Central to the politics of the three adaptations I will explore in the context of West Germany in the 1950s—Carol Reed’sThe Third Man(1949) based upon the story by Graham Greene, David Lean’sThe Bridge on the River Kwai(1957) based upon the best-selling novel by Pierre Boulle, and Orson Welles’sThe Trial(1962) based upon the novel of the same name by Franz Kafka—was the phenomenon of the Cold War following the military defeat of Germany and the end of World War II. As a political and ideological showdown between the state socialism of the former...

“Shelved and safe” as a twentieth-century film classic, it is probably difficult for most filmgoers today to imagine the hope and enthusiasm that greeted the 1949 release of Carol Reed’sThe Third Manin Europe. Based upon a short novel by Graham Greene,The Third Man—set in a postwar ally-occupied Vienna—tells the story of the naive American writer, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), who discovers the corrupt activities of his allegedly murdered American friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), and reluctantly helps the British police officers, Calloway and Paine (Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee) apprehend him. A romantic subplot focuses upon...

Inundated with awards in 1958, including seven Academy Awards and three New York Film Critics Circle Awards,The Bridge on the River Kwai, produced by the noted Jewish/Austrian/American producer Sam Spiegel for Columbia pictures and directed by the British director David Lean, tells the story of the construction of the Singapor-Bangkok railway by British POWs (prisoners of war) for the Japanese during World War II. It is based upon the bestselling novel by the Frenchman Pierre Boulle. In the film, a captured British troop led by Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) marches into a Japanese prisoner of war camp and is...

The American auteur and actor Orson Welles’s lifelong interest in a critique of fascism was evident in his 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’sThe Trialas well as in the ways he modified the story for his purposes. Welles’s reading of Kafka as a “prophet of fascism,” whose Josef K. actively resists his oppressors—even if to no apparent avail—sought to shift the story’s focus from Josef K.’s anonymous, personal torment to the larger institutional and political structures of the postwar period, totalitarianism, fascism, state communism, and Cold War angst. Within these structures, Welles suggests that Josef K.’s irrational...

Barbara Klinger has made a case for developing and improving the field of reception study of film by paying closer attention to: 1) public combat over film meaning rather than unities, 2) historicizing inquiry beyond industrial practices, and 3) pursuing diachronic and synchronic meanings.¹ Implicit in her three points is a framework for an understanding of “the historical” in relationship to film studies and adaptation studies to which I subscribe: that a focus upon conflict rather than consensus can tell us more about relations between audiences and films in the past; that knowledge of the past should be sought beyond...

Throughout 1995 and 1996, a series of film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels were released to audiences around the world. Beginning, as one critic put it, “almost subliminally” withClueless—a loose adaptation ofEmmaset in a contemporary Beverly Hills high school—written and directed by Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), the trend continued withPersuasion, a British production adapted for the screen by Nick Dear and directed by Roger Michell,Sense and Sensibility, adapted by Emma Thompson and directed by Ang Lee,Pride and Prejudice, adapted by Andrew Davies and directed by Simon Langton for British...

While filmmakers were engaged in postfeminist explorations of identity issues in their adaptations of Jane Austen’s works, the critical reception of the films tended to frame the “Austen boom” as a conservative response to postmodern liberation. However, the feminist playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s review ofSense and Sensibilitystood out by linking the Austen films to questions of contemporary Hollywood depictions of female character: “Precisely 200 years ago, Jane Austen was writing great parts for women. She didn’t have to meet with a creative executive with a post–Thelma and Louiseagenda or a Hollywood agent with a client list of...

Close on the heels of the Jane Austen dramatizations came a series of adaptations of novels by the Anglo-American novelist Henry James:The Portrait of a Lady, directed by Jane Campion,Washington Square, directed by Agnieszka Holland, andThe Wings of the Dove, directed by Iain Softley.¹ Whereas all of the Austen dramatizations had been directed by men, two of the three James adaptations were directed by women, a fact that sparked commentary from several critics, emphasizing the extent to which they as “foreign” (non-U.S.) directors might be overly intimidated by so illustrious a modernist as James.² However, the release...