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Using 1934 film of The Scarlet Letter
Margot Sempreora, Ph.D.
Associate Prof. of English, Webster University
St. Louis, MO

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LITERATURE AND FILM

This project pairs a classic of American Literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), with its 1934 translation into film in order to look, first, at the values in Hawthorne's original story, and second, at the film version of this story as a product of the particular age in which it was made. The hope is that the project will be useful both as a resource for the teaching of Hawthorne and as a means of understanding that film, no matter what its subject, reflects the era in which it was created.

The Scarlet Letter has been made into a dozen film versions in the last 100 years. You will look at a version made in 1934, just seven years into the era of the talkies. Several silent versions preceded this talkie, and four more versions were made for the big screen and TV after 1934. (See us.imdb.com [Internet Movie Database] for film history and resources of all types.)

What fascinates filmmakers about a story written in 1850 concerning people who lived in 1640? There is something about this story that makes Hollywood studios think it will sell tickets! The story is, in fact, full of sensational material. Think about the plot:
- First: a married woman has a child with the community's most highly respected religious leader and refuses to identify him
- Next: the woman's husband, believed dead, returns and engages in the evil project of searching out and destroying the child's father
- In addition: Hester, Pearl and Dimmesdale seem to possess powers beyond the scope of the human--supernatural "sympathies" (as Hawthorne calls them) which allow them to sense others' weaknesses and sins

Hawthorne took as his subject matter dark stories about human beings struggling within themselves, with each other, or with some form of evil in the world. He once wrote that literature "is a plant which thrives best in spots where blood has been spilt long ago." Hawthorne set his stories in those "spots" in New England. While no blood is literally spilt in The Scarlet Letter, the Massachusetts Colony of the 1640s is certainly a spot where characters suffer and die. Hawthorne's narrator, a writer very much like Hawthorne himself, tells us in the first chapter, called "The Custom House," that he shares the guilt of his forefathers for their intolerance towards Quakers and their execution of innocent people in the Salem witch trials. The narrator wonders if his ancestors felt the shame that he feels:

"I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes...."
("The Custom House")

While Hawthorne suggests his reasons for creating the novel, Hollywood has had its own reasons for re-telling this tale each time it has returned to it. The translation of a novel into film is an act of interpretation; it reveals the temperature of the age in which the film is made as much as it reveals the talent of the filmmaker. The film version of a novel can never simply be a verbatim "record" of that novel. Rather, it interprets the novel in a variety of ways as it tells the story. For example, film directs our eyes to look at some things and not others; it influences our emotions with images, camera angles, and sound; and it arranges the sequence of images to create a particular effect upon our thinking. Scenes are added to the film or omitted, according to the director's interpretation of the story.

You can imagine that the 1934 version is markedly different from the recent 1995 version. In 1995, a promotional description read: "When intimacy is forbidden and passion is sin, love is the most defiant crime of all." The movie was rated "R."

The version of the film you will watch comes out of a decade in which Hollywood was submitting to demands that it censor its own films by imposing standards of decency. For example, pressure was brought to bear by The National Legion of Decency, a committee of Bishops who reviewed all films and labeled them "Passed," "Objectionable in Part," or "Condemned." If you were a Catholic and attended a film that fell into the "condemned" category, you committed a venial sin, according to the National Legion of Decency.

So, in the mid-1930s, Hollywood produced many films of courtship, marriage, and family life. These were the years when Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was first adapted, and Shirley Temple sailed on The Good Ship Lollipop; Frank Capra's innocent comedy, It Happened One Night, won an Oscar for best picture.

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BEFORE YOU WATCH THE FILM

Some General Questions to Consider:

1. How does one make a decent family film based on a tale of illicit love between a married woman and a minister? What was the audience led to feel by the filmmaker about Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth and the people of Salem? Watch to see what techniques the filmmaker uses to shape The Scarlet Letter into a "family film."

2. Something else to watch for: this early talkie was still affected by some of the techniques of visual storytelling from the age of the silent films. Watch for moments when the camera lingers in silence, allowing us to read the meaning of a gesture or a look without the help of dialogue.

3. Watch for places where the narrator's portions of the novel have become information divulged through dialogue or visually. (The film does not use a narrative voice-over to help tell the story.)

Specific Questions about This Film Translation:

4. How is sound or music used to enhance the telling of the story?

5. What scenes are added to the film? Why do you think they were added?

6. Which scenes from the novel are missing from the film? Do you think their absence alters Hawthorne's tale significantly?

7. Some objects, (such as the "A") or images (such as the forest or the scaffold) are repeated in Hawthorne's novel. Do you find objects or images repeated in the film? If so, do they help to promote the themes of the story?

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GENERAL THEMES

- the individual vs. society

- the ramifications of concealment and guilt

- gender roles

- (filmmaking as interpretation)

AFTER THE FILM

1. What moments from the novel are told well by the camera and why?

2. What difference does it make to the telling of the story that the "Custom House" chapter is missing?

3. What difference does it make that the film is missing the wild forest and the presence of the supernatural or evil?

4. Is the character of Pearl as you imagined her?

5. What methods of filming are used to lead you to feel sympathy for certain characters and dislike or distrust for others?

6. What was the purpose of the added comic scenes?

7. Does the film successfully convey the theme of the individual vs. community?

8. What difference does it make to our understanding of the character of Hester that our last image is of her standing on the scaffold, rather than as an aged and wise counselor for her community, as she appears in the novel?

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)
BIOGRAPHY

Born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne descended from Puritan religious leaders and lawmakers who figured prominently in both the persecution of the Quakers and the Salem witch trials. His powerful connection to the land of his forefathers is evident in much of his fiction, but never more powerfully expressed than in The Scarlet Letter. Published in 1850, after short story collections, Twice Told Tales, and Mosses from an Old Manse had appeared, the success of The Scarlet Letter finally brought Hawthorne recognition and financial security as a writer. Hawthorne was friends with many of writers of the era whom we still recognize for their powerful influence on American literature, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville. Hawthorne's work rises out of the great ideas and genre of his era: transcendental thought, the Romance novel, the Gothic novel. Hawthorne quickly produced two more novels set in New England-The House of Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852)-then in 1860, after a stay of three years on England as US Consul to Liverpool followed by and two years in Italy, The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) was published, his first novel with a European setting.

THE SCARLET LETTER - 1934
Directed by Robert G. Vignola

Writing credit: Leonard Fields and David Silverstein

Complete credited cast:

Colleen Moore : Hester Prynne
Hardie Albright : Arthur Dimmesdale
Henry B. Walthall : Roger Chillingworth
Cora Sue Collins : Pearl

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Runtime: USA:69
Country: USA
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Sound Mix: Mono

Useful Links for Researching and Teaching Hawthorne

http://www.wwnorton.com/naal/frame/auth.htm

http://www.moviediva.com/MD_root/reviewpages/MDScarletLetter.htm

http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/nh/hawthorne.html

http://www.coolmemes.com/reader/hawthorn.htm

http://www.penguinclassics.com/AUS/resources/teachers_guides/t_hawthorne_scarletltr.html

http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/hawthorne.htm

http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap3/hawthorne.html

http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/literature/bedlit/authors_depth/hawthorne.htm

http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/nh/nhfilm.html

http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-4056.html?mail-03-09

Great Link to Film Information:
http://www.imdb.com/

Continue on to:
The Scarlet Letter
Paisan
The Trial Of John Peter Zenger
Zero de Conduite
Birth Of A Nation