Watching the Movies that Go with the Books: An American Tragedy

For purists, seeing a movie after reading the book can be downright harrowing. The actors have the wrong hair. The script eliminates four of the best scenes - and irreverently changes two more. High on rubber cement, the script writer creates a whole new subplot to replace the three other ones he mutilated like the sick serial killer he is. Frankly, if not for some popcorn and the great reward of fuming after the fact, the whole experience would be too much.

Of course, there is another option - or so I'm told - which is to take the same faith I would give to the book and loan it to the film, assuming that the director has a viable story s/he wants to tell. It may not be the same story that appears in the book, but it was inspired by the book, and it can be interesting (instead of irritating) to compare and contrast the two. You know, theoretically.

Testing this whole notion, last night we watched A Place in the Sun, the 1951 Columbia Pictures adaption of An American Tragedy. The director - who won an Oscar for his efforts - decided that the story he wanted to tell was a tragic tale of a love that could not be. The marketing department definitely got the memo, billing the movie as "The Screen's Most Powerful Love Story," which naturally takes place between Clyde and Sondra, renamed George and Angela for the film and played by Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

To tell the screen's most powerful love story, it becomes necessary to make a few changes to Dreiser's novel, and by a few, I mean scores, including changing the setting to post-war America.

- Roberta, renamed Alice, becomes a dowdy, unattractive, whiny, grating shrew who does everything but boil George's pet bunny. Seriously, when he goes to spend the week with Angela and her parents (!) at the lake, Alice sees a picture of him in the paper with Angela and hops a bus, calling George at Angela's house and demanding to be picked up at the bus station NOW and married IMMEDIATELY; otherwise, Alice will go to Angela's house and tell her parents everything.

- Angela's parents, meanwhile, seem more or less prepared to allow George into the family - even after George discloses fully his poor (and embarrassing) background. Marrying Angela is not a dream in this version of the story, and entering the upper crust is not a tantalizing possibility. It's all real, and it's all going to happen, provided George can somehow get rid of the shackle that is Alice.

- Instead of planning Alice's murder, however, George decides to kill her rather spontaneously. Once he's out on the water, he loses his nerve (because he is a really good guy, after all), and Alice falls into the lake because she stands up and overturns the boat.

- Despite all of these changes, George in the end decides that he must be guilty, because while Alice was drowning, he wasn't thinking of her. He was thinking of Angela. In his prison cell, he bids Angela farewell (she will love him forever, though), and he goes to the chair, presumably meant to have our tears as he fades from view.

In an odd way, seeing this romantic version of the story increased my admiration for Dreiser's novel. In the book, Clyde is an ass - in no small part because Roberta is not. The book doesn't simplify Roberta; the book makes her an attractive, intelligent girl whom Clyde woos, pesters, and finally seduces, only to abandon her even before her hour of need. Clyde is an ass. And to put us in his head, to make him sympathetic to us in spite of that, is a serious accomplishment.

The book also encourages us to think in ways that I did not fully credit. By giving us two very clear characters to root for, the film makes us unwittingly complicit in the murder of Alice. We want Alice dead, if only to make Shelley Winters stop whining! In the book, however, we are meant to question much of what we read. Jason realized this just from reading; for me, it took seeing the film to help me see the book.