Updike on Screen

Among the several good books I've read recently is Adam Begley's 2014 biography of novelist-poet-essayist John Updike (1932–2009), one of my favorite writers since my high school years (and the subject of my very first term paper). Begley's treatment is fair minded, thorough (but not overwhelming as so many bios tend to be these days), and written with an elegance worthy of Updike himself, a consummate stylist whose sumptuous sentences still take my breath away.

I was slightly disappointed, however, that Begley had almost nothing to say about the film and television adaptations of Updike's work. Discussing them wouldn't have added many pages to his tome since the efforts to bring Updike to the big and small screens have been relatively few. The Witches of Eastwick (1984) was made into a theatrical feature by George Miller (of Mad Max fame) in 1987, followed by a couple of TV pilots and an actual series, Eastwick, that was cancelled after one season. In 1979 Fielder Cook adapted Updike's series of short stories about a suburban couple, Richard and Joan Maple, into a TV movie, Too Far to Go. And nine years before that, Jack Smight's adaptation of Rabbit, Run (1960) appeared (briefly) in theaters. And that's it, so far as I know. Updike did sell the rights to his 1968 best-seller, Couples, to Hollywood for six figures, but the movie was never made. (I seem to recall that Franklin Schaffner [Planet of the Apes, Patton] was supposed to direct.)

Begley only mentions Miller's Witches, recounting how Updike and his wife, Martha, caught a showing at a mall multiplex: "She loathed it; he was less bothered, especially as the screenplay veered away from the book and the whiz-bang special effects took over, leaving him free to enjoy the three witches [Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer], each lovable in her own way. In the book he had been careful to keep Van Horne [the tale's Satan figure] from stealing the show as the devil tends to do, but [Jack] Nicholson, who had no such scruples, gave an outrageously exuberant performance; Updike was pleased that the filmmakers had nonetheless managed to convey that the story was about women." As I've always found the page-to-screen process fascinating, this left me hungry to learn even more, especially about Updike's responses to the other adaptations of his books.

I confess that in addition to Witches, I've only seen Smight's film of Rabbit, Run, and that was once, years ago, on television, with commercials. What I mainly recall is how utterly pedestrian it was despite (or, more probably, because of) its slavish faithfulness to the novel. Never more than a mediocre director, Smight could muster no cinematic equivalents to Updike's shimmering prose. The film did have one lasting effect on me, however: as I read Updike's three Rabbit sequels, I kept picturing James Caan, the star of the film, as the books' titular protagonist. The author himself thought otherwise. At an Updike lecture I attended around the time Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel in the tetralogy, was published, he made a comment to this effect: "Caan was not how I saw Rabbit." I just wish I could remember what else he said on the subject. Unfortunately, Begley's biography provides no further illumination.

I can't help but suspect that the short shrift Begley gives to "Updike on screen" reflects a litterateur's bias against that upstart medium, the cinema. Now that the movies are 120 years old and postmodern theory has blurred the distinctions between high and low culture, such biases aren't as pervasive as they used to be, but I fear they persist nonetheless.