Archive | Book Matters
I woke with a voice screaming in my ear and this is what it said:The Purple Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
If ever there were a book that wouldn’t be adapted today, it’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. About a 1930s Scottish teacher who pimped out her students to a colleague and favored fascism, it hardly jibes with today’s helicopter parenting and political orthodox–not to mention any ethical compass. Yet it’s arguably Muriel Spark’s best novel and certainly her most touted. As slim as it is crisp – technically, it could be described as a novella – it began its long life as a 1961 segment in The New Yorker before being published as a separate book. In 1968, it was adapted into an eponymous and much-celebrated play by Jay Presson Allen, who went on to write the screenplay for the iconic 1969 film starring Dame Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie. Said Allen: “All the women who played Brodie got whatever prize was going around at that time.” In fact, Zoe Caldwell nabbed a Tony for her portrayal in the theater production, and Smith won a subsequent Oscar. Continue Reading →
‘The BFG’: Sparkling, Sputtering
Since the 1980s, Steven Spielberg has strayed far from the family fare that made his name. If it’s a long road from “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial” to “Schindler’s List,” it’s an even longer one to 2014’s talky, admirably unaccommodating “Lincoln.” (Leave it to Spielberg to find the feel-good story of the Holocaust.) And while many of these later-career offerings are solid, I’ve never shaken the conviction that the director is most at home in Boy Wonder mode, when he’s spurring us all to the awe we registered naturally as children. Now he’s tackled “The BFG,” the 1982 Roald Dahl children’s book about London orphan Ruby and a big friendly giant (get the acronym now?). The resulting adaptation is not only pleasurable but pleasurably nasty. Continue Reading →