely like this anywhere in the book. The effect on Rambo of the war, in the book, is one of having turned him into a killer. The effect, in the film, is to have turned him into a victim, but a victim who has finally managed to take some kind of revenge.

The words put into Rambo’s mouth in the film, and into his head, in the novel, at this climactic moment neatly encapsulate the different areas that the two tellings of his story wish to focus our attention on, the message that they carry to us.

‘Nothing is over! Nothing is over! You just don’t turn it off…….

I did what I had to do to win but somebody wouldn’t let us win……in the field we had a code of honour……..back there…..I was in charge of million dollar equipment, back here I can’t even hold down a job’

(Kotcheff, quoted in Jackson, p169)

‘but this way,, the only proper way, in the last of the fight, trying his best to kill Teasle…….And at least then I’ll have died trying…..the gun went off unintended. So careless and sloppy. He cursed himself. Not the real fight he had hoped for.’

(Morrell, p236)

It is his own performance that the novel’s Rambo is concerned with, in his personal contest with Teasle. In the book Teasle gets the final small chapter. It his thoughts we follow to the end of the story.

‘He thought about Anna again, and she still did not interest him. He thought about his house he had fixed up in the hills, the cats there, and none of that interested him either. He thought about the kid, and flooded with love for him,’ (Morrell, p238)

The book is rooted firmly in the personal contest between these two men, and in their obsession with their own performances in that contest. It has no wider horizons, and neither do its characters. The examination of Teasle’s motives and outlooks is also more extensive in the book, and highlighted early on, when he is trying to persuade Orval to pursue Rambo into the darkening evening (in order to be able to keep control of the pursuit). Orval asks a question that is not posed in the film.

‘What did this kid do to you, Will?

‘He sliced one deputy nearly in half and beat another maybe blind.’

‘Yeah, Will,’ Orval said and struck the match, cupping it to light his cigarette. ‘But you didn’t answer me. What did this kid do to you?’

(Morrell, p62)

Had the film been made ten years earlier, it would have had to be more like the book. The ideas it expresses would not really have existed. Had the book been written ten years later, it would probably have been more like the film. The ideas that had developed by then could not have been ignored.

The novel tells us a ‘worm turned’ sort of story, in which a backwoods sheriff makes an assumption about ‘a nothing kid’ who looks like a hippie, though the word is never used. As an ex-military man the novel’s Teasle, and his deputies do not expect John Rambo to be capable of resisting them. They learn differently. Teasle especially, as his last thoughts show, learns that he and Rambo have more in common than he expects. There is a reciprocal movement in Rambo too. Near to the end he recognises what has driven him: ‘he had also been proud and delighted to show them how good he was at fighting’. (Morrell, p232)

There is no equivalent communication in the film version. Whereas in the book what Rambo is showing to the war veteran Teasle is that despite looking different, like a drop out hippie, he is the same, in the film he is showing that, though both of them wear the badge of the state, they are different. That difference is that one is a soldier, and the other is not: ‘In the field we had a code…….Back here there is nothing.’ (Kotcheff, Quoted in Jackson, p169)

The comparison reveals not an issue of fidelity of film to book, but one of context, and throws light on the uses of story and the way in which those uses may be largely determined by what is considered significant, by both teller and receiver, at the time of the telling, rather than at the time of the originating of the story.

How Stories Change - The Shooting Party

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 10:04:22 -0400

The Shooting Party - a faithful adaptation.

The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate. (Penguin Classics, 2007 [1980])

The Shooting Party, Alan Bridges (dir.) Geoff Reeves films, 1985, restored 2006 DVD.

A comparison of novels and their adaptations into other media can help clarify our understanding of what are the intentions and achievements of both versions.

The Shooting Party, a novel by Isabel Colegate, begins with two long paragraphs. The first locates the story in time and ambience, with a description of the people as if they were in a painting, and of the action in relation to the Great War. The second locates the story more precisely in the English landscape, across which we move to end at Nettleby Park: ‘an estate which belonged in 1913 to Sir Randolph Nettleby, Baronet, a country gentleman.’

The third paragraph begins with the actual words that Sir Ralph is recording in his Game Book, a fact made plain to us by the eventual interjection of his granddaughter. ‘Why are you always writing in that big black notebook, Grandpa?’

The subsequent chapter moves about between general descriptions of Nettleby, and the other characters to be introduced, but the crucial introduction has been to Sir Randolph, for he is the character to whom we turn for the ambient response of the novel to all of the other characters, to their doings and motivations, and to the wider world in which the story is set. At the end of the book, after similar varied paragraphs ‘finishing off’ the life stories of all the characters we have met, the final paragraph is reserved for Sir Randolph. Again, we are offered the world, this time the post story world, which pushes against the boundaries of our own, through his eyes, and in such a way, that allows us to leave him, and the story, behind, as if he were, in the words of that opening paragraph, ‘from a long time ago’. In the last words of the book: ‘…the Twenties, a period of which Sir Randolph, despite his deep affection for his grandson, entirely disapproved.’

The film begins and ends with a different scene, shown from a different point of view. At the beginning and the end, with potent ambiguity, we see the shooting party, formed up like a company of infantry, marching out across green fields, the suggestion of officers and NCOs unmistakeable in the formation. Voice-overs, elegiac to begin with, and paralleling the introductory paragraphs of the novel, become specifically focussed on the Great War, as in Lionel’s voice, the letters referred to in the post-story tying up of the book are realised. Paralleling those closing paragraphs, in which we are told what became of everyone, a series of brief notices, telling where each has died in the conflict, is shown, but the image, of the shooting party setting out is used as the background.

Though this is undoubtedly poignant, it does shift the focus, away from Sir Randolph, and towards Lionel, whose love story, though important, is not as central, in my opinion, to the book, as Sir Randolph’s commentary. It is a minor point, and I wouldn’t try to exaggerate it. The film, beginning with the shooting party returning to the house, and introducing the narrative element of Lionel giving the Ruskin book to Olivia, also subtly reduces the importance of Sir Randolph, whose Game Book scene, though faithfully reproduced, follows later.

If there is a triangle, of Character-Action-Thought, then this adaptation moves the apex from Thought (expressed through Sir Randolph), to Action (expressed through Lionel’s love affair with Olivia; a not unexpected transition when moving from words and imagination, to motion picture and observation. It by no means banishes Thought, however. The question we must ask is does this reflect an intention to change the story, or the purposes of the story, or does it reflect the opposite: a desire to be faithful to the story within a different medium. In this case, I feel the latter is more likely (and viewing the ‘specials’ on the DVD edition, the producers claim that).

The issue of the Great War is interesting, because for both novel and film the Great War was already in the past, and is referred to at the beginning of both. The emphasis is slightly greater in the film I feel. The march of the Shooting Party, the movement of the beaters into place, Lionel’s voice-over from the trenches, and the brief obituaries, at the end, all tend to make it so. The actual shoot too, is filmed with a heavier emphasis on the volleying of the guns than in the novel. Yet none of these elements is entirely new. In the novel though, the parallels are not so visual. The beaters do manoeuvre. The war deaths are referred to, and so is the war service of the ladies, and of course Lionel’s letters are all of him that survive, but the novel gives us other endings too. Gilbert and Aline, and Randolph’s grandson Osbert, and Dan Glass all go on to other fates. Cornelius Cardew too, is developed more in the novel, and he becomes no war casualty. Perhaps a difference here is that novels gain in richness from developing more broadly, whereas films, which until the video/DVD era, had to be taken in at a sitting, and could not easily be reviewed by the turning back of a page, gained in impact by concentrating on a narrower front.

With the Lionel-Olivia thread of story, as with the Great War comparison, what is interesting, is that those particular threads should be given emphasis over other possible ones. Of course, we love a love story, and when Chou-en-Lai, China’s Foreign Minister in the nineteen seventies, was asked about the significance of the Great War, he famously replied that it was ‘too soon to say’, highlighting the significance of that event in contemporary minds. We have just, in 2009, celebrated the life of the last surviving ‘Tommies’.

If Sir Randolph’s part is slightly played down in the film, Cornelius Cardew’s is severely restricted, yet, by casting John Gielgud in the role, the producers must have been asserting its importance. Cardew is a fully developed character in the novel, but arguably a one dimensional one in the film. In the novel we have extensive back story, and forward story, and his actual presence within the action is more complex and time consuming. This is most noticeable in the scene where Tom Harker dies. In the novel Cardew is present, and offers a commentary that is judged, by our touchstone, Sir Randolph, to be unhelpful. ‘I cannot think that a helpful observation,’ said Sir Randolph. ‘No,’ said Cornelius, wringing his hands and retreating step by step across the grass. ‘No, it is not helpful.’

In the novel, Isabel Colegate is as interested in exploring Cardew’s character, motivation, and his view of the world, as she is in exploring those of other members of the cast. He brings a peculiar, outsider’s viewpoint of the Country House set, to the story, and makes an interesting comparison with Sir Reuben, and with Count Rakassyi. The distinctions here are fine, and not at all obvious. Rakassyi is foreign, but unlike Reuben, the Jew, is of the European aristocracy, and therefore an insider. Yet culturally he is an outsider, misunderstanding Cicely’s response to Harker’s death: ‘He was only a peasant.’ To which Cicely replies with a devastating rebuke. ‘But we all knew him, you see.’ He does not see though, and has to have it spelt out for him, at the end of the main narrative: ‘Oh I think I shall never visit you in Hungary.’

Sir Reuben, on the other hand is an outsider, by virtue of his race, yet is so deeply embedded in the society, that he can dream of adopting a surrogate son, to cement his sense of belonging. Cornelius Cardew is an insider by race, yet his ideas isolate him from both the shooting party guests, and the rural population dependent on them. Only Sir Randolph manages to communicate with him, as a fellow pamphleteer, but there is a degree of asymmetry in their conversation. Cardew craves the approval of Sir Randolph, but receives only the common decencies from him.

Which brings me back to Sir Randolph’s commentating role, applied to all the other characters, even-handedly, and with humanity. In rebuking Cardew he is asserting, as the guiding opinion of the story, his own view of rural England, against that of the man from Hindhead. His rebuke of Cardew is perhaps his strongest statement, apart from one. That is the reply to Gilbert Hartlip, perhaps the most vehement statement in the novel, and given equal power in the film. ‘You were not shooting like a gentleman, Gilbert.’

In the novel this statement stands at the heart of what the story is about. In the film it has to share that heart with the love affair of Lionel and Olivia and the glowering presence of the Great War. In fact the film uses the two narrative threads of Lionel-Olivia, and Lionel-Gilbert to draw us along, with the lesser narratives, of Osbert and his duck, Count Rakassyi and Cicely, John and Ellen, and Minnie and Sir Reuben in relation to Aline, in support. As in the book, Sir Randolph comments on all these, but they are definitely lesser concerns. Lionel has been elevated to a more central role in this telling. There have been compressions: the restriction of Cardew’s role, and the replacement of Charles Farquhar by Sir Reuben as Aline’s lover. Perhaps the differences are driven by the film’s need to concentrate on story, and the two obvious threads of story, are Lionel’s love for Olivia, and his unintentional rivalry with Gilbert, which drives on the death of Tom Harker, itself a metaphor for the destruction of the whole rural edifice by the dog-eat-dog world that Sir Randolph sees ahead. The film makes these threads the point of the story. The novel barely elevates them above the other threads.

Constraints of time may often seem to explain what is cut out of a novel in the retelling by a film maker, but there are additions too. These may be to clarify, or to change some of the narrative threads, or perhaps to make up time, where a story is simple, and may be quickly told. In The Shooting Party there is such an addition. You will not find the ‘fancy dress competition’ in the book, but there it is, fitting seamlessly into the film, and being used like the other scenes, to reveal the characters, in their various pairings. As the prize giver and master of ceremonies, Sir Randolph’s role, in book and film, is neatly emphasised and revealed. The children get to award the prizes, but Sir Randolph makes sure that we see his house guests for who they are, by what they do, or do not do, by what they attempt to be, and the grace, or lack of it, with which they behave.

Much of the detail in the book is replicated faithfully, for its function, like the scene above, to reveal the characters and what drives them in this fading world, is the same. Bob Lilburne worries about his lost cuff-links, and fails to imagine people ‘we don’t know’, and believes that he doesn’t ‘think I would want to know such people.’ Tom Harker cries ‘God Save the British Empire’ as he expires. Sir Randolph fantasises about taking to the hills.

The novel is much more even handed in dealing with all the couples and trios that are offered than is the film. It sets them against each other, and filters them all through Sir Randolph’s gaze. Isabel Colegate uses Nettleby Park as a sort of Prospero’s Isle, in which Sir Randolph, with his Game Book, takes the Prospero role. All the other characters are put through their paces and weighed by him, and the narrative thread, of Gilbert and Lionel, and all the other threads make up a tapestry which is itself the object of the book. Unlike in the film, the individual storylines do not support a central storyline, but with it, make up a whole picture, of rural England on the verge of change. The Great War, undoubtedly hovering in the wings, is not there to throw a particular light on the events, but is an explanation of the end of the world being described. We are being shown a picture; the one described in that first paragraph, and Sir Randolph Nettleby has acted as our guide to and interpreter of it. The film uses that tapestry as the background to the story of the characters within it. There is a subtle difference here, in what has been done, and in the implications of what were the intentions of the storytellers, each in their own medium. Isabel Colegate is showing us a world from which our world sprang. The film is telling us a story set in that world.

Next time, 'First Blood'......