DVD Chronicle (review)

What do It Happened One Night, Stagecoach, The Killers, Rear Window, Rashomon, and The Spider’s Stratagem have in common? The answer is that they all derive from short stories, It Happened One Night (1934) being based, for instance, on Samuel Hopkins Adams’s “Night Bus,” while Robert Siodmak’s 1946 The Killers adapts Hemingway’s famous story of the same title, as does Don Siegel’s 1964 remake of the film. Bernardo Bertolucci went to a Jorge Luis Borges story, “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” for The Spider’s Stratagem, one of a surprising number of screen works to stem from the fictions of this most allusive, most writerly, of writers. Sometimes the history of an adaptation is slightly more complicated: Ernest Haycox wrote the Saturday Evening Post story “Stage to Lordsburg” on which John Ford based Stagecoach, the 1939 Western making John Wayne a star, but Haycox shaped his own story after a nineteenth-century tale, Maupassant’s “Boule de suif.” As for Rashomon, Kurosawa adapted that most famous of all multiple-perspective films from two stories by the turn-of-the-century Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa. “In a Grove” supplied the basic story of a rape and murder witnessed from different viewpoints, and “Rashomon” the ruined-temple-in-the-rain setting for the Kurosawa’s narrative frame.

Obviously, there is something about the compression of the short story form, its focus and intensity, which suits filming. Reviewing Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Edgar Allan Poe observed that because short prose narratives could be perused in a single sitting, they could achieve a remarkably unified effect. Films are watched in one sitting too—at least when we see them in theaters, an increasingly rare experience these days. It takes a certain discipline, as readers of these DVD Chronicles will know, to sit in front of a television and DVD player and simply watch a film straight through, avoiding as much as possible what Poe called “worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal.” The reward of disciplined viewing is, precisely, the perception of a unified effect. Not that the effect is always successful. An origin in a short story is no guarantee of a film’s quality, and as it happens I am not particularly enthusiastic about The Spider’s Stratagem, which though beautifully photographed by Vittorio Storaro is cryptic and diffuse in a way Borges’s story is not. (In any case, the film is currently unavailable on DVD.) And in my view only the opening sequences of Siodmak’s The Killers are fully recommendable. These, faithful to the tight-lipped dialogue in Hemingway’s story, convey also its sense of menace emerging from banality, the tough-guy threats in the small-town luncheonette, the bullets finally coming to Ole Andreson as he lies passive and inarticulate and helpless on his rooming-house bed. The story gives only the vaguest of motives for the killing—unlike the film, which tacks on a long, moderately watchable back story, with Burt Lancaster as a fighter caught in the toils of a femme fatale played by Ava Gardner. The Criterion Collection DVD of Siodmak’s film also includes Don Siegel’s version, and an amusing rarity: a nineteen-minute, next-to-no-budget film adaptation of “The Killers” directed by the young Andrei Tarkovsky, who years later would write and direct the Russian sci-fi films Nostalghia and Solaris.

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