Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924-2013.

Knodt, Ellen Andrews

Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924-2013. By Candace Ursula Grissom. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014. 252 pp. $40.00.

Candace Grissoms Preface to her detailed study of the films adapted from the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway explains her critical stance and her "systematic method of film adaptation criticism"(2). She focuses on the image of the ouroboros, a dragon-like creature that swallows its own tail, to illustrate that authors both profit from and are harmed by their celebrity status: "Like the ouroboros, both Fitzgerald and Hemingway's careers moved in an endless circle, nourished by the cult of celebrity during their early years, but destroyed by it once the authors became famous and were forced to work within the confines of personas that live on today as self-perpetuating legends" (1). She posits that the film adaptations of their works follow this circle as well, incorporating their celebrity lives along with their texts.

To evaluate the two dozen films, Grissom defines the best films as "cohesive cinema" containing a "consistent artistic vision" that produces a "harmonious ... adaptation of the original printed work" (2). She derives criteria for "cohesive cinema" from six broad questions, the basis of which is "thematic consistency between the original author and the source text as well as the filmmaker and the adaptation" (2). In her analysis, Grissom refers frequently to adaptations that adhere closely to the original text ("conversion"); that alter texts slightly ("interpretation"); or that change texts markedly ("revision"), though each of these approaches is found in successful and unsuccessful films (2-7).

In her analysis, Grissom provides a wealth of information for film aficionados with two chapters on Fitzgeralds films and two chapters on Hemingway's, both grouped chronologically. Grissom examines directors' decisions to adhere or depart from the authors' texts, authors' collaboration, back stories of actors chosen and rejected for parts and their suitability for their roles, and screenwriters' challenges (such as the censorship imposed by the Hays Code (20)). Scholars of the authors' biographies and original texts may take issue with some of Grissoms conclusions. For example, she mentions that an early film of The Great Gatsby (1949) avoids censorship because it doesn't mention Jordan Baker's "sexual liaison with Nick, which is detailed in Fitzgerald's original novel" (24). And Grissom praises Baz Luhrman's film of The Great Gatsby (2013) as "genius" for beginning with Nick Carraway's writing his account at the suggestion of his psychiatrist in the "Perkins Sanitarium" because "any audience member ... knows that both the author and his wife Zelda were under psychiatric care for significant portions of their lives" (92). She further defines this kind of therapy as "the modern-day equivalent of Catholic confession, and Fitzgerald was Catholic," thus in her opinion making Nick in the Luhrman treatment a "trustworthy" character (92).

In her chapters on Fitzgerald, Grissom explains that films from 1924-1962 produced largely "revisionist" adaptations of short stories "The Camel's Back" in the film Conductor 1492 (1924) and "Babylon Revisited" in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) in which directors changed the original texts markedly, introducing plot twists and characters not in the original works. Two novel adaptations include an "interpretative" film of The Great Gatsby (1949), "which fails ... because it strays from his central message"(25); and a faithful "conversionist" adaptation of Tender is the Night (1962), which Grissom praises as "one of the most completely consistent artistic visions in the Fitzgerald film canon"(34).

The 1974-2013 Fitzgerald adaptations include two different versions of The Great Gatsby (1974 and 2013); successful interpretations of The Last Tycoon (1976) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008); and the failed revisionist version of The Beautiful and the Damned (2008). Grissom details the faithfulness of Francis Ford Coppolas script of the 1974 Gatsby as an excellent example of a conversionist treatment of the novel, but lauds Baz Luhrman's interpretative 2013 film for its "stellar cast", "lavish set designs," and "top-quality musical performance" to "create a work of cohesive cinema that encircles another generation in the Fitzgerald ouroboros" (91).

Turning from Fitzgerald films to those of Hemingway's works, Grissom examines two film versions (1932 and 1957) of A Farewell to Arms in Chapters Three and Four, which were vehicles for the actress wives of the respective directors Frank Borzage (wife Helen Hays) and David Selznick (wife Jennifer Jones) as well as wholesale changes from the original text, garnering Hemingway's disgust at their treatment. Borzage, Grissom explains, was a conservative Roman Catholic who sanitized the text (marrying Frederic and Catherine) because of his traditional values as well as the requirements of the Hays Code (103). Selznick's treatment, Grissom concludes, is more faithful to the original text, but she admits that his previous hit Gone With The Wind affected filming of war scenes "toward the spectacular" (171). Furthermore, Hemingway and Selznick clashed personally over the casting of Rock Hudson as Frederic Henry and Jennifer Jones, as Catherine (171). On balance, Grissom concludes that Selznick's film deserves more credit than it has received and is "a work of cohesive cinema" (178). In contrast to this project, Hemingway successfully lobbied for the actors Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman to play his protagonists in For Whom The Bell Tolls and reportedly was largely pleased by the resulting film (1932). Grissom agrees that the film is "one of the best visual interpretations of a Hemingway novel" (117).

Two films exemplify the complexities--both positive and negative--of an author's collaboration with filmmakers. First, the film treatment of To Have and Have Not (1944), starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, which Grissom terms "a cinematic classic" (127), is attributed to Hemingway's agreeing to plot changes in his original text. In contrast, Hemingway's oversight on The Old Man and the Sea (1958) complicated filming and likely doomed the result: "when the actual author of a text is too actively involved in the filming process, the result can ironically stray even farther from the intention of the original ..."(187). Grissom explains that Hemingway's insistence on technical details of marlin fishing, including a futile month in Peru to find a "thousand-pound" marlin, led to huge expense and the decision of second director John Sturges to intercut scenes from a fishing documentary supplemented by a foam rubber marlin (192-93). In addition to the technical difficulties, the over-reliance on Hemingway's original text and an obviously non-Cuban, overweight Spencer Tracy as Santiago ended in critical failure and "a financial disaster at the box office" (193).

In the study of Hemingway films, Grissom provides many fascinating details, but, as with Fitzgerald's works, she sometimes draws conclusions on Hemingway's original texts that may seem unwarranted to scholars. For example, in contrasting the 1964 film of "The Killers" with the 1946 version, Grissom criticizes the later film for "the absence of a fundamental struggle between good and evil, which is present in all the Nick Adams stories" (205). Yet, Grissom treats other Hemingway works perceptively. In examining films of Islands in the Stream (1977) and The Garden of Eden (2008), Grissom analyzes the Hemingway posthumous novels more extensively than the films. She refers frequently to scholars to explain the autobiographical content of both novels: Hemingway's relationship with his sons depicted in Islands (215-17) and his relationships with his wives in Garden (226-31). Though she does so in order to contrast both films with the posthumous works, she seems more interested in the experiments Hemingway attempted in the novels than the merits of the film adaptations, both of which she feels fail to achieve thematic consistency.

Returning frequently to her image of the ouroboros, the dragon that eats its own tail, and her central theme of the celebrity authors whose very celebrity imprisons them in a circle of their own making, Candace Grissom finds through successes and failures, the films of F. Scott Fitzgerald's and Ernest Hemingway's fiction "will continue to turn, gathering in at least one more Generation" (100).

Ellen Andrews Knodt

Penn State, Abington