For a lot of children over the last forty years, one of the most recognizable stories around the holiday season has been that of The Polar Express.  The short story told through exquisitely painted illustrations in the now famous book by author and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg has become a staple for the holiday season and one that has been passed down through generations.  First published in 1985, the book was an instant best seller and became the winner of the pretigeous Caldecott Medal for it’s excellence in children’s literature.  But what is it about this book that has made it endure.  For one thing, I’m sure many of us Gen X and Millenial kids at some point got this book as a Christmas present, helping to solidify it’s connection to memories of the holiday itself.  But the quality of the book itself has also given it a long standing reputation among readers.  Van Allsburg’s illustrations are vividly realized and draws the reader into it’s imaginative world.  Just the cover image alone is enough to draw the eye.  For a lot of childen, there’s nothing more evocative than seeing a train driving itself down a neighborhood street in the late night snow and stopping right in front of your front long.  Van Allsburg of course had a talent for creating imaginative imagery in his drawings to go along with his other-worldly stories, being the author of other beloved classics like Jumanji and Zathura.  This is probably why his books have often lent themselves so well to movie adaptations, because they already had a very cinematic look to them already on the page.  Jumanji of course inspired a 1994 adaptation starring Robin Williams, as well as blockbuster series in the 2010’s starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.  These films though brought Van Allsburg’s stories to the big screen in a live action form, which loses a bit of the magic that the book’s illustrations had.  While Jumanji had to leave something out in the translation to the screen, an enitrely different approach was given to The Polar Express (2004) when it was finally given a movie adaptation.  This approach would be taking the extra step to be fully faithful to the original style of the book, and it would utilize what was at the time the cutting edge of computer animation technology.

Enter Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Zemekis.  Zemekis had been spending the last 20 years as one of Hollywood’s most innovative directors, using his films as testing grounds for cutting edge visual effects.  And this included one of the most impressive runs of any director in the industry’s history.  He hit it big with Back to the Future (1985) and would continue to deliver many other visually impressive films in the years ahead, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997) and Cast Away (2000).  Each of these films didn’t just land strongly with critics and audiences, but they also astounded with their visual effects innovations. Zemekis always seemed to be one step ahead in his embrace of new innovations in visual effects and he found creative ways to incorporate them into the stories he wanted to tell.  And a lot of those effects still look impressive even after 30 plus years, including the mix of animation and live action in Roger Rabbit, or the digital removal of actor Gary Sinise’s legs for his role as wounded veteran Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump.  But, after Cast Away, Zemekis was looking to dive deeper into a field that he had tested briefly before, which was animation.  He was drawn to the book The Polar Express like many others, and saw it’s potential as a movie.  But, you couldn’t adapt it the same way that had already been done with Jumanji.  A big reason why The Polar Express the book is beloved is because of those stunning illustrations.  Making this movie in live action would rob the story of some of that whimsical nature, so Zemekis and his team opted to make Polar Express an animated film instead.  But, it would be a very different kind of animation, and one that would indeed be threatening to the status quo at the time with regards to how animation works.  While Zemekis’ commitment to keeping the visual storytelling true to the book with his adaptation is commendable, his approach unfortunately missed the mark with making it worthwhile, and sadly a lot of the movie has aged like egg nog.

“These tickets… are not…. transferable.”

What Robert Zemekis’ The Polar Express is most noteworthy for is for being the first full length movie entirely animated through motion capure technology.  The mo-cap system had been used throughout the 90’s for various visual effects shots, mainly to help create various movements for digital sprite characters in CGI generated crowd simulations.  But, in 1999, George Lucas used the technology to completely animate one of the main characters in his new Star Wars movie The Phantom Menace (1999), based on an on-set actor’s performance.  This character would be the much maligned Jar Jar Binks, and say what you will about the character, but his creation was very much a breakthrough for motion capture technology.  The tech would be further refined by filmmaker Peter Jackson and his crew when they used it to create the character Gollum based on actor Andy Serkis’ standout performance in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  But, thus far the tech was used mostly to bring creatures to life that would blend in with live action settings and co-stars.  No one had ever attempted to use the techonolgy for an entire film with every actor’s performance put through that animation filter.  That’s the challenge that Robert Zemekis was willing to take.  His production company ImageMovers specifically set itself up as an animation studio devoted to working exclusively with motion capture, and Zemekis would lead the charge with The Polar Express being his next film and the first under this new initiative.  But, despite the creative freedom that motion capture technology allowed for someone like Zemekis to work with, it also had drawbacks that unfortunately have only grown more obvious over time.

“One thing about trains.  It doesn’ matter where they’re going.  What matters is deciding to get on.”

For The Polar Express, Zemekis called upon one of his long time collaborators to not just be the headlining star of this movie, but also his guinea pig for all the experiments they were about to try out with this new technology.  Tom Hanks would be working for the third time with the director, after Forrest Gump and Cast Away, and it wouldn’t be the last as they have recently teamed up again for Pinocchio (2022) and Here (2024).  But, unlike their past collaborations, Hanks wouldn’t just be playing one role, but many.  What seemed to draw Hanks to the film was the fact that he would be able to play multiple characters in the same film without ever having to change wardrobe or disappear through make-up.  All he would have to do is put on a motion capture jumpsuit and have his physical performance recorded on an empty soundstage through sensors.  It’s less of a hassle for preparation, which would give Hanks more of an oppurtunity to focus on his physical characterizations.  Some actors may find that kind of way of acting to be outside of their comofort zone, as they would find it difficult to act without a physical set to act in, but for an actor like Hanks it didn’t matter because he’s always been someone whose focus has been on mentally finding himself embodying a character.  And he’s given a lot of variety to do that in this movie.  He plays no less than 6 different characters, including Santa Claus himself.  He’s even doing the mo-cap performance for the Hero Boy, the main character (though his voice is provided by a young Daryl Sabara).  Of all those character, only one actually looks like Hanks in the finished film, The Conductor.  And while Tom Hanks commitment to playing six different roles is impressive in of itself, the mo-cap animation unfortunately robs a little bit of the character out of the performance due to it’s limitations.  The technology was still fairly young at the time, and with the movie going very hard in trying to achieve a sense of realism in it’s animation, it unfortunately sends the actor’s performances as the characters into the Uncanny Valley.  Hank’s facial features on a ten year old’s body especially come across as unsettling in some shots because it just doesn’t look natural.  And the dead eye stare of the characters in many shots, where of course mo-cap technolgy hadn’t perfected eye movements just yet, really points out the creepy unnatural state that was limiting this tech at the time.

The Polar Express as a movie for the most part seemed to be too ambitious for it’s own good when it came to the mo-cap animation of it’s characters.  But, one of the reasons why Zemekis chose this as a way of adapting the book was because he felt that it was the best way of staying true to Van Allsburg’s original illustrations.  When the movie isn’t showing the characters, it actually does succeed in adapting the look of the original book.  Every environment has that glowing aspect to it, with the balance of light and shadow conveying the balance between the chill of the winter snow and the warmth of the interior spaces.  The depiction of the North Pole village where Santa lives expecially feels in the same spirit as Van Allsburg’s drawings, with all the buildings built with bright red bricks.  But of course, given that this is a story coming off the page, Zemekis needed to take these still tableaus from the books and given them movement.  The are some creative visual ideas thrown into the film that take the initial concepts from the book’s drawings and expands on them.  An extended sequence where we watch a a ticket flutter around in the wind across the landscape really shows off what was possible with computer animation at the time as Zemekis turns the whole thing into a oner with camera movements that would be impossible to pull off with a real camera.  But other moments kind of rob the scene of the simple charm that were in the original drawings by creating too much activity on screen.  The “Hot Chocolate” song and dance sequence is one such moment where it feels like Zemekis is just showing off because he can, and it doesn’t add anything of value to the story.  That’s why so much of the movie feels at war with itself, because at time it does showcase some impressive animation while at the same time also showing us how bad mo-cap animation can look when it’s trying too hard.  One really feels that a better movie could’ve been made had it had a more affirmative side; being either a live action film with elements improved through motion capture animation, or just fully animated in general.

“There’s no greater gift than friendship.”

There’s also one other issue negatively affecting the movie.  As beloved a story as The Polar Express story is, it’s also very brief.  That was always the point; Van Allsburg intended this to be a holiday themed bedtime story that a parent could read to their child in one sitting, or a child could thumb through an appreciate the pictures.  At 32 pages in length, there’s not much there for a feature length run time.  So, inevitably there is a lot of padding that has to be added to the story itself.  Van Allsburg mostly tells the story from the point of view of an unnamed boy character.  The Boy doesn’t have much character in the story and is mainly just the avatar for the reader, having the journey to the North Pole being presented through his eyes.  The story essentially is about reconnecting with childhood, and finding the ability to believe in magical things again.  The connection to that comes through the boy wanting to hear the sleigh bells of Santa’s reindeer, but in order for that to happen, he must open up his mind to believing that it’s real.  The book concludes with the sleigh bell that is given to him as a gift by Santa becoming a symbol of that connection to childhood wonder.  Over time, the narrator who was that Boy shares that he never lost the ability to hear the ringing of that bell as he grew older though many others had.  The movie also makes this an important part of it’s climax, and the scene where the Boy does finally hear the ringing of the bell is still poignant.  But, unfortunately we have to go through a lot of scenes that ultimately add little to the plot, like a prolonged sequence across an icy lake, in order to get to the one scene that matters.  The book gets it’s point across through a beautifully realized journey of discovery through a child’s perspective, while the movie is a lot of noise and action that ultimately just lead nowhere.

The problem is that Zemekis is trying make the movie bigger than it really needs to be.  It’s loud, full of slapstick antics, and also I might add a musical.  And sadly the music is also doing too much as well.  The great Alan Silvestri (a long time collaborator of Zemekis) wrote the score for this film, and it unfortunately becomes very repetitive after a while, replaying the same melody from the signature song “Believe” over and over again.  Too much of the movie takes these plot cul-de-sacs before ultimately returning to what was originally in the book.  It inevitably makes the movie feel cumbersome after a while, because you just know that these moments purely exist to give the movie extra length.  With the limitations of the animation and the uninteresting detours that the plot takes, The Polar Express as a movie comes across as a soulless product, purely made to capitalize on holiday spirit.  And it seemed to work, as the movie did quite well at the box office, riding the wave of holiday season crowds looking for anything that embodies the spirit of the holidays in their entertainment.  But, the film over time has not aged well, with people now looking it as a poster child for how poorly early motion capture animation looks compared to what is possible now.  The Uncanny Valley look of the characters just becomes off-putting to viewers today, neither being endearing or pleasant to look at.  We’ve seen the techonology become impressively implemented in films like Avatar (2009), and also used to bring previously impossible characters like Thanos in the Avengers movies to vivid life while still maintaining a connection to the subtlties of the actor’s performance.  The Polar Express hasn’t even improved over time even as an artifact of an earlier time in the growth of the technology, like what happened with Tron (1982).  There’s an unfortunate soullessness that sticks with The Polar Express even if it was made with good intentions by Zemekis and company.

“Seeing is believing, but sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can’t see.”

The only reason it seems that The Polar Express managed to become a hit at all is because it’s an easily marketable movie for holiday viewing.  It still has a place on most holiday playlists on TV, but it’s legacy as a pioneer in animation is almost non-existant.  Things did not go well for ImageMovers in the years after The Polar Express.  Zemekis would direct two more films using the mo-cap technology (Beowulf and A Christmas Carol), while two other films by other directors (Monster House and Mars Needs Moms) would also be made through ImageMovers.  Disney, which financed A Christmas Carol and Mars Needs Moms, ended up buying ImageMovers in 2009, and after the spectacular box office failure of the latter, they shut the company down completly and absorbed it’s assets into it’s own in house animation studios.  Robert Zemekis was reportably in early development of a motion capture remake of the Beatles’ classic animated film Yellow Submarine (1968), and some test footage of it has surfaced online over the years, but that came to an end once Mars Needs Moms collapsed the whole motion capture craze.  Zemekis went back to live action filmmaking with 2012’s Flight and has put this whole era of his career behind him.  In the end, audiences chose to see fully animated movies made by actual animators instead of this weird hybrid style that motion captue was. The credits for Pixar’s Ratatouille (2007) even proudly touted in it’s credits that it was “100% Genuine Animation,” a blistering rebuke towards motion capture being a possible replacement for it’s creative model.  One would hope audiences feel the same about this troubling push towards AI in recent years, and how that threatens to upend animation as we know it today.  Is The Polar Express a terrible Christmas movie?  Hardly.  There’s nothing really offensive about the movie.  It’s just a film that falls well short of achieving what it sets out to do, and that’s mainly due to the fact that it exists more as a gimmick to tout new technology than as a worthwhile story to be told.  The book does a much better job of conveying the wonder and warm feelings of Christmastime.  Though the movie The Polar Express does come close in brief moments to capturing the simple wonder that was found in Chris Van Allsburg’s book, it mostly gets lost in all the excessive additions that Robert Zemekis added to pad the story out.  The original story reminds us all why Christmas Time brings us so much joy because it connects us with that wonder and spirit that lived so much in us when we were little.  The Polar Express movie unfortunately reminds us of the things that were better left to be forgotten, especially when it is looking back at you with those lifeless doll like eyes.

“Though I’ve grown old the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe.”

The 1930’s and 40’s was a time of turbulent upheaval for society; something that even today we still feel the ripples of.  The 1930’s were defined by the economic collapse of the Great Depression, which ushered in an era of the New Deal reforms that reshaped America’s domestic policy.  And if that was not enough for one generation to go through, the Depression was followed up with World War II, the bloodiest conflict of the 20th Century.  This was an era that offered up so many stories of survival in the face of adversity and there were plenty of writers who managed to capture that era with a genuine emotional connection to the times.  One such author was American crime novelist James M. Cain.  Cain, a former journalist, was known for creating hard-boiled stories of dark corners of the American experience.  His novels were often first person confessionals of his characters admitting their crimes to the reader and giving out all the details about how they were done.  His stories often involved murder, love affairs, and deception as part of their plots, which made many of his earliest works particularly intriguing to readers looking for something salacious to read in the turbulent Depression years.  The hard-edged stories that he wrote particularly caught the eye of Hollywood.  Many of his early novels, like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity would not only receive high profile movie adaptations, but Cain’s work would also be instrumental in developing a brand new film genre that would come to define the era, known as Film Noir.  And while many of his stories fit well into the genre of Film Noir, not every story that he wrote necessarily centered around crime either.  In perhaps his most well known novel, the 1941 best-seller Mildred Pierce, his story there would actually center around social and economical disparity resulting from the Great Depression.  In a rather ahead of it’s time sort of way, Cain actually shun a spotlight on the struggles of women in the workplace and created a surprisingly potent feminist figure in his titular protagonist; a woman who manages to overcome the obstacles put upon women seeking success in American society.

It didn’t take long for Hollywood to see the potential in Cain’s story, and Warner Brothers immediately snatched up the rights to the novel, intending for it to be one of their next prestige films.  Micheal Curtiz, fresh off of his Oscar winning success directing Casablanca (1943) would prove to be an ideal choice in bringing this film to the big screen.  He was a multifaceted filmmaker who could work in any kind of genre, including crime thrillers like Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.  But what mattered even more was who would be playing Mildred.  This was a role that was surprisingly not sought after by most actresses at the time, because many stars were afraid of taking on a motherly role because that was a sign of an actress getting older, which would have aged them out of other coveted roles.  Michael Curtiz’s preferred choice for the role, Barbara Stanwyck declined for this very reason, as did Bette Davis, which is ironic given who they did eventually cast.  Thankfully for Warner Brothers, there was one movie star that not only was unafraid of taking on the role of a mother in her film, but was also actively campaigning herself for the part as well.  Joan Crawford was very different from a lot of other leading ladies of her time.  She often shunned glamour roles, even though she was stunningly beautiful enough to pull them off, because she was more interested in taking more risk taking parts that were often grittier and truer to the American experience, especially during the depression.  Mildred Pierce was a role that seemed almost tailor made for her.  She was drawn to working class heroines, and she had the acting chops to pull it off, while at the same time having the matinee idol visage to still shine on the big screen.  And this would be a role that she would make all hers.  The film would win Joan the only Academy Award of her career, and it’s still the role that most people associate her with.  It can definitely be said that Curtiz and Crawford delivered a cinematic classic with Mildred Pierce (1945), but it is interesting comparing it to the book as well, because there are some striking differences.  Some of them were done out of necessity, due to the code censorship of the day, but it does make watching the movie a slightly different experience than reading the novel.  And in a surprising twist, some of the changes made may have inadvertently contributed to the birth of the film language of Film Noir as a result.

“I felt as though I’d been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life, except for the few hours it took to get married.”

One thing that becomes pretty clear between reading the book and watching the movie is that their depictions of Mildred vary in subtle ways.  The book treats Mildred as a more grounded depiction of a women driven to survive in any way she can.  She’s not glamourous or stunning; she’s an average woman both physically and mentally.  And that’s what made her a relatable heroine.  Many readers recognized her, or perhaps found themselves feeling seen as her.  This was a woman who had to sacrifice a lot to maintain everything that she could of the life she had before things went haywire.  She was the embodiment of the average American who had to scrape by in the midst of the Depression and also had to step up when the War left the nation with even less stability.  Her adversity through it all is what made her such a potent symbol of the time.  She goes from housewife, to waitress, to restauranteur, to a corporate head in a very short span, which before the Depression years would have been seen as unusual for a woman.  But this was also the Rosie the Riveter era, when women were called upon to enter the workforce in a way that they hadn’t before because so many men were overseas fighting in the War.  It was a time when women were finally showing their worth as equals in the workforce, and Mildred Pierce was that type of upwardly mobile heroine that this time period valued.  It’s probably what drew Joan Crawford to the role, because she wanted to represent that kind of figure of feminine exceptionalism.  And for the most part she does do justice to the character of Mildred.  She shows off how intelligent Mildred is at running a business and finding new ways to succeed that some of her male counterparts would never have figured out.  The one big difference in her performance is that her Mildred is a bit more melodramatic, which is probably a result of the acting style of the time.  Crawford was definitely more subtle in her acting than most, but there is a soap opera like quality to her performance her as well.

“I think I’m really seeing you for the first time in my life.  And you’re cheap and horrible.”

One thing that the movie does perfectly translate over from the book is the theme about the corrupting influence of wealth.  In particular, both the movie and the book are sharply critical of elitist attitudes in society.  Living through a Depression would have soured many people’s attitudes towards those who flaunted their wealth, especially if they were people who never earned their money through hard work.  This attitude is personified through two different characters in the story; Mildred’s deceptive second husband Monty, and her snobbish oldest child Veda.  Veda in particular is one of the most loathsome characters ever created in both literature and on the silver screen; a spoiled brat who will do anything to maintain an affluent lifestyle, even at the cost of shaming her own mother.  She makes for a shocking villainess in this story given the lengths she goes to.  In the movie, she was played by a remarkable young actress named Ann Blyth, who as of this writing is still with us today at the ripe old age of 97.  Blyth does an amazing job of personifying this cold, ruthless schemer who will never accept anything less than what she feels like she’s owed; which is mostly unreasonable.  She is the biggest test ever of a mother’s unconditional love and the tragedy of Mildred’s story is that she puts the love of her children before everything else.  In the movie, you see Mildred have more of a spine when standing up to her daughter, including one of cinema’s most epic slaps to the face after Veda shames her for working as a waitress.  Mildred’s confrontation with her daughter builds more gradually in the novel, with Mildred putting up with a lot before things hit their boiling point, which results in a very shocking moment in the book.  For a lot of people who read the book and watched the movie in it’s era, Veda was the personification of the very class of people who made the Depression as trying as it was; unchecked greed mixed with a stubbornness to refuse to change for the sake of others.  

The characters of Mildred and Veda very much translated in tact from the book to the screen, but a lot of other characters saw more dramatic changes in the adaptation.  Mildred’s first husband Bert is a bit different in the movie, especially in the opening.  You see him as a bit more of a negative influence in her life as he becomes more frustrated that Mildred is pulling her wait more than he is.  Bert (played by Bruce Bennett) is definitely a symbol of the displaced man who ended up loosing his social balance through the Depression.  Without work, a lot of men couldn’t support their families, and that led to a lot of broken marriages as families split so that there would be one less mouth to feed in the household.  But, like Bert in the book, the portrayal of the character softens as he recognizes Mildred’s value as a successful businesswoman.  Though they do go through with the divorce, it is revealed that Bert is the better man in her life as the scheming Monty shows his true colors through the latter half of the story.  It’s interesting that the movie chooses to put Bert in a more antagonistic role early on than how he’s portrayed in the book, which is far more positive.  It’s perhaps the movie’s way of motivating Mildred to push herself harder to prove everyone else is wrong about her.  Another interesting change from the book is the absence of Mildred’s neighbor and closest friend, Lucy Gessler.  In the book, Lucy is a feisty and loyal confidant for Mildred who helps to push her in the right direction; appealing to all of her better instincts.  The movie instead gives a lot of Lucy’s characteristics to another character from the book, Ida Corwin, who starts off as Mildred’s supervisor at a restaurant and then later becomes her business partner.  Ida in the movie is played by a scene stealing Eve Arden who gets all the best one-liners in the movie.  It seems like the filmmakers wanted to streamline the story by combining the two characters into one, but it was probably also done as a means of giving Mildred more agency in the earliest part of the story.  If she only acted upon pursuing a career in the restaurant industry after a friends suggestion, then it minimizes the self actualization and deep rooted intelligence of Mildred herself.

“Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea.  They eat their young.”

Where the book and the novel divert the most though is the framing of the entire story itself.  Oddly enough, of all of James M. Cain’s earliest novels, Mildred Pierce was the only one that was not framed as a first person testimonial.  And yet, that’s the way that the movie chooses to frame it’s story, having Mildred herself recount all the events that led up to this particular night as she’s being interrogated by the police.  Which is the other big change from the novel; there’s a murder in the movie.  The murder is literally what opens the movie, with Monty (played by Zachary Scott) falling dead from a gunshot, his last words being Mildred’s name.  We don’t see who fired the shot, but the very next moment in the movie shows Mildred walking onto a pier, contemplating throwing herself in and committing suicide, which is certainly a suspicious thing to do right after we’ve seen her husband be murdered.  All of this, however is an invention purely for the movie itself.  The whodunit aspect of the movie in a way was done as a response of skirting around the aspects of the book that couldn’t be adapted because of the Production Code in place at the time.  In the book, there is a much different and more shocking conclusion to the story.  Mildred has given up so much of her hard earned wealth to help give Veda and her new husband Monty the lavish lifestyle that they clearly cherish more than anything.  But, it puts Mildred in a needlessly precarious position with her business expenses being unable to pay for all of this luxury living.  And then she is dealt the harshest blow of all when she finds Monty in bed with Veda (who by the way is still underage).  Monty desperate to plead his case, but Veda just arrogantly flaunts the scandalous situation even more in front of Mildred, and this becomes the final straw.  Mildred violently attacks Veda and strangles her, causing her to lose her beautiful singing voice.  There’s no murder, but what was left of Mildred’s idealized life with Veda and Monty is forever broken.  What’s more, it also proves to be another scam on Veda’s part, as pretending to lose her voice merely lets her out of a contract that kept her in California.  She leaves Mildred broken even further by this deception and in a way still gets what she desired by the end.  The book’s finale has Mildred consoled by Bert in her grief, and ultimately Mildred celebrates by proclaiming “The hell with her” before the two decide to drink their sorrows away.

This bittersweet ending that comes after the villain leaves without ever facing their comeuppance would not have flown with the censors in Hollywood at the time.  The bad guys always had to pay the price in the end no matter what, so that’s why the murder plot was set up in the film.  The set up is the same; Mildred doesn’t find Monty and Veda in bed together, but she does see them in a compromising intimate situation, which still gets the betrayal across in the story.  Where things divert is that Monty second guesses his relationship with Veda after Mildred has found them out, and Veda can’t accept that, so she shoots Monty dead for betraying her.  Mildred returns after hearing the gunshots, prepares to turn her daughter in to the cops because of how hurt she is by their affair behind her back, but Veda once again plays upon Mildred’s motherly love and Mildred, in another moment of weakness, tries to take the blame for her daughter’s crime.  Only, it doesn’t work out and Veda is still arrested.  Mildred is finally free of her, but the movie leaves Mildred still heartbroken, which is different from the more optimistic finale in the book.  The themes of the book still work within this new finale, but it also undermines Mildred’s growth as well.  You just want her to finally assert herself as a mother finally after Veda clearly crossed the line, and yet she still puts her above herself.  If there was ever a warranted place for Mildred to actually be justified in abandoning her child, this would’ve been it.  But, that’s what the filmmakers had to deal with if they were going to make this story work under the Code restrictions.  And in some ways it was a blessing in disguise.  There’s nothing noirish about the original book, but the murder plot in this movie helped to make it work within the Noir style.  Curtiz and his team made great use of dramatic lighting and shadows in this film to give the story a darker tone.  The ending in particular, with Mildred finding Monty and Veda making out in the beach house is one of the most quintessential Noir moments ever pt on film.  While most of the rest of the movie is a compelling drama about endurance and adversity in the face of ongoing struggles, the noir scenes that frame it are just as potent as any detective story made around the same time that were more distinctly noirish.  In fact, you can see the influence of Mildred Pierce in many other Noir films that came after; the pier scene being an often imitated moment in other films.  

“Mildred…We weren’t expecting you.  Obviously.”

One thing that this movie for sure did was to give Joan Crawford the iconic role that would define her career.  There’s questions about whether she was as good of a mother in real life as she was playing Mildred Pierce, as Mommie Dearest (1980) famously speculated on.  But there is no doubt that she crafted a potent portrayal of motherhood that in many ways was both inspiring and also frustrating.  The book gives a much more satisfying catharsis for Mildred, as she finally learns to let go and just accept that she is better off without toxic people like Veda and Monty in her life.  The movie sadly still confines Mildred into a sense of guilt by the end that she honestly doesn’t deserve.  But overall, the book and the movie are undeniable classics that still hold up very well 80 years later.  The movie stands as one of the classics of old Hollywood, with incredible craft behind the camera as well as in front by it’s incredible cast of actors.  One can’t help but think of Joan Crawford in that iconic fur coat standing on the pier in the dead of night as a quintessential Hollywood moment in cinema.  And the fireworks between her and young Ann Blyth are some incredibly intense scenes as well that further define this as a great film.  The book on the other hand goes far deeper into the character’s psyches and also takes more risks in telling it’s story.  Many years later, director Todd Haynes made his own adaptation of the novel in a 2011 mini-series for HBO, starring Kate Winslet as Mildred and Evan Rachel Wood as Veda.  In that series, Haynes stuck much closer to the book and was able to delve more into the darker themes of the story, given the extra creative freedom he had with no more Production Code to get in the way.  The mini-series is pretty good in it’s own right, but the 1945 film feels even grander because of it’s iconic old Hollywood status as well and also because it was more of a snapshot of that time period.  Mildred Pierce spoke to a world that was just coming out of 15 of the worst years this country has ever faced with the Depression and the War.  Those who participated in the movie lived through all that, and that made their portrayals in the film all the more personal.  As we are going through our own time of uncertainty right now, I wonder how audiences today would respond to a story like Mildred Pierce.  In many ways, I think a character like her would still feel familiar to a lot of people and that’s what helps to make her portrayals on the page and on the big screen feel so timeless.  

“You look down on me, because I work for a living.  Don’t you.”

Neil Gaiman has emerged as one of the most unique voices in modern literature over the last couple of decades.  The British author has particularly had a hand in creating a renewed interest in fantasy literature, especially when it comes to darker themed fantasy.  Gaiman himself cites the likes of J.R.R. Tolkein and Lewis Carroll as inspirations in his writing, and it’s interesting how he has carved out his own voice the literary world.  Not only has he made a name for himself with the written word, but he has also become a celebrated writer in the field of comic books as well.  The common theme that seems to appear in most of his writing is the idea of mythical and celestial beings existing in a modern world setting.  It’s a theme that pops up in most of his works.  His first novel, Good Omens, involved a familial relationship between a literal angel and a demon.  American Gods told a story about the gods of the old world making their way through life in the New World of modern day America.  Even his run of Sandman comics for DC involved the clashing of heaven and hell on earth.  But even with all of the literal biblical sized elements that he throws into his stories, his writing is also focused on the humanity that often comes into conflict with these world shaping elements.  Perhaps the best illustration of his ability to ground the fantastical in a contemporary, ordinary world is found in what was his first foray into children’s literature.  Of course, when we say children’s literature from the pen of Neil Gaiman, it’s still in the genre of horror fantasy.  His version of a story appropriate for young readers is within the same context of the works of the Brothers Grimm being appropriate for young readers.  He softens his edges, but still creates for his readers a spooky and at times also disturbing atmosphere.  And that’s the story we find in his 2002 novella, Coraline.

Coraline tells the story of a young girl who finds that her new home is not what it seems.  The titular heroine is at odds with her parents after their move, and wishes for an escape.  She finds that escape when she finds a door in the back of the house to another house identical to her own, only livelier and more welcoming.  There she finds a woman identical to her mother, only with buttons sewn onto her face instead of eyes.  This “Other Mother” is generous and attentive in a way that her own Mother has not been, and Coraline grows more fond of this “Other World.”  As he seems more inclined to stay in Other World, she soon realizes there is a catch; to live there, she must sew buttons into her own eyes just like the other residents there.  She of course refuses, and begins to see the Other Mother for who she truly is, a deceptive creature called the Beldam, who begins to grow  more grotesque after the pleasing facade has fallen.  Coraline manages to return to the real world, but her family is nowhere to be found.  It is here that Coraline realizes the cost of taking her parents love for granted, and favoring her own comfort and happiness over the needs of the family as a whole.  From this point, she determines to find her real family, and in the process, she learns of the horrible history that her new home has had with the Beldam lurking behind the hidden door.  Overall, it is a spooky sort of haunted house story that Neil Gaiman manages to craft that certainly is provocative without ever being gory.  You can definitely see the Lewis Carroll influence, as the Other World is a twisted take on the concept of Wonderland, where it takes on a sinister character after making too much sense instead of nonsense.  When the novella was first published, it was instantly successful, earning Gaiman among other things a Hugo Award.  A couple years later, Gaiman would oversee a graphic novel adaptation, which was published in 2008.  The graphic novel gave readers the first visual representation of Gaiman’s imaginative world, and as it turned out, it would be just an appetizer as Coraline was about to make the jump to the big screen.

“How can you walk away from something and then come towards it?”

Enter Laika Animation studios.  Laika had just emerged after a rebranding of the old Will Vinton Studios, which had been the stop motion workshop that had been animating shorts and commercials since the 1970’s, famous for the California Raisins among other things.  Due to growing health issues, Will Vinton was looking to pass his Portland, Oregon studio off to new management that he hoped would continue the stop motion tradition after he was gone.  A former animator who work at his studio was Travis Knight, who just so happened to be the son of Nike founder Phil Knight, and he managed to convince him father to invest in Vinton’s ailing studio.  Vinton retired in 2005 and shortly after Travis Knight took over management of the studio, re-branding it Laika Animation.  Knight wasted no time in turbo-charging the output of his new studio, quickly looking for a project to develop into a feature film that he hoped would put the studio on the map.  Given that stop motion already has this other-worldly feel to it, so a story like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline was a match made in heaven for Laika.  The story had all the elements that was ideal for the studio, a spooky story that could still appeal to all audiences and allow for them to flex their arms creatively, especially with the construction of the “Other World.”  And to also show that Laika was serious about getting the tone of the book right, they sought out some veteran help by hiring Henry Selick to direct the feature.  Selick, of course, famously directed the classic stop motion feature, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) for Disney and producer Tim Burton.  The success of that film led to a follow-up adaptation of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (1996), but the souring of the working relationship between Selick and Burton eventually led to the former leaving their partnership in pursuit of a different creative path.  This was fortuitous for Laika, as they wanted their house style to evoke the weird and imaginative sights that both Nightmare and Giant Peach both shared.  Bringing Selick on board would prove to be exactly what their Coraline project needed, as it gave the film the fully realized vision that it needed.

“You probably think this world is a dream come true.  But you’re wrong.”

So, what did Laika manage to do to give Coraline the cinematic treatment.  Gaiman’s story already lent itself very well to the visual form as the graphic novel demonstrated.  On the whole, Laika didn’t make a whole lot of changes to the story itself; it plays out pretty much as it did on the page, with some notable but not too drastic alterations.  Perhaps the most noticeable difference is that Laika decided to give their setting a bit more character.  Neil’s novel is set in no particular place, with only the house itself being the primary setting for the story.  It’s presumed that Neil sets his story in his home country of England, as the house he describes is reminiscent of the old manor houses that dot the English countryside.  Laika on the other hand gave Coraline a decidedly American setting, and in fact the studio chose it’s own back yard as the place to set this story.  The movie takes place in the town of Ashland, Oregon, which is a real town nestled just north of the California state border.  It’s a small cultural community known for it’s yearly Shakespearean Festival.  If you’re wondering why the movie has citizens from the town reciting quotes from the Bard, that’s the reason why.  It’s an interesting choice to set the story there, because while Ashland can be an inviting place, it’s also a bit cut off, being surrounded by mountains and farms.  The often gloomy Oregon weather also plays well with the atmosphere of the story.  But what is interesting is that Laika also makes the “real world” in their movie stylized as well.  Both the realms of reality and fantasy have the same off-kilter look; the big difference is the way that the different realms are colored.  Coraline’s reality is muted and washed out, while “Other World,” is bright and colorful.  This is an effective way to differentiate the two, with the more sinister side appearing initially to be the more appealing of the two.  The effect is still the same with regards to the story, which works to Laika’s advantage.  They are able to make even the real world visually interesting, without sacrificing the impact of seeing the “Other World,” and in the end it gives the movie as a whole a vibrancy of style.

The characters for the most part are pretty similar to their literary counterparts.  One change that is made to the characterization is that the movie does not carry over Gaiman’s use of the first person narration from Coraline herself.  Coraline is still the main character here, but we are experiencing the story with her, rather than having her recount it for us.  Apart from that, she is the same character described in the book; spunky and free spirited, but still flawed due to her abrasiveness, especially when she shows it to her parents.  The story is a coming of age tale and through it we see Coraline grow into a more responsible character, not letting personal interests and desires get in the way of doing what’s right.  The animators definitely made her distinct, with the matching of her yellow rain coat and blue dyed hair creating an instantly iconic profile.  She’s also given great personality by a then teenage Dakota Fanning in her vocal performance.  Her work in the film is also complimented by a surprisingly complex vocal performance by Teri Hatcher as both Coraline’s mom and as “Other Mother” aka the Beldam.  Hatcher remarkably plays her role with incredible range, showcasing so many different variations on the same character; being warm and inviting at one point and then terrifyingly shrill by the end.  The Beldam is also a character where the animators got to be more creative in their designs.  Neil Gaiman described the creature as looking just like Coraline’s mother, except taller, thinner and paler, and obviously with those unsightly button eyes.  In the film, the Beldam goes through multiple transformations, at times being similar to what Gaiman described, but done one step further.  By the end, the Beldam is almost insect like, with metal needles as spider legs.  It makes for a truly terrifying villain for the story, and one that very much could only be fully realized in this style of animation.  All of the other characters are much like their counterparts in the book, with the animators using their creativity to give them all exaggerated bodies.  Coraline’s neighbors in particular are fun caricatured designs, like her downstairs neighbors Miss Spink and Miss Forcible having extreme “curves”, and her upstairs neighbor Mr. Bobinsky having blue skin.  The one character that seems to be the most direct pull is The Cat, who in the movie speaks with the distinct voice of Keith David.  He’s a character that definitely feels like he jumped right off the page, and he’s very much present in much of the promotions of the movie, including appearing as part of the logo.

“Even if you win, she’ll never let you go.”

There is one character that was original to the movie that made a significant change to the story.  The film added another neighbor named Wybie to the plot; a boy around Coraline’s age that doesn’t live in the same house like the rest of Coraline’s neighbors but nevertheless still hangs around the property.  He starts off as a bit of a nuisance to Coraline, being a bit of a weirdo that talks too much.  But, when Coraline begins to investigate deeper into the mystery of the house she lives in, she learns that Wybie’s family has a dark past related to it.  Wybie tells her that his grandmother lost a sister when they used to live in the same house.  The sister disappeared one day and was never seen again.  It’s only after Coraline challenges the “Other Mother’s” authority that she comes face to face with the truth.  The house is haunted by the spirits of children, all of whom were captured and eaten by the Beldam, who lured them into the “Other World” the same way that Coraline was.  This revelation is found in the original book, but the fact that one of the ghost children is related to Coraline’s new friend in the real world gives the revelation a much more personal angle.  It hits home a lot more that Coraline knows what fate she’s about to face after becoming aware of Wybie’s great aunt’s own grisly fate.  It helps to elevate the threat of the Beldam in the story and it gives Coraline a bit more purpose in the story.  Not only is she going to face off against the Beldam for her own survival, but she also is doing it to seek justice for those who were not able to escape.  It definitely gives Coraline a bit more urgency in her story, showing that she is thinking through her ordeal as she presses forward.  The inclusion of Wybie in the story also gives Coraline a character that she can relate with on a personable level.  As she finds out, Wybie is the only one who believes her after she has passed into a different world, with all the adults dismissing her childish “fantasies” as just that.  It’s interesting that in the “Other World,” the Beldam has also created an “Other Wybie” whose mouth has been sewn shut.  Perhaps the fact that “Other Mother” went to the extra effort to keep “Other Wybie” silent is what convinces Coraline to take the words of the real one more seriously, and that’s an interesting new wrinkle added into the plot of the film.

What the movie and book both effectively realize is the theme of confronting fears head on as a positive sign of maturity.  For Coraline, she appears on the surface to be a fearless pre-teen girl whose adventurous spirit leads her to explore the unknown.  But all of that fearlessness to what’s in front of her also puts a wedge between her and her parents.  Her fear is internalized; she is afraid to open up to her parents and tell them she loves them, because that’s a sign of immaturity in her eyes.  There’s a degree to that in every rebellious youth, but the movie and the book Coraline confronts this theme in a very vivid way.  Her fear manifests clearly when the Beldam has taken her parents away.  She realizes her greatest fear is being alone, and that because of her actions, she has ended up isolating herself, making her own fear come true.  It’s a mature theme to explore in a coming of age story like this, and it’s interesting to see how Coraline comes to the realization that having everything come to her on her terms is actually what has made her world come apart.  Once the Beldam shows her true form, and the “Other World” begins to slowly crumble apart, we see all the old things that made the “Other World” so inviting before suddenly become the things of nightmares.  In her quest to save her parents, all of the different encounters with the “Other” residents of the house become twisted and nightmarish moments in the final act of the film.  And the worst is saved for last when she has to face the Beldam face to ugly face, all the more disturbing when the creature is still faintly like her mother.  Another interesting element that was added for the film was the idea of the Beldam luring her victims with dolls that look just like them found in the real world.  What it tells us is that the Beldam seems to sense the insecurity that a child like Coraline possesses and uses the dolls as a plant to coax out the curiosity of each child once they arrive at the house.  Neil Gaiman’s story certainly deals with all these themes, and thanks to Henry Selick’s creative vision, those themes manifest is some truly eerie and at times terrifying moments on screen.

“She wants something to love, I think.  Something that isn’t her.  Or, maybe she’d just love something to eat.”

Coraline premiered in February of 2009, but regardless of its wintertime release, it has since become a favorite for Halloween time playlists.  The film was critically well received and it had a pretty healthy box office take for a stop motion animated film.  More importantly, it put Laika Animation on the map.  In the 15 years since Coraline’s premiere, they have released four more features (2012’s ParaNorman, 2014’s The Boxtrolls, 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings, and 2019’s Missing Link) with a fifth one currently slated for 2025 called Wildwood.  While they have struggled to repeat the same success as Coraline, each film is still highly regarded and the studio has helped to keep the prestige of stop motion animation going.  Like many other successful runs, it matters how well a studio is able to perform on it’s first go, and Laika certainly found the right story to tell with Neil Gaiman’s short modern fairy tale.  The movie itself has helped to elevate the novel itself, which when it was first published was regarded as one of Gaiman’s lesser works.  It was still loved, but it didn’t shine as brightly as Gaiman’s run of Sandman comics, or his novels Good Omens and American Gods.  What is noteworthy though is that the movie Coraline was the first actual cinematic adaptation of one of his literary works.  Since then, many of his novels have been been given adaptations, mostly for television.  Both American Gods and Good Omens were faithfully adapted into shows for Starz and Amazon Prime respectively, while Netflix managed to take his vast collection of Sandman comics and turn it into a successful mini-series.  And after 15 years, Coraline still holds up and is probably even more popular now than it was when it first premiered.  One thing that really has helped it to stand out is the fact that it’s an animated feature that’s not afraid to be a little dark.  Animation used to have a lot more darker moments than they do now, and those were the kinds of movies that have withstood the test of time.  Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to make a family friendly film have that extra little bit of peril in it, even if it becomes borderline horrific, because those end up being the scenes that we remember most from childhood on.  Coraline has the perfect mix of all that; whimsy, humor, creepy atmosphere and even a good scare here and there.

“They say even the proudest spirit can be broken…with love.”

One of the strongest contributions that merry old England has contributed to world literature are the books that have been written specifically for younger readers.  Popularized specifically in the turn of the 20th Century, children’s literature began to blossom and leave it’s mark on the publishing world, and many of the most well known authors were coming from the English literary community.  What really distinguished English children’s literature were the memorable characters that came from these imaginative stories.  Whether it be the maniacal Mr. Toad from Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows, or the boy who never grew up in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or the practically perfect nanny in P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, these were characters that lept off the page and captured the imagination of children not just in their native England, but all around the world as well.  But the most popular of these characters may have come from the unlikeliest of authors.  That character of course would be the little stuffed bear known as Winnie the Pooh.  Pooh Bear is a character known the whole world over, rivaling even Mickey Mouse in overall awareness across cultures.  But what is it about the character of Winnie the Pooh that has managed to transcend multiple generations and cultural barriers.  In essence, there is a simplicity to the world of Winnie the Pooh that connects with our imagination at a very young age.  As children, we see our own little worlds as being much grander than they really are, and out of that we develop an imagination where that small little world is the place for a great adventure of our making and the toys we play with are our companions.  That’s at the core of the Winnie the Pooh stories, and it’s also where their creation began.  Winnie the Pooh was born out of a real place and the imagination of a real child, which itself evolved into an interesting story on it’s own.

Alan Alexander (A.A.) Milne was a mildly successful playwright in England during the earlier part of the 20th Century.  He served his country in World War I, and the experience left severe mental scars.  His writing post-War became more harsh and bleak as he was passionate to express his anti-War feelings to the world.  The toll of the war led him to retreat from the social life of London, and he spent much of the 20’s at a country estate near Ashdown Forest in East Essex.  Most of these exile years were spent in the company of his young son, Christopher Robin Milne.  Hoping to start fresh with his child that he neglected because of his seclusion due to triggering war flashbacks, the peaceful countryside allowed Milne to settle down and give more attention to his son.  He observed how Christopher Robin would create his own adventures in the woods outside their home, and always with a stuffed bear at his side named Growler.  This inspiring scene would spark the creativity in Milne’s mind once again and he began to write about Christopher Robin’s adventures in the 100 Acre Wood that was Ashdown Forest.  And though Christopher Robin was indeed a part of his stories, the name of the bear needed to be more distinct than Growler.  At the time, the London Zoo had just welcomed a Canadian bear cub with the name Winnipeg, or Winnie for short.  And though the Milne had changed the name of his stuffed bear, Christopher Robin contributed the addition of Pooh to the name, as it was what he called a swan that lived in the nearby pond on the property.  Christopher’s names for all of his other stuffed toys also made it into the story, including the tiny little Piglet, a tiger named Tigger, and a donkey named Eeyore.  Over the course of two years, A.A. Milne wrote over two dozen Winnie the Pooh stories, and they were published collectively in two volumes, the titular Winnie the Pooh (1926) and The House on Pooh Corner (1928) soon after.

“Pooh, for a bear of very little brain, you sure are a smart one.”

The two Winnie the Pooh books were enormous hits all over England and they managed to make a huge impression across the pond as well in North America.  The impact of that success unfortunately was not all that good for Milne and his family.  One of the things that really captured the imagination of young readers were the many illustrations that were included in the books, taken from pencil sketches by Milne’s longtime collaborator and friend E.H. Shepard.  Shepard’s depiction of Winnie the Pooh and his critter friends would become iconic and influential for years beyond, but when it came to drawing Christopher Robin himself, Shepard and Milne made the mistake of basing his likeness on the real Christopher.  As a result, the very young boy became a bit of a celebrity, with many people clamoring to meet the real Christopher Robin.  Christopher would go on a whirlwind tour helping to promote the book, with A.A. Milne unable to stop the frenzy surrounding his son.  There was even a reckless marketing ploy where Christopher participated in a photo shoot with the bear Winnipeg at the London Zoo.  That’s right, a barely 8 year old child was made to stand next to a live bear that could’ve easily attacked him without warning.  Thankfully nothing happened, but it is shocking to think how poorly Christopher was treated during these promotional days.  Naturally it led to some resentment in Christopher’s later years, as he grew to hate the bear that made him famous and thus denied him a simple childhood.  A.A. Milne also resented the success of his Winnie the Pooh books because they overshadowed his other work and weren’t reflective of his true passions.  Winnie the Pooh would be a sore spot in the Milne family for many years, as Christopher became more estranged from his father, whom he blamed for exploiting him.  Towards the end of his life, A.A. Milne chose to distance himself from his most popular creation, refusing to have it dramatized in any form, both on screen and on the stage during his lifetime.  Eventually he and Christopher did reconcile in later years, but they together chose to disown the cuddly little bear.

“The only reason for being a bee is to make honey.  And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”

After A.A. Milne’s death in 1956, the rights to his Winnie the Pooh stories were passed on to his publisher’s widow, as Christopher Robin Milne had no interest in claiming the character for himself.  A couple years later, the widow of the publisher would put up the rights for a film version for the first time ever.  There of course was one filmmaker who had his eyes set on the Winnie the Pooh stories for a long time and jumped immediately at the opportunity.  That person of course was Walt Disney.  Disney gained the exclusive rights to the Winnie the Pooh stories in 1961, and he was intent on putting his own spin on the world renowned stories.  But, instead of crafting a full length feature based on the books, Walt opted to make short subject adaptations of select chapters of the Winnie the Pooh books.  Given that the Winnie the Pooh books are just a collection of self contained short stories, it made more sense to have a series of shorts made rather than a singular film with a feature length narrative.  And so, Walt Disney and his animators would begin their work on Winnie the Pooh with an adaptation of the first two chapters of the original 1926 book; one with a story of Pooh using a balloon to fly up into a tree in order to reach the honey found in a bee hive and other involving Pooh getting stuck in the entrance hole of the bunny hollow of his friend Rabbit.  This first short would be called Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), which sadly would end up being the last animated project that Walt Disney would see to completion.  After his death in 1966, Walt’s animation team began work on the second featurette, entitled Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968), which among other things introduced the character of Tigger into the series.  Blustery Day would prove to be even more popular than the first short, and it ended up winning an Oscar as well for Animated Short.  A few years later, the third short Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974) was released.  The three shorts were then combined into a package feature film called The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) with new animated interstitials and a finale added.  This package feature is how most people are able to view the original run of Disney’s take on Winnie the Pooh, but it’s not the last we would ever see of the little bear.  Indeed, Winnie the Pooh would be around for quite a while, appearing in Saturday morning cartoons, holiday specials, and he would even get another animated feature film from Disney in 2011, simply titled Winnie the Pooh.  Not to mention, he would become a gold mine in merchandising for Disney, making billions of dollars for the company.  Remarkably, what A.A. Milne chose to cast aside, Disney would embrace and make their own, and it would be one of the most lucrative acquisitions they have ever made.

Though for fans of the original books, it’s that Disneyfication of the character that has become controversial over the years.  Many people in the UK are especially resentful of how Americanized the Disney version of Winnie the Pooh is.  The Disney shorts very much lack the English identity that is so crucially part of Milne’s writing.  A.A. Milne was a poet first and foremost, and his Winnie the Pooh stories were full of the kind of flourish that he excelled at as a writer.  Some of the moral lessons learned by Pooh and Christopher Robin show how Milne himself was trying to process his own outlook on life, with Pooh acting as both a companion to Christopher as well a bit of a therapist.  Much of that  flourish is minimized in Disney’s versions, as Winnie the Pooh and his friends speak more or less like other American cartoon characters of the time.  Even though the characters themselves may be missing some of that distinct Milne dialogue in favor of a more straightforward American style sense of humor, Walt Disney and his team still found a clever way to work some of Milne’s style of prose through the inclusion of a narrator.  Voiced in the original run of shorts by English actor Sabastian Cabot, the narrator plays an important function within the adaptation.  He not only brings Milne’s own voice into the film, but he even interacts with the characters as well.  One of the more inspired choices of the Disney adaptation is to have the characters actually interacting within the pages of the book itself, including treating the text as actual physical objects.  They’ll even address the narrator directly, aware of his existence.  It’s an interesting aspect that Disney added  and it helps to both pay homage to the original text while at the same time allowing for creative flourish on the part of the animation itself.

“Heffalumps and Woozels are very confusal.  A Heffalump or Woozel’s very sly.  If honey’s what you covet, you’ll find that they love it.  Before your eyes you’ll see them multiply.”

Even with the changes Disney made, the shorts still maintains a reverence for the source material.  It is clear that the Shepard illustrations were key inspirations for the visual style of the 100 Acre Wood.  Disney Animation was going through a transitional period in the mid to late 60’s, as they embraced a newer, sketchy style look thanks to a Xerox process that translated pencil drawings directly onto animation cels.  It worked well on some projects, like the more modern day 101 Dalmatians (1961), but looked a little too course on films that should have had a softer, classical look like The Aristocats (1970).  For Winnie the Pooh, the Xerox process was a perfect match, because of it’s similarity to the Shepard illustrations.  The backgrounds in particular really feel like they were pulled right off the page, and given the short’s gimmick with the living manuscript that the characters interact with, it’s clear that Disney really wanted to capture that simple beauty found in the original texts.  The character designs take heavy inspiration from the Shepard drawings too, though with noticeable differences to help make them easier to animate.  Disney’s Winnie the Pooh is a bit more rotund than his book counterpart, though Disney still keeps the shape of his bear head very similar to how it is in the book.  Piglet is almost a direct translation, while other characters are embellished a bit more.  Tigger is especially more dynamic in the Disney version, being both animalistic, but also capable of human like behavior.  Disney’s choices in voices also go a long way towards making the characters come alive.  Veteran actor Sterling Holloway, a favorite of Walt’s, was brought on to give Winnie the Pooh his voice, and it’s a perfect match.  While literary purists may bemoan Holloway’s American accent on this very British bear, there’s no denying the soft tone on his voice is delightful to listen to and feel natural for a stuffed bear named Winnie.  Ventriloquist and comedian Paul Winchell delivers a rousing performance as Tigger, especially in developing the distinctive laugh of the character with his “hoo hoo hoo hooo.”  Character actor John Fiedler brought his distinct high pitched voice to the part of Piglet, and he would continue to voice the character for another 40 years up until his passing in 2005.  One key change that the Milne family probably would’ve approved of are the changes to Christopher Robin.  In addition to also giving the character an American accent (provided by a number of young actors), they also changed the look of the character to help distance him more for the real Christopher Robin.  His function in the story is also less direct, with him passively being a part of stories that Winnie the Pooh is more independently motivated in.

“Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in the enchanted place on top of the forest, a little bear will always be waiting.”

Though Disney made several changes to the characters, they still remarkably remain faithful to the stories themselves.  All of the shorts that made up The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh were adapted from Milne’s own stories.  The stories themselves get mashed together to create bigger narratives, but each one translates original ideas from Milne’s own imagination.  Disney clearly knew that many in the audience would’ve been familiar with these stories, especially the iconic Honey Tree and Flood stories.  Where Disney saw their chance to bring their own flourish was in expanding upon concepts that are limited when described on the page.  One of the biggest moments that Disney contributed to Winnie the Pooh is found midway through the Blustery Day short.  In it, Winnie the Pooh learns about the concept of Heffalumps and Woozels from Tigger, fearing that they will steal his honey.  This leads to a nightmare sequence when Disney creates some truly surrealistic imagery.  I would make a guess that this was the segment that helped the short win an Oscar because it is a one of the most tripiest moments found in any Disney movie.  The “Pink Elephants” sequence from Dumbo (1941) seems to have been an inspiration, with Winnie the Pooh finding himself caught up in a weird place surrounded by Heffalumps and Woozels that shapeshift into anything.  It’s definitely the thing that deviates the most from Milne’s original vision, which is far more grounded in a magical reality.  Apart from that detour, which makes sense in the scheme of the story as part of Winnie the Pooh’s nightmare, the stories play out just as Milne wrote them.  The stakes never grow too dire; the only real conflict overall in the arc of these stories is the contention between Rabbit and Tigger, which the characters are too good natured to ever take too seriously.  Disney showed with the Heffalump sequence that they were capable of deviating far from Milne’s vision, but they wisely kept Winnie the Pooh characteristically simple and direct in line with how the books told their stories.

As Winnie the Pooh inches closer to his Centennial anniversary, it is remarkable to see how his influence has not waned but instead grown stronger.  After the character entered the public domain a couple years ago, it didn’t take long for opportunistic filmmakers to exploit that freedom and use the iconography of Winnie the Pooh as the basis for a horror movie.  Thankfully, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) came and went and was widely panned by everyone, so it’s existence shouldn’t cast a bad rep on the character going forward.  What has been one of the stranger legacies of the character, however, has been his influence on global politics.  At some point, many people pointed out the visual similarities between the Disney design of the character and Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jingping.  President Xi has been aware of this, as the comparison to Winnie the Pooh is often used as a way of mocking the controversial leader, so what has come as a result has been a crackdown on all Winnie the Pooh related imagery all across China.  The only exceptions allowed are select pieces of merchandise, as well as costumed appearances at Shanghai Disneyland.  Other than that, no one in China is allowed to distribute anything not approved by the Chinese government with Winnie the Pooh on it.  Now Winnie the Pooh has been turned as a symbol of rebellion in China, which I don’t know how an anti-Fascist pacifist like A.A. Milne would feel in response.  As of now, the Disney version of the character remains the face of the character that most of us know today, and Disney is not likely to be slowing down with their presentations of the character.  He is now as big of a driver of the Disney brand as Mickey himself, with Pooh being especially popular with the youngest part of Disney’s audience.  Has it taken away from some of the appeal of the character that Milne first imagined.  The original shorts did an admirable job of staying true to their literary source, but in the years since, with Disney going way beyond the books with countless spin offs on television and home video, it can be argued that Disney has been a little overkill with their hold on the property.  Still, Winnie the Pooh remains more or less the same honey loving bear we all love, and like his original literary companion Christopher Robin, he has been a guiding role model for kindness in much of our childhood memories.  If Winnie the Pooh’s legacy in the end is to encourage a lot more kindness in the world, than perhaps A.A. Milne was able to fulfill his intent for seeking a more peaceful world after all.

“The most wonderful thing about Tiggers is that I’m the only one.”

Stanley Kubrick is no stranger to literary adaptations in his body of work.  In fact, the bulk of his filmography is sourced from previously published works of literature; from best-sellers like Stephen King’s The Shining (1980) to obscure novellas like Arthur Schnitzler’s “Traumnovelle” which was the basis for his final film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).  And all of those adaptations range from faithful, to completely divorced from the original text.  For Stanley Kubrick, it’s always been the stories that have captivated him the most, or to be more exact, how the story can be shaped through his vision.  Kubrick was always a visual filmmaker first and foremost, so the appeal of these stories more or less based on how they formed within his own imagination.  That’s probably why he was so drawn to the futurism of Arthur C. Clarke, or the unflinching war stories of Gustav Hasford, or the class critiques of William Makepeace Thackery.  More often than not, Kubrick’s stamps on these stories become so iconic that the stories become more identified with him than with their original authors (such as with The Shining, much to King’s dismay).  But if there was one film where the author’s voice still manages to shine through even with Kubrick’s vision, it is with Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1971).  It was a bit shocking when Kubrick decided to adapt Burgess’ 1962 dystopian novel about violent street thugs and authoritarian regimes as his follow-up to his massive space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  It wasn’t unusual for Kubrick to adapt controversial novels to the big screen, like he had with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1962), but A Clockwork Orange had since it’s original publication been known to be a notoriously hard to adapt to the screen as well as controversial for it’s content, which was scandalous for it’s time.  Still, Kubrick saw something in the story that appealed to his tastes as a filmmaker, and with the surprising backing of a major studio like Warner Brothers, he set to make the un-filmable filmable.

Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, never saw himself primarily as a creative writer.  He was foremost a musician and a scholar, finding vocation in linguistics, where he would provide translations for various literary and musical works from around the world.  In his time as an academic, he would write satirical works, which often ran afoul of the social establishment in England at the time.  In the early 1960’s, Burgess suffered a health scare, where he was misdiagnosed with having a brain tumor.  Worrying that his time would run out soon, he frantically put his writing skills to work to create a novel that he hoped to sell before his death in order to give his wife support after he was gone.  The tome was completed in a remarkable three weeks, and not soon after, Burgess learned that he was not in fact dying.  Still, he had a book now that he could sell and it would end up becoming the the novel that he would be forever known for; A Clockwork Orange.  Based on a real event that occurred to Burgess and is wife during the London Blitz, where they were robbed and assaulted in their home by deserters from the American army in the blackout, Clockwork Orange was a dark, satirical look at the extremes of society.  Those extremes would of course be the fanatical violent indulgences of an un-disciplined population of youth and the authoritarian over reach of law and order trying to pacify it.  Essentially it was a novel examining the exercise of free will, and the fine line that society walks between freedom and order.   Burgess ultimately had written a novel that would cause controversy, but to what extant he didn’t know.  Many critics believed that his novel, with it’s frank depictions of sex and violence, were almost endorsements of those kinds of actions.  The novel is entirely told through the eyes of it’s young “ultraviolent” protagonist, who for long passages in the novel relishes in the horrific actions that he undertakes.  But, with Burgess putting us in the POV of such a violent character, he is also asking us to consider what the best course of action would be right to deal with such a character.  As we watch his re-habilitation through his perspective, Burgess is making us consider the idea that the solution may be even worse than the problem.

“Real horrorshow! Initiative comes to thems that wait.  I’ve taught you much, my little droogies.”

It is interesting to examine Kubrick’s take on the writings of Anthony Burgess in the film A Clockwork Orange, because out of all his adaptations, this is the closest Kubrick has ever gotten to making a film exactly like the source novel.  Initially, Anthony Burgess was commissioned by Warner Brothers to draft a screenplay for Kubrick, but the director ultimately declined to use it.  Apparently, Burgess’ screenplay was even more violent that the novel.  Ultimately, Kubrick would adapt the book himself, and some would argue that he barely even followed his own script on set.  Sometimes he would just show up on set with the novel in hand, and plan his scenes based on that.  That’s why when you read the book and watch the movie, you will see almost complete parity.  There are of course some minor tweaks that Kubrick made to get the source material to a point where it met his vision.  One of the very obvious changes was in the ages of his characters.  The protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, a hoodlum teenager named Alex, commits horrific acts like violent assaults, robbery, rape, and even murder, and all at the age of 15.  This, of course, wouldn’t fly with any film studio, so Kubrick made the choice to age up Alex to a young man on the verge of adulthood.  The same goes for his victims, as some of them are also underage in the book.  But, even with that, the film maintains nearly every other aspect of the novel; from it’s first person narrative point of view, to it’s near futuristic setting, to the graphic depictions of sex and violence which in it’s day earned the film the ever dreaded X Rating.  Yet, even with it’s risky nature, the film was success in it’s time, and probably to an extent that worried both Kubrick and Burgess in the years to come.

“FOOOD….ALRIGHT?”

One of the aspects of the movie that wins praise from the literary community is the incredible realization of the character of Alex.  Alex DeLarge, as he is named in the film, is one of the most fascinating characters to have ever been put on screen.  The success of the film largely is due to how well the character works on screen, considering that it all revolves around him.  One of the things that mattered in the casting of the character was finding an actor who could embody the entire arc that the character goes through, from the out of control delinquent that we literally meet in frame one to the broken down reformed young man who struggles to adjust in a world that he had a hand in making worse.  For the part of Alex, Kubrick found his ideal performer in young actor Malcolm McDowell.  McDowell, who was in his mid-twenties at the time of filming, managed to embody the anarchic teenage fury of the character to perfection.  What probably helped McDowell land the part was his breakout performance in English filmmaker Lindsey Anderson’s If…(1968), where he played a rebellious student at a stuffy English boarding school.  McDowell would proved to be not just right for the part, but he even brought elements to the character that made him stand out from the page even more.  Apparently, the now iconic white uniforms with bowler hats black boots, and codpieces that Alex and his gang of “Droogs” wear in the film were inspired by Cricket gear that McDowell would come to the set wearing.  Another thing that Malcolm is famous for bringing to the film is an entirely improvised scene where Alex and the Droogs attack an author (played by Patrck Magee) and his wife.  The moment from the book is clearly inspired by the real life incident that Anthony Burgess endured, but Stanley felt it needed something more, so he asked Malcolm to do a little dance while he was in the middle of the attack.  Malcolm, as a result broke into a rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain,” making the already horrifying moment all the more darker with the inclusion of such a cheerful song.  After shooting the scene, Kubrick got on the phone and called Warner Brothers to secure the rights for the song, knowing that Malcolm had made the perfect subversive choice.

One other thing that is remarkable about Malcolm’s portrayal of Alex in the film is that he was able to master the unique language of Burgess’ novel.  Anthony Burgess invented a special dialect spoken by Alex and his gang called “Nadsat,” which is a combination of Russian and Cockney slang.  Not only did the Yorkshire born and raised Malcolm have to wrap his mind around this unusual new accent, but he had to do so as part of the character’s inner monologue as well.  The effect works out really well, as it makes Alex even distinctive within the film amongst the other characters also speaking this new dialect.  Malcolm gives Alex’s inner monologue this eerily sinister tone, which shows that even as his violent tendencies are suppressed by his reform, the dark aspect of his character is always still there underneath.  A lot of the Nadsat dialogue that is found in the novel is something that may given the novel the reputation of being un-filmable, so it is interesting to see Kubrick not only embrace it in his adaptation, but also keep it intact word for word.   In many ways, the dialect is key to the satire of the story, as it is representative of the social divisions between generations that drive the people in the story to their extremes.  The authoritarian government types that mean to suppress Alex’s violent tendencies speak with an authoritative and refined tone, much in contrast to Alex’s free-wheeling slang.  But of course as we see in the novel and the film, civility is not necessarily defined by the manner in which the character speaks. The upper class and highly educated types in the novel, from the government officials to the doctors conditioning Alex during this treatment, to even the radical political writer all have their own evil ends on which Alex finds himself in the middle of.  For Burgess in his writing, he is showing that no one is blameless in the story; Alex is more a product of the evils of polite society rather than just an anomaly within it.

“The pain and sickness all over me like an animal.  Then I realized what it was.  The music coming up from the floor was our old friend, Ludwig Van, and the dreaded Ninth Symphony.”

One of the interesting aspects of the novel is seeing how the extremes play against each other.  We see Alex for the monster that he is from the beginning, and know from the start that he is a character beyond redemption.  But, Burgess also challenges the idea of how we must as a society respond to such a monster.  In the story, Alex undergoes a treatment called the Ludavico Technique, which is a form of behavioral modification done through aversion therapy.  Mainly, it involves Alex being subjected to images of violent actions while being administered a drug that induces sickness, thereby causing him to revert to sick feelings whenever he feels a tendency to act in a violent manner.  Unfortunately for him, while they are administering the treatment, he recognizes the background music as that of his favorite composer Beethoven (“Lovely Ludwig Van”).  As as result, the same treatment now renders him docile with his favorite music as well; which is even more torturous for him.  Both the novel and the movie do an effective job of portraying the benign evil of this experimental treatment, and the de-humanizing aspect of it.  As much as Alex is deserving of punishment for his crimes, the Ludavico Technique is portrayed as an especially gruesome form of torture.  It for one is especially shocking to see actor Malcolm McDowell strapped to a chair with his eyelids clamped open, and have it not be a special effect.  McDowell really put himself through that, and the clamps at one point did really scratch his eyeball, which he thankfully recovered from.  But one can’t help but watch that scene and feel unease about what is being done to Alex.  As bad as he is, the solution should not be equal or worse to the crimes committed.  And this is what Anthony Burgess intended his readers to think about.  He must of thought of horrible things that he wanted to see done to his attackers, and then he began to self-reflect on what that reveals about him.  A society too comfortable with violence as a response to violence is one that he saw as especially perceptible to authoritarian leanings.

What may be the most monumental difference between the book and the film is the famous “missing chapter.”  Anthony Burgess’ original novel is comprised of 21 chapters.  Broken into three parts, the 21 chapters show the progression of Alex’s character from out of control youth, to pawn of the state’s response to the problem of violence, to ultimately a victim himself.  The book’s title comes from the cockney phrase, “queer as a clockwork orange,” which provides an even deeper meaning as the main argument of the novel itself.  The idea of a “clockwork orange” is the absurd idea of taking something that is supposed to grow organically and force a mechanical working upon it.  Mainly, a “clockwork orange” is something, or someone, who has been forced to change their own nature in order to conform to society.  The movie follows this aspect from the novel, except for the end.  In Burgess’ original novel, the final 21st chapter finds Alex returning to his old ways after the treatment wears off.  But, as he has a run in with one of his old Droogs, who has changed on his own to live a better life, it makes Alex reconsider his own choices.  And the novel concludes with Alex finally choosing to change; with his own free will and not through the influence of social pressure or forced treatment.  In this final chapter, Burgess states a hopefulness for humanity, where even the worst kinds of people are capable of change, if they are allowed to naturally grow up.  Kubrick on the other hand leaves out this final chapter, which was also excluded in the published version in the United States.  Kubrick’s interests were more geared towards the corruption of the society that forced it’s morality on Alex while not addressing it’s own evil inclinations.  The movie concludes with Alex reverting back to his old ways, but not with the hopeful note of personal growth.  In a way, it makes the movie more cynical than the book with regards to it’s view on violence, showing that the opposite sides of Alex’s anarchy and the oppressive government meaning to eliminate him are in for a never-ending cycle.  In some ways, the oppression possibly made Alex even more inclined to villainy, as he sinisterly claims “I was cured alright.”

“Goodness comes from within.  Goodness is chosen.  When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”

Despite winning acclaim upon it’s release, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange proved to be a little too potent for society at the time.  A string of gang violence took off in the months after the film’s release in Great Britain, with some of the thugs imitating the likes of Alex and the Droogs in their crimes.  Kubrick was so worried about the effect that his movie was having, that he took it upon himself to have it pulled from exhibition in Britain, and the film would remain out of print in the U.K. for the rest of his lifetime; though it still was widely available in the U.S., where it developed a classic status.  Anthony Burgess did praise Kubrick’s work on the film adaptation, but in later years he tried to distance himself from the film and the novel, believing that it unfairly painted him in a scandalous light.  Over time, people have come to recognize the film less as a dangerous, exploitational film and more as the darkly comic satire that Burgess intended it to be.  There will still be debates over whether Kubrick was right to excise the more hopeful final chapter, but there is little doubt that he created a masterpiece that has greatly withstood the test of time.  From that unforgettable first opening shot (one of the greatest in cinematic history) in the Korova Milk Bar, to the anarchic energy of the film’s opening act, to the way that Kubrick uses music in his story telling (both in the classic renditions as well as the synth modified recordings by composer Wendy Carlos), the movie is a film that continually surprises in every scene.  Of all of the adaptations that Stanley Kubrick put onto film, Antony Burgess’ writing feels more in line with his tastes as an artist than anything else he has made.  It’s like the two were meant to be; Kubrick needed a story with a voice as unique as Burgess’ and Burgess needed a visionary eye like Kubrick’s to make his world come to life.  And of course the unforgettable performance by Malcolm McDowell helped to make Alex an icon of cinema that will forever be remembered.  You just know that you’re in for a wild ride when the first thing you see after the titles is the main actor staring creepily right down the barrel of the camera lens.  Kubrick’s artistry makes a statement to be sure, but the message from Burgess about the need for free will in the human experience also shines through, even with all the extremes.  Viddy well, little brother.  Viddy well.

“Great Bolshy Yarblockos to you.”

The Gothic Romance has long been a popular genre in Western literature.  We often pass by the bookstands at our local stores and see these often laughable looking book covers of two impossibly beautiful characters embracing against a stormy skyline.  As omnipresent as these kinds of titillating novels may be in book stores across the world, they nevertheless have been instrumental in shaping literature as we know it.  The gothic fiction has it’s origins in early 19th century literature, which helped to cement the very Victorian era elements in so much of the novels we see today.  It was in this literary movement where authors like the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley flourished.  In their works, they used Gothic imagery (such as dark castles, forests, or hidden passages) to inject a bit of forbidden anger into their stories, which in it’s own way turned into subversive escape for female readers.  For the writers themselves, it was a way to break away from the standard male centered marriage stories that often defined Victorian literature at the time.  These kinds of novels helped to elevate the voices of women in literature, as gothic romance often were the only outlets that allowed women to voice outrage over violence committed against them by framing it within these darker themed stories.  These were stories by women and for women, but even beyond that connection, these kinds of novels would have a profound effect on the presentation of gothic themes overall in storytelling over the next century.  As the genre evolved into the 20th century, more authors found ways to adapt the genre to more modern readers, and in turn, refresh the Gothic genre with even more taboo elements in their stories.

One such author who modernized the Gothic romance for 20th century readers was Daphne Du Maurier.  Du Maurier was an English author who worked primarily within the genre, often taking the gothic elements to near supernatural levels in her writing.  She was greatly influenced by the Bronte sisters, as many literary scholars see parallels with her stories and those of the legendary writers like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.  She wrote almost continuously over a 40 year period, including novels, short stories and plays.  But it’s her earlier work in the 30’s and 40’s that she is most remembered for.  Novels like The Loving Spirit (1931), Jamaica Inn (1936) and My Cousin Rachel (1951) often involved young heroines who have their lives upended by tragedy, mystery and even a little bit of spectral haunting.  She was a master of creating a sense of dread throughout her novels, with the oppressive melancholy of the often gloomy English weather being a pervasive element.  A critique of many of her works was that she often made her stories too depressing, with her novels often denying the reader a happy ending.  But, even as her writing was frequently dreary and foreboding, she also remained a very popular author.  Critics didn’t warm up to her novels initially, but the average reader loved her subversive style and the way that she challenged their sensibilities.  Of all of her books, the one that undeniably remains her seminal work is the novel Rebecca (1938).  The novel was an immediate success upon publication, and naturally gained the immediate interest of Hollywood.  A movie adaptation was begun even as the first edition of Rebecca remained on book shelves, and it would begin an interesting story all of its own, as it would launch a whole new chapter in the career of one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers, which also led to a tumultuous behind the scenes clash in it’s own right.  The film adaptation of Rebecca also shows an interesting experiment in Hollywood could work around it’s limitations in order to do justice to a challenging source material.

“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

The film rights to Rebecca were bought up immediately after publication by one of the biggest personalities in all of Hollywood; David O. Selznick.  The “take no prisoners” producer was already in the middle of his magnum opus film adaptation of Gone With the Wind (1939) when development began on Rebecca.  The latter may not have been as epic in scale as the former, but Selznick was still determined to turn Rebecca into his next big hit after Wind.  Being another sweeping romance that was a hit with readers, there was no doubt that Rebecca would be an ideal production for Selznick to take on, but it would require a different kind of filmmaker in order to get the more Gothic elements of Du Maurier’s story right.  That filmmaker would turn out to be a rising star out of the British film scene.  Alfred Hitchcock had been making a name for himself across the pond with critically acclaimed thrillers and mysteries such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938).  And for years, Hollywood had been calling for him to cross over and bring his talents to Tinseltown.  But, given that many of the offers that came Hitchcock’s way were just standard Hollywood dramas, the more Gothic minded filmmaker often refused to make the transition.  But, once Selznick secured the rights to Rebecca, the offer could not be passed up.  For Hitchcock, Rebecca was exactly what he was looking for, with it’s taboo subject matter, Gothic setting and themes, and tension filled mystery.  He not only agreed to make the film, but Selznick also managed to talk him into a multi-film contract at his studio; a decision that Hitchcock later would regret.  But, there’s no denying that the marriage of Hitchcock’s direction and Du Maurier’s writing was perfect match.  Indeed, the finished film does display the standard Hitchcockian brilliance, though you can also sense the intrusive meddling hand of Selznick at play as well, and it lead to some interesting changes to the story in contrast to what appears in the book.

“Why don’t you go?  Why don’t leave Manderley?  He doesn’t need you.  He’s got his memories.”

Certainly one of the most important things that Hitchcock and Selznick needed to accomplish to do justice to the novel was the casting of the characters.  In particular, they needed to pick the right actress for the never-named protagonist.  One of the most interesting choices in Daphne Du Maurier’s novel was that she tells the whole story as a  first person testimonial from her female protagonist, and never once shares that character’s name.  The heroine, whose credited in the movies as just “I,” is meant to be the audience’s surrogate for this tale, and leaving her unnamed is an interesting bit of experimentation on the part of the author.  The film carries that over, but apart from opening narration, the character must be able to stand out without having an identifiable moniker.  For casting, the movie found it’s ideal heroine with Joan Fontaine.  The English actress, and sister of fellow Hollywood legend Olivia de Haviland, is a perfect embodiment of Du Maurier’s protagonist.  She is strong willed but also effectively haunted in her performance, able to make the character resonate within the movie.  She is also a perfect match for the brooding presence of Laurence Olivier as the dashing millionaire widower Maxim de Winter.  Olivier had already become a household name a year prior with his star making turn in the Hollywood adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1939), but Maxim’s tortured persona would be a big difference for the actor after the strong willed Heathcliff.  Olivier very much welcomed the role, seeing the hapless Maxim as a great contrast to his other noteworthy role, which showed Hollywood that he had more range, which would help the Shakespearean trained thespian break free from typecasting that so many actors would fall into during those studio system days.  For both Olivier and Fontaine, this was a good risk taking opportunity that helped to strengthen their opportunities as performers, rather than just as actors, something common in British cinema but not so much in Hollywood.

But what made it necessary to have someone like Hitchcock on board was for presenting a presence on screen for someone who is never actually seen; the titular woman.  Maxim de Winter and the protagonist waste no time falling in love and they marry before the first act is even over.  Where Du Maurier’s story really kicks into high gear is when Maxim brings his new bride home for the first time, to the mighty manor house known as Manderley.  The Manderley manor is a character within the novel and the film in it’s own right, an ominous Gothic mansion full of history that in time comes to overwhelm the new bride.  And in particular, the mansion bears the omnipresent memory of Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca.  While there is no actual ghostly presence described by Du Maurier within the story, the way she describes the cold, oppressive feeling of Manderley often gives the reader a feeling of the place being haunted.  Hitchcock perfectly captures this as well in his direction.  Drawing upon his history of making tension filled thrillers back in England, Hitchcock gives Manderley this foreboding feeling, using the contrast of light and shadows to great effect.  Working with a Hollywood sized budget, he even gets to work on a scale he hadn’t been able to have before.  The actual Manderley house in the film doesn’t exist, and was created through highly detailed models, which was necessary given how the needed to have the mansion destroyed by the end of the movie.  But the sets themselves also go far in helping to accentuate the ghostly feel of the setting.  The great halls have this domineering castle like feel to them, but when you see the bedroom that once belonged to Rebecca, it’s ethereal like with it’s billowy see-thru silk drapes.  It all helps to reinforce the idea from Du Maurier’s novel that even though Rebecca is dead and gone, her presence still dominates the house that Maxim’s new bride must now live in.

“I watched you go down, just as I watched her a year ago.  Even in the same dress you couldn’t compare.”

One of the other things that Hitchcock also perfectly translated from the novel, and perhaps even improved upon, is the character of Manderley’s domineering housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers.  Mrs. Danvers is one of the most memorable villainesses in 20th century literature, and she seems to have been a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock’s too.  Played magnificently in the film by Australian actress Judith Anderson, Mrs. Danvers is the figure in the story that most actively allows the memory of Rebecca to endure.  Her intent from day one is to make the new “Mrs. de Winter” felt like an intruder into Manderley, but she does so with carefully applied gaslighting under the guise of being a good caretaker.  She reinforces in the mind of the protagonist that Rebecca is and will forever be the love of Maxim’s life, and that the best course of action for her is to leave Maxim and break his heart or take herself out entirely.  It’s through the character of Mrs. Danvers that both the book and the movie approach it’s most taboo and challenging subject matter.  Many scholars have theorized that Mrs. Danvers devotion to the memory of Rebecca has more to do than with just what’s on the surface.  Though it was has never been substantiated, it was thought that Daphne Du Maurier was bisexual, and had same-sex love affairs in her past.  If true, it might have been something that informed her writing with regard to Mrs. Danvers’ motivations in the story.  A same sex attraction, and even a hidden love affair, is hinted at very much between her and Rebecca in the story, and it carries over into the jealousy that she holds for the protagonist.  In some ways, the gaslighting done towards the protagonist carry a little bit of grooming as well, which for a story like this was very taboo for it’s time.  Naturally, Hitchcock had to tread lightly with this subject matter, as censors would not allow for any hint of same sex relationships mentioned in any movie at the time.  Of course, for a filmmaker like Hitchcock, and even Selznick to some extant, boundaries are there to be tested, and they certainly took it as far as it could go.

The movie does stick pretty close to the novel, until it does clash with the Production Code standards that all of Hollywood had to stand by.  The code forbade any explicitly sexual material, even in innuendos, and made especially strict guidelines in how acts of violence should be depicted in movies.  Apart from censoring the implications of queer subtext with some of the characters, the movie also had to gloss over the moral shades of gray when it comes to the characters.  In the novel (spoilers), we learn that Maxim’s haunted demeanor over the thought of Rebecca is not because he loved and misses her, as the protagonist suspects, but because he in reality hated her and was responsible for her death.  In the book, Maxim confesses to shooting Rebecca in a secluded fishing cabin by the beach and throwing her body out into the sea afterwards.  The Production Code wouldn’t allow for film to have it’s male lead responsible for killing his wife in cold blood, so in the movie, the death was changed into an accidental death, with Rebecca implied to have smashed her head open on the exposed end of an anchor during a physical fight with Maxim.  Both incidents do push Maxim towards his guilty conscience, but the movie version definitely makes the moment feel more sanitized and ludicrously convenient.  We of course learn in both cases that Rebecca was already dying from a terminal illness, and she coaxed Maxim into killing her as part of her death wish, but the moment feels much darker in the original book.  Du Maurier’s penchant for tragic endings also gets changed in the movie as well.  Manderley is set ablaze by Mrs. Danvers, but the novel treats it as shocking final act that ruins the lives of all.  In the movie, both Maxim and the protagonist live, but Mrs. Danvers receives her comeuppance in the inferno; a victim of her own obsession.  To Hitchcock’s credit, he makes this tacked on ending memorable in it’s staging, with a haunting final look on Judith Anderson’s Danvers face as the inflamed ceiling of Manderley comes crashing down on top of her.  But, the more bitter finale of Du Maurier’s novel does a lot more towards creating a haunting final note to leave the story on.

“It wouldn’t make for sanity, would it, living with the devil.”

The confluence of Du Maurier’s writing, Hitchcock’s direction, and Selznick’s showmanship led to a brilliant cinematic adaptation of this classic novel, even in a compromised state.  The gamble definitely paid off, but unfortunately it was David O. Selznick that took all the glory.  Rebecca would go on to win the coveted Best Picture award at the Oscars that year, the only film of Hitchcock’s to ever achieve that honor, though he himself never received the award for Best Director throughout his career, despite frequent nominations.  Sadly, because of the success of Rebecca, Hitchcock was further locked into his contract with Selznick, leading to a contentious decade ahead where both director and producer clashed frequently.  The upside, however, is that it firmly established Hitchcock as a force in Hollywood, where he would go on to create some of the greatest movies of all time like Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and of course Psycho (1960).  Hitchcock would even revisit the writings of Daphne Du Maurier again when he adapted one of her more supernatural short stories into a classic thriller known as The Birds (1963).  Unfortunately due to his contentious working experience with the domineering Selznick, he would later dismiss Rebecca as one of his lesser works towards the end of his career.  Du Maurier didn’t feel the same way, and over time she celebrated Hitchcock’s adaptation as one of her favorite adaptations of her novels, even with all the alterations.  To this day, Rebecca the novel and the movie still represents one of the best examples of Gothic romance from the 20th century.  The atmosphere, tone, and risk-taking elements all work together to make it a story that has stood the test of time and can still leave it’s audience captivated.  As a piece of woman’s literature, it’s also ahead of it’s time, and it’s interesting how this story is driven first and foremost by the women within it.  The protagonist doesn’t have a name, and the woman whose name makes up the title is only mentioned in the past tense, and yet, they drive the narrative more than the male characters, who this time are cast as the passive players in this story.  A full 80 years after it’s original publication, Daphne Du Maurier’s novel and the Hitchcock film it inspired are still feminist narratives that feel as relevant today as they ever have been.

“Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?”

Just like the same movement in cinema, American literature also changed significantly during the rise of counter culture in the 60’s and 70’s.  Rising out of the Beat generation and it’s poetic forbearers like Allen Ginsberg, the hippie movement brought it’s own wave of groundbreaking, socially conscious writing to the forefront of attention in the minds of young American.  Tackling everything from social taboos, to the rights of the oppressed, to psychedelic philosophizing, to just plain old “sticking it to the man,” there were many books both fiction and non-fiction that helped to define that turbulent era.  One prominent voice to emerge from that time period, whose writing particularly evoked all the rage, restlessness, and free-spirited thinking of the hippie movement, was novelist Ken Kesey.   Kesey was not your stereotypical hippie.  He was broad shouldered, had a horseshoe haircut that he often hid under a beret, and was also an avid outdoorsman who hunted. He often viewed himself as a bridge between the beat generation and the hippies, as he embodied the enduring spirit of one into the other.  He founded the hippie collective known as the Merry Pranksters, who travelled across the country aboard their psychedelically painted school bus and hosted “happenings” in numerous cities where they would share their art as well as psychotropic drugs with new people.  These “happening” were immortalized by fellow novelist Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid  Acid Trip.  He was also an early mentor of a little band known as The Grateful Dead.  But, it’s through his writing that we best know him.  He didn’t write much throughout his career, often spending most of his time as a cultural ambassador as well as a teacher, but the stuff he did write are touchstones of the era that he participated in.  He often considered his second novel, 1964’s Sometimes a Great Notion, to be his magnum opus, but the novel he is better known for is his debut, which of course spawned it’s own Oscar-winning adaptation; 1962’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Kesey had it in his mind to be a writer very early on.  After earning his English degree at the University of Oregon, he continued onto a graduate creative writing program at Stanford.  While there, he worked part-time on a graveyard shift at mental health facility.  At the same time, he also earned a bit of extra cash volunteering to take psychoactive drugs as part of Project MKUltra.  Both of these side gigs during his formal education no doubt inspired him with the subject of his first novel.  He completed his manuscript almost immediately after graduation, and it was published not long after in 1962.  It was a controversial book to say the least in it’s time, with it’s very anti-authoritarian message, and it was even banned in some parts of the country.  But, in general, it caught on with young readers, especially those of the beat generation and in the burgeoning counter culture.  Also surprisingly, it caught the attention of some big names in entertainment.  Actor Kirk Douglas optioned the book almost immediately for a stage adaptation, which was brought to Broadway by playwright Dale Wasserman.  The play was likewise also a hit, and it’s been revived and staged many times over the years since.  However, a film adaptation took a bit longer to come together.  Douglas maintained the film rights as well, but no studio would finance the project, often objecting to the tone and message of the story.  After a decade, Kirk Douglas had grown too old to play the lead part of Randall McMurphy anymore, and he was starting to look for other parties interested in taking the project off his back.  Well, that interested party turned out to be his son Michael Douglas, who was eager to prove himself as a movie producer.   Michael eventually landed a deal with Warner Brothers, with a script adaptation by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman.  Czechoslovakian filmmaker Milos Forman was tapped to direct, this being only his second English language film after Taking Off (1971).  Kesey largely remained hands off during the making of this movie, but the production did honor his native Oregon roots by filming the movie at a real asylum in the city of Salem.  Indeed, comparing the book with the finished movie, one will find an almost faithful adaptation, though with some very crucial difference.

“I must be crazy to be in a loony bin like this.”

One thing that the movie gets almost exactly right in it’s adaptation is the core theme of the story.  The book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a novel about individualism, and how institutions are built to break down the free will of those within it and why it’s necessary to fight back against it.  At the heart of the story is the clash between two different mindsets; that of the revolutionary fervor, embodied in the character of inmate Randle Patrick McMurphy, and that of rigid conformity, embodied in the caretaker of the facility, Nurse Ratched.  The brilliant thing about the story is that neither character is purely good or evil.  McMurphy enters the mental asylum feigning illness as a way to receive what he thinks to be lighter incarceration than prison, which he’s been sentenced to for statutory rape.  Nurse Ratched is by all accounts well liked outside of work, but in the asylum, she is a manipulative, passive aggressive tyrant.  There are a lot shades of grey with these characters, which is what makes Kesey’s novel such a richly layered narrative.  McMurphy is likewise manipulative, but his challenging of Ratched’s authority and refusal to comply, even if it’s sometimes for selfish needs, is an inspiring shake-up of the established order.  What Kesey celebrates in McMurphy is the refusal to just let the system grind down the individualism of the people within it.  As demonstrated through scenes where we meet the individual patients at the asylum, they are often kept under control through rigorous routine, harsh rules for stepping out of line, coercion through rewards and public shaming.  McMurphy, unlike Ratched, sees the individualism in each of the different inmates and treats them like they should be treated; as human beings.  The other inmates suddenly gain a sense of their own self worth once again, and one by one begin to rise together with Randle in pushing back against Ratched.  The rebellious spirit of course doesn’t last long and McMurphy pays the price.  But, in a very important line of dialogue, he implants the seed of rebellion in all of them, after failing to lift a hydrotherapy console in the washroom he says, “But I tried, didn’t I?  Goddamnit, at least I did that.”  Even if rebellion leads to destruction, as it does by the end of the story, the idea itself endures and thrives.

“Mmmmm, Juicy Fruit.”

It cannot be said enough how well this movie is cast across the board.  After Kirk Douglas had outgrown the role that he originated on stage, there really was only one logical choice for Randle McMurphy.  Jack Nicholson was at the time of this film’s making hitting a career highpoint.  He had already won acclaim for roles in Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Detail (1973), and of course Chinatown (1974), all three which earned him Oscar nominations for Best Actor.  He was steadily becoming the movie star of the moment in the mid-70’s, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a movie that was just tailor made for him.  When you read Randle McMurphy on the page, you can think of no one other than Nicholson in the role.  Fast talking, abrasive, and irreverential, you would almost think Ken Kesey wrote the character with Nicholson in mind; which I doubt was the case as Nicholson was just a bit part actor back when Cuckoo’s Nest was first published.  It’s honestly a good thing that the movie adaptation had to wait ten years just so Jack could be ready to play the part.  He nails every part of the movie, capable of being laugh out loud funny but also sincere in the more dramatic moments as well.  But, he is pretty much matched in every way by the breakout performance of Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched.  Fletcher in many ways improves upon the character as she is written in the novel.  The way that she exudes menace through such a cool demeanor and controlled voice is remarkable.  She is the perfect embodiment of every stuffy bureaucrat who dehumanizes people down to pawns in their own little power play.  The way she breaks down her patients, especially Billy Bibbit in the film’s finale, with her cold hearted use of shame is a very chilling portrayal of institutional evil put on screen.  Fletcher won out the role after performers like Angela Lansbury and Anne Bancroft passed on it, and like Nicholson as McMurphy, it’s a part that seemed to be made just for her.

What I find the most interesting about the remainder of the characters is how they are fleshed out by the movie in a way that they aren’t in the book.  The biggest example of this is the thing that is most different between page and screen.  That would be the character of Chief Bromden.  The tall, silent Native American patient at the asylum, played in the movie by Indigenous actor Will Sampson, is a secondary but still very important character in the film.  However, in the book, his role is fleshed out because he is actually the point-of-view character through which we witness the story unfold.  We get much more insight into Bromden’s mindset, and it’s interesting seeing how someone like McMurphy is observed through someone else’s eyes.  In the movie, McMurphy is the focal point character, and Bromden grows into an important part of the story the more that McMurphy interacts with him.  Even with the different POV’s on which the book and movie hinge around, the story still effectively gets it’s themes across.  It kind of works a little more interesting in the film, as Bromden remains an enigma for much of the first half, being a stoic mute.  It helps to raise the surprise level even more when he does break out of his shell, demonstrating the McMurphy’s influence on him.  Even as McMurphy succumbs to the limits of his rebellion, it’s Bromden who in the end carries his spirit on, as he smashes the window open with the hydrotherapy console that couldn’t be lifted up before, leading the the movie’s bittersweet but uplifting conclusion.  The book allows the reader to understand the thought process of one taking in the lessons of defiant rebellion, but the movie also makes that transformation feel rewarding as well, because we are able to see what the spark of rebellion is like when found in the unlikeliest of places.

“You know Billy, what worries me is how your mother is going to take this.”

I will also say that the thing that also brings out the authenticity of the adaptation is the choice of location as well.  The insane asylum that we see in the movie is the real deal, and probably not that unlike the one that inspired Kesey in his writing.  An interesting side note, the role of the asylum’s director was played by the actual director of the Oregon State Hospital where they filmed.  Milos Forman and his team did such a remarkable job turning the asylum itself into a character.  The way that Kesey describes the interiors of the hospital in his novel, with it’s cold sterile feeling, comes across perfectly in the movie.  Not only that, but Forman also utilized the local Oregon flavor of the setting as well.  Being an Oregon native myself, I can tell you that this movie is a source of pride among Oregonians.  No where does the movie show off the beauty of the state of Oregon better than in the scene where McMurphy hijacks the asylum’s field trip and takes the patients on a fishing trip off the coastline.  This is another moment in the movie that perfectly captures the spirit of Kesey as a character, since he himself was an avid fisherman, and often spent many trips fishing up and down the coast.  My hometown of Eugene, Oregon was ground central of Kesey’s Merry Prankster movement.  To this day, many of Kesey’s disciples still live in the Eugene metro area and are continuing to contribute to the counter culture flavor still found there.  Kesey remained a fixture in the local arts scene until his death in 2001, and the city honored him with a statue in the town square.   Kesey’s home state of Oregon was just as big of a muse in his writing as anything else, and though it’s as integral to the plot of Cuckoo’s Nest as it is to Sometimes a Great Notion, it’s still nice to see that the movie went the extra mile to bring it’s location shoot to the Beaver State.  That’s a major contribution brought to the film by director Milos Forman, whose style was very much shaped by his years working in documentaries for Czechoslovakian television.  He knew the importance of having his movie set in real places rather than on a soundstage.  It’s something he would apply on even larger scales later on, including the Oscar-winning Amadeus (1984).

It’s interesting to see how differently both the book and the movie were received in their respective times.  The book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was in many ways far more subversive in the early sixties than the movie was in the mid-seventies.  For the book, the country had yet to go through traumatic experiences like the Assassination of President Kennedy or the Vietnam War, so it’s plea for rebellion was not as widely accepted in it’s time.  It was subversive to challenge authority, something that was only valued by the beatniks and counterculture, and not the mainstream.  But, of course, there was plenty to be rebellious about in that time.  Marginalized groups like African Americans, the LGBTQ community, and Indigenous Tribes were beginning to march for their rights in the time period that Kesey was writing his novel.  Though he used the allegory of patients within an insane asylum, the same theme of demanding dignity in a world built to suppress them still rang true through in Kesey’s writing, and so many activists found inspiration in the way Randle McMurphy created what the late congressman and activist John Lewis called “good trouble.”  By the time the movie was released a decade later, the world had changed dramatically.  The psychedelic 60’s gave way to the rebellious 70’s, and when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reached theaters in 1975, the counterculture was not only thriving, it had become the culture.  The war in Vietnam was in it’s final, miserable days and the hard fought for Civil Rights Act was the law of the land.  But, this was also the era of Watergate, and America was still facing a crisis of authority pushing down on the oppressed.  However, in that expanse of time, people now knew to spot the flaws in the system, and call out those who were abusing their power for their own satisfaction.  In that respect, Nurse Ratched changed from a symbol of the system to a much more defined monster, reminiscent of the would be authoritarians like President Nixon who were trying to put the counterculture back into the shadows of society.  Across it’s different eras, the story remarkably maintained it’s resilience, but as we saw, it also gained new and interesting layers between book and film.  Even almost 50 years later, there are still many other elements to the story that gain new significance in perspective with the times.

“You’re not an idiot.  Huh! You’re not a goddamn looney now, boy.  You’re a fisherman!”

As a movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s remains a landmark in cinema.  It was only the second movie ever to sweep the top five honors at the Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay) after It Happened One Night (1934), and the only other movie to do that since has been The Silence of the Lambs (1991), putting Nest in an exclusive club.  Nicholson of course finally walked away a winner after so many nominations, and honestly, of all his performances this was the right one to honor him for.  His work as Randle Patrick McMurphy is just iconic, and so full of energy.  Ken Kesey gave his protagonist the initials R.P.M. for a reason, and Nicholson is the one and only actor to truly bring that character to full potential on screen.  Louise Fletcher likewise delivers an iconic performance as Nurse Ratched, turning her into one of cinema’s most unforgettable villains.  The supporting cast, many who came from the Broadway and Off-Broadway stagings, also includes an incredible group of up-and-comers from that era like Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and Brad Dourif.  But, it’s also interesting to see how much of the book is maintained through the translation.  Every moment of the book makes it on screen and the only real big difference is whose eye’s the story is seen through.  Speaking of the character of Chief Bromden, you couldn’t ask for a more emotionally stirring finale than what happens between him and Randle in the closing minutes.  There you see the true power of rebellion manifest.  As the spirit is destroyed in one person, the lobotomized Randle, it is carried forward through Bromden, the one he inspired the most.  And as Bromden runs off into the horizon after making his breakthrough, we are left feeling optimistic about the future, even through a moment of despair.  The will to fight for a better world is greater than one man.  Ken Kesey saw injustice in his world, and it’s interesting that he chose to spotlight those deemed broken by society as his champions in a cry for humanity.  To this day, that is what has kept One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest such a powerful and relevant story.  We still see people treated unfairly in uncaring engine of our society.  For Kesey, the purpose of his story was to help convince the reader that no one is helpless and doomed to a life within walls.  We just need to be convinced that we matter in the world, and that it’s worth demanding better of the system that is built to look over us.

“One flew East. One flew West.  One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”

It’s hard to contemplate how harsh the Great Depression was on working class Americans so many years and generations after it happened.  Today, we worry about pandemic related mass unemployment and supply chain disruptions resulting from a year of lockdowns, but the Great Depression was a whole different kind of monster.   With an unemployment rate that reached a staggering 24% of the population which persisted for several years due to stagnant growth in the economy, it still remains unchallenged as the greatest economic downturn in US history.  With the stock market crash came the collapsing of the banks, which could no longer provide loans to boost business or help average citizens hold onto their homes.  Eventually, foreclosures drove many people out of their homes and into tenement camps that later became known as “Hoovervilles,” named after then President Herbert Hoover, whose botched handling of the economic crises was largely blamed for the prolonged Depression.  It was a harsh time in America, as people were desperate to find any work they could, and that often led to many people falling victim to scam artists and greedy opportunists who would prey upon the desperate for cheap labor.  This in turn led to a rise of push back from the workers, and they started organizing and demanding better may and living conditions.  Sadly, the workers faced resistance by being labeled communist agitators, and wealthy business owners used their powerful influence to manipulate the legal system to deny workers the rights that they were seeking.  Still, the rise of unionization and the clear devastation brought on by the poor handling of the economy led to a change in the American political system, which eventually led to the election of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency, who ran on a promise of a “New Deal” overhaul of the Social Welfare system in America.  Though it would take many years of tough battles in the halls of congress, Roosevelt eventually got his New Deal programs passed, which brought about pivotal new safety net measures, like Social Security and a Federal Minimum Wage.  Probably no other era in 20th century had as much of a profound effect on the future of America as those Depression years.

And yet, as time has pressed forward, the lessons taken from the Depression seem to have faded as well.  Today, we take Social Security for granted, and unionization is at the lowest level it has ever been, which in turn has led to another era of wealth inequality and corporate exploitation of labor.  What we have left to remind us of the horrible legacy of the Great Depression are the stories told by our elders and the documentation of that time period that survives to this day.  The Dorthea Lange photographs of migrant workers living in Hoovervilles still vividly capture the horrific reality that ordinary American citizens endured over those years.  Several news articles and news reels that have survived also have given us an idea of what it was like, though they feel more and more detached so many years later.  For many, the most enduring portrait of the horrors of the Great Depression comes from the pages of what many consider to be among the “Great American Novels;”  John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, as well as the famous 1940 movie that it inspired.  Born and raised in Salinas, California, Steinbeck saw the effects of the Great Depression all too clearly, as he witnessed the mass migration of poor farmers from the Prairie states making their way to the fertile lands of his home state, only to see them being either threatened, mistreated or generally exploited by his fellow Californians once they got there.  In his writing, he expressed sympathy for the working man, and sought to tell their story.  He wrote articles for the San Francisco News about the plights of the migrant workers in a series that came to be known as The Harvest Gypsies, which told the story in the workers’ own words.  He would also write many short stories and novels that offered many different windows into the lives of poor working farmers, such as Of Mice and Men and of course The Grapes of Wrath.  His writing has often been described as Dust Bowl Fiction, relating to the simultaneous catastrophe of the Dust Bowl famine of 1935-36, which exacerbated the Depression even further.  Though a lot of his writing gave a much needed compassionate voice to the too often overlooked migrant worker, it was not always met with favorable reception.

“Takes no nerve to do something, ain’t nothin’ else you can do.”

John Steinbeck wore his New Deal progressive politics proudly on his sleeves, which often opened him up to accusations of being a communist sympathizer or just an outright card carrying member.  The Grapes of Wrath was his most pivotal work to date, detailing through the eyes of one family all of the harsh realities of Depression Era exploitation.  In his novel, he makes no illusions of where he stands, with every authority figure and capitalist portrayed as corrupt, and the only compassionate party in the story other than the migrants are the supervisors of a Government run camp that helps keep the law enforcement at bay.  For it’s perceived anti-capitalist viewpoint, The Grapes of Wrath was banned in many corners of the country, with censors fearing it would inspire communist infiltration of the workforce.  Even in Steinbeck’s home state his novel met resistance, with the Kern County Board of Supervisors out right banning the sale of the book.  But one other part of the state that responded well to Steinbeck’s novel was Hollywood, and in particular, a very unlikely champion named Daryl F. Zanuck.  Zanuck, the head of 20th Century Fox, was a lifelong Republican, but he was sympathetic to the struggles of the working class during the Great Depression and the movies from his studio often reflected a progressive attitude towards social issues.  Naturally, he found the appeal in Steinbeck’s vivid portrait of Depression era suffering. and optioned the novel right away, long before it even went into wide publication.  Still, Zanuck had to get around the censorship issues that plagued The Grapes of Wrath.  He sent investigators to tenement camps up and down the state of California to see how accurate Steinbeck’s accounts of the horrific conditions the migrant workers lived in were.  Not only did their findings back up Steinbeck’s accounts, but they proved to be even worse than expected.  With that knowledge, Zanuck knew that it was not only worthwhile to adapt The Grapes of Wrath for the big screen, but also essential.  He tapped one of the most celebrated filmmakers of that period, John Ford, to bring the novel to life, and it would prove to be one of the most ideal matches of filmmaker and author Hollywood would ever see.

“I never had my house pushed over before.  Never had my family stuck out on the road.  Never had to lose everything I had in my life.”

John Ford’s film largely sticks pretty close to the book for the first part, but diverts significantly in the later half.  Those second half differences in particular reveal a lot about what it took to get the movie made in the midst of the threat of censorship.  It also reveals a lot about the different world views of the author and the director.  Even with the limitations, the movie still manages to paint a vivid portrait of the Great Depression and the horrifying affect it had on the people who lived through it.  Like the book, we are introduced to the Joad Family, a tightly knit unit of Oklahoma farmers, known as Okies, who have no other choice than to hit the road and head off to a hopefully better life in California.  After the bank forecloses their farm, with the Dust Bowl rendering their soil useless, the Joad family straps everything in their possession to the back of a beat up old truck and leaves the land that has sustained them for generations behind.  The book and movie detail the sights and events that follow them along the way as they drive down Route 66 to their destination.  The movie removes a couple of the different vignettes on the road trip out, but still keeps the important ones in the film, including the losses of loved ones.  Where John Ford really proves he’s the perfect director to tackle this kind of subject matter is in his no nonsense approach to his visual story-telling.  His film feels completely devoid of the usual Hollywood glitz and you would almost believe that he’s shooting a documentary at times.  One of the most remarkable moments in the movie is when the Joad Family arrives at their first Hooverville in California, and Ford shows their arrival through an incredible POV shot from the front of their truck.  The camera pans across the view they see of the camp, with poor and destitute people staring back as the truck passes through.  You really see the influence of Dorthea Lange’s heartbreaking photographs in this memorable POV shot, with the camp appearing to be the real deal.  This must have been a shocking thing for audiences in 1940, which was only a couple short years removed from the worst years of the depression.  People who avoided seeing the conditions within these camps were now suddenly witnessing it first-hand on the big screen, and the Ford style was very instrumental in making that happen.

But what mattered the most in making the story resonate within the film was how well audiences connected with the characters.  In many ways, this is where we see some of the big differences between the novel and the film.  In Steinbeck’s novel, all the members of the Joad family are spotlighted with their own different struggles during the journey.  In the film, it’s really only three principle characters that are focused on.  One of course is the protagonist eldest son of the family, Tom Joad.  Tom Joad was very much a coveted part to play, as he embodied the idealized American working man identity, fighting for justice in a world that has treated the helpless poorly.  Daryl Zanuck would end up giving the role to one of the rising stars in Fox’s stable of talent; a young man named Henry Fonda.  Fonda had already been under contract at Fox for many years, but had never been the central lead in a film until now.  With Tom Joad, Fonda’s folksy Nebraska background came in handy, because he could believably portray a destitute migrant farmer while still maintaining his movie star, golden boy profile.  In many ways, straddling both of those two worlds enabled Fonda to create Tom Joad into this more mythic figure as a result; becoming the epitome of the righteous crusader for the rights of workers.  Something I’m sure Fonda welcomed as he shared much of Steinbeck’s progressive political views.  Apart from Tom Joad, the other crucial characterization that’s central to the story is that of Ma Joad.  Ma’s part in the story is more or less exactly as Steinbeck wrote, with her being the crucial glue that keeps the family together through all the hardship.  But, as the movie elevates Tom Joad to a more central role in relation to everything else, her maternal relationship to him likewise also gets elevated.  Veteran actress Jane Darwell, in the role that won her a supporting actress Oscar, is absolute perfection as Ma Joad.  Her resilience and practical outlook on life is both inspiring as well as heartbreaking.  She has got to be the pillar of strength that keeps hopes up even as the seems to be none left.  And Ms. Darwell perfectly conveys that in her performance.  A particularly memorable scene comes early as she burns the last of her remaining possessions before they leave their Oklahoma homestead.  When she looks at herself in the mirror while dangling a pair of old earings next to her head, she conveys without words the warming nostalgic memories of her past and how the dread of the future cast a cloud on her now.  They are both two mighty performances that bring these pivotal characters to life.

“Tom, you gotta learn like I’m learnin’.  I don’t know if right yet myself.  That’s why I can’t ever be a preacher again.  Preachers gotta know.  I don’t know.  I gotta ask.”

The remaining members of the Joad family are all still present, but Ford’s film chooses to relegate them to very minor roles in comparison to Tom and Ma.  Instead, the other character given focus in the story is an unrelated tag along on the Joad’s journey named Jim Casy.  Casy is a one time preacher who lost his faith and believes like the Joad family that a better life may await him in California.  He’s pretty much exactly the same kind of character as he is in the books, played memorably in the movie by Western film stalwart John Carradine.  Casy, in many ways, is where Steinbeck brings in his own voice to the story, as the character begins to become the voice of righteous indignation to the mistreatment of the migrant farmers.  Though he’s a man who lost his faith before the beginning of the story, he becomes enlightened again after seeing the injustice committed all around him.  He radicalizes and begins to assemble other workers to join him in unionizing.  It’s largely because of the character of Jim Casy that the book found so much resistance from the censors.  One, the character was a sympathetic and in many ways inspirational view of a labor organizer, someone that the capitalist establishment was desperate to vilify.  Secondly, it’s pretty clear that Steinbeck also wrote the character as something of a Christ allegory, one of many allusions to religious symbolism in the book as a whole.  His initials are JC after all.  And in the same spirit as the symbol he represents, Casy also meets his end not long after his enlightenment, leading Tom to pick up his mantle after being shaken by Jim’s murder.  For a lot of establishment figures, the use of this Christian allegory was especially seditious in their eyes, particularly those in the Religious Right.  That, as well as a lot of the frank depictions of violence and sexuality in Steinbeck’s novel led to to it being so widely banned across the country.  For Zanuck and Ford, they needed to find a way to make the message of Steinbeck’s writing work without running into those same censorship hurdles.  Carradine’s performance greatly helps to make Jim Casy a believable character.  He’s not overtly Christ-like in the way the character in the book is, but he still comes across as an inspiring voice that brings to the front all the righteous rage his character should have.  Carradine’s mellow voice and wide hopeful eyes also help to imbue the character with the same kind of spirit that Steinbeck’s words bring to the character.  To make this character work and appeal to a broad audience, the filmmakers managed to walk that fine line perfectly.

Essentially, the movie tempers the more radical nature of Steinbeck’s prose while still retaining it’s essential spirit.  But where Steinbeck and Ford diverge is in their ultimate outlook on the fate of the Joad family, which in many ways reveals how both men viewed humanity as a whole.  The endings of the books and the movie are very different, which in some ways make sense considering what a book can get away with more than movie.  Both stories do eventually lead to Tom Joad’s departure from the family, as he is being pursued by the law for killing the man who slayed Jim Casy.  But what happens after that is where the split happens.  John Ford follows up Tom’s heartbreaking exit with a beacon of hope for the Joad family.  A good job opportunity has presented itself, and the Joads hit the road for Northern California with hope that something good waits on the other side.  In these final moments, Ma Joad reflects on how, after everything that has happened, the family has the ability to press on and be hopeful.  In her words, “we’re the people,” she basically underscores the idea that by sticking together, they’ve managed to make themselves stronger, and that is what will get them to an eventual better life.  It’s basically a statement to reinforce the idea of change through solidarity, reinforcing the call for unionizing that the book promote.  Steinbeck on the other hand leaves the story on a bit more bleak note.  Things don’t go well for the Joad family up to the final page.  The eldest daughter of the family, Rose of Sharon, has been with child for the entirety of the story.  In the final chapters, she gives birth to a stillborn baby.  After this tragedy, the Joad family are also forced to take shelter from a storm during their travels.  When they find an abandoned barn to hide in, they also find another migrant farmer dying of starvation.  Realizing the man’s need for nourishment, both Ma Joad and Rose realize what they must do.  So, in a rather bleak final note to end the book on, Rose let’s the starving man drink the breast milk that she’s been lactating post-pregnancy.  You can probably see why John Ford opted for his ending.  It does offer an interesting contrast, though, as Steinbeck seems to express a more pessimistic outlook on the state of humanity.  Ford clearly wanted to inspire his audience with a glimmer of hope, but Steinbeck clearly wanted us to see just how bad it had gotten in America, and that hope was very much fleeting.  Steinbeck’s ending overall feels far more like an indictment of the system that he viewed as broken.  I imagine this must have been an image that he probably witnessed while investigating the camps, and it’s one that he wanted the reader to clearly understand as well.  Both Ford and Steinbeck clearly wanted to instill sympathy for their subjects, but Steinbeck’s approach feels far less like a Hollywood ending, and more of a wake-up call to his readers to see the world for how it really is.

“Wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.  Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.  I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad.  I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there too.”

With nearly a century gone by since the deepest depths of the Depression, we have less of a comprehension of how bad it got.  My one connection to that time comes from the lessons I learned from my Grandparents.  My Grandpa and Grandma on my mothers side in particular were very familiar with the kinds of narratives found in John Steinbeck’s novels, because they themselves grew up in the same California farming communities that these migrant farmers flocked to during the Depression.  They didn’t tell me much about the horrific kinds of exploitation that was going on during that time, partially because they weren’t near any of those farms and they were probably too young to realize what was going on.  They did tell me about how their families often had to ration goods in those days, and that something as commonplace today as an orange was seen as a luxury to them during the Depression.  As a tradition every Christmas in the years since, my grandparents would place an Orange in our stockings, done as a way to remind all of us of what their families went through to endure the hardship of the Depression.  It’s certainly the thing that introduced me to the reality of the Great Depression.  Though my grandparents were as heavily effected, they nevertheless remembered how hard it was, and they didn’t want us to forget too.  That’s why John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer winning The Grapes of Wrath is not only an important story to remember, but an essential one as well.  It shows the depths that humanity can fall to when pushed to it’s limits, and that all that we have left after we’ve lost everything else is our own compassion to each other and the willingness to do good in spite of such bad odds.  John Ford managed to bring the essence of Steinbeck’s to the big screen, albeit to the extent he could given the censorship limitations at the time.  With his down to earth sense of humanity, remarkably naturalistic photography courtesy of the legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland (who also won an Oscar), and incredible lived in performances from his cast, Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath is every much just as masterful as the book that inspired it.  Today, both the book and the movie’s messages feel more relevant than ever as we are seeing yet another reckoning between capital and labor erupt in America, and the same old Red Scare tactics being revived to push back against it.  It’s a time like this that a movie like The Grapes of Wrath becomes essential viewing, to remind us that this kind of story happened in America, and not that long ago, and it could very well happen again if we are not careful.  The pandemic certainly made that a possibility.  The Grapes of Wrath, both as a work of literature and a cinematic masterpiece, are undisputedly among the great American fables, and whether their outlooks are hopeful or pessimistic, it is crucial that all of us pay attention to it for our own good as a nation.

“Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out.  But we keep a’comin’.  We’re the people that live.  They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us.  We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.”

Social justice has long been a theme found throughout literature, with authors giving voice to the concerns of the day and finding the medium of storytelling as an effective way to argue a point directly to the reader.  Oftentimes when a writer tackles a particularly pressing issue in their work, it is a reflection of their state of mind with regards to the issue at the time of writing.  And though some works that tackle a social justice point head on can have the positive effect of stirring the conversation in it’s moment, their stories must also be able to stand on their own outside of that conversation.  Some books that were considered progressive in their time have over the years been reexamined and critiqued as being relics of a era where those same values have either fallen out of favor or chaned completely.  The novels of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Adventures of Huck Finn  by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain respectively were heralded as passionate arguments against slavery in their time, but their less enlightened depictions of black characters in the novels have led them to be heavily criticized based on the values of today.  But if one novel manages to breakthrough the values of it’s day and can still resonate many years later with readers young and old with it’s message of racial equality, it’s that special piece of writing that stands as a true perennial masterpiece.  Such is the case with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a book whose legacy may be one of the most profound in all of American literature.  First published in 1960, Mockingbird made it’s debut right at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America.  Though Civil Rights battles were ongoing throughout the history of America, it hit it’s apex immediately after the slaying of Emmett Till in 1955 and was brought to the mainstream with public figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leading the charge.  And with Mockingbird’s direct and frank depiction of racial tensions in a small Southern town through the eyes of a young, impressionable girl named Scout, Harper Lee was able to connect readers of all races and backgrounds with the the call for Civil Rights in a way that still has the power to call for social justice over 60 years later.

Harper Lee is a unique icon in the world of American literature.  She only ever published two novels in her entire lifetime, the second of which was a first draft of her most famous work that her estate chose to release publicly despite Lee’s own wishes (2015’s Go Set a Watchman).  That’s not to say she wasn’t an active writer.  She wrote hundreds of columns, essays and non-fiction pieces throughout her life, but To Kill a Mockingbird was her one and only fictional novel that she intended to publish.  Most of her writing involved the life she knew growing up in Monroeville, Alabama, particularly with regards to the growing racial tensions she experienced there.  Writing always seemed to be in her blood, and it worked out that her childhood friend in Monroeville also shared her interests.  Living next door to her was a boy named Truman Parsons, who would later become known as Truman Capote, a prolific and influential literary icon in his own right.  Capote made a splash in the literary world first with his successful run of columns in Harper’s Bazaar and the runaway bestseller Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958).  It was believed that in Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) that he based a character named Idabel on Harper Lee.  Harper would return the gesture by basing a character named Dill on Capote in Mockingbird.  Though she said that Mockingbird was not a direct autobiographical work, it is pretty clear that a lot of the canvas on which she draws her narrative is taken from her own childhood.  At the center of the story is a young tomboy girl named Scout Finch who witnesses the trial of a black man falsely accused of rape where her father, Atticus Finch, argues for his defense in court.  Though personal in nature, the story touches upon so many issues that resonated with readers that were themselves coming to terms with racial injustice in America.  As a result, Harper Lee found herself becoming a perhaps unexpected but nevertheless essential contributor to the Civil Rights Movement that helped to end Jim Crow and Segregation laws in America.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

Naturally, Hollywood took notice of the power of Lee’s novel, and immediately went to work on crafting a big screen adaptation.  The rights to the novel were picked up immediately after publication by Universal Studios, though getting the movie on the screen wouldn’t be easy.  For one thing, most other studios were reluctant to tackle issues regarding race at the time, given that they were afraid of losing the southern audience.  That’s not to say that most of Hollywood was opposed to the Civil Rights Movement; it’s just that they viewed making a movie about racial injustice to be a financial risk that was better thought to be left untapped.  So, many films that tackled racial injustice on the big screen tended to be smaller and low risk ventures, but that was about to change with Mockingbird.  The novel was enormously popular with Hollywood elites, and many of them were campaigning hard to be a part of this upcoming film.  Though Universal had a strong stable of acclaimed directors, the responsibility for adapting Lee’s novel would fall to Robert Mulligan, who up until that time was mostly a TV director.  With his producing partner Alan J. Pakula, Mulligan sought to create a very down to earth adaptation of Lee’s writing, free from the typical melodrama of most socially conscious Hollywood films.  The casting of the roles was also a particularly important part of the development of the film.  The characters of Scout and her brother Jem would go to newcomers Mary Badham and Philip Alford, both authentically from Alabama.  The crucial role Atticus would pass through the hands of many Hollywood leading men at the time, including Universal’s top box office star at the time, Rock Hudson, who campaigned hard for the role.  Ultimately, the role was given to Gregory Peck, who said yes after having read the novel in a single sitting the night before.  In both it’s approach and it’s execution, Universal Pictures’ adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird was intent on bringing to the screen the essence of Harper Lee’s pivotal novel, and for the most part, it was a successful execution.

“Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand.  It’s knowing you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”

Upon both reading the novel and watching the movie, it is pretty astounding how well it translated.  Though some of the flavor of the setting in Harper’s writing gets lost in the translation, the overall narrative is there in tact.  We are told the story, like in the novel, through the eyes of Scout, though the movie adds the factor of it being a recollection several years after the fact by an adult Scout (voiced in narration by an uncredited Kim Stanley).  And with this perspective, the movie is able to tap into a sense of nostalgia that informs the tone of the movie.  Though the novel and the movie indeed are about racial injustice in the South, it is also a story about innocence lost and the effect that moments of distress and trauma have on children.  For much of the story, Scout learns more and more about the struggle of racial justice, and how truly critical it is for justice to be upheld.  She watches as her father puts his own reputation and even safety on the line in their quiet little town for the sole purpose of showing that everyone, regardless of race, should be treated fairly under the law.  A particularly potent moment from the book that made it into the movie involves Atticus holding back a lynch mob from taking his client out of prison and enacting their own warped sense of “Southern Justice.”  Only when Scout and Jem unexpectedly show up to meet Atticus in the middle of this tense situation does the mob disperse.  Knowing the history of lynchings in the South, this scene carries some very ominous overtones, and it becomes a pivotal teaching moment for Scout as well.  Having faced harassments at school because of her father’s case, and how her father remains undeterred in the face of a mob, she learns that social justice is a struggle that requires a strong sense of moral fortitude, and it emboldens her to take the issue more seriously.  Scout’s journey, from being ambivalent towards social issues towards becoming more compassionate and serious with regards to racial injustice is at the core of why Harper Lee’s novel is such a crucial benchmark in the Civil Rights movement.  It’s a call for readers to wake up and see more clearly the struggles that exist within their own neighborhood and not be deterred by the power structures that allow for those barriers to endure.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the film’s production is how well it brings the audience into the world of Harper Lee’s writing.  The fictional town of Mycomb, modeled obviously by Lee’s own hometown of Monroeville, feels so authentic within the movie, that anyone might swear that it was a real place in rural Alabama.  But in fact, the entire movie was shot right on the Universal Studios lot in the heart of Hollywood, California.  Everything from the town square to Finch’s quaint little neighborhood was fabricated from scratch.  To fit the Southern Gothic nature of Lee’s novel, every element of the setting had to feel lived in, and the production design team, led by the legendary Henry Bumstead, put so much effort to recreate a Southern setting right in the middle of Universal Studios.  Most of the sets are gone today, but the town square remains a fixture on the backlot to this day.  It may be familiar to Back to the Future (1985) fans, as the courthouse façade was repurposed many years later to become the iconic Clock Tower from that movie.  The interiors were also intricately detailed to reflect the kind of town that Harper Lee was familiar with.  The pivotal courtroom set, where a big chunk of the movie takes place, was modeled after a real one in Monroeville, which is used to this day as a staging venue for theatrical adaptations of the novel and many other plays as well.  Much of the reason why Universal went so far out of it’s way to build the town within the novel instead of shooting on location mostly had to do with the fact that much of Lee’s childhood home had been modernized over the years, and no longer retained that Depression Era aesthetic that she described in the book.  It’s probably the main reason, but it might have also shielded Universal from any local resistance from the Southerners who objected to the message from the novel.  In any sense, the best aspect of the movie is that it stays true to the novel’s sense of time and place, and it drives home for the audience a sense of authenticity that often was rarely found in most movie depictions of the South.

“Our courts have our faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.”

But apart from the setting, what most people remember from the movie is the character of Atticus Finch himself.  Harper modeled the character mostly on her own father Amasa Coleman Lee, an attorney who also was in the business of taking on black clients who were being persecuted by the Jim Crow system of justice in the South.  Though the elder Lee was not quite as progressive as the Atticus depicted in the novel and film, he did become an advocate for racial equality in his later life, and was proud of Harper’s effective advocacy for such issues.  No doubt the stoic, unbending strength of the character appealed greatly to a long time supporter of civil rights like Gregory Peck.  Though Peck had been around for years in Hollywood, the actor had struggled to define his place as a leading man.  Stuck in mostly war films and westerns, with an occasional romantic comedy thrown in (Roman Holiday), Gregory wanted desperately to have that role that really showed off his strengths as a dramatic actor and also embody the progressive politics that he held up so seriously.  In Atticus, he found that role that would indeed define his career and turn him into an icon.  It’s hard to imagine anyone but Peck in the role.  With his towering frame and booming voice, Peck’s Atticus is the very definition of stoic strength.  But Peck uses his acting talents beautifully in the role, especially during those courtroom scenes.  His delivery of the defense for the accused, Tom Robinson (a fantastic Brock Peters), is dignified and with conviction, and is one of the most inspirational arguments for the definition of true justice ever put on screen.  Peck’s incredible performance is also matched by the authenticity of Mary Badham’s Scout, who is honestly the living embodiment of her literary counterpart.  If Atticus is the movie’s moral backbone, than Scout is it’s beating heart, and both are brought to perfect life by the actors portraying them.  The supporting players also feel authentic too, especially considering that some of them are acting outside of their comfort zone portraying some pretty vile racist characters.  But considering the importance of the story’s message, it’s a testament that everyone aimed to be as authentic as possible.

Since it’s debut, both on the page and on the screen, To Kill a Mockingbird has become pretty much an essential piece of media for generations.  It was especially an effective tool in classrooms to teach students about racial history in America.  I myself remember having to read the novel in school and I was introduced to the movie for the first time in the same way.  But, like many other pieces of literature that has been examined and re-examined over the years, the novel and movie have faced criticisms for it’s portrayal with regards to racial issues.  One of the most common criticisms is that it speaks about racial justice from a very white perspective, which some have claimed is patronizing to Black Americans.  In addition, it has been said that Atticus Finch is one of the clearest examples of the “White Savior” trope ever used in literature; where the focus of the story becomes less about the people who are victims of racial bigotry and more about the white people who come to their aid with far less resistance in their way.  It is a problem that Hollywood has had over the years, with well intentioned social justice films being made that unfortunately turn into self-serving vanity projects in the long run.  There are elements in To Kill a Mockingbird that do unfortunately fall into this trope, particularly surrounding the character of Atticus.  Atticus is very much lionized in the novel and the film, and that is reflected in moments that we see with the black citizens in the community showing reverence for the man.  A memorable scene from the movie, where all the black audience members in the courtroom stand up for Atticus when he leaves the floor after the trial has ended could easily fall into that kind of trope.  However, given the context of the scene in the movie, and the inspiration from which Lee drew upon, the moment feels less exploitive and more genuinely loving.  Atticus stood up for one of their own, so they will stand up for him (symbolically at least).  It’s about finding the common ground on which all races can strive to fight for, and that’s where I think To Kill a Mockingbird rises above those tropes.  I honestly am glad that I was exposed to a movie and novel like Mockingbird at such a young age, because it informed me why issues like this matter and why that moment of shared reverence for one another in that courtroom is such an ideal to strive for in our society.

“Miss Jean Louise, stand up.  You’re father’s passing.”

Like the novel it was based on, the movie To Kill a Mockingbird was a sensational success both critically and with audiences.  It was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, but didn’t win (which is hard for me to argue against since the movie that won is my all time favorite film, Lawrence of Arabia).  Still, Gregory Peck walked away with the Best Actor award, which is probably one of the most well deserved in the history of the honor.  Atticus Finch, to this day is still celebrated as an idealized crusader for social justice that many activists today aspire to be like.  And like Scout, upon experiencing this story and witnessing it unfold, we have our own eyes upon to what role we must play in making the world a more just place.  It is reflected in Scout ultimately opening her heart out to another outsider in the story, the recluse Boo Radley (Robert Duvall in his screen debut), after he had saved her and her brother Jem from an attack by a vengeful racist thug.  Like Scout, the events of the story make us open our heart to those who fall unfairly outside the justice system today, and it calls upon us to reconsider our own place in the world and what we must do to seek justice for those that don’t usually get it.  That is in essence what Harper Lee wanted us to learn in her novel, and probably more than any other American novel of the 20th century, it shaped the conversation on racial issues across the whole mainstream, and helped push the Civil Rights movement further than ever before.  Harper won a well deserved Pulitzer for her work and in the years since the novel has only grown more in esteem.  Even most Southerners hold it up as a work of literary genius.  Still, the reason why both the book and the movie endure to this day is that it gives a strong human connection to a universal theme of social justice.  Even 60 years after it’s original publication, the themes of the novel still resonate, as racial injustice is a reoccurring problem that we still grapple with; the recent killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers last year, among far too many others, being a perfect example.  Despite some legit criticisms of it’s handling of racial justice in it’s narrative, To Kill a Mockingbird is a story just as potent today as it was when it was first published.  With Harper Lee’s graceful writing, and easily identifiable characters, it’s a story that appeals to our better angels and reminds us that racial justice and equality need help in the world and that we must recognize it and fight for it.

“He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room.  He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

There really are very few action adventure films that hold up as well as Jurassic Park (1993).  Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking blockbuster ushered in a new era in Hollywood when it came to visual effects, utilizing CGI at a level previously unseen before in the movies.  It also restarted a renewed interest in paleontological studies, as fans young and old finally got to see dinosaurs on screen that looked more real than ever before.  The movie’s plot certainly was tailor made for the cinema, but you have to go pretty far back to remember that before Jurassic Park was a hit movie it started out as a hit novel.  Jurassic Park was the original brainchild of one of the most celebrated Science Fiction authors of his time; Michael Crichton.  Crichton had already built up a long-standing relationship with Hollywood before.  His earlier work like The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man were runaway best sellers that in turn were adapted into hit movies.  Crichton even dabbled into filmmaking himself, both writing and directing the original film Westworld (1973), which of course would later go on to influence the hit HBO series of the same name.  So, when he began writing what would end up being Jurassic Park, he probably had a good feeling that it would likely be made into a film right away.  In fact, Universal Pictures optioned the novel even before it was published in 1990.  It passed around to a number of filmmakers, but once it landed in the hands of Spielberg, it was just a natural fit.  Who better to trust with Crichton’s high concept vision than the guy who’s been at the forefront of so many groundbreaking effects films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Back to the Future (1985).  However, Jurassic Park would be different from those movies before and that is largely due to the themes that Crichton often worked with.

Michael Crichton was a Harvard educated medicinal scholar, earning an M.D. in 1969.  However, he never actually practiced medicine in his life, opting to pursue his writing career instead, especially after getting his first novel published while still attending school.  Despite this divergent path, Crichton still put his scientific knowledge at the forefront of his work, writing through the lens of speculative Science Fiction.  Though many of his novels feature science that either doesn’t actually exist or hadn’t been invented yet, his scientific background allowed for him to provide enough informed detail to actually convince the reader that the fictionalized science in his novels could be plausible.  And many of his predictions have remarkably proven to be close to reality since he first wrote them down.  The Andromeda Strain showed a believable scenario of how society might respond to a deadly viral outbreak that seems eerily close to today.  The Terminal Man provided a dire warning of the dangers of how computers could be used for mind control purposes.  Westworld predicted the advances in robotics, and Jurassic Park speculated on the potential consequences of genetic engineering; all things that we are seeing continually explored in science today.  Despite the usual bleakness of Crichton’s narratives, he was not a science skeptic.  He believed very much in expanding the scientific advancements that he wrote about, but he also argued that every scientific experiment must come with a fail-safe protection, just in case things go horribly wrong.  More than anything, he hated the abuses of science, and this became an over-arching theme of his work.  In particular, he used his writing to critique the science for profit motive that he often saw being abused in his time, particularly by pharmaceutical companies, entrepreneur engineers, and politicians who exploited science for their own agendas.  This in particular is what frames the narrative of Jurassic Park; a money-making venture gone horribly wrong.

“Welcome to Jurassic Park.”

It’s interesting to note that Jurassic Park began not as a novel, but as a screenplay.  Crichton wrote his first draft back in 1983, with the focus of the story centered on a young grad student who creates the first living dinosaur through genetic engineering.  The breakthrough leads to investors, who devise the idea of creating a wildlife park of dinosaurs.  It’s part of Crichton’s critical eye that something as monumental as the creation of a living dinosaur would inevitably lead to the desire of exploitation for the sake of entertainment in the end.  In many ways, this early draft of what would end up being the story echoes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the one who made the scientific breakthrough being forced to confront the harsh reality of what it means to play god, and how a perversion of nature inevitably ends up destroying those who break it’s rules.  Over time, Crichton revised his story, deciding to expand upon his themes in a novel form.  In the book, the breakthrough and exploitation period has already passed, and what we find instead is a scenario of what corporatized science run amok would look like.  The Jurassic Park in question comes across as this sanitized, Disneyland like paradise, but as the novel progresses, that veneer of safety is stripped away to reveal the harsh reality that man should never have messed around with natural order.  Though the themes never changed over the time of writing the book, Crichton certainly wrote his story with a eye for adventure as well.  His book is filled with spectacular set-pieces that do lend themselves well to cinema.  There are detailed encounters with each dinosaur found on the fictional Isla Nublar, including the memorable raptor chase and the frightening encounter with the Tyrannosaurus Rex.  For the most part, these set-pieces made the translation to the big screen pretty much in tact, but what is interesting is how the move from page to screen shifted the themes of Crichton’s novel.

“Dinosaurs eat man.  Women inherit the Earth.”

One big difference between Michael Crichton’s novel of Jurassic Park  and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation is the way that the characters are used.  For one thing, Spielberg streamlines the number of characters to just a select few.  A lot of the novel focuses on the scientists working behind the scenes in the bio-engineering labs where the dinosaurs are created.  In the film, much of their roles are distilled down to one character in one scene of the movie.  The character of Dr. Wu (played by B.D. Wong) is given more of a role in the novel, but in the movie he appears just to given scientific exposition for the audience, explaining exactly all we need to know about how the park was able to create dinosaurs.  In this case, it actually helps the film to streamline Crichton’s scientific details.  Spielberg knows that what the audience is waiting for is real life dinosaurs, and by giving us one scene to establish what we need to know, it helps to free up the rest of the movie’s plot just for that.  Spielberg also gave more character dimensions to different characters and even altered their fate from what was in the book.  This is particularly the case with Dr. Ian Malcolm, played memorably by Jeff Goldblum.  In a case where I think the character was altered to better reflect the actor who’s playing him, Dr. Malcolm is very different from his literary origins, where he is depicted as a rigid, intellectual scientist who actually dies early on in the book.  Perhaps when Spielberg cast the suave, eccentric Goldblum in the role, he tailored the character to be more like him.  A lot of the character’s arc in the story is actually taken from another character named Donald Gennero, who is depicted in the movie as a cowardly lawyer who gets quickly eaten by the T-Rex at the halfway point.  Gennero’s skepticism of the park is also reversed in the film, with the “blood-sucking” lawyer being all in on the plan for the park, while Malcolm is given the more cynical view.

But perhaps the most dramatic change from book to screen is the depiction of the character John Hammond.  In the book, Hammond is the epitome of Crichton’s view of corporatized science taken to it’s most extreme.  Hammond in the novel is a callous, profit driven business tycoon who created the park as nothing more than a way to earn more money.  He cares little for the dinosaurs that are grown out of his laboratories, and even less for the poor humans who are put at risk of getting eaten by the dinosaurs when they get loose.  He’s basically more P.T. Barnham than Walt Disney in this regard, seeing the park less a bold vision and more as a means to increase his own stature in the world of business.  Spielberg on the other hand leans more in the Walt Disney direction with his portrayal of John Hammond.  With his version, John Hammond is more idealistic and is not concerned about the financial viability of the park.  In his own words, he “spares no expense” in seeing his park becoming a reality.  For him the park is a source of pride, but it’s in that rosy outlook that he naively misses the flaws in his plan.  It’s a far more sympathetic version of the character, departing very far from Crichton’s version.  It also helps when the charming and jovial Sir Richard Attenborough is playing him.  And Spielberg definitely seemed to want to emphasize Hammond’s noble intentions, because cinematically it reinforces the wonder of the park’s potential.  Inevitably, Hammond’s arc in the movie is proof of Murphy’s Law imagined through this scenario, where everything that could go wrong, does go wrong, and it better illustrates the Frankenstein parallels even more.  In the book, Hammond is unredeemable, and inevitably is killed by his own creation; eaten alive by a pack of dinosaurs.  But in the movie, Hammond lives, and Spielberg leaves us with a poignant moment as Hammond looks back on a park he must now leave behind, seeing it descend into disaster.  Though Spielberg’s version of the character of John Hammond is sympathetic, the themes of Crichton’s novel still resonate, as his naivete is emblematic of the lack of foreseeing the need for a fail-safe plan to be in place.  As Ian Malcolm astutely points out to John Hammond in the film, “You spent so much time thinking about whether or not you could, you never stopped to think whether or not you should.”

“If Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”

From that we see the biggest departure that Spielberg makes from Crichton’s novel, and more than anything it speaks to Spielberg’s sense of how such a story should play on the silver screen.  We as the audience need to be given the sense of wonder, looking in awe at a world where dinosaurs walk the earth again.  That’s why the opening part of the movie takes a far more optimistic tone.  The movie does begin with an intense opening scene, where we do see the lethal threat that keeping dinosaurs captive can pose; in this case with one employee becoming a victim of a velociraptor.  But, after that, the movie doesn’t have it’s next moment of danger until almost the halfway mark.  Instead, we follow the characters of Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), who are pretty much as they are from the book, as they see the park for the first time.  And their sense of wonder translates to our sense of wonder.  With help from John Williams iconic score, we are given an amazing introduction to the dinosaurs, roaming the park peacefully in the way that I’m sure John Hammond had envisioned.  But once the movie moves into the second half, the wonder gives way to terror, as we learn the real cost of toying with nature.  By giving that contrast between the idealized vision and the risks that lie underneath, Spielberg gives the themes of Crichton’s novel more resonance.  We need to be given that exciting sense of the potential of the park, before we see the terror that can come when it all falls apart.  And that’s when the terrifying set pieces of Crichton’s novel become all the more cinematic.  The Tyrannosaurus Rex encounter in particular is a masterclass in cinematic tension building, as Spielberg builds up the reveal of the creature in an incredible way.  Utilizing the groundbreaking CGI animation from Industrial Light and Magic and full sized animatronics from the Stan Winston workshop, the T Rex is an incredibly realized creation that still holds up to this day.  And perhaps drawing from his “slow reveal” lessons from the making of Jaws (1975) Spielberg brilliantly establishes the T Rex’s arrival through something as simple as water ripples in a cup.  Though Crichton’s writing lends itself very well to the cinematic form, it’s Spielberg who made it work in such a brilliant fashion with his sense of how to make it all work on the screen.

One thing that I do think Spielberg translated perfectly in tact from Crichton’s novel is the corporatization of science within the park.  After that inspiring moment where we first see the dinosaurs, John Hammond then takes his guests to the main hub facility of the park.  There we see the sanitization of what Hammond has accomplished, presented through branding, merchandising , and state of the art presentation.  The film even has the characters watch what is essentially a propaganda piece in the form of a cartoon, which both spells out the science behind the film for the audience but also illustrates the naïve way that John Hammond is trying to market his park to a less informed public.  Spielberg definitely drew inspiration here from some attractions found in Disneyland and other parks, like the Carousel of Progress and Adventures Thru Inner Space, which also provided sanitized, propaganda messaging from their corporate sponsors like GE and Monsanto.  And though there initially is no malice behind what Hammond is trying to push through what he sees as entertainment, it nevertheless shows the way that science can often be manipulated in order to create the rosiest of outlooks to the wider public.  It’s in this part of the movie that we do see the movie reach the more cynical view of Crichton’s novel.  Though the realization and the vision behind the park is impressive, it’s once the scientists dig deeper into what’s actually going on inside the labs that they begin to see behind the corporate veneer of it all, and see it’s inherit danger.  The little details in Spielberg’s portrayal of Hammond’s compound really drive home this point, as there is a great contrast between the sweet wholesome confines of the facility and the ultimate wild reality of the park itself.  It’s especially poignant when Spielberg cuts to a stuffed animal version of a dinosaur in the gift shop right after the characters have been attacked by the real thing.  Ironically, an identical gift shop can be found today at Universal Studios right outside the Jurassic Park ride exit.  At least there the dinosaurs are not real.

“They never attack the same place twice.  They are testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically.  They remember.”

In both cases, the novel and the movie are both brilliant bodies of work, but they do take different angles on achieving the same message.  For Crichton, the perversion of science is inevitable and the consequences bear out on the people who unwisely play god without caution.  In Spielberg’s film, there is an added level of poignancy where the failure of the park becomes more of a tragedy than anything.  I think the most fascinating angle that Spielberg takes in his film is the way he portrays John Hammond.  For Crichton, he was the epitome of capitalism’s exploiting of science for all the wrong reasons.  Spielberg, on the other hand, almost in a way identifies with John Hammond, viewing him as a man wanting to create something positive for the world in an entertaining way, only to see his vision unrealized and shattered by the end.  I think that it’s why he cast a fellow film director like Attenborough in the role.  Like a lot of directors, Spielberg has had his share of disappointing failures go wrong even after embarking on them with the best intentions.  I don’t think it’s any coincidence that he added this element into the movie that was his follow-up to the disappointing Hook (1991).  At the same time, I hardly think that Spielberg was disrespecting the vision of Michael Crichton with his revisions.  After all, Crichton had a hand in the screenplay for this as well, taking cues from his original draft and also giving Spielberg the go ahead to make the changes that he needed, with David Keopp providing the extra material.  Whether you read the book or watch the movie, the message in the end remains the same.  We all must be wary of how we use science in near and distant future.  Science is a powerful tool that can help uplift society if used correctly, but it can also be a force for destruction if used improperly.  Basically, both Crichton and Spielberg’s ultimate intentions is for everyone to educate themselves and have a better understanding of Science in general.  Jurassic Park is a cautionary tale of unchecked Science run amok by people who should never have utilized it in the first place.  And on top of that, it is an incredibly vivid adventure that still stands the test of time, even as Science has caught us up to where it’s visions may even become a reality some day.

“Before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you wanna sell it.  Well…”