Bradbury’s idea of censorship lacks depth. But even worse is the on-screen depiction of the renegades’ solution to book burning—to have people “become” books. An issue intended to be serious becomes comic at the thought that people might devote their lives to some of the volumes shown burning on-screen.
While Kubrick and writers Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson have changed the focus and toned down some of his narrative’s brutality, Cobb yet remains the ultimate source of the film’s drama and of most of its ideas.
In The Power of Adaptation in “Apocalypse Now” Marsha Kinder critically compares and contrasts the film and the novel. In this article, Kinder states that “Coppola rarely hesitates to change Conrad’s story-setting, events, characters-whenever the revision is required by the Vietnam context.”
Far from showing an ignorance of horror, as King asserts, the film shows Kubrick’s depth of knowledge of film form and its possibilities.
In 1956, François Truffaut was browsing in a Paris bookstore when his eyes fell on a copy of Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché. He was immediately drawn to the title and, as he studied the jacket, intrigued to discover that it was a septuagenarian’s first novel. At the time Truffaut was twenty-four and supporting himself by writing film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts. He purchased the novel, took it home, and pored over it until, like a character in Fahrenheit 451, he knew it by heart.
Coppola’s “heart of darkness,” like Conrad’s, is a triumph of style over story. Or rather, the description—words for Conrad, mise-en-scène for Coppola—is the story’s raison d’être.
Lolita’s path from novel to the Stanley Kubrick’s and Adrian Lyne’s film adaptations. Essay by Rebecca Bell-Metereau
Apocalypse Now come segno della divisione fra il moderno e il postmoderno. Saggio di Francesco Binni
Traduzione italiana del romanzo di Joseph Conrad pubblicato nel 1902
Prefazione di Vladimir Nabokov alla pubblicazione italiana della sceneggiatura che ha scritto adattando il suo romanzo. Kubrick utilizzerà ben poco di questa versione ma lascerà ugualmente a Nabokov il credit di unico autore dello script
Italian translation of Harry Grey’s novel The Hoods (it. Mano Armata), published by Longanesi. The book was the model for the film Once Upon a