While preparing A Double Life for Universal-International, director George Cukor doubted whether Ronald Colman had the physical and vocal capacity to play the leading role of Broadway theatrical star Anthony John. The actor himself was rather apprehensive-especially as Garson Kanin's and Ruth Gordon's script called for him to play extended scenes from Othello. In an interview with columnist Hedda Hopper he claimed that the part "had everything. I read it and I loved it, realizing, as any actor would, that it offered the opportunity of a lifetime" (Hopper B3j. Following extended consultations with noted Shakespearean actor/manager Walter Hampden, Colman eased his way into the part; his efforts were rewarded with a Best Actor Oscar in 1948 (the only Oscar he ever received in a lengthy movie career).1While A Double Life offers a fascinating example of Shakespeare's tragedy performed in the grand manner characteristic of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century romantic actors, it appears to show how interpretations of Shakespeare (especially in terms of acting styles) have shifted since the late Victorian era, when actor-managers toured the country as well as playing on Broadway with their repertoires. Colman's emotionally raw characterization seems archaic, a throwback to a long-forgotten era of theatrical oarnstorming that seems thoroughly out or place in the movies. At the same time I suggest that Kanin and Gordon use the past to comment implicitly on the present; while new approaches to acting such as the Method have evolved-and achieved considerable popularity in the late forties in movies and the theater alike-they might be equally destructive to the performer's sense of being. The film proposes that the only way for actors (like all human beings) to cope with the demands of the social and theatrical roles required of them is to interpret "adaptation" as a psychological process helping them come to terms with new experiences both mentally and physically. A Double Life reminds us that adaptation is not solely an act of literary and/or media-related transformation but concerns all of us as we try to deal with new phenomena around us.The script had been penned several years previously by Kanin and Gordon and sold to Columbia Pictures. Then Harry Cohn, head of the studio, decided not to make the picture and refused even to pay for the script. The Kanins subsequently sola it to Universal-International and arranged to borrow their friend Cukor from MGM. At the time A Double Life was filmed, the studio had embarked on an ambitious program of commissioning prestige pictures, as well as assuming responsibility for the American distribution of J. Arthur Rank's British hits Great Expectations (1946) and Hamlet (1947). Under new head of production William Dozier, the studio stopped the assembly-line production of B movies and serials and invested heavily in more up-market projects: A Double Life being one of the most successful both artistically and financially.2 Originally Laurence Olivier had been slated for the title role, but as he proved unavailable Colman was cast instead.Although both of them penned autobiographies, both Kanin and Gordon remained remarkably silent about the script's origins, other than recounting the painful process of seeing it rejected by Columbia and picked up by Universal-International. Yet it is clear that they were fascinated by the actors of the past. Described by her husband as someone knowing "more theatrical history than anyone I nave ever encountered" (Kanin 30), Gordon revered actors who took on the difficult dual roles of performer and producer-at one Eoint in her autobiography she celebrates Sarah Bernhardt, who "did things er own way" (273). Kanin's novel One Hell of an Actor (1977) concerns the author's quest to find out about the life of John J. Tumulty, a barnstormer who played Shakespeare throughout the West Coast in the mid-nineteenth century, as a possible subject for a screenplay or stage play. …
Orson Chimes at Midnight (1965) performs a cinematic collage. It adapts several early modern texts across genres and authors, comprising multiple Shakespeare plays, including histories and a comedy; and comprising a history proper, too, as it integrates Holinshed's Chronicles as well.1 The film, moreover, incorporates several narrative modes, which are linked by their shared concern with past. Indeed, scholars have long observed that Chimes at Midnight positions as a sustained meditation on memory and history. Jack J. Jorgens, for instance, states that film show[s] fifteenth century filtered through memory and imagination (110); and Andrew M. McLean writes that film leadfs] viewer to an understanding of his place in history and of forces of history as they operate in life (197). But critics overlook tension between memory and history in film. And this reflects a more general oversight in critical treatments of Chimes at Midnight, which have not fully grasped contests film stages between and among its various narrative modes and media.Michael Anderegg recognizes one dimension of inter-medial tension in film when he contends that governing strategy of Chimes at Midnight is the rewriting of Shakespeare's text, a rewriting that includes an attempted erasure of writing, a critique of rhetoric, indeed an undermining of language itself (126). Robert H. Bell takes this recognition further, arguing that Welles's film [Chimes at Midnight] comprises a critique of language, in ways that resemble movement beyond language toward spectacle (20). Anderegg's focus on film's writing is instructive, and Bell astutely suggests that film critiques writing to ultimately privilege its own medium. But Bell does not flesh out just how it does so, and neither critic explains carefully wrought relationships between film's multiple writings and narrative modes and media. It is my purpose in this essay to demonstrate how Chimes at Midnight effectively organizes its different narrative modes and media-including memory, history, writing, theater, sound, image, and, more broadly, film-establishing a cinematic hierarchy through various narrative contests that announce themselves at very outset of film. In first section of what follows I will demonstrate how film presents a logic of containment and displacement to assert its own cinematic predominance among several media, effectively reworking memory, history, writing, and theater in its own moving image.2 In my second section I will explain how film stages a sustained inter-medial contest between sound ancf image by thematizing it through what Dean A. Hoffman astutely explains as film's comprehensive engagement with a matrix of shifting power relations in Shakespeare's and Holinshed's texts (104).3 I will conclude by expounding Falstaffs key symbolic role in film's inter-medial dynamics.Welles expressed his investment in inter-medial aspect of Chimes at Midnight in an interview about film. When asked by Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio how he conceives scenes, Welles responds, Music. Music and poetry. It's that rather than simply visual (160). He goes on to suggest that comes out of these media, saying, With me, is a to what poetical and musical form dictates; a solution, as I will conceive it here, to competing demands of poetical and musical forms or, as I will call them, written and aural modes of film (Cobos and Rubio 160). The and kinetic image is also a to several other medial modes in film. Resolving and regulating dictates of written, aural, and theatrical media as well as memorial and historical narrative modes that make up Chimes at Midnight, visual, I will argue, is a solution to all of them, indeed filmic of all of them, produced by their admixture, and so contains them all. …
The culture and entertainment industries have a long history of producin cross-media adaptations and spin-offs of popular stories, characters, an fictional worlds. Fans of books, plays, movies, television programs, comic strips, graphic novels, computer games, and even theme park rides are offered numerous opportunities to extend their enjoyment of a particular work or experience by re-engaging with its pleasures in another format. The opportunities for them to do so escalated in the second half of the twentieth century, with the emergence of huge media conglomerates that recognized the financial advantages of exploiting their most popular properties across multiple subdivisions of their businesses.The Dirty Harry franchise is a case in point. Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood and based on an original screenplay, was released by Warner Bros, in December 1971. It would go on to become the fifth highest American box office earner of 1972, helping to push its already popular popular star star to to the the top to spot in the annual Quigley list for the first of five times s (Steinberg 443; Quigley). It was the beginning of a journey that would see Warners Tamers continue to develop sequels and spin-offs for a further thirty-seven years.A great deal has already been written about Dirty Harry and its movie sequels. My purpose here is neither to retread those analyses, nor to attempt justice to the full range of Dirty Harry entertainment products. What I wish to do instead is to consider an intriguing but lesser-known group of entries in this franchise, namely its twelve spin-off novels, written under the pseudonym of Dane Hartman and published at two-month intervals between June 1981 and April 1983. The titles in this series are Duel for Cannons (1981), Death on the Docks (1981), The Long Death (1981), The Mexico Kill (1982) ,Family Skeletons (1982 City of Blood (1982), Massacre at Russian River (1982), Hatchet Men (1982), The Killin gConnection , The Blood of Strangers (1982), Death in the Air (1983), and The Dealer of Death (1983)These books, which contain original stories that extend the world of Dirty Harry, interest me for a number of reasons, the foremost being the ways they relate to the films and to other components of the franchise. With this in mind, there are four key issues I wish to address. First is the nature of the target readership and the ways the authors and publisher sought to cater to their presumed preferences; second, how they developed the themes of the three films that preceded them; third, significant differences in content and mode of address that arose from the change of medium; and, finally, the differences in style and content that are attributable to their specific era of production. Before I turn to these questions, it seems useful to provide a brief overview of the contexts in which this book series exists.BackgroundWithin months of Dirty Harryu0027s arrival in cinemas, its first film sequel had already gone into development. Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976) were Doth tremendously successful at the domestic and international box office, with each film grossing more than its predecessor (Box Office Mojo). Warners obviously thought they were on to a good thing. As a commercial outfit in a high-risk industry, continuing to milk this tried-and-tested franchise must nave seemed like a no-brainer. The fly in the ointment was that Eastwood thought differently and pulled the plug on the movie series. It would be a further seven years before he relented and gave them Harryu0027s highest-grossing comeback film, Sudden Impact, as a welcome Christmas gift for 1983 (Allison 231.But, by the early 1980s, Warners was far more than a film studio. Warner Communications Inc. (WCI) had become the worldu0027s largest leisure conglomerate, with its risks spread across a host of other divisions including music, book and magazine publishing, cable communications, consumer electronics, and toys, among other enterprises (Gustafson 574-80). …
George Bernard Shawu0027s Pygmalion, the classic story of the phonetics expert who transforms a Cockney flower girl into a by giving her lessons in speaking properly, makes extensive use of the human voice as a trope in order to explore the nature of subjectivity. Over the course of Eliza Doolittleu0027s education at the hands of Professor Henry Higgins, we witness a split in her subjecthood represented by her changed voice. quickly teaches us that talking a lady requires an elaborate social performance, a kind of passing that compromises Elizau0027s sense of self. Even her initial desire to talk like a lady suggests an awareness of such a social performance, one that would render her gendered and classed self and body into a more acceptable entity, one that does not have to reassert her status as a good girl. At the start of the play, her voice and her material reality match. By the end, Eliza has become a proper voice in a body and context she does not recognize, signifying a split subjectivity, leaving her to simply ask, What am I fit for? only option available to reconcile this split, to find her way toward true subjecthood, according to Shaw, is to leave Higgins, discover a form of economic autonomy suitable to her new identity, and create new relationships not defined by the power dynamic intrinsic to her tie with her teacher. To form a romantic attachment to Higgins would be the very thing that would prevent Eliza from shaping her own subjectivity, the very thing that would undercut Shawu0027s claims for his character-and of course it is the very thing that audiences have insisted upon since the premiered.Every published edition of the has for its final scene some version of Eliza leaving Higgins to make her way in the world, finding economic autonomy and self-respect in the form of employment, and marrying Freddy Eynsford-Hill, a poor but pleasant booby who has fallen in love with Eliza and represents an opportunity, in her eyes, for love and companionship on relatively equal terms (possibly even terms wherein she might hold more sexual and economic power).1 1938 adaptation of Pygmalion, written by Shaw, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller and co-directed by Howard and Anthony Asquith, puts forth claims similar to those of its source text up until the conclusion, and then exhibits the same kind of confusion around its own ending that has been part of that textu0027s history and reception. film version has Hilleru0027s Eliza return to Wimpole Street to gaze adoringly at Howardu0027s Higgins while he asks, with what Shaw called, somewhat acidly, a lovelorn complexion (Dukore 142): Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza? This is similar to Shawu0027s language from the final act of his original play, presented with a very different physical stance and vocal inflection.The film engages voice as trope, permitting an exploitation of cinematic strategies around voice and sound tnat would have been impossible in the original stage production; these strategies highlight the ethical questions at the heart of Shawu0027s as well as the difficulty artists and audiences alike have found in resolving them. As Nicholas Wilhams has pointed out, [has] an ambiguity of ending that makes easy interpretation unsatisfactory (145). This comment is echoed by Paul Bauschatz: More problematic all around, is the unresolved ending of the play (182); and Nicholas Grene: The relationship between Higgins and Eliza, in particular its conclusion, has become the critical question of Pygmalion (111). At the same time, a number of critics, especially Donald Costello, have observed that the film is well-served by its use of visual imagery, sound and music, and editing: it does well, as a film, many of the things that are simply not possible on stage.2 By focusing on how the film exploits sound, especially Elizau0027s voice in relation to her screen presence, we can see how the adaptation simultaneously instantiates Shawu0027s metaphoric use of voice and his ethical claims about subjectivity-and compromises the fundamental stance of the source as so many productions have done before. …
