Paramount released William Wyler’s Carrie in 1952.35 Some commentators employ its historical context (HUAC’s heyday) to account for the movie’s missing social criticism. Whatever the
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merits of that argument, Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s screenplay certainly leaves a great deal to be desired as a vehicle for adaptation in most other ways. Radical changes in Carrie’s character alone suffice to render the film nearly unrecognizable to the novel’s admirers. Jennifer Jones projects little of the dreamy longing and unfulfillment that mark the book’s heroine as so quintessentially American, the spiritual precursor of characters as diverse yet typical as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Updike’s Rabbitt, and Didion’s Maria Wyeth. Nor did the script allow Jones to exploit the book Carrie’s status as American fiction’s first fully developed material girl, dazzled by department store jewelry counters and turned on more by the cut of men’s clothes than by the protoplasm beneath the cloth. In a scene particularly revealing of the screenplay’s errant trajectory (by Dreiser buffs’ standards), Hurstwood accidentally burns one of his last presentable suits with an iron and Carrie cannot understand why he gets so upset. Carrie, the book character, could never be so uncomprehending of such a sartorial tragedy.
Assuming that the Goetz team and Wyler were perceptive readers who did not simply misconstrue the novel, their intention in rounding off the edges of Carrie’s character looks akin to Stevens’ in turning Dreiser’s careless Sondra into the committed Angela of A Place in the Sun. Like that film of the previous year, Wyler’s is primarily the story of two lovers more romantically portrayed than those in the source text, designed to win over an audience. In Carrie’s case, the distance between the novel and the film is widest in the closing scenes. Whereas the Carrie of the novel gives a perfunctory bill or two to the down-and-out Hurstwood, who petitions her at the stage door, and then soon forgets him in the flush of her success, Wyler’s heroine responds to the former bar manager’s predicament with a rich overflow of sympathy. In fact, she welcomes him back into her life and utters a line unthinkable in the novel: “Let’s take what comes.” Such a distinctly generous act, even though her sympathetic side has been nurtured by Bob Ames, would be beyond the character in the novel. But it is perfectly in sync with Wyler’s Carrie because Ames is missing from the movie, along with Carrie’s internal debate that Ames stimulates concerning getting or giving as potential paths to secular salvation. By the end of the novel, readers know Carrie to be a cross-fired compound of self-absorbed longing and latent compassion. By the end of the movie, the audience sees her just as she appears throughout, a simple-hearted helpmate closer in character to Dreiser’s Jennie. Leaving out the inner conflict which constitutes the heart
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of the novel cost Wyler any chance at the kind of enhancing ambiguity I have been describing as characteristic of the best adaptations.
Another opportunity missed by Wyler to the detriment of his film involves the short shrift he gives to the novel’s urban scenes. Dreiser endows Chicago, and to a lesser extent New York, with a life of their own. Seen mostly through Carrie’s eyes, the city emerges in the novel as a vibrant marketplace of modern man’s desire objects, resistlessly alluring. Unaccountably, Wyler reduces rhapsodic descriptions of Chicago to one inspired street scene and the film’s action in New York takes place almost exclusively inside. The director’s long take technique was not well suited to the task of bringing the urban scene alive. Had Eisenstein undertaken an adaptation of Sister Carrie, he might have effectively used montage to suggest the city’s infinite promise. Unfortunately, Wyler’s talky, downbeat, darkly photographed Carrie might be better titled A Place in the Gloom.
Another problem with Wyler’s adaptation has a good deal to do with the political atmosphere in Hollywood at the time. Though the director professed admiration for Sister Carrie’s “intense feeling” about “abject poverty during the triumph of American capitalism,” one gets little sense of social outrage from the film. Editors made more and more cuts in it and even eliminated the actual filming of Hurstwood’s suicide to ease Paramount’s worry over showing “an American in an unflattering light.”36 Whatever punch the filming originally packed was left on the cutting room floor and the remaining reels depict a tragedy wrought by violations of what one critic calls ‘‘suburban” mores — especially marital respectability.37 But questions about the depth of Wyler’s own sensitivity to his source material can also be raised. The controversy that attended the director’s casting of Laurence Olivier as Hurstwood conjures up one such question. The reviewer Bosley Crowther, in a contemporary piece, alludes to unidentified parties who regarded Olivier as a “perilously chancy choice.”38 Wyler regarded Olivier, however, as eminently suitable. The reason is clear. The director later described Dreiser’s Hurstwood as “very sophisticated and cultured,” a view for which there is little evidence (quoted in Madsen 306). The dapper manager of the novel knows a few current plays but his interests center on the gossip of the bar scene and Carrie. Wyler’s conception of Hurstwood’s sophistication comes closer to Dreiser’s Ames, or at least to the Ames the novelist tried unsuccessfully to flesh out. Consequently, Olivier, though his relatively pompous presence dominates the movie, fails to recall the original Hurstwood. Actually, the only
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inspired bit of casting in the film features Eddie Albert as Drouet. His gaseous, duplicitous travelling salesman, mouthing the refrain “Drouet’s the name, charm’s the game,” perfectly captures the novel’s “merry, unthinking moth of the lamp” (63).
Unfortunately, Albert’s performance cannot save what Axel Madsen calls the “violently sentimental version of Dreiser’s tale’’ (306). Wyler’s preoccupation with Hurstwood’s fall and near total neglect of Carrie’s rise typifies the sentimentality. (As does the director’s decision to tug at the audience’s heart strings by making Carrie pregnant with Hurstwood’s child which she loses, a miscarriage in more ways than one.) In fact, Dreiser corrected his own inappropriate focus on Hurstwood at the conclusion of the novel by adding a coda about Carrie to the typescript. (The holograph ends with his suicide. The film ends with his decision to kill himself.) In redirecting the reader’s attention to his heroine, the novelist attended to what Wyler chose to ignore, namely the fact that the book in question was called Sister Carrie, not Brother Hurstwood. Actually, Wyler and others at Paramount had been concerned about the title, dropping the “Sister” for fear the public would shun it as the story of a nun. Ironically, the film, so mistakenly called “memorable” by Dreiser’s psychologist niece, Vera,39 has been overshadowed by the late horror opus of the same name featuring another “Sister,” Sissy Spacek.40
For the reasons I have set out in this essay, none of the versions of Dreiser’s novels so far filmed have approached their source texts in complexity of vision, not to mention force of feeling. The two adaptations of An American Tragedy and Wyler’s Carrie fail in part because of ideological or narrow political considerations and in part for artistic reasons. None achieves the range of Dreiser’s novels. Gering’s Jennie, on the other hand, does not measure up solely because of artistic incapacity. Only Eisenstein’s scenario for An American Tragedy promised a superior treatment. But even it, thanks to the Russian director’s Marxist template, decreases the dimensions of the source material. The general lack of enthusiasm displayed for these films by Dreiser’s votaries is understandable. A fully realized adaptation would recreate the profound tensions that structure any given Dreiser novel just as they trouble our own lives. It would explore in depth crucial questions about the limits of individual and societal responsibility, about desire and its discipline, about the beauty and cruelty of life, about all the conflicts that Dreiser exploited to become in C. P. Snow’s view the last of the great American storytellers.41 We can only hope that a new generation of filmmakers appreciates and does not squander the possibilities Dreiser’s books offer.
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Notes
1. A Place in the Sun. Dir. George Stevens. With Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters (Paramount, 1951).
2. Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 2 vols. (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925).
3. Eisenstein, Sergei M., G. V. Alexandrov, and Ivor Montagu. “An American Tragedy: Scenario,” in With Eisenstein in Hollywood by Ivor Montagu (New York: International, 1967) pp. 208–341. (Quotation, p. 286.)
4. Molly Haskell, “Is It Time to Trust Hollywood?” New York Times Book Review January 28, 1990: 1ff.
5. Orson Welles, Interview. Stories from a Life in Film by Leslie Megahy (BBC in association with Turner Broadcasting, 1989).
6. Keith Cohen, “Eisenstein’s Subversive Adaptation” in The Classic American Novel and the Movies, ed. Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin (New York: Ungar, 1977), pp. 239–56.
7. An American Tragedy. Dir. Joseph von Sternberg. With Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, and Francis Dee (Paramount, 1931).
8. Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.