Film Adaptation
Immediately after Bedelia had been published in 1945, Isadore Goldsmith went about to prepare a film adaptation. The screenplay was co-written by Herbert Victor and Goldsmith himself, but although Caspary was consulted as well, she could not do anything about Goldsmith's decision to relocate the action to England and Monte Carlo and to update it to the present. In the film, the Carringtons, a British couple, are spending their honeymoon in Monte Carlo, where they are pestered by a young detective who poses as a fledgling artist. Caspary pointed out that unless the action of the movie were set before the First World War, the whole point she wanted to make in the novel about women's dependence on men—and Bedelia's deviant ways of circumventing that dependence—would be lost in the film, but Goldsmith was adamant.
The black-and-white movie, which was one of the few independent productions ever made at Ealing Studios, was released in 1946. It starred Margaret Lockwood as Bedelia Carrington ; Ian Hunter as Charlie Carrington; Barry K. Barnes as Ben Chaney; and Anne Crawford as Ellen. The film was directed by Lance Comfort.
Caspary felt so strongly about the film's distorted message that she later wrote another screenplay based on her novel in the hope that it would be turned into a U.S. film, a project which, however, was never realized.
Read more about this topic: Bedelia (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words film and/or adaptation:
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)