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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. The mills of the gods (read Hollywood solons) ground too exceedingly "fine" for that.\n (Tho' some novellas by Chekov, for instance, have fared very well, indeed, in the filming, like Heifitz's The Lady with the Dog, of which the closest counterpart we have is, of course, Noel Coward's Brief Encounter, by David Lean, also as successfully brought to screen life.) But one dreams of what von Stroheim might have made of Merezhkovsky's Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, or at least of Lajos Zilahy's The Dukays, not to overlook his own novels.

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 Cinéma 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. Clyde Griffiths. Dreiser, in desperation, sued, lost, then turned to von Stroheim to rescue the project, but who would let von Stroheim do what they would not let even Eisenstein do? Crime and Punishment fared better in France under Pierre Chenal with Pierre Blanchar as Raskolnikov and Harry Baur as Porfiry, sharply and incisively done. Recently the Russians themselves finally tackled it, as they have, at long last. The Brothers Karamazov, with War and Peace and Don Quixote one of the three cornerstones of the world's literature. I have not yet seen the Russian version but I recall a splendid German adaptation done by the Russian Fedor Ozep with Fritz Kortner as Dmitri, Fritz Rasp as Smerdyakov, and Anna Sten as Grushenka, with a marvelous musical score by Karol Rathaus, that, under the title of Der Moerder Karamazov, dealt just with one of the central episodes of the vast novel, the murder of Karamazov père, but what a film, both in terms of Dostoïevski and in terms of itself! This is a rare occurence, like the French Crime and Punishment was, like the French version of Conrad's Under Western Eyes with Pierre Fresnay and the original silent version (with Percy Marmont) of Lord Jim was (and the sound remake with Peter O'Toole. though well cast, was not). As for the Hollywood Brothers Karamazov, with Lee Cobb, YuI Brynner, Maria Schell, the less said about that the better. Conrad's Heart of Darkness as envisioned by Welles would doubtless have renewed our faith in screen adaptations of the classics from the excerpts published, but this, too, was not to be vouchsafed us. The mills of the gods (read Hollywood solons) ground too exceedingly "fine" for that.

What does that leave? Plenty, of which mention should certainly be made of other rare occasions "when the stars were fixed right in the heavens" and we were permitted such exceptional works as Renoir's Madame Bovary which had, the cachet of a collaboration with Flaubert, as did Raymond Bernard's Les Misérables, with Harry Baur as Jean Valjean and Charles Vanel as Javert, have the veracity of a collaboration with Victor Hugo. Or Renoir's A Day in the Country, which lives on the screen like a double collaboration, this time, with Renoir pere, for its visuals, and Maupassant, himself, for its irony. Hollywood did a respectable Les Misérables with Laughton as the implacable Javert, but it was no match for the French version. And although the Russians never tackled Dostoievski's White Nights, the French did (most recently and, alas, ineffectually, in Four Nights of a Dreamer, considering the director was the sensitive Bresson) and so did the Italians, via Visconti, in the sad and beautiful little film starring Mastroianni and Maria Schell called, quite simply. White Nights. (I must not forget Renoir's Manet-like silent Nana with Catherine Hessling a marvel.)

Hollywood has often walked in where angels feared to tread, as witness the commercially successful Wuthering Heights by William Wyler which diluted the Brontë novel, as it did Anna Karenina (three times, twice with Garbo and once with Vivien Leigh). But give Hollywood secondary works, like Blasco-Ibañez's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram's version, not the sound "remake" by Minnelli, bien entendu) or Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel or the Nordoff-Hall Mutiny on the Bounty, and you get very respectable works, indeed. Or James Hilton's Lost Horizon, or, going a notch or two higher, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, both fairly true to their sources and effectively done. But where subtlety or Stimmung is needed, don't give it even a second rate work like The Song of Songs of Sudermann, expecting more than Mamoulian found in it, but give it an equally second rate work, like Sudermann's>4 Trip to Tilsit, for Murnau to do and expect everything - and get it in Sunrise. The right director for the right film can turn dross into gold. Another German novel even more obscure than Amy Jolly was The Oath of Stephan Huiler by Felix Hollaender which, tho' originally slated by Ufa producer Erich Pommer for the great Murnau to direct, was on a sudden inspiration turned over to the comparatively obscure E. A. Dupont (because he had circus experience) and the result was absolutely stunning. I speak of Variety.

And yet as many, if not more (and I think more) memorable films were the result of stories written originally for the screen, like The Last Laugh, Caligari, Citizen Kane, Foolish Wives, The Wedding March, L' Atalante, Zéro de Conduite, Potemkin, The Big Parade, The Crowd, Hallelujah, Underworld, Docks of New York, Earth, The End of St. Petersberg, Children of Paradise, The General, Grand Illusion, Intolerance, La Kermesse Héroïque, The Last Command, Metropolis, M, The New Babylon, The Nibelungen, Open City, Paisan, Quai des Brumes, Storm Over Asia, The Waxworks, not to mention the complete oeuvre of Chaplin and almost the complete oeuvre of René Clair.

You will note I omit plays as literary sources for films. If I included them, they would make this already long piece even longer and would only reinforce what I hope needs no further reinforcing: that while the novel has served the film well, as indeed all published literary sources have, the best results have been obtained in the "blood transfusions" from secondary, rather than primary, works into the veins of the film. One must always hope that in the process the patient doesn't die. Dickens has fared fairly well, all things considered, and although we have had two major attempts at Don Quixote, by Pabst with Chaliapin and Kozintsev with Cherkassov (and shall soon, God willing, have a third, the long promised one by Orson Welles), this one (which has made of "quixotic" one of the tenderest words in the English language) may also in the end be as elusive as Proust, Joyce and the Russian giants. (Tho' some novellas by Chekov, for instance, have fared very well, indeed, in the filming, like Heifitz's The Lady with the Dog, of which the closest counterpart we have is, of course, Noel Coward's Brief Encounter, by David Lean, also as successfully brought to screen life.)

But one dreams of what von Stroheim might have made of Merezhkovsky's Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, or at least of Lajos Zilahy's The Dukays, not to overlook his own novels. Paprika, Poto Poto and The Fires of St. John, all of which he had hoped to film. Or Eisenstein's dream to do William Seabrook's Black Majesty, Sutter's Gold, from Blaise Cendrar's L'Or, The Glass House, from the Russian novelist, Eugene Zamiatin, Dreiser's An American Tragedy ....

I do not want to turn this recital into a catalogue of titles, although one could make quite a case this way for the subject of novel into film, both pro and con, and the reasons for both.

I have voluntarily left for the last the example of the filming of Frank Norris' McTeague by von Stroheim in the film the world today knows as Greed, what's left of it. This, of course, is the classic example of not only absolute faithfulness of transliteration from one medium into another but the expansion and enlargement of the novel into a multi-layered film, that gives deeper meaning to the original. I cannot think of another instance where this has been done. And, as I said in the foreword to my book, The Complete 'Greed, ' which laments the loss of the original 9 ½ hours of footage that represented Stroheim's first cut, " It is to make up for this loss that I have attempted to 'reconstruct' the complete film, insofar as it is possible to do this, through the still photos that remain of it, following the original scenario . . . ." I had 400 still photos to do this.

"The distance between the ape and man is not so great," said Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, "as between man and the superman." Echoing which, it can be truly said that the distance between Norris' McTeague and the released 2 ½ -hour version of Greed is not so great as between the latter and what the original film, as revealed by these photos, must have been.

L'Envoi

Anatole France was once reverently ushered into a Paris projection room to view a recently completed film version of his novel. The Red Lily. When it was over, the producer and his director and stars anxiously awaited the verdict of the cher maître. He smiled affably and congratulated them on a verv interesting picture. "But are you sure," he asked timidly, "that it's supposed to be The Red Lily?"