HISTORICAL NOVELS AND FILM ADAPTATIONS

And the subject of this thread is: ??

Judging a historical novel by its film adaptation is an impossible task. Take Doctor Zhivago, for instance. The film adaptation is far superior to the novel for the average reader, who would lack the Russian historical frame of reference that Pasternak takes for granted in setting his novel. Moreover, the opening scene of the film, so crucial to bringing the film fill circle, is a mere postscript in the novel.
Moving on to "Lawrence of Arabia", another classic, it is a film based upon a war memoir (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom), yet the events in the film script demand that fictional characters stand in for historical ones. Thus we have a fictional character (Dryden) based upon Mark Sykes speaking of himself in the third person as some stranger ("an English Civil Servant"), to a T. E. Lawrence who worked with Mark Sykes in the Arab Bureau, and who disagreed with his view of the Arabs but respected him as a man.

Films have to be judged as films, and novels, on a more literary plane, as novels. And to critique a novel, you first have to readit.

Edited by lirelou - 30-Jul-2013 at 23:28

Belated apologies,lirelou and Windemere, for your thoughtful responses. I did not see them until today. I quite agree that "judging a historical novel by its film adaptation is an impossible task." At the same time, as you say, Windemere, "Anne Boleyn's role in history wasn't very well known until that film came out." I studied and taught history for more than 50 years, but am now retired. There are many films now that I would have used back in those old days.-Ron
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I wrote a personal piece when I heart that Peter O'Toole died. I submit it below for your possible pleasure.
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Peter James O'Toole(1932-2013) was an Irish-born, British educated, actor of fame who died last weekend. He began working in the theatre, and gaining recognition as a Shakespearean actor, while I was making a name for myself in a small town in Ontario in pee-wee and bantam baseball for teens and pre-teens. O'Toole made his film debut in 1959 when I was in grade 10, and in love with a girl around the corner named Susan Gregory.

I have put together in the 2300 words which follow several pieces of prose and poetry, pieces I wrote in recent years since retiring after a 50 year student and working life: 1949 to 1999, and after reinventing myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist. These words below serve as a personal reflection on the man and his life, and my own life, our lives sometimes in a curious and, for me at least, interesting synchronicity-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, George Town, Tasmania.
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CINEMATOGRAPHY and ECCENTRICITY

Part 1:

Perhaps I was attracted to the autobiographical aspect, the epic story, of a larger-than-life adventurer, T.E. Lawrence(1888-1935). His Arabian adventure in the film Lawrence of Arabia moved me, I recall, even after the passing of more than half a century. Perhaps it was the impressive cinematography that got to my emotions. Perhaps it was the music, the rich lyrical scores, of Maurice Jarre.

By the time I came to write this prose-poem, this reflection, after the passing of Peter O'Toole last weekend, I had seen the film Lawrence of Arabia twice in the 54 years since the start of its production history began back in October 1959. October 1959 was the month that the famous TV series The Twilight Zone started. I also joined the Bahá’í Faith that same month. O'Toole married for the first time in 1959; 1959 was a big year for this now famous man who has acted for the last time. O'Toole was into autobiography and memoirs which you can read about in the detailed account of his life at Wikipedia. I have now been working on my own autobiography for 30 years, I do not possess the genius for words which this man who is said to have memorized all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets.

O'Toole played the role of Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. The film was first released three months after my travelling-pioneering venture began in Canada in September 1962 for the Canadian Baha’i community.

Lawrence's life and personality were enigmatic and complex, solitary and adventurous. He was, we are told, given to masochism; he was often beaten when a child by his mother; his sex-life was problematic; we are also told he was excessively arrogant. These are qualities I have myself exhibited but, after more than 50 years of living, and after some reflection and reading, I don't think I have ever exhibited these qualities and these problems with anything like the same intensity as Lawrence did.

I have not been tested by envy or jealousy except on the rarest of occasions. I've never had trouble with sex in anything like the same way and extent as was the case with Lawrence. Fame and wealth, the frenzy of renown, have also eluded me and, in some ways, I am thankful.

O'Toole has had to deal with alcohol and cancer, diabetes and a blood disorder; I think I've had a healthier, and far less frenetic life; alcohol has never been a problem nor have drugs, although I've had to deal with the perils of bipolar I disorder.

These qualities, these human problems and attributes to which I have referred above in the lives of either Lawrence or O'Toole , are features of life that characterize people's life-narratives, millions of people, in various degrees. People sometimes become more conscious of them, more articulate, when they go to write their autobiography as I have done in recent decades, and as Lawrence did in writing his, his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Part 2:

Peter O’Toole(1932- ), as I say, had his problems with alcohol, marriage, and health. He also had to deal with an extreme eccentricity, and a brilliance of sorts; he is and was a useful exemplar for students in the field of abnormal psychology. It seems, though, that they were useful qualities for his role in Lawrence, a man of brilliance and eccentricity as well. O'Toole said he was “a retired Christian” who had given up organized religion in his teens when my own life was just getting started back in the 1940s.

The historical man, T. E. Lawrence, took on the task, among others, of uniting the Arabian Bedouins against their Turkish oppressors. My task was one of trying to bring unity to a people as well, although in the years 1959 to 1962, my adolescence, when I first began to deal with this task, I had no idea of the scale, the nature and the complexity of the exercise, an exercise I have come to be involved with myself in some three dozen towns where I lived since my adolescence—some 50 years ago. My task did not operate on anything like the scale that Lawrence’s did. My world was a micro-world; my mise-en-scene, was: small towns and cities, schools and places of work, families and small groups.

I don't want to summarize the story of Lawrence nor the movie here, suffice it to say, the cinematography was breathtaking, and the music captivating. The music has hung around in my memory bank for decades. Some argue that these were the main reasons for seeing the film. Lawrence seemed to possess the paradoxical qualities of a man blinded by his ego, desirous of fame and yet, at the same time, self-effacing.

The film works with themes of fate and war, Arab tribal disunity and national politics. Lawrence exists as a dark, blank shadow, a complex, jelly-like personality in a brightly lit desert. He is a man incomprehensible even to those who knew him best: intelligent, charismatic and slightly mad. In the end he could not bring unity to the Arab tribes, could not even begin to create an Arab state. It's been a problem writ-large during the recent Arab spring.

Part 3:

Unity was elusive for Lawrence and for the Arabs for many reasons, as it is elusive for us in our 21st century planetizing world.   The pioneers of our generations beginning, say, with the silent generation(1919-1939), have been able to construct only a portion of this unity, a stage along the way to the unity of humankind in the many generations to come. These several generations have got some help from science and technology which have catapulted us into a neighborhood virtually overnight, at least as the bird of history flies. As Buckminster Fuller once put it: it’s utopia or oblivion. I’m going for utopia; there is little point in working for oblivion.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 28/12/'06 to 16/12/'13.

I had no idea back then that
I would be a bit mad, too, as
I journeyed across the desert,
the Arctic-ice, the many great
tracts of land playing my part
in trying to unite the peoples
of the Earth who did not seem
to want to unite at least through
the mechanism which I advised
and suggested-again and again-
for over fifty years, say, back to
the '50s as we were just starting
to go to the moon, to rock-'n-roll.

The cinematography, the mise-
en-scene of my days, could be
magnificent in the hands of a
David Lean, a poetic imagery
with super-Panavision 70 mm
scope. You could even capture
the hills and valleys of my life
with a spectacular epic story, a
much larger-than-life idealistic
adventure & reduce my several
decades to, say, 150 minutes!!!

I had my eccentricity, but it was
nothing like Peter O’Toole’s, &
I married someone who helped
to keep my eccentricities within
bounds of social propriety—and
thus function in society….in the
classroom and in the community
with its heterogeneity. But fame
and wealth would never be mine.

Ron Price
28/12/'06 to 16/12/'13.
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I found it interesting that Peter O’Toole and director David Lean reportedly had a falling out after O’Toole turned down the lead in Zhivago. It was interesting to me, too, that Lean was married six times! Sort of puts whatever marital troubles I've had in the half-century since the 1960s in a helpful perspective. O'Toole's marital troubles also make mine pale into insignificance. That is often the case with celebrities of stage and screen, sport and superheroes of all sorts.
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EPIC

Preamble:

Oscar-winning French composer Maurice Jarre, who wrote the rich, lyrical scores for films including Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, died last weekend, 28/3/'09, in Los Angeles at the age of 84. I post here this prose-poem as a personal quasi-eulogy to this pioneer-traveller in the world of music composition for film.-Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia
Section 1:

The shooting of the film Lawrence of Arabia was completed in the first two months of my own travel-pioneering life for the Canadian Bahá'í community, from 20 August to 20 October 1962. The film was released in North America on 16 December 1962, the year I finished my adolescent baseball and hockey careers, and my matriculation exams in Ontario at the age of 18 hoping to enter university the following year.

Lawrence of Arabia has been ranked as the greatest film in the history of the epic genre; it won seven Academy Awards that year, and it is today regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema. The film depicts the experiences of T.E. Lawrence, author of The Pillars of Wisdom, an autobiographical account penned in the aftermath of WWI. It tells of the experiences of British soldier, T. E. Lawrence, during WWI serving as a liaison officer with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt of 1916 to 1918 against the Ottoman Turks.   
-Ron Price with thanks to “Lawrence of Arabia,” in Wikipedia, 1 April 2009.

There are epics and epics, eh Lawrence?
Little did I know that I would come to
write one forty years later and they could
argue over whether I, too, was egotistical.

Your epic has many twists and turns, eh?
But that is the way life is, Lawrence. I’ve
found it so and I never even went to war,
but I must say, Lawrence, that my years
have seen a war of sorts; goodness, it has
never ended.1   It’s been an epic tale and
associated with what well may become
the greatest drama in the world’s religious
history; that erudite Gibbon, in matters
ecclesiastical, wrote about the most awful
scene in the history of humankind only he
was out by, arguably, at least 1000 years!2

1 American writer Henry Miller described as "far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the destruction we are now witnessing with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble." –Henry Miller quoted in Geoffrey Nash, The Pheonix and the Ashes, George Ronald, Oxford, p.55.
2 J. W. Swain, Edward Gibbon: The Historian, MacMillan, London, 1966, p.70.

Ron Price
1/4/'09 to 16/12/'13.
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Edited by RonPrice - 12-Jan-2014 at 01:26

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens       
Dickens' famous opening sentence introduces the universal nature of the book, the French Revolution, and the drama depicted within.   
"It was the best of time, it was the worst of time, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,"      

A Tale of Two Cities was a 1935 black-and-white MGM film starring Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, and Edna May Oliver.     
It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.