Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Henry James's fiction has proved a remarkable resource for filmmakers, inspiring well over 100 film and television adaptations, both of which I include in the category of “Jamesian film.” In addition to the predictable — Merchant-Ivory and Masterpiece Theatre — James has attracted directors as diverse as François Truffaut, Vincente Minnelli, and Peter Bogdanovich, actors from Montgomery Clift to Robert Cummings, producer Roger Corman, and screenwriters Alan Jay Lerner, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Film versions of “The Turn of the Screw” have featured Deborah Kerr, Ingrid Bergman, Lynn Redgrave, Amy Irving, and Valerie Bertinelli as the governess, Linda Hunt and Marianne Faithfull as narrators. Starting in 1933, with Berkeley Square, starring Leslie Howard, and continuing into the twenty-first century's The Golden Bowl, featuring Uma Thurman, Henry James's prose has engaged artists and audiences worldwide. Film has brought him the popular audience he never reached during his lifetime. In turn, James offers complex characters, intriguing plots, and vivid visual imagery, not to mention cultural capital and cachet, to those who create and watch films.For all of James's reputation as an ivory-tower practitioner of literary art aimed at the elite few, we know that his first experience of film was definitely not a highbrow one: in 1897, he watched, enthusiastically, ... log in or subscribe to read full text