The tricks of the transference trade
David Nokes
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION ON SCREEN edited by Robert Mayer CUP, £47.50, pp. 242, ISBN 0521793165 It's odd the things in novels that get immortalised in film. In Tom Jones (the novel) the episode where our hero eats three pounds of beef before retiring with Mrs Waters is part of Fielding's ironic lexicon; as is her reaction, deploying the whole Artillery of Love', in ogles, leers and sidelong glances, which 'hit only a vast Piece of Beef ... and harmless spent their force'. In the book it is amusing: but in Tony Richardson's film, as Peter Cosgrove argues, it is 'the most famous scene'. This is not because the film (screenplay by John Osborne) doesn't work; it does and is hugely entertaining. It is just an indication of the way that tiny events are picked out and become hugely memorable in the translation from one medium to another. At least this episode did exist in the written version. The other major event in the 1963 film which everyone recalls is the hunt, which, though an invention, 'yields much more to the audience' than any number of Tom and Sophia scenes. Keen on a spot of anti-blood-sport propaganda. Richardson stuffed his deer with lashings of beef liver to get his hounds really slavering. But the episode grew, in typical 1960s fashion, into a set-piece vignette of bloodthirsty but excited hunters v. animal rights activists with Lady Cranborne ('very spectacular she looked riding side-saddle') careering through the countryside in a thoroughly Fieldingesque manner. It may not have been in the novel, but it captured far more essential qualities of Tom Jones than the much longer and, Martin Battestin notes, clumsier BBC version of 1997.
Defoe fared much the same. In the 18th century there were so many imitations of Robinson Cnisoe that, Pat Rogers notes, they represented an entire 'sub-branch of continental literature'. On film, however, this valiant capitalist had two great failings. being an instinctive racist and having a total lack of sexual desire, Jack Gold's Man Friday (1975) used Adrian Mitchell's hilarious two-hander to poke fun at him, but, alas, sadly failed. The beautiful surroundings of Manzanillo and Richard Roundtree's winning ways made Peter O'Toole's one-dimensional performance as Crusoe not so much comic as maniacally absurd. Moll Flanders, with her cheerful life not of isolation (she was 'Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife, whereof once to her own Brother') strikes much nearer the Hollywood path, Kim Novak, plucked for stardom from her career as 'Miss Deep Freeze', struck Terence Young as ready to melt in his 1965 movie Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders. Defoe's book is virtually ignored as Moll's sexual career is cut to three liaisons, her marriages to two and all signs of childbearing and motherhood rigorously deleted. This Playboy romp (Moll's life of physical hardship is represented by a smudge across Miss Novak's sensual face) was replaced in 1995 by Pen Densham with a right-on feminist version. Moll (Robin Wright) is a card-carrying activist who marries only once (a struggling artist), and when he dies is rescued by a black African. Her one (female) baby is lost and rescuing her takes up the rest of the film. The final image is of the threesome. Moll, her man and daughter, dancing on a beach while her voice-over intones that all men and women are created equal'. This reassuring myth was itself replaced in 1996 by an authentic four-hour long Moll Flanders, disassociated from Densham/Wright's version by being prefaced, in the USA, by Russell Barker's warning to parents that its themes (bigamy, prostitution, incest) rendered it highly unsuitable for children. This came the closest to the book, but wasn't a patch, (or should that be a smudge?) on Kim Novak.
A more thoughtful essay is Cynthia Wall's investigation of how the use of spaces in Clarissa, the 1991 BBC film for which I wrote the screenplay, emphasises the gradual build-up of claustrophobia. Staircase and window shots suggest limitations and restrictions of individual perspective which, though not strictly 'faithful' to the text, employ the resources of a visual medium to reproduce something recognisably Richardsonian'. Many essays in this lively book are similarly instructive; only one or two depend for their appeal on invective. Alan D. Chalmers hasn't much time for the Channel 4 version of Gulliver's Travels (1996), which is good for including all four books, but woefully links them with a spurious law court sub-plot between Gulliver (Ted Danson) and Dr Bates (James Fox) attempting to replace him in Mrs Gulliver's affections. It isn't only the meretricious plot devices this entails, or the ghastly closing shot of the Gullivers embracing in a Dorset landscape (as opposed to Gulliver forsaking all the Yahoos and conversing with the Houyhnhnms in his stables). When one recalls that Fox's character is specifically referred to as Master Bates (say it aloud) one realises how many things have been missed here. Others may take a different view of the films (and novels) presented, but that is part of the beauty of texts. Novels are a movable feast, as lubricious as Kim Novak, or as indigestible as James Fox.
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