Hollywood and the Invention of England

Projecting the English Past in American Cinema, 1930-2017

Jonathan Stubbs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781501368134
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501305849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

Drawing on new archival research into Hollywood production history and detailed analysis of individual films, Hollywood and the Invention of England examines the surprising affinity for the English past in Hollywood cinema. Stubbs asks why Hollywood filmmakers have so frequently drawn on images and narratives depicting English history, and why films of this type have resonated with audiences in America. Beginning with an overview of the cultural interaction between American film and English historical culture, the book proceeds to chart the major filmmaking cycles which characterise Hollywood's engagement with the English past from the 1930s to the present, assessing the value of English-themed films in the American film industry while also placing them in a broader historical context.

1

The Uses of Literature: Adaptation and Englishness in the 1930s

The representation of the English past in Hollywood cinema has strong links to the adaptation of English literary texts. Films of this type have a long history in American cinema, but this chapter focusses on a small but high-profile cycle of films from the 1930s. The conventional approach to studying literary adaptation in cinema has been based on the textual comparison of film adaptations and their source material. As a result, much work in this vein has sought to determine the ‘fidelity’ or ‘faithfulness’ of the adaptation in question, appraising films in terms of their success or failure at transplanting the essence of literary source material into a new medium. This line of thought implicitly places literature and cinema at opposite ends of a cultural spectrum: when a book is adapted for the screen, art and authorship are set in conflict with commerce and mass production. The limitations of this approach have been highlighted by various scholars. Perhaps most forcefully, Simone Murray has reproved adaptation studies for its reliance on comparative textual analysis, a practice she derides as ‘intellectual tail-chasing’ and ‘a formalist textual fetish’.¹ From a post-structuralist perspective, Robert Stam has questioned the notion that adaptation films are necessarily descended from an ‘original’ text at all, suggesting instead that they be seen as ‘caught in the ongoing whirl intertextual reference, of texts generating other texts … with no clear point of origin’.² Similarly, Brian McFarlane argues that ‘the precursor literary work is only an aspect of the film’s intertextuality, of more or less importance according to the viewer’s acquaintance with the antecedent work’.³ Adaptation is therefore not a linear process in which an ‘original’ text descends from one medium to another, nor should this conversion be regarded as the appropriation and debasement of an artistically pure creation by an industrialized mass culture. Rather, it can be understood as a facet of the wider circulation and intersection of cultural material between and within various forms of media.

At the same time, the relationship between precursor and antecedent works (to use McFarlane’s terms) has plainly been of great significance for filmmakers and it has frequently been centralized in the marketing and promotion of films adapted from literature. As Hollywood studios embarked on a new cycle of literary adaptations in 1934, the Los Angeles Times published an article entitled ‘Why the Movies Change Your Favorite Books’. Presented as the ‘composite opinion of several film producers’, the article engaged with issues of adaptation directly, from a film industry perspective. According to one unnamed producer,

When we secure a literary property of great traditional value, it is only a matter of good business that we start out with the sincere intention of giving it to the public with all faithfulness. … Our greatest sales value lies in the fidelity with which we adhere to the original plot.⁴

Fidelity, or at least the impression of it, was desirable for marketing purposes. But the article also explained at length why it was necessary for films to depart from their source material. The main reasons cited were the comparatively shorter length of films and the need for audiences to identify with protagonists. To illustrate the ‘pictorial method’ used by Hollywood screenwriters and to highlight the diligent labour which the adaptation process entails, draft pages from the Treasure Island (1934) screenplay were reproduced in the newspaper. As this account suggests, adaptation in this era involved a careful negotiation between the perceived cultural value and popular status of a literary text, the specific practices of the medium, the prerogatives of the filmmakers and the expectations of a heterogeneous mass audience. As Jeffrey Sconce has put it, the adaptation of literature ‘involved assigning the economic capital of the studio to convert the cultural capital of the novel back into the economic capital of a successful motion picture’.⁵ In this transmission, fidelity to the source material is important in as much as the audience feels (or is led to feel) that it is important. The status of the literary author in this process depends on the commodity value which is assigned to him or her. As this chapter will demonstrate, the promotional discourses which surround adaptation films frequently evoke the prestige associated with literature and the cultural authority of English authors such as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare and Emily Brontë. The process of adapting literature does not simply transfer a written text into a visual medium; it also aims to transfer the cultural cachet which surrounds the written text.

This chapter argues that adaptation, specifically the adaptation of English literature in the 1930s, can most usefully be seen as an industrial strategy employed for several specific and related purposes. Adaptation has often been convenient for Hollywood studios: an undeveloped literary text provides a fixed and predictable starting point for which copyright status is clearly established and, in the case of older literary works, does not incur royalty payments.⁶ For risk-averse producers, the familiarity of many English plays and novels gives adapted films immediate name-recognition, thus simplifying the process of marketing them to a mass audience. In addition, the cultural capital associated with English literature can be leveraged to raise the legitimacy, prestige and moral standing of individual films and perhaps the film industry as a whole. This cultural capital also aligned Hollywood with educational practices, allowing its film adaptations to be marketed within the American school sy stem. This chapter assesses these adaptation strategies firstly by examining the influence of the film industry’s self-regulation and the public campaign for ‘better pictures’ on literary adaptations in the mid-1930s. In particular, I will examine David Copperfield (1935) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) as manifestations of a campaign to raise the moral standing of the film industry and of the invocation of fidelity in the marketing of adaptation films. I will then turn to the later literary adaptation films Wuthering Heights (1939) and Pride and Prejudice (1940) to examine how the English literary film was adjusted to suit the shifting political climate as Europe went to war. In all of these adaptation films, representations of Englishness and the cultural status assigned to English literature were aligned in different ways to the culture of modern America.

Sound, censorship and ‘better pictures’

Films based on English literature can be traced to the earliest days of filmmaking in America. In 1897, for example, the American Mutoscope Company released The Death of Nancy Sykes, a brief sketch adapted from Oliver Twist with the popular stage actors Charles Ross and Mabel Fenton. In 1905 the same company adapted another literary excerpt entitled Duel Scene from Macbeth, featuring three costumed actors and a painted theatrical backdrop. As Lawrence Levine has argued, canonical English literature, particularly Shakespeare, enjoyed a high profile in the popular culture of nineteenth-century America and was commonly adapted in a range of media, including film.⁷ But it was not until around 1907, as methods of narrative construction became more sophisticated, that English literary material assumed a more prominent place in American cinema. Film producers in this period looked increasingly to the literature of Western Europe for subject matter. As Jim Collins has put it, ‘The maturation of the industry from sideshow curiosity to solid middle-class entertainment was to a great extent accomplished through a series of artistic and exhibition strategies spearheaded by the adaptation film.’⁸ At a time when the moral direction and artistic value of cinema was in dispute, many commentators welcomed this turn towards literature. In October 1909 The New York Times, which had previously shown little interest in cinema, was moved to observe:

Since popular opinion has been expressing itself through the Board of Censors of the People’s Institute, such material as ‘The Odyssey’, The Old Testament, Tolstoy, George Eliot, De Maupassant and Hugo has been drawn upon to furnish the films, in place of the sensational blood-and-thunder variety which bought down public indignation upon manufacturers six months ago.⁹

Similarly, albeit with rather more vested interest, the vice-president of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), which was established in 1908 as a cartel of the larger film producing firms, declared,

When the works of Dickens and Victor Hugo, the poems of Browning, the plays of Shakespeare and the stories of the Bible are used as a basis for moving pictures, no fair-minded man can deny that the art is being developed along the right lines.¹⁰

Others greeted this sudden vogue for high-brow adaptation with sarcasm and condescension. As one commentator speculated in 1909, ‘There seems to be no reason why one may not expect to soon see the intellectual aristocracy of the nickelodeon demanding Kant’s “Prolegomena to Metaphysic” with the “Kritiek of Pure Reason” for a curtain raiser.’¹¹

Films adapted from published material continued to occupy a prominent place in production as the American film industry adjusted to the challenges of producing and exhibiting movies with synchronized sound. In the 1933–4 season, for example, Hollywood companies spent a combined sum of $2 mil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: England, Their England
• 1 The Uses of Literature: Adaptation and Englishness in the 1930s
• 2 Abstractions of Empire: Filming British Imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s
• 3 Ideology and Adventure: The Post-War Swashbuckler Film
• 4 Cosmopolitanism and the Cold War: Historical Epics in the 1950s and 1960s
• 5 Boom and Bust: The English Past in the Swinging Sixties
• 6 Intimations of Quality: English Heritage and the ‘Specialty’ Film in the 1980s and 1990s
• 7 Pirates, Wizards and Wardrobes: The English Past in the Contemporary Family Film
• Conclusion: An Available Past
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright