THE MT VOID
08/19/22 -- Vol. 41, No. 8, Whole Number 2237

Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Sending Address: evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
All material is the opinion of the author and is copyrighted by the
author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent or posted will be assumed authorized for
inclusion unless otherwise noted.

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send mail to eleeper@optonline.net
The latest issue is at <http://www.leepers.us/mtvoid/latest.htm>.
An index with links to the issues of the MT VOID since 1986 is at <http://leepers.us/mtvoid/back_issues.htm>.

Topics:
Six Lost Worlds: The Dramatic Adaptations of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle's Novel (Part 5) (film comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
THE LOST WORLD (1999) and Tarzan (letter of comment
by Peter Rubinstein)
John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith (letters of comment
by Gary McGath, Kevin R, and Robert Woodward)
This Week's Reading (KWAIDAN, KWAIDAN by Lafcadio Hearn)
(book and film comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

===================================================================

TOPIC: Six Lost Worlds: The Dramatic Adaptations of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle's Novel (Part 5) (film comments by Mark R. Leeper)

[continued from last week]

Summary

Sadly after the one reasonably good film version in 1925, there are
no satisfying versions of Doyle novel. All versions have been too
anxious to introduce new characters, frequently love interests.
And some try to make political points. This is just not a novel
that has been treated very well in its film adaptations. Ordering
them best to worst, identifying them with the person playing
Challenger and the year I would say:

1. Wallace Beery 1925
2. Bob Hoskins 2001
3. Patrick Bergin 1998
4. Claude Rains 1960
5. John Rhys-Davies 1992
6. Peter McCauley 1999

It should be noted that the 1997 film THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK
is based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name. Nothing
that I have ever seen has ever connected it with the Doyle's THE
LOST WORLD. I nevertheless notice that there are several plot
parallels to film versions of THE LOST WORLD. One man claims there
is an isolated place in South America where dinosaurs can be found.
There is an expedition to find the place. After a struggle
against the dinosaurs, one is brought back to a modern city where
it escapes and goes on a rampage. It is hard for me to not see
this as a sort of tribute or homage to the film versions of the
Doyle.

There have also been audio versions of the story. Unfortunately, I
do not know of where any but one are available. BBC Radio did
productions of the story in 1938, 1944, 1949, 1952, 1958, 1975, and
2013. I have not heard these versions, nor would I know even where
to search for them. Any pointers from readers to where to find
these or other adaptations would be welcome. I have heard an
audio-book abridgment read by James Mason. He was chosen, no doubt,
because of his association with two classic films based on more
classic science fiction books, TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE
SEA and JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, albeit books by Jules
Verne not Arthur Conan Doyle. The one audio dramatization I have
heard was not one I had much hope for and it was about what I
expected.

ALIEN VOICES: THE LOST WORLD (1996)

"Alien Voices" is an audio theater company specializing in science
fiction stories. It is built around three actors associated with
three different series of STAR TREK. The actors are Leonard Nimoy
(formerly Spock), John de Lancie (Q), and Armin Shimerman (Quark).
"Alien Voices" seems frequently also associated with the cable
Sci-Fi Channel. The drama group seems to specialize in doing the
classic science fiction stories from the likes of H. G. Wells,
Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

There are a number of faults built into any "Alien Voices"
production. The first is that the three actors are overly familiar
and overly associated in other roles. They also have
characteristic voices. That makes it almost impossible to lose
them in their character. Through ego, I suspect, they don't want
to be lost in the roles either. One does not have Lord John Roxton
as a character so much as John de Lancie DOING Lord John Roxton as
the character. The acting is uniformly weak. They use their own
voices rather than using dramatic tricks to change them and at the
same time other actors are exaggerating accents unrealistically.
Thus the actors and scriptwriter make very clear that they do not
take the material seriously and they do not expect the audience to
do so either. It is supposed to be all in good fun, but it makes
it very hard to appreciate the stories. In any case the length of
the stories is on the order of forty-five minutes, which it really
not enough time to do justice to the novels they are adapting and
too much time is spent on the humor. In addition, what is there is
not faithful to the novels. That is not uncommon in dramatic
adaptations, but they take particularly large liberties. In the
case of THE LOST WORLD, Summerlee is a woman and becomes a love
interest for Edward Malone. There are little sexual double
entendres and other references that the Victorian Doyle would never
have wanted in a novel intended as wholesome entertainment for "the
boy who's half man or the man who's half boy."
The story is told as the newspaper editor McArdle (Leonard Nimoy
with no effort to sound Scottish) reading dispatches from Edward
Malone. Just how these dispatches are supposed to get to London
from the top of the plateau is unclear, but in this version not a
lot of time is spent actually on the plateau. That part of the
story, what should be the shank, is much abbreviated. In fact,
there are only two encounters with dinosaurs on the plateau. While
that part has a few of the essentials from the novel, it is the
least compelling sequence of the dramatization. That may be
because the virtues of that part of the story are mostly visual.

In any case this adaptation is at best half-hearted and of all the
versions in covered in this article, it is the one least likely to
capture the imagination of a young new-comer.

There has never been a fully satisfying adaptation of Doyle's
novel. After a span of ten years in which there were four
cinematic versions, it seems unlikely there will be another one for
a while. However, that was what I would have thought after three
adaptations and we got still one more. As special effect
technology improves, the fascination that virtually everybody has
with dinosaurs, will lead more people to try to render them
realistically on the screen. Then they will want to put them in
adventure stories. Some of Edgar Rice Burroughs is a possibility.
But really there is only one major classic adventure story with
dinosaurs. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it in 1912. It's THE LOST
WORLD.

[-mrl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: THE LOST WORLD (1999) and Tarzan (letter of comment by Peter Rubinstein)

In response to Mark's comments on THE LOST WORLD (1999) in the
08/12/22 issue of the MT VOID, Peter Rubinstein writes:

[Mark writes,] "On the plateau the explorers find Veronica, a
Sheena-like jungle girl clad in a brief leather two-piece. She
also is an abundant source of cleavage and is the last survivor of
a previous expedition that included her parents. She has grown up
on the plateau, and she lives in a fantastic tree house beyond
anything Tarzan imagined. It even has an elevator." [-mrl]

I haven’t seen this version, but I would point out that the later
Tarzan movies show his treehouse with an elevator. (Powered by
pachyderm) [-pr]

===================================================================

TOPIC: John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith (letters of comment by
Gary McGath, Kevin R, and Robert Woodward)

In response to the quote from John Maynard Keynes in the 08/12/22
issue of the MT VOID ("Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that
the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work
for the benefit of us all."), Gary McGath writes:

Keynes thought that being more well-off and comfortable and having
nice stuff is "the nastiest of motives"? That explains a lot about
him. [-gmg]

Kevin R responds:

JMK was presumably trying to rebut Adam Smith:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the
baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their
own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to
their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but
of their advantages. [etc]" [Book I, Chapter 2 of WEALTH OF
NATIONS]
(<https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/adam-smith-butcher-brewer-baker>
)

This from a civil servant, who collected a significant proportion
of his income through coercion. [-kr]

Robert Woodward asks:

Wasn't this a position that he was appointed to AFTER the
publication of WEALTH OF NATIONS? (BTW, if I follow your
definition correctly, all civil servants collect most of their
income from coercion because the vast majority of government income
is from taxes.) [-rw]

Kevin responds:

If I was unclear, I apologize. By "This from..." I was referring
to the remark by Keynes that the Leepers used at the end of MT VOID
#2236.

I would hesitate to call an 18th century Don at a Scottish
University a "civil servant." Who owned, operated and funded those
at that time? The Crown? The Kirk? The Edinburgh town council?
Was it what we would now call a QUANGO?

In the 1700s, the students paid their lecturers directly, acc to:

<https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/college-cost- 18th-century-scotland/459387/>

[-kr]

===================================================================

TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book and film comments by Evelyn
C. Leeper)

KWAIDAN (1964) may have been inspired by DEAD OF NIGHT. FLESH AND
FANTASY predates DEAD OF NIGHT, and there were a couple of horror
anthology films a year or so before KWAIDAN, but DEAD OF NIGHT is
considered the real inspiration for the horror anthology sub-genre.
However, KWAIDAN made some major changes. Unlike the other horror
anthology films, both before and after, there was no framing story.
In a sense, this parallels when movies decided they could have
non-diegetic music; it was a decision that the audience was
intelligent enough to cope with four totally separate stories. (I
am reminded of the first time the child of a friend read a short
story collection. After the second story, he wonders how the
author would connect it to the first, and the third confused him
even more. But he was only about eight years old.)

It is worth remembering that KWAIDAN is from 1964, well after many
major Japanese films. It may be just me, but I keep feeling I am
watching a film from the early 1950s, perhaps because of the heavy
use of soundstages rather than shooting external scenes outdoors.

All four episodes of KWAIDAN have fabulous art/set design, which I
will comment on in the individual stories.

"Black Hair" has very little diegetic sound; it is almost entirely
voice-over, music, and sound effects. There is well-crafted use of
lighting in the skies--sunrise, etc. At the end color of the robe
and hair fluctuates, but this just reflects the subjectivity of the
scene. The arrow-shooting contest sequence was shot outdoors in a
realistic style, but all the other scenes were obviously shot on a
soundstage. The one negative is that the ending is predictable.

"The Woman of the Snow" was shot entirely on a soundstage. There
is a shot of a sky full of eyes that may have been inspired by the
1945 Alfred Hitchcock film SPELLBOUND. The red flag at the river
in an otherwise monochromatic scene is like the red coat in
SCHINDLER'S LIST. There is interesting between color (e.g., the
old man's face) and monochrome (e.g. the young man's face). In
general, the director and cinematographer keep monochrome for
flashback, and then switch to color for the present, but with no
cut, just a filter change.

"Hoichi the Earless" starts with the Battle of Don-no-ura between
the Genji and the Heike. (ObSF: Somtow Sucharitkul has written an
opera about this battle, under the pen name S. P. Somtow.) There
are some outdoor shots of the sea, but even the sea battle was shot
on a soundstage with a tank and a painted background. The relative
calmness of the water, as compared to the real sea, is one of many
giveaways. (One is reminded of the scene at the end of THE TRUMAN
SHOW.) This seems to reflect an attitude that is common in
Japanese kaiju films, which is that the audience is expected to
have a willing suspension of disbelief at the obvious model work
(trucks, buildings, etc.) rather than complain about how
unrealistic tit is. In some sense, it is the attitude that a movie
can be considered the same way one considers a stage play or puppet
theater. One doesn't complain that the backdrop of a stage set
looks painted or that the puppets don't look like real human beings.

This episode goes between realistic scenes of the monastery (even
if they are obviously on a sound stage), and surreal scenes of
Hoichi's nightly destination. For example, there may be a driving
rain in the "real" world, but when other monks get to the
destination, the rain suddenly stops, and all the water on the
ground disappears. There is also a clever scene where the flames
from two monks' lanterns escape and fly around on their own.

As the final story, "In a Cup of Tea" is sort of like a "palate
cleanser" dessert after a heavy meal. It is a fairly simple story,
about a man who sees someone "trapped" in a cup of tea. The vision
keeps recurring, and eventually the person "escapes" and attacks
him. At the end, a friend and a servant wonder where he is--and
then the servant sees him in a bucket of water.

Needless to say, highly recomended.

Released theatrically in the US 11/22/1965.

Film Credits:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058279/reference>

What others are saying:
<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kwaidan>

Two of the four stories in KWAIDAN are from KWAIDAN: STORIES AND
STUDIES OF STRANGE THINGS by Lafcadio Hearn (Dover, ISBN
0-486-21901-1): "The Woman of the Snow" ("Yukionna"), and "Hoichi
the Earless" ("Miminashi Hoichi no Hanashi"). In a Cup of Tea"
(Chawan no Naka") is from Hearn's KOTTO; BEING JAPANESE CURIOS,
WITH SUNRY COBWEBS. "The Black Hair" ("The Reconciliation") is
from SHADOWINGS. All are Hearn's re-tellings of classical Japanese
folk tales. [-ecl]

===================================================================

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net


The only way to keep your health is to eat what you
don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what
you'd rather not.
--Mark Twain

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)