| Chapter : | Introduction |
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has long been associated with Dickens’s Christmas books and recreated by Griffith. Once The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) had shown how epic social canvases could be integrated with telling details presented in expressive close-up, other filmmakers soon followed Griffith’s path. However, many of the top-grossing Hollywood films in the decade that followed—20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1916), The Ten Commandments (1923), The Covered Wagon (1923), and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)—emphasize spectacular attractions over psychological penetration or social analysis. Of the most successful films of the period, only The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), The Big Parade (1925), and Griffith’s own Way Down East (1920) follow anything like a neo-Victorian trajectory.
The arrival of synchronized sound and the quest of producers such as David O. Selznick for the cachet and the market appeal that were offered by literary sources produced adaptations of David Copperfield (1935) and Pride and Prejudice (1940) alongside Dracula (1931) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931).After these developments, the aesthetic of the dialogue-driven synch-sound feature merged more closely with that of the bourgeois realism of the nineteenth-century English novel. Even here, however, important distinctions should be made among the several legacies that nineteenth-century English novels left twentieth-century cinema. As Kamilla Elliott puts it,
Most earlier collections on the subject, focusing on this last legacy—a repository of specific stories such as Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol, and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes as widely adapted texts—share the project announced by Erica Sheen: to “take the question of fidelity as their primary critical point of reference” (2). How closely, they ask,