The cinema : 1952 (1952)

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SUBSTANCE INTO SHADOW I93 (and not consistently subjective : other chapters are written from other characters' viewpoints). Harry Morgan the recurring heroic figure of Hemingway's books is meditating upon the wound inflicted on him by a Chinese smuggler. From a statement of what happened, the narrator turns to speculation. This is the first difficulty and it is a considerable one. (It is conceivable that Harry's meditations on the possible consequences of Mr Sing's bite could, "n some way, be externalized in dialogue. If so, his doubts would reach the audience but in the wrong way, for Hemingway's credo states that a man must fight his battles alone, and shut up about it.) But even if this difficulty could be met, there is still the matter of Hemingway's prose style, which needs interpretation. The terse sentences (or long, repetitive sentences, split into terse clauses), the constant use of repetition, and the hectic punctuation all these give his style a quality which is an inseparable part of what he writes, and would, in a faithful adaptation, have to be rendered in film terms. The literary style cannot be divorced from the underlying Weltanschauung in his books, for it is deliberately blunt — couched in a language in which thought is an impossibility. In suggesting that the effect of the idiosyncrasies and vocabulary of a writer's style could be translated into film terms, the critic is at something of a disadvantage. Only a practical demonstration could prove the point. He can only point to instances where a similar problem has been solved and these, admittedly, in the case of Hemingway's novels, would be difficult to find. Only the opening passage of The Killers achieves anything like an equivalent effect. But this in itself shows only that Hemingway has been unfortunate in his adaptors. Clarence Brown, in Intruder in the Dust (see below), achieves, sporadically, a deliberate visual style which corresponds remarkably with Faulkner's (equally individual) prose. Milestone achieved in All Quiet on the Western Front a more consistent parallel with Remarque's noveL o