Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Filming an unfinished novel: The Last Tycoon
- 2 The texts behind The Killers
- 3 The Day of the Locust: 1939 and 1975
- 4 Ship of Fools: from novel to film
- 5 Intruder in the Dust and the southern community
- 6 Dramatizing The Member of the Wedding
- 7 Film and narration: two versions of Lolita
- 8 World War II through the lens of Vietnam: adapting Slaughterhouse-Five to film
- 9 John Huston's Wise Blood
- 10 Genre and authorship in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
- 11 Screening Raymond Carver: Robert Altman's Short Cuts
- 12 The Color Purple: translating the African-American novel for Hollywood
- 13 The specter of history: filming memory in Beloved
- 14 Filming the spiritual landscape of James Jones's The Thin Red Line
- Filmography
- Index
- References
4 - Ship of Fools: from novel to film
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Filming an unfinished novel: The Last Tycoon
- 2 The texts behind The Killers
- 3 The Day of the Locust: 1939 and 1975
- 4 Ship of Fools: from novel to film
- 5 Intruder in the Dust and the southern community
- 6 Dramatizing The Member of the Wedding
- 7 Film and narration: two versions of Lolita
- 8 World War II through the lens of Vietnam: adapting Slaughterhouse-Five to film
- 9 John Huston's Wise Blood
- 10 Genre and authorship in David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
- 11 Screening Raymond Carver: Robert Altman's Short Cuts
- 12 The Color Purple: translating the African-American novel for Hollywood
- 13 The specter of history: filming memory in Beloved
- 14 Filming the spiritual landscape of James Jones's The Thin Red Line
- Filmography
- Index
- References
Summary
Both the author of Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980), and the director and producer of the novel's film adaptation, Stanley Kramer, had grand expectations for their works. Porter envisioned her novel (the only one she published) as her crowning achievement, the work that would finally put to rest the carping critics who had dismissed her as “merely” a writer of short stories. Ship of Fools, moreover, would be the fullest expression of the major themes and issues that she had been exploring all along in her short stories, her culminating statement on life in the twentieth century, and, more generally, on the human condition. As the centerpiece of her career, the novel would look both backward to her previous work and forward to posterity.
Kramer, likewise, had high hopes for his film. As he recalled in his autobiography, he read Ship of Fools not long after its publication in 1962 and was immediately struck by its potential as a motion picture, observing that while reading the novel “ideas for filming kept flooding into my head. The characters, the subcharacters, the mature but tragic love story, all appealed to me. And the technique of telling the stories with a narrator who would function like a Greek chorus occurred to me in what I thought was a brilliant flash.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen , pp. 68 - 81Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007