Requiem for cavalier attitudes

Great directors used to know how to have their way with source literature. Even novels of distinction were no impediment to Vincente Minnelli and his worldview.

Brad Stevens
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Three highly regarded novels which became Vincente Minnelli movies

Three highly regarded novels which became Vincente Minnelli movies

I have not yet seen Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Nor, until recently, had anyone else. Yet this state of ignorance failed to prevent a seemingly endless series of comments being made about the film via social media, blogs and newspaper columns. The assumption seemed to be that Taylor-Johnson would precisely reproduce the narrative, dialogue and ideological tendencies of E.L. James’s novel. In recent years, films based on bestsellers have stuck closely to their sources (indeed, this is often a contractual obligation), with entries in the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises displaying few ambitions beyond providing illustrated versions of the books from which they are adapted.

This phenomenon is a relatively recent one. The standard complaint of novelists used to be that Hollywood cretins had taken their visions and distorted them beyond recognition. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule. David O. Selznick respected authors’ intentions, and prevented Alfred Hitchcock making some fairly radical changes to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1940). But generally speaking, American directors felt free to alter literary works in whatever ways they wished; Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944) bore only the vaguest resemblance to Ernest Hemingway’s original, while Whit Masterson’s pulp thriller Badge of Evil underwent major surgery before being filmed by Orson Welles as Touch of Evil (1958). And there are even more extreme examples: Philip Dunne’s Wild in the Country (1961), an Elvis Presley vehicle written by Clifford Odets, was ostensibly an adaptation of J.R. Salamanca’s The Lost Country, but takes nothing from Salamanca except a few character names.

According to Jean Mitry, “The novel is a story which is organised to form a world; film is a world which is organised to form a story,” and it is a truism that poor books usually inspire better films than great books do. Otto Preminger, in particular, was known for turning mediocre literature into cinematic masterpieces.

But three of Vincente Minnelli’s finest achievements were based on highly distinguished (though now largely forgotten) novels: James Jones’s Some Came Running (1957, film 1958), William Humphrey’s Home from the Hill (1957, film 1960) and Irwin Shaw’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1960, film 1962). Far from slavishly reproducing these texts, Minnelli made sweeping changes. His Two Weeks in Another Town takes a pair of otherwise unrelated individuals from Shaw’s book – a would-be writer and a popular young actor – and combines them into a single figure, while Home from the Hill adds an entirely new character, Rafe Copley (George Peppard), whose presence deepens and enriches the material.

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

It may well be that the credited screenwriters partly determined how these stories mutated in their journeys from page to screen (Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. were certainly responsible for Rafe); but no writer contributed to more than one of these projects, and the emphasis all three films place on troubled masculinity suggests that the most telling revisions can be safely attributed to Minnelli.

Many of the elements introduced into Two Weeks in Another Town are directly autobiographical: star Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas) and director Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson) watch Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) in a screening room, and a new scene in which Kruger’s wife, Clara (Claire Trevor), tries to commit suicide in a bathroom – a mirror on the inside of the door shattering as her husband forces his way in – was evidently modelled on Minnelli’s recollections of Judy Garland’s 1947 suicide attempt, which he later described in his autobiography, I Remember It Well (1974): “I tried breaking down the door, but I wasn’t strong enough. Finally, I picked up a heavy chair and broke through. The mirror on the other side of the door shattered as I charged in.”

But the changes Minnelli made to the opening scenes speak more directly to his concern with masculinity, and were surely just as strongly influenced by personal experience. Whereas Shaw’s Jack Andrus leaves behind a happy family life and a government job when he is summoned to work on a film in Rome, Minnelli’s has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and is recovering in a sanitarium. Shaw has Andrus being punched by a drunk shortly after stepping off the plane, but Minnelli substitutes a scene in which an ex-agent tells Andrus he despises him; Andrus responds by slapping the man, a stereotypically ‘feminine’ gesture which demonstrates his alienation from the traditional masculine role.

Home from the Hill (1959)

Home from the Hill (1959)

Some of the subtler changes made to Home from the Hill point in a similar direction. One of the book’s central characters, Captain Wade Hunnicutt, is described by William Humphrey as being “a very comfortable-looking man, without looking as if he strove for comfort. He was always very trim and sleek. His pockets never bulged. They were empty. He carried nothing on him. He put no lock on anything he owned and so did not carry keys. He could go anywhere he wanted to go without need of money. He did not carry a watch. Time would wait on him.”

This passage is clearly the source for a scene in Minnelli’s film in which Wade (Robert Mitchum) lectures his son Theron (George Hamilton) on the things a ‘real’ man should not have in his pocket: “No identification, because everybody knows who you are; no cash, because anybody in town’d be happy to lend you anything you need; no keys, ‘cause you don’t keep a lock on a single thing you own; and no watch, because time waits on you.” Purposefully expanding upon the hints offered by Humphrey, Minnelli portrays masculinity as something purely negative, a death-oriented worldview capable of defining itself only in terms of what it rejects.

For Minnelli, masculinity is a ‘minus’ compared with the ‘plus’ of femininity, and his male characters are redeemable only to the extent that they are capable of learning from the women they encounter.

Some Came Running (1958)

Some Came Running (1958)

Perhaps the most powerful example of redemption in Minnelli’s oeuvre occurs at the end of Some Came Running, and again involves a departure from the novel, which concludes with its central character, Dave Hirsh, being killed by his wife Ginny’s former lover. Minnelli – apparently acting on a suggestion made by Frank Sinatra, who plays Dave in the film – has Ginny die protecting Dave.

Equally significant is a modification involving Bama Dillert (Dean Martin), a gambler friend of Dave’s who constantly refuses to remove the hat he is wearing (a habit paid homage to by Michel Piccoli in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris). Although this detail is taken directly from Jones’ book, it never really leads to anything there. The film, however, ends with a new scene, Ginny’s funeral, and closes on the image of Bama showing respect for Ginny (whom he had previously referred to as a ‘pig’) by taking off his hat. If Bama’s obsession represents the absurdly inflexible nature of masculine behaviour for both filmmaker and novelist, Jones can suggest nothing to put in its place, whereas Minnelli stresses the desirability of casting off masculinity’s trappings and adopting a more feminine worldview.

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