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ELT 41 : 4 1998 outted him as a repressed homosexual—a revelation that has caused no end of speculation and distress" (16). Does Hanson mean the Episcopalian Bishop Spong of New Jersy? Hanson fails to supply why, when, or where he did so. Was it in a book, an essay, a sermon? Where could we find the "speculation and distress" Spong caused? Unfortunately, Spong's name isn't even listed in the abbreviated index. Decadence and Catholicism, regrettably, is a disappointing work. Hanson's volume reads as a series of prolonged personal essays. Over and over again, he uses such expressions as "I think," "I find," "I presume ," "I would argue"; and then for variety's sake, he employs the editorial "We are told," "We might suspect," "We might well wonder," and "We might ask." Yes, we might ask. G. A. Cevasco St. John's University The Hidden Truth Gene Moore, ed. Conrad on Film. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xv + 262 pp. $59.95 THE MOST SIGNIFICANT of the 86 entries in the Conrad filmography , all of which are discussed in this book, are Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936), based on The Secret Agent; Marc AUégret's Razumov (1936), based on Under Western Eyes; Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands (1952), the best screen adaptation; Richard Brooks's Lord Jim (1965); Andrzej Wajda's The Shadow Line (1976); Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979)—and Eleanor Coppola's fascinating documentary , Hearts ofDarkness (1991), about the making of her husband's film. Francis Coppola's brilliant work, apart from the quest, has very little to do with Heart ofDarkness, which is not even credited in the film. His analogy between Belgian and American imperialism is false because the United States was fighting an ideological war to stop the spread of Communism and did not wish permanently to occupy and exploit the riches of Vietnam. The main problem in the film was the portrayal of Kurtz as a spellbinding speaker and towering intellectual. In the old days we'd have Henry Fonda or Gregory Peck playing a doctor or lawyer, wearing spectacles and using a few polysyllabic words. Now we have a mumbling, inarticulate Marlon Brando reading in the depths of the jungle a major source of The Waste Land: Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, in the Anchor paperback edition. 478 BOOK REVIEWS Christopher Hampton's The Secret Agent (1996) and Alastair Reid's Nostromo (1997) are too recent to be considered. The former is dark and dreary, with no charwoman Mrs. Neale, Stevie too attractive and alert, Winnie's motives unclear and the poignant cab scene, in which Winnie's mother voluntarily goes to the poorhouse, poorly done. The latter is well acted and visually beautiful, with a clear plot line and serious treatment of the political themes. There is also Swept from the Sea (1998), based on "Amy Foster," a lush, "romantic" and embarrassing perversion of Conrad 's story. The great irony is that the potentially finest films about Conrad's work were never completed, never begun or never released. Orson WeIles 's Heart ofDarkness (1939) was never finished. We have evidence, including two half-hour radio plays, about how he might have done it, but no film. David Lean's Nostromo, with a screenplay by Hampton and Robert Bolt, starring Marlon Brando, Eric Porter and Dennis Quaid, was canceled when Lean died in April 1991. And Mark Peploe's Victory (1995), with Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill, was, according to the American production company I spoke to recently, held up by the distributor Miramax. That company "was not behind the film" and never released it. Conrad on Film includes 17 illustrations and has, on its striking dust jacket, a still of Trevor Howard being paddled upriver by a native crew in Outcast of the Islands. The extensive bibliography contradicts the editor 's assertion that Conrad is "certainly not [studied] by film scholars" (32). The index, which does not differentiate between identical titles of novels and films and has no separate entries for these films, is extremely poor. Most of the contributors—including four European academics, three graduate students and one librarian—are...

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