Friday, April 13, 2007

Mangling Ernest Hemingway

In Slate, I take a look at an unfortunate cinematic subgenre, Hollywood Hemingway:
widescreen, Technicolor adaptations featuring foreign settings and doomed love, and always at least half an hour too long. Mostly products of the 1950s, they were made when Hemingway was a living legend and motion picture executives—thanks to the collapse of the studio system and the new ubiquity of television—were deeply insecure.
Responses from Joshua Gibson and from Alex Massie, who writes for The Scotsman and The New Republic.