Film Versions
A film version of #44, The Mysterious Stranger was shot by The Great Amwell Company and shown in the United States on PBS in 1982, later running on HBO. The role of 44 was played by Lance Kerwin, with August played by Chris Makepeace.
Another movie adaptation of this book was shot in the Soviet Union by Igor Maslennikov and released under the name Filip Traum. It was shown in the cinemas only once in 1991, and up until 2007, when a remastered DVD-version was released, the general public mostly did not know anything about this film.
A scene about this story also appears in the 1985 claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain, where Satan gets Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher to construct small clay people to bring to life and live in a small kingdom together before Satan destroys them through fighting, plagues and natural disasters, depicting the futility of mankind. The scene also quotes Satan's last line from the book. In this version, Satan appears playful and friendly when he constructs the small kingdom, slowly revealing himself as cruel and hateful as he destroys it. He appears as a robed noble, with a mask where his head would be. As his true nature is revealed, the mask changes from a pleasant appearance to a demonic one, and finally to a grinning skull.
Read more about this topic: The Mysterious Stranger
Famous quotes containing the words film and/or versions:
“If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)
“The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)