Abstract
As Juliet John writes, “Oliver Twist always has been, and always will be, an illegitimate text of mixed and impure origins.” This chapter foregrounds Oliver Twist’s status as a hybrid text – its impurity – to explore the divergent effects its adaptations have produced in the respective receptions and oeuvres of two prominent filmmakers: David Lean and Roman Polanski. In addition to complicating our understanding of the adaptation process, exploring the different ends to which Lean and Polanski adapt Oliver Twist emphasizes the multiple, even contradictory ways that prestige can be generated within a cultural economy. Moreover, considering the influence of Oliver Twist on the career arcs of these two filmmakers also offers a critique of auteurism by challenging the assertion that auteurs tend to eschew literary adaptations.
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Notes
- 1.
The son of caricaturist Isaac Cruikshank, George Cruikshank (1792–1878) was a celebrated and prolific illustrator and caricaturist (“Cruikshank, George” [1985] 1995). While most of his work consisted of political caricature, he also illustrated such popular works as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1831, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley in 1836–39, William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Tower of London in 1840, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853. Oliver Twist was his second involvement with Charles Dickens, after he illustrated the First and Second Series of Sketches by “Boz” (1836–37). In 1835, he became the editor of The Comic Almanack, the forerunner to the venerable humour magazine Punch.
- 2.
For example, Burton M. Wheeler asserts, through a careful reading of the novel as originally serialized, “that ‘The Adventures of Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress’” was begun as a short serial, that Dickens had already published four instalments before deciding to convert it into a novel, and that its plot did not take shape even in general form until he had published yet another three instalments” (1983, 41).
- 3.
Indeed, Alfred Hitchcock also attests to the complexity of prize culture as well as the need to see it in terms of something like James English’s (2005) economy of prestige. Hitchcock was, of course, among the auteurs originally enshrined by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics, and among cineastes his famously dismissive acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement Oscar (“Thank you…Very much, indeed.”) has been a further sign of his artistic credentials. That the only Academy Award bestowed on one of his films was Best Picture for the slavish literary adaptation Rebecca (1940) – when the trophy went to middlebrow producer David O. Selznick – is typically seen as a textbook case of the exception that makes the rule. This all testifies to how, in English’s formulation, both awards culture and “prize-bashing rhetoric” emerge as two sides of the same coin within an economy of prestige (41).
- 4.
In a much-anthologized article published in 1969, Pauline Kael noted that the auteur theory had, over time, “evolved into its opposite” (1973a, 78). Calling it initially “a defense of the studio system,” insofar as directors who “transformed their assignments into works with a personal vision” were “auteurs who could fulfill themselves within the commercial system,” Kael concluded that “by now, the term stands for almost nothing except the idea that the movie director is an artist” (1973a, 78–79).
- 5.
Among some auteur theorists, of course, the auteur is less an artist in an expressive or Romantic sense than, say, “a principle of textual causality like genre or narrative which asks and insists that readers and audiences see the work as whole, complete, and beyond individual differences and inconsistencies” (Corrigan 1998, 41). From this angle, as David Bordwell notes, “a body of work linked by an authorial signature encourages viewers to read each film as a chapter of an oeuvre” (quoted in Corrigan 41).
- 6.
As Anthony Lane (2008) puts it, the opportunity to adapt Dickens offered David Lean “his chance to break free from the shackles of Coward’s impeccable taste.”
- 7.
Here, Anderegg refers to Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal 1944 essay, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” which Garrett Stewart has described as “the most famous genealogical essay in the literature of cinema” (2003, 122). (See Eisenstein [1944] 1949.) Eisenstein celebrates D. W. Griffith as the innovator behind montage editing, tracing “cross-cutting and other innovations in editing ‘syntax’ to Griffith’s encounter with Victorian fiction, especially Dickens” (Stewart 205; Marsh and Elliott 2002, 460).
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Jackson, J.E. (2017). Oliver’s Auteurs: The Cases of Lean and Polanski. In: Kennedy-Karpat, C., Sandberg, E. (eds) Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52854-0_6
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