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Daisy Miller: Bogdanovich's Film and James's Nouvelle
From Zeffirelli to Bogdanovich, any filmmaker still sacrifices his name and reputation when he adapts a literary masterpiece to the film medium. Zeffirelli has been all but universally condemned by the scholars for his screen versions of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. More recently Bogdanovich has suffered similar castigation for his film, Daisy Miller, based on James's nouvelle. The problem of evaluation of prose and poetry adapted into film appears to originate in the failure of most critics to grasp the essential difference between a literary work and a film so well established by George Bluestone in his Novels into Film. Bluestone's work clearly lays down the principle that in the case of novel and film, "each is autonomous, and each is characterized by unique and specific properties."1
Moving from a medium of words into one primarily of visual images, the story and its characters are certain to be altered, merely because of the nature of the different medium if nothing else. But if we can accept the proposal advanced by Robert Richardson and others that film is "an extension, but a magnificent one of the older narrative arts,"2 then we must acknowledge that Bogdanovich, along with other filmmakers, has the right to attempt his own rendering of Daisy Miller. For that matter, we perhaps too often forget that not one of Shakespeare's plots is completely original, and should rather remember that many of the great Elizabethan's dramatic conceptions have their origins both in works of history and non-dramatic literature. Hence, why are we so anxious to chide Bogdanovich for the attempt?
But this process is precisely the one carried out by the majority of the reviewers of Bogdanovich's adaptation. All but the earliest review are emphatically condemnatory. What I find both amusing and irritating about these early reviews is that none of the authors seems to be sufficiently acquainted with James or his nouvelle to make sweeping generalizations about Bogdanovich's transfer of the story. Practically all of them call James's work a novella, a term clearly not preferred by James because of its Italian connotations. The movie editors of Playboy cleverly evade this issue by calling the nouvelle "a classic Henry James story,"...