In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Thomas Hardy on Screen, and: Seeing Hardy: Film and Television Adaptations of the Fiction of Thomas Hardy
  • Pamela Dalziel (bio)
Thomas Hardy on Screen, edited by T. R. Wright; pp. xiv + 216. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, £45.00, £17.99 paper, $75.00, $29.99 paper.
Seeing Hardy: Film and Television Adaptations of the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, by Paul J. Niemeyer; pp. viii + 302. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2003, $35.00 paper, £21.50 paper.

The titles under review are the only two books thus far published on screen adaptations of Thomas Hardy's fiction. Until recently there have been relatively few adaptations to discuss. Although Hardy's novels were popular with American and British film-makers during the early years of cinema—at least four silent films were produced during Hardy's lifetime and another in 1929, the year after his death—there were no Hardy films made in English during the 1930s and 1940s, and only one (a children's film based on "Our Exploits at West Poley") in the 1950s. John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) was followed by several BBC television adaptations and Roman Polanski's Tess (1979), but it was not until the mid-1990s that Hardy attracted sustained attention from feature film and television producers.

The history of Hardy on screen therefore does not contribute much to the history of cinema or television. Of the thirteen contributors to T. R. Wright's Thomas Hardy on Screen, only Roy Pierce-Jones discusses the virtual absence of Hardy screen adaptations for nearly forty years, and in the process provides an overview of the BBC personalities and policies that led to Hardy's initial exclusion from the socially conservative drama series broadcast on Sundays. With the exception of Pierce-Jones, all of Wright's contributors are known primarily for their work on Hardy rather than on film. Indeed, the collection is intended for Hardyans, not for film studies specialists. This observation is not a denigration but a definition; almost all the essays are strong and should be essential reading for both Hardyans and those who teach Hardy's novels, which are often first encountered by students in screen adaptations.

The first half of Thomas Hardy on Screen consists of Wright's introduction, three general essays (Wright on Hardy's "cinematic" narrative techniques, Roger Webster on the "painterly" visuality of Hardy's novels, and Simon Gatrell on filming "Wessex"), and three historical essays (Peter Widdowson on the silent films, Pierce-Jones on adapting the short stories, and Judith Mitchell on representing masculinity in the 1990s). The remaining seven essays—arranged chronologically by the novels' publication dates rather than the films' release dates—focus on individual adaptations of six of the seven novels that Hardy effectively canonized by classifying them for his collected Wessex Edition as "Novels of Character and Environment." Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) is awarded two essays: John Paul Riquelme's on Polanski's controversial Tess and Richard Nemesvari's on the LWT/A&E mini-series Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1998). The only Novel of Character and Environment not discussed is Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), recently adapted as a not-for-purists romantic comedy first telecast by ITV on Boxing Day 2005, hence after Wright's collection had gone to press.

Most of the collection's essays are intelligent close readings of the adaptations in relation to the letter and the spirit of Hardy's texts, though the contributors avoid acknowledging their own assumptions about the "problematic . . . 'essence' of Hardy's work" (1), which, as Wright observes, is precisely what is under discussion. For example, [End Page 744] Rosemarie Morgan, ignoring the absence of a critical consensus with respect to Hardy's most bafflingly complex heroine, states categorically that Eustacia Vye is a "tragic heroine" (116), a judgement that inevitably influences Morgan's response to the 1994 Hallmark Hall of Fame Return of the Native. Morgan rightly points out that the television film translates Hardy's novel into "pure romance" (109), as popularly defined, and erases Hardy's "rebellious woman" (120 [qtd. from Hardy]). She accordingly considers the opening shots...

pdf

Share