Jottings - Slice of Life - 262 (Adapting a novel for screen. The brilliance of Daphne Du Maurier and the genius of Alfred Hitchcock)

One of the most perplexing questions that often face movie makers is how efficacious is it to adapt a popular novel, or a significant work of literature for cinematic representation. The temptation to do so is always there on the periphery of a director’s awareness. To pick a story from a book that is widely read in its day, gives the film maker the confidence that his audience wouldn’t shun the movie because of its story. Once that important element of risk is taken care of, then all that remains for an astute director to do is to assemble the right actors, set the right atmosphere, infuse life through music and anticipate with confidence that his movie would resonate well with viewers, rake in money, and help him climb the ladder of artistic success. In the last hundred odd years of cinema, majority of movies, especially those made in the early years of cinema, lasting till the 1960s, were mostly adaptations of books. Virtually no author - living or dead-was left alone. From the ancient epics to modern classics, books provided the default story line. Tolstoy, Dickens, Austen, Hardy, Bronte sisters, Trollope, Daniel Defoe, Victor Hugo, Jonathan swift, and many of the contemporary writers including Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Raymond Carver, Herman Wouk among others have lent their written word to the magic on screen. In this enterprise of converting books to movies , the task and dilemma of the director is simple. Should he translate the book verbatim into its cinematic representation, page to page, chapter by chapter; or use his artistic and creative discretion to extract the essence of the tale, and cast it into different mold for screen? To translate a book as it is without modification is no doubt operationally arduous, but, from the directors’ point of view relatively secure because there is the underlying assurance of the text to vouch for what is happening on screen. On the other hand, subtle art of extracting the essence of story, transmute the substance of it to create a captivating cinematic narrative requires genius, artistic courage, confidence and heightened mastery of the medium and its craft . The audience will either love such a movie for its ingenious adaption, or shun it as blasphemous and not worthy of the book or the author. Directors who have adapted the essence are often the geniuses of cinema, and their work is testimony of how two great arts forms - books and movies, can collaborate without impinging on the other.

Daphne du Maurier is undoubtedly one of the most widely read authors of the last century, and she continues to be read with the same enthusiasm by millennials today. Most of her books have never been out of print. As is invariably the case, there are critics who classify her writing as mere pulp-fiction with no literary merit, and others who place her work on a high pedestal; but, that hasn’t stopped the reading public from relishing her works over and over again. Like it or not, she is one of few authors whose books can be reread with increasing satisfaction. There is something about the way she narrates her tales of fragile or untenable marriages, the brooding atmosphere and gothic decor, her depiction of impenetrable gloom and darkness within the human heart and outside, the centerstage given to the feminine elements of instinct, gut feel and deep emotions; and more than anything else, her unique style of unfettered writing to tell a convincing story with precision, heightening tension and voluptuous language, makes her one of the few writers in the history of literature who can educate and entertain equally well. The fact is: one just can’t put down a Du Maurier novel. Like surging waves, it drags the reader along its ebbs and flows, tossing him in and out of passages of great beauty and emotional intensity, before leaving him awash with delight and aesthetically refined. How can one forget “Rebecca” in which the Heroine is never seen, only felt as a shadow in vivid descriptions; or “My cousin Rachel” where a young man is torn between the bewitching beauty of his uncle’s wife, and at the same time secretly suspects her to be the murderer of her husband; or the “French Man’s creek” - the chivalrous yet forbidding tale of a pirate’s love for a noblewoman set in Maurier’s favorite town - Cornwall, England; or “Jamaica inn”, the classic gothic tale of lustful uncles and creepy rooms, the book that set Du Maurier up as a novelist. All these books are long novels, leisurely developed and spun without the pressure of length or time. And not surprisingly, all of them have been made into films, not once, but multiple times. But it is in Maurier’s short stories that she true genius as a writer shone through. In 1952, She published a set of stories under the title “ The apple tree”, which among others, featured one of her finest stories — “The Birds”. As a short story, Birds is unparalleled in literature. In twenty odd pages, Maurier sketches couple of days in the life of family, who suddenly find themselves in the grip of birds behaving violently and agitated. The oddity slowly begins to take ominous proportions as Nat the farmer understands the gravity of the situation, and attempts to physically secure his family, sealing his home in all possible directions. The birds persistently screech and bang against the sealed windows chipping the wooden planks to break in, and in the process some die in the manner of Kamikazes - suicide bombers of second world war. To nat, the whole thing doesn’t make sense. As the attacks continue relentlessly, it dawns upon him through the local news that what is happening around his farm is representative of a full scale bird attack on various parts of England. The News also informs him that the government is taking steps to curtail this mysterious phenomena. Meanwhile, the attacks increase in intensity and regularity, making it impossible for Nat to step out of his home. He is fast running out of food, and cigarettes too, which he needs to calm his nerves. In the final scene, when the birds retire after a fearful assault, Nat summons the courage to drive down to his neighbor’s home, only to find that they have been pecked to death. Their home is in disarray, and the husband and wife dead and bloody. He cares less, and goes about collecting as much food as he can from their refrigerator , reaches home, only to regret that he forgot to carry back firewood to keep his own home warm. Nat doesn’t feel any regret. He has no time or inclination to display even basic remorse over his dismembered neighbors. In a war, which is what Nat thinks it is, there is no time for such frivolities. This is the sense of appalling apathy that Du Maurier creates through her writing. From a warm, retired and pleasant farmer in the beginning of the tale, to a paranoid man towards the end who believes that birds have launched a full scale war on England, the character of Nat undergoes transformation in a couple of days. Du Maurier’s beautifully crafted sentences mirrors the feelings of Nat as he grapples with something he cannot comprehend, but knows for real. In each page, the readers enter deeper into Nat’s psyche and lives those complex emotions along with him, as the threat from the birds turns ominous and cannot be reckoned as a casual outburst anymore. At the end of the story, the spellbound reader is left a little uneasy and frightened, and at least for some time, our heart will skip a beat if there is sound of a bird heard in the vicinity.

Given the genre of Du Maurier's stories, It is not surprising that over 12 Film adaptions and 40 dramatizations for television has so far appeared of her works. Her tales make fascinating material for cinema, and anyone who wants to make a gothic story with a touch of foreboding and doomed romances turned to her books. Alfred Hitchcock was one of them. As a long time friend of the Maurier family, Hitchcock had worked with Daphne’s father and was reasonably acquainted with his Du maurier’s works. In 1939 and 1940 Hitchcock adapted two of Maurier books - Jamaica inn and Rebecca - into movies. However, in both these ventures, his artistic demands were subject to the whims of producers, and Hitchcock throughout his career resented any interference with his vision of his films. Therefore when Rebecca became a commercial and critically successful, and was considered one of the finest adaptions of a book for cinema, Hitchcock himself wasn’t particularly satisfied. In his mind, the film was nothing but a faithful reproduction of the book with nothing of his own creative vitality or interpretation present in it. Hitchcock always had a particular liking for short stories as his raw material. It gave him the inspiration he needed, without going into details. Therefore, when the short story “The Birds” came out in 1952, Hitchcock creative antenna stood up. He was deeply interested in the idea of Birds revoting against mankind, but decided to bide his time, committed as he was to other projects. By then, ironically, Maurier was also becoming uneasy about cinematic adaptions of her stories. She was worried that her works was beginning to be known more through movies than her books themselves, and the reading public began to perceive her stories as written primarily for the silver screen, and not so much as works of literary fiction in its own right. Nothing can dissatisfy or dampen the spirits of a keen author more than such a perception. However, in 1962, Hitchcock returned to Maurier’s theme once again. From 1952 the idea was incubating in his mind, and when he finally decided to make the film, he was firm and clear that the movie would not be a word to word adaption of Du Maurier’s story, but a completely different narrative with just the essence of the story running as an underlying thread, and nothing more. Du maurier agreed, after some debate. With the authors consent under his belt, Hitchcock bought the tale from the gloomy settings of Cornwall to the ocean drenched shores of California; and, from travails of a single character of Nat the farmer, Hitchcock expanded the screenplay to a broader canvas with multiple personalities and perspectives. Beginning with pair of love birds entering the bay area as a gift, followed by a touch of romance , a flicker of jealousy and a hint of forbidden love, Hitchcock lifted the theme beyond it confines of the book to allow for different interpretations depending upon which relationship strikes a chord in the viewer. While Du Maurier just based her book on an hypothetical abnormality in natural world drawn from her experience with aircrafts bombing England during war time, Hitchcock constructed a multilayered visual narrative based upon the original idea interspersing the tale with his trademark human fears and trepidations. the audience were left with the question : did the birds trigger the panic in human beings; or was it the human atmosphere in Bodega bay, and its undercurrents of emotions that instigated such abnormal behavior in the birds? Hitchcock leaves us a conundrum, which renews itself each time we see the movie.

Alfred Hitchcock made “Birds’ after a gap of twenty years from his last Du Maurier adaptation. It is undoubtedly one of the finest movies Hitchcock made in his illustrious and prolific career. In it, he demonstrated how a true convergence between movies and books can be achieved, and what it takes to lift the theme of a story, embellish it for the screen without sacrificing the essence, and able to transcend the original tale in its visual form and effect. “Birds” represents the art of movie making at its very best - the genius of Hitchcock borrowing from the literary imagination of Du Maurier. It cannot be bettered.

God bless…

yours in mortality,

Bala