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 →
Archive | Film Matters
‘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 →
The Long-Haired ‘Our Kind of Traitor’
You’d think John le Carré books would be easier to adapt. Full of intrigue and elegant melancholy, they seem like ideal cineplex fare. But it takes a crackerjack team to translate the spy novel author’s carefully crafted cynicism onto a big screen without getting lost in his details. The best of the lot may be Fernando Meirelles’s sweeping 2005 take on The Constant Gardener or Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with Gary Oldman as a retired agent whose fangs have only mildly been filed down by time. “Our Kind of Traitor,” British television director Susanna White’s interpretation of le Carré’s 2010 Cold War rekindling and the latest addition to the le Carré canon, is a slicker animal – different but not necessarily inferior. Continue Reading →