Category / adaptations

Row of cinema seats
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Huthering Weights

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
“Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell, 2026)
Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

When I was clinging onto the idea of teaching English Literature, I got three part time gigs teaching nineteenth literature. This was ironical, because as an undergraduate there was an notable gap in my Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (and up to about 1990) that was Victoria Literature. Inevitable I had to teach three different Dickens and three Eliots, but Emily saved me by only having a single surviving novel.

I suspect my only knowledge of it was Kate Bush (which I had seen) and a Cliff Richard musical (which passed me by).

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To Tie Firmly

Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)

Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020)

It may be, of course, that I read Rebecca years and years ago — I know I started it and I studied the opening paragraph, the dream of the Manderley mansion from years later, but I’m not sure I got much further. And when I bought two Du Maurier boxsets, I don’t think Rebecca was part of them. It took me a while to track down a copy — although naturally I found several since, as a battered paperback 1992 reprint got more battered as it got carried around.

The conceit should be familiar: lady’s companion Rebecca meets aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter in Monte Carlo and the two have a whirlwind romance, before returning to the ancestral pad in … where we take to be Cornwall but it isn’t named in the book. The new bride finds life at Manderley difficult and the ghost of the dead Rebecca hangs over her, especially through the behaviour of housekeeper Mrs Danvers. A ball would be useful, perhaps, but Mrs Danvers persuades her to wear the same costume as Rebecca had and then it seems as if a wedge has been driven between the loving couple. Then a body is discovered in a sunken boat… Continue reading →

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Wolves Do Not Eat Popcorn

Skriften på veggen ((The Writing on the Wall) Stefan Faldbakken, 2010)
Svarte får ((Black Sheep) Stephan Apelgren, 2011)
Dødens drabanter ((Consorts of Death) Stephan Apelgren, 2011)
I mørket er alle ulver grå ((At Night All Wolves Are Grey) Alexander Eik, 2011)
De døde har det godt ((The Dead Have It Easy) Erik Richter Strand, 2011)
Kalde hjerter ((Cold Hearts), Trond Espen Seim, 2012)

The first series left me with a degree of trepidation – would Hamre be back or has the series jumped the shark. The answer is – spoiler – he is back and so it was worth watching. The friendship gets closer, to the extent that I was expecting him to be written out. No spoilers here. But there is a growing sympathy, especially as Veum gets closer to a new girlfriend Karin (Lene Nystrøm), who appears in a different guise in the novels.

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Brief Natural Nudity

The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci, 2020)
Emma. (Autumn de Wilde, 2020)

There is nothing we seem to like better in the British Film Industry than a literary adaptation — and there have been great versions of Austen and Dickens in the past, so much so that it wasn’t until two hours and four minutes into Emma. that I felt we need another Austen on screen. Continue reading →

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Shelf Indulgence

The Bookshop (Isabel Coixet, 2017)

Sometimes the gun over the fireplace in Act One is a paraffin heater.

This film works really hard not to be liked. It’s set in and around a bookshop in a small Suffolk village set up by widowed Emily Mortimer, and everybody loves a bookshop. Well, not everybody, because Patricia Clarkson, channelling Glen Close as Cruella de Vil, would rather have an arts centre, for reasons which need not detain us and clearly don’t detain the film. Meanwhile, Bill Nighy, who increasingly leads me to poor viewing choices, is a misanthropic widower who likes books and likes Emily Mortimer. In particular, in turns out he likes Ray Bradbury.

What’s not to like?

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Musicals to Watch Out For

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, directed by Sam Gold. Young Vic)

I confess I know little more about Alison Bechdel than the Bechdel-Wallace Test and its origin in Dykes to Watch Out For. This is a failing, as I have read Maus and have copies of some Joe Saccho and Harvey Pekar, which is almost like having read them.
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The Real Lucy Barton

Rona Munro, My Name is Lucy Barton (Directed by Richard Eyre, Br/dge Theatre)

ETA: I see I got the name of the play wrong. Doh.
There was some anxiety from several reviewers that Nightfall didn’t sufficiently fill the thrust stage of The Bridge Theatre. So they follow it up with a one-person monologue, performed by Laura Linney, adapted from Elizabeth Strout’s novel My Name is Lucy Barton. To make that feat more impressive, it is performed without interval, with a set that is little more than a hospital bed, a cabinet and a chair, plus a projection screen.

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Moustache on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, 2017)

So this comes with a weight of expectations and spoilers — is this the one where the detective did it or was it the fourth victim, who faked his death? Branagh had started his film career trying to out Sir Larry Sir Larry with worthy Shakespearean adaptations, but with the odd psychological thriller to show versatility. And the truly dreadful and misnamed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And now a crowd pleaser: an always redundant adaption of the hoary Agatha Christie novel. I think it’s a lose-lose situation: either he’s faithful to the original and we know what’s gonna happen or he’s not and we feel cheated.

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Spall’s Well That Ends Well

Electric Dreams: “The Commuter” (Tom Harper, 2017)

Now this is more like it — a fantasy partly set at Woking Station.

Funnily enough, I was looking at train times to Woking today and I’ve been there a couple of times. It get destroyed in War of the Worlds.

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