Carrie, the 1952 adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's (1871–1945) Sister Carrie (1900) starring Laurence Olivier, Jennifer Jones, and Eddie Albert, has never been judged one of William Wyler's better films. Contemporary critics found its style “surprisingly conventional” and “static,” and Bosley Crowther, film critic of the New York Times, dismissed it as “a violently sentimental version of Mr. Dreiser's ironic tale of love and its deterioration.” In the ensuing decades, literary critics have echoed Crowther, Carolyn Geduld faulting Wyler for subscribing “to the suburban moral code” and for creating a “bourgeois heroine,” and Lawrence E. Hussman concluding that distortions of Carrie “render the film nearly unrecognizable to the novel's admirers.”

The “fidelity approach” that these critics take, Brian McFarlane declares, is “a doomed enterprise” because it is simply “unilluminating.” Some things can be “transferred” from novel to film, but much “necessarily requires adaptation proper,” that is, “equivalences in the film medium.” Showing a postmodernist bent, Robert Stam argues that a source novel “can generate any number of critical readings and creative misreadings,” for it is “a dense informational network, a series of verbal cues that the adapting film text can then take up, amplify, ignore, subvert, or transform.” Wyler was a skilled filmmaker who admired Dreiser's work. Even though he ignored some aspects of the novel, including virtually all of its dialogue, he took up much else, sometimes amplifying, sometimes subverting, sometimes transforming it through numerous “equivalences.”