Dimmesdale as a liberal committed to the just treatment of his Indian brethren, a Dances with Wolves Kevin Costner, of the Puritan set. Reading the academic literature would indicate that such is an uphill battle. Academics almost universally loathe it, as did the mass media reviewers of the time. James M. Indeed, the popular reviews were more entertaining than the film itself.
Doth the critics protest too much? Demi Moore as Hester Prynne is no more insulting to literature than the American Budweiser is to, of course, far superior German beer.
These are, of course, fighting words with my colleagues, particularly those in literature departments. Heretofore, there has been one academic defender of the film, Laurence Raw. Raw deftly details how each film responds to historical and industrial forces. For example, in his analysis of the version of The Scarlet Letter , the one featuring silent film icon Colleen Moore in her final film, Raw argues that Robert G. For all its convincing analysis of the social and cultural context surrounding the films he studies, Raw is still confined to a one-to-one correspondence between a single Hawthorne work and only one film adapted from it.
The table of contents to Adapting Nathaniel Hawthorne to the Screen is a laundry list of film titles that replicate the Hawthorne canon: eight versions of The Scarlet Letter , one House of the Seven Gables , and two versions of The Scarecrow and Much recent work seeks to break the one-to-one correspondence model of the discipline of Adaptation Studies.
The process of adaptation does not only result in a film that illuminates a novel, it fundamentally changes, irreparably our understanding of that novel. It is my hope that such a method will illuminate the possibility of a truce between cinephiles and protectors of the literary canon. In an angry defense of her own film, Ms.
