Stendhal's heirs (2)

By Tracy

I recently finished Theodore Dreiser's monumental novel An American Tragedy (1925). I'm not the first by any means to notice its indebtedness to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, though the two novels are also extremely different. I was reading it as part of the "parvenu" or "upstart" thematic list I've set myself.

The protagonist (anti-hero rather than hero) is Clyde Griffiths, a young man raised in poverty and relative ignorance by well-meaning street preachers. Clyde has a longing for a better life in every material sense, and a sensual nature he has difficulty controlling.

Taken into employment at his rich uncle's factory, Clyde finds himself in a social no-man's-land: forbidden to mix with the women workers he supervises, but too lowly for acceptance among his uncle's set. Good-looking and sartorially-minded, he attracts the attention of wealthy young Sondra, but not before he has entangled himself -- compromisingly -- with Roberta, whom he now wishes to be rid of.

The story echoes Stendhal's only in its outlines -- the pride and social ambition realised through a woman's love and attentions, the abandonment of an earlier love -- the crime and trial and the question of capital punishment.

What's more, Dreiser took his plot from a real-life news item, as did Stendhal in his own time, so that both were to some degree fictionalising fact... although to say only that is to misrepresent the phenomenal fictional achievement of both authors.

Dreiser's novel is much less readable than Stendhal's. There were many passages I had to force myself to read simply because of over-telling. Dreiser seems to think he has to state something, then state it again, then re-examine for other ways of stating it. For a modern reader this is excruciating -- but it's not just a matter of being stylistically dated -- plenty of novels of similar age are more readable. It seems to be a deliberate stylistic choice, his own kind of realism.

Most credible critics seem to agree it's a masterpiece, but a flawed one.

Film-makers have made several attempts at it. The only one I've seen is George Stevens's A Place in the Sun (1951), with Montgomery Clift in the lead role (character names are all different, and half the story is missing, but film adaptations have to do that sometimes). A very young Elizabeth Taylor plays the rich love interest, and Shelley Winters the cast-off working-class girlfriend. The film is highly watchable and very disturbing.

Bad, Botched Brel (but still...)

By Tracy

Smitten as ever with le grand Jacques, but rarely getting time to listen these days, I finally succumbed and borrowed the DVD of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris from Planet Video in Mount Lawley last week.

Can’t say I wasn’t warned – apart from a few fanatics who must be tone-deaf or very tolerant, almost every online review I read had stressed how awful the film was.

It’s not Brel singing – though he does make a brief appearance to sing Ne me quitte pas at one point in the film. It’s the filmed version of a stage show built around translations – sometimes complete makeovers – of a clutch of Brel’s songs into (American) English.

We saw the Perth version of this stage show, minus some of the numbers, two years ago, with much better singers and far greater dynamism – a production to mark the 30^th anniversary of Brel’s death. It did, however, downplay the politics and was more about pure entertainment. The original play dates from 1968 and even in the later film you can see many of the political and social concerns of that time being alluded to or openly referenced in the way the set of songs has been stitched together.

Some of the translations are quite good, or at least quite in keeping with the spirit of the Brelien universe. Some are weak.

The film dates from 1975 and feels at least as dated as that, or more. It’s as if the filmmaker was trying to cross Godspell with Hair  and Rocky Horror, and run it through the sieve of a chaotic Andy Warhol production.

That on its own wouldn’t bother me – chaos being okay to some degree, and representative of what they were trying to say about the world.

But the voices of the singers in this film version were unbearable to me. And I don’t think it’s just the inevitable mental comparison with Brel himself – Elly Stone is simply too shrill for my liking, and the others watery and wobbly. (I did find Stone's rendition of Marieke quite moving, but I suspect it was the translation and the melody itself. Here is Brel's.) Voice styles change, go in and out of fashion – some seem to transcend that, as Brel's does, but not these. I tried just watching the versions of my own favourite songs, but it was painful.

Still, I put myself through it. And survived to tell the tale. One for desperate fans only (if then).