Movies are more expensive to market than any play on Broadway in that thousands of cinemas need to be filled versus just one theater. People can walk out of movies a lot easier than they can a theater, but it is more about the economics. For the most part, movies are arguably for the everyman and theater is for every thinker.
A theatergoer in New York City, especially before the advent of Broadway's Disneyfication, would arguably be a more cosmopolitan and educated individual. Those who could not afford to go to theater, or had no access to it, would see the film version in their local cinema. That locality would being remove from urban dwellings like New York and be more like Waterloo, Iowa or Peoria, Illinois. This is not to say that theater would not have its lower classes in the third tier, but the playwright could consider themes and dialogue to be that of a more critical and liberal audience than what the film market would bare in Middle America and beyond. When the screenwriter sets out to adapt a piece of theater for the screen, he or she will need to consider the age old question, will it play in Peoria?
The question affects what the screenwriter decides to use in terms of plot points and narrative for the film; it also affects what challenges the filmmakers have in suggesting themes. The film seeks to work on a more subliminal level than the explicit nature that would play out in dialogue for the stage. While that dialogue is the poetics of the experience, visuals and the non-verbal is just as important as any spoken word in both stage and film.
In Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes, a play that premiered in New York City the year of 1939 and set in the Deep South, has Alexandria, the youngest of three women in the play, owning her own path towards intellectual maturity; rather, in the film adaptation (also written by Hellman) has her needing a form of life coaching from David Hewitt, a character that is the most explicit addition to Hellman's screenplay. Hewitt is back from his life in the North bringing his liberal ideals into this Southern town. Hewitt is vocalizing what the audience may be thinking at times about slavery, independence, and greed. He holds Alexandria's hand into self-actualization in the film and literally takes her away from the evil confines of the Hubbard household. Alexandria escapes with her man, weakening the film's impact of her achieving a sense of independence and self-reliance on her own. However, in the play she confronts her mother, Regina, and stays in the house at the very end until the curtain falls. On stage the audience sees daughter confront mother—confidence in the face of madness; rather, in the film she flees the madness. In the play, the relatable character is Alexandria—a person eager to explore and bring back Horace, her father. She is someone who can take care of her father and finally stand up to her mother; she thinks for herself in that Alexandria puts two and two together when Regina has practically murdered Horace in the end of the story. Alexandria's deductive reasoning is reflective of the audience wanting someone to stand up to Regina; in the film, Regina's deduction is stripped away more by Alexandria's uncle, Ben, who is placed in the foreground of the frame and thusly making the deduction more pronounced by him rather than his niece. Alexandria, in the film, has more of the thinking done for her by the men in her life—Horace gives her advice in the hotel room when she sees David in Mobile; David is telling her to think for herself and see the evils of greed; and Ben acerbically points out Regina's scheme to Alexandria.
In his book, Film and the American Left, Keith Booker points out that the film The Little Foxes "is one of the strongest indictments of capitalism in all of American film, a stance it probably gets away with by its setting in the South." Indeed, The Hubbards are exploiting the black workers and cheap labor in post-Civil War South, while Alexandria flees this life of exploitation and runs from it with the more liberalized Hewitt (Booker, 90-91).
In the play, Alexandria is still left to exist with this cold and calculating family and the audience is given no hope of her ability to overcome the physicality of opression or have any escape for greener pastures. Hellman deftly veils the condemnation of the exploits of capitalism through a romantic lead in Hewitt and his subplot of wooing Alexandria towards marriage, thus the themes in the film act on a less overt and dire level than in the play. Moviegoers may not get Hellman's critique of the haves, have-nots, and want-to-have-mores if they are just going to the cinema to see a good entertaining drama, but Hellman's message symbolically works by carrying a storyline where the man is trying to court a young woman—even if he needs to sound smart and worldly to do so. This is not intended to dumb down the material; rather, the romance exists as a thread of hope in a rather pessimistic tale. In a film that was just coming out as the world was beginning World War II and How Green Was My Valley won the Oscar in 1941, a John Ford film about coal miners striking, America was having labor issues around the country and Hellman's adaptation of her own script utilizes her additional character and storyline to make audiences smile for the romance while also taking note of the themes affecting themselves—the working man. Additionally, the seemingly trite romance between Hewitt and Alexandria offers a counter balance of mood in order to bring out the stark contrast of acidic and often-venomous men-and-female relationships in Birdie and Oscar or Regina and Horace. This contrast is not as prevalent in the play, but then again an urbanite may not need such sugarcoated relief. When adapting her original source material and faced with having the film play in Peoria, Hellman concedes to adding a love story, but weaves the themes that she dealt with in the play in a way that enhances her point—exemplifying it with Hewitt being the explicit orator for what the audience should consider throughout the film's unraveling. Hellman accepts that people may not get the film's message and it is in the creation of Hewitt that she solves the problem.
However, the adaptation by the screenwriter is only half the story; a director's approach to the material is just as critical. As George Seaton, writer-director of Miracle on 34th Street, wrote in 1956:
In the theater, because of that gap between even the first row and the actors, the performance is almost always a little larger than life. Like the actor whose voice is necessarily a bit loud and his gestures overly expansive, the playwright almost always has to write with a broad pen. This exaggeration, which is not only acceptable but is expected in the theater, is not true with films. Although only a photograph, the motion picture, because of the proximity of the camera to actor (and consequently audience to actor), is candid and realistic. As the actor has to tone down his stage performance for the camera, so does the screenwriter have to be on guard against the playwright's necessary overemphasis, the pretentious line of dialogue and the artificiality of high-flown phraseology. (Seaton, 222)
Seaton's explanation clearly sets the challenge for a director's adaptation of the material for the screen. William Wyler, the director of the film, translates the material to create a visual story in the restrictions where much happens in a handful of locations. Wyler uses locale and production design to mitigate the "exaggeration" that Seaton warns to avoid. While the play's set is a living room in a large Southern home, Wyler begins the film outside of town where willow trees hover their leaves above. The audience enters the town along with Alexandria from right-to-left, opposite direction of how Westerners read and an indication of entering trouble (in the grammar of film). By opening the film in this setting, he opens the film up and gives the audience a feeling of entering the story much like theatergoers enter a theater and thus entering the "home" of the Hubbards that is on stage.
Wyler's stage is the Hubbard's home for the most part, only opening the film up to outsiders—the Hewitts, the bankers, and the black characters are all allowed to roam freely in and out of the Hubbard home. Birdie and Regina are not allowed to leave the house, they are confined to the space and only able to enjoy the freedom of backyard protected by a white fence like hens in a coop waiting to be victims of foxes.
It is when Alexandria leaves the home that she grows as a woman; first when she fetches her father, another time is when she leaves for good. Later, Regina speaks of leaving to Chicago, but Wyler doesn't let her past the picnic table for tea. This visual context of freedom and what lengths a woman must go through to obtain it offers a statement when black characters are able to come and go as they please—women either entrap themselves by yielding power to men (Birdie), snatch their power from men (Regina), or by jointly engage decisions with the company of men (Alexandria). These story points are not as strong in the play. The additional statement offers a more cinematic experience to the overall point of the film.
Gregg Toland's cinematography uses deep focus and wide-angle lenses to give the spectator a sense of theatrical space. Wyler places items in the foreground such as phallic bottles of bourbon and then placing vaginal-looking armoires in the background in order to veil the battle of the sexes on a subliminal and symbolic level, bringing visual subtext to the audience. In a play, the special relationships of actors are used to convey the subtext of the material; however, Wyler is able to use production design to deliver a visual tug-of-war between men and women. These elements enhance the viewer's experience in ways that film achieves over theater. Even if the implied themes are lost on the moviegoer in Peoria, the film adaptation can enhance the story for the viewer in that the playwright expects the theatergoer to think about what is being said, but the screenwriter, with the help of the director, is able to show the moviegoer that what is not being said is just as important and, even more so, entertaining.
Booker, M. Keith. Film and the American Left : A Research Guide. New York: Greenwood P, 1999.
Hellman, Lillian. Six Plays by Lillian Hellman. New York: Vintage, 1988.
The Little Foxes. Dir. William Wyler. Perf. Bette Davis. 1941.
Seaton, George. "A Comparison of the Playwright and the Screen Writer." The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 10 (1956): 217-26.