Novel into Film

Alexandra Tolstoy, daughter of that titan among novelists, preferred King Vidor's War and Peace to Sergei Bondarchuk's, which it antedated by a decade, because she could believe in the Natasha of Audrey Hepburn over that of Lyudmila Savelyeva in the Soviet version. Otherwise she didn't have much to choose from, both lacking not only the epic sweep of the novel (despite their spectacular battle scenes) but, more importantly, missing its point. War and Peace is not a novel of plot but of historical progression. Tolstoy interprets history as a blind force which makes short shrift of the deliberate designs of men. Thus he juxtaposes the "natural man," Kutuzov, with the military genius. Napoleon, whose defeat is brought about by causes which his deliberate planning has failed to foresee. There is no overtone of this in either version. Will the forthcoming 20-episode, 15-hour BBC television version finally reverberate to this great idea that permeates this cornerstone of world literature? They've been trying a long time to do it - no less than three versions were done in Russia in 1915 - and maybe it can't, in the final analysis, be done, just as Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past (and even Moby Dick) can't be done, though it doesn't stop them from trying. Joseph Strick found no visual equivalent for the language of Joyce (Eisenstein, who had conversations with Joyce about doing it, would have), and the director of that misguided "remake" of Lang's M, Joseph Losey, is hardly the man to bring Proust to the screen, not that anyone is. As for Moby Dick, John Huston would have done better to play Ahab himself (he has the right craggy and demonic face for it) and to have left the adaptation and direction to Orson Welles (who had already done it vividly on the stage - yes, on the stage - in the form of A Rehearsal for a Stage Production Of Moby Dick, which is what it was called). The point of all this is that the bigger the literary source, the more intractable it is, the more it resists adaptation into another medium, especially the films - because to film means to compromise because the large investment involved necessitates a large audience to insure a profitable return on the investment, besides which the knack of finding a visual equivalent of a literary style (let alone its content and the overtones of that content) is given to few. If the King James version of the Bible can be regarded as a literary work, which it certainly is, this was the most intractable of all. if we are to judge by Huston's attempt to put the first five chapters on the. screen, which Peter Morris of the Canadian Film Institute has rightly called "perhaps the worst spectacular of all time." This was the tenet of the French nouvelle vague directors and the Cahiers du Cinema crowd - Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, etc. - so they chose small, tight themes which resulted in small, tight but excellent films (like A bout de souffle. The 400 Blows, Les Cousins) and left the big themes to Hollywood and others - which also resulted in small, but loose and far from excellent films. When Hollywood tackled second or even third rate novels, it could do very well by them, as witness Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, which became The Birth of a Nation, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, which became - well, you know what that became. Or Benno Vigny's Amy Jolly, an obscure German novelette subtitled "The Woman of Marrakesh," which became Morocco under the witchery of Josef von Sternberg, not to mention an almost equally obscure German novel by Heinrich Mann, Professor Unrat, an episode of which provided von Sternberg with the idea for The Blue Angel. Yet what happens when Sternberg tackles major works like Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment? Excellent films in themselves if considered apart from their monumental sources. For the former, Eisenstein's (with his assistant Alexandrov) adaptation was not to be vouchsafed us, as Paramount, for whom it had been prepared, rejected the idea of a film that would indict society as the true murderer in the case of The People vs. …