Brian McFarlane,
Screen Adaptations: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations: The Relationship Between Text and Film.
London: Methuen Publishing Ltd. 2008
ISBN: 978-0713679093
US$19.95 (pb)
224pp

The cover of this book features a near naked man and woman kissing passionately in the rain. If this rather startling modern depiction of Pip and Estella in Great Expectations (USA 1998) seems incongruous, it’s partly because the hold of the 1946 David Lean version of the novel is still so strong that even more than sixty years on many of us still visualize Dickens’s story in its terms. Lean’s film was of course, to an important extent, a love story, but it contained none of the overt sexual passion of this image from Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 version of the novel. In offering a “genuinely sexy take” (p. 126), Cuarón succeeded in investing a familiar tale with new significance for a more individualistic and hedonistic age.

Brian McFarlane argues that the benchmark of a successful adaptation is not “that tiresome word” fidelity but the extent to which the film-maker can offer a “bold re-imagining” (p. 143) and create a new work with its own thematic agenda. The goal is to achieve an artistic independence that allows the film to live anew for its own time. Yet as McFarlane acknowledges, the continuing force of great literature makes its influence difficult to disregard completely. For it is hard to resist comparison “when the original is a kind of masterpiece”. In the case of Great Expectations the difficulty is compounded by the fact that there are two masterpieces at stake. Since 1946, every film-maker has had to lay the cinematic ghost of a great film-maker so that to hear of Great Expectations should no longer be to think of Lean’s Great Expectations (UK 1946).

It is a testament to the stature of the 1946 version that even today it still seems no more possible for a film adaptation of Great Expectations to escape Lean than Dickens himself. The success of the Cuarón version was to be able to offer a new viewpoint for a different time, but it was still in part an act of homage to both Dickens and Lean.

The first part of McFarlane’s book is a literary appreciation of Dickens’s novel, which explains the enduring qualities that have caused not only the cinema, but also radio, television, theatre and contemporary fiction to continue to revisit it. In establishing the literary brilliance of the original text with an insightful analysis that made me want to revisit the novel, he underlines the extent to which Dickens continues to demand his due, but also the nature of the challenge that faces the would-be adaptor.

To the extent that narrative is the common ingredient to both novel and film, the success of an adaptation will depend on the film-maker’s attitude to this critical interface. To illuminate the task of translation involved, McFarlane turns to Roland Barthes’s useful notion of cardinal functions – those events that”are crucial to the working out of the plot” (p. 11). He then constructs a table of cardinal functions for Great Expectations, which provides a valuable point of reference for his detailed discussion of the various screen adaptations that follows in the middle part of the book. The point that emerges most strongly is that to respect the cardinal functions alone is not enough. Contributing just as much to the final essence of a novel are what Barthes would call the “integrational functions” (p. 93) of mood, character and atmosphere. Disregard for these values in the 1934 Hollywood adaptation of Great Expectations resulted in a film that contained “events following each other more or less as they do in the novel but without the novel’s – or anyone else’s – sense of their significance” (p. 85).

McFarlane’s perceptive account makes it all too clear why this production should now be long forgotten. Indeed, one of the attractions of his book is the clinical efficiency with which it dissects the mediocre. When he writes of the 1975 would-be musical TV version of the novel whose songs were removed during the production because they stopped the action dead, his appraisal neatly evokes the sterility of a film that somehow managed to remove the essential melodrama of Dickens as well as the songs. “We can most easily imagine [the] film as a Christmas afternoon television programme whose sated viewers won’t feel they’ve missed much if they doze off” (p. 110).

As a medium that has over the years proved itself such an effective host for the weekly instalments of the mini-series, McFarlane points out that television seems well suited to a nineteenth-century author who wrote for serial publication. It is no surprise to learn that there have been five such adaptations over the years. McFarlane finds some real virtues in the two examples he examines in detail, yet for all its theoretical advantages it’s hard not to conclude that television suffers from some kind of a domestic smallness that prevents it from eclipsing the best of the cinema versions.

So, finally, we find ourselves returning to Lean. McFarlane’s detailed discussion of the Lean adaptation, which on the basis of chronology one might expect to find some where between the beginning and the middle of the book, is put off until the very end. McFarlane explains that the decision was determined by the film’s high critical reputation: “I wanted readers to have in mind … the other kinds of treatment the novel has attracted, without their simply being seen as cowering in the long shadow of the Lean film” (p. vii). But the effect is to throw an emphasis on the very length of that shadow, for our sense of the most important rendezvous having been deferred encourages us to regard the earlier discussions as warm-up acts for the main attraction.

While McFarlane’s decision is an admirable gesture of neutrality, it is his verdict that Lean’s version remains unsurpassed that most justifies the long wait. It is the most Dickensian and yet the most cinematic adaptation of the novel; Lean is true to an inspired author, but also true to himself as an equally inspired film-maker. There is a sense of coming full circle: while the first part of the book explained the qualities that account for why we continue to return to Dickens’ novel, the last part explains why we will continue to return to Lean’s film – a film that exists, as McFarlane puts it, not just for its time but for all times.

Charles Drazin,
Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Created on: Friday, 24 July 2009