Adaptation
John Ford said that his 1939 film Stagecoach was "really Boule de Suif" and McBride attributes the "film's sharp social criticism" to its being "more deeply influence by Maupassant" than by Ernest Haycox's 1937 short story "The Stage to Lordsburg" that established the framework of the film itself.
There have also been several more direct adaptations of Maupassant's story. In 1934, the Moscow Art Players, under the auspices of the Soviet studio Mosfilm, produced a silent film version of Boule de Suif called Pyshka. It was adapted and directed by Mikhail Romm and starred Galina Sergeyava. The film was re-released by Mosfilm in 1955 with a narration and sound effects added to it, but remained unknown outside of Russia until its belated premiere in New York in 1958. New York Times reviewer Howard Thompson describes the film as "little more than a musty curio" but with a storyline that "is still pretty wonderful as a yarn and a scathing commentary on hypocrisy and selfishness"
In 1944, Hollywood director Robert Wise undertook a project for RKO Radio Pictures titled Mademoiselle Fifi, based on two of Maupassant's short stories, "Boule de Suif" and the 1882 "Mademoiselle Fifi." This version starred Simone Simon as Elizabeth Bousset, here become the "little laundress" of the short story "Mademoiselle Fifi" rather than the prostitute of Boule de Suife" while the dandified and lecherous lieutenant is played by Kurt Kreuger. This was Wise's first film as director, having had his start as a sound effects editor and then as a film editor (most notably for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons with Orson Welles)
A French film version was released in 1945 as Boule de Suif and then released in the U.S. in 1947 as Angel and Sinner. This film version, directed by Christian-Jaque based on a screenplay by Henri Jeanson and starring Micheline Presle and Louis Salou, also imported much of the character of the lecherous Prussian soldier the Maupassant story "Mademoiselle Fifi".
In July 2006, the opera "The Greater Good, or The Passion of Boule de Suif" opened as a part of the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in Cooperstown, New York. The opera was composed by Stephen Hartke based on a libretto by Phillip Littell and directed by David Schweizer.
In 2009, it was adapted and drawn by Li-An as a French-language graphic novel and released by Delcourt Press. In an interview, Li-An noted that one reason Boule de Suif was chosen for the Delacourt "Ex Libris" collection was that it had been "more or less at the base of John Ford's Stagecoach" and that the original short story offered a timeless message about human nature and how the "value of a person does not depend on social status" but rather on one's own personality.
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Famous quotes containing the word adaptation:
“In youth the human body drew me and was the object of my secret and natural dreams. But body after body has taken away from me that sensual phosphorescence which my youth delighted in. Within me is no disturbing interplay now, but only the steady currents of adaptation and of sympathy.”
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