The American Reception of Tourneur’s Volpone in the 1940s

Introduction

Maurice Tourneur’s French screen version of Volpone,¹ the best film adaptation of Jonson’s satiric comedy,² was released in Paris in 1941 and reached the United States in 1947, at a time of social, ideological and economic change. A detailed analysis of the film’s paratext, which includes press reviews, interviews and a sophisticated advertising campaign throughout the United States between 1947 and 1949, yields valuable information on the changing nature of the targeted audience. Analysis of the socio-political and economic context casts light on the positive reception of Tourneur’s Volpone, an icon of French refinement that perfectly met the demands of American audiences for cultural capital in the prosperous aftermath of World War II.

The fact that the source text is an early seventeenth-century English comedy, transposed into the film medium by a twentieth-century French screenwriter and film director, and shown in a subtitled version all over the United States during the late 1940s, speaks of the key role played by adaptations as a means of ensuring the afterlife of classical texts.³ Well aware that texts are heavily dependent on their contexts of production and reception,⁴ I have paid special attention to the circumstances that surrounded the production and reception of Ben Jonson’s initial hypotext⁵ in 1606. For the same reason, I have looked into the different contexts that may have affected the play’s successive hypertextual transformations over a period of three hundred and fifty years.⁶

In order to offer an informed assessment of Tourneur’s film version, I have identified the most outstanding features of its previous hypotexts, especially Stefan Zweig’s 1926 German stage adaptation of the play⁷ and Jules Romains’ 1928 French adaptation of Zweig’s version.⁸ Taking into account that Romains was also the screenwriter of Tourneur’s film version of the play, special attention has been paid to the specificities of the film medium⁹ in terms of length, plot and character portrayal to account for the differences between both adaptations. Finally, as Tourneur’s French film was shown with English subtitles in the United States, the most relevant changes it underwent before its American release have been pointed out.

The political, ideological and commercial contexts of production and re-production have been addressed in all cases, especially when dealing with the film’s reception in the United States. The rich archival evidence I have gathered on the film’s distribution and reception has confirmed to what extent the text is dependent on its context of reception.¹⁰ These circumstances are particularly relevant when analyzing a text with a high satirical content, as both individuals and institutions are likely to take offence at it. This is why, for example, both Zweig and Romains, while retaining Jonson’s denunciation of greed and lust in their respective versions, adapted them to their target audiences.¹¹ These versions, moreover, explored the issue of xenophobia in a way that suited the personal tastes of their adaptors: sarcastic in the case of Zweig—himself a Jew—and more subtle in that of Romains. Attention to their reception history reveals that some texts were performed with few changes, whereas others were subjected to substantial pruning before being staged and/or shown. The first case applies to Zweig’s theatrical adaptation as performed in Germany in the late twenties, where, according to the reviews of contemporary newspapers, audiences did not find fault with any aspect of the play. The situation had been different in Austria, where Zweig’s adaptation was first performed on 6 November 1926. On that occasion, most reviews of the performances that took place in Vienna’s Burgtheater highlighted the play’s salaciousness,¹² in spite of the systematic deletions that the promptbook evidences.

The situation was reversed in the case of Romains’ stage adaptation, as no reviews of the 1928 performances at the Parisian Atelier¹³ condemned the text’s ribaldry, even though Romains’ adaptation of Zweig’s version did not remove a single word that could be deemed immoral. Romains was clearly...