Adaptation is an odd term: ostensibly largely formalist, it’s apt to be used in ways that imply judgements of value, since it’s not every film whose script has been developed from a play or a story or whatever that is perceived as an adaptation.1 Clearly Welles’s Othello counts, at least for most people, as an adaptation, because the literary work on which he based his script has such salience that it is never wholly eclipsed in the process, and thus we remain conscious of the adapted quality of the film. So does Pride and Prejudice, in whichever version. And so too, for most of us, would Hawks’s The Big Sleep. But what about Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice? For many these are movies first and foremost. We may recall by the bye that they’re based on stories by James Cain, but do we really attach much importance to this? Can he claim the status of the original author, rather than just being a convenient source of material? And as for Casablanca — even if one knows that it’s based on Everybody Comes To Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, that doesn’t mean that one really thinks of it as an adaptation of the play. Yet by comparison, some have adaptation thrust upon them: Forbidden Planet is now routinely referred to as a version of The Tempest, but as Judith Buchanan has shown, it was long while before this struck people, but having struck, the label’s stuck
