Although Evelyn Waugh is one of my favourite writers, I cannot think of any great films which have been based upon his works. Or, for that matter, any great television series; I have never been a fan of that monumentally tedious adaptation of "Brideshead Revisited" from the early eighties. I think that the reason why Waugh does not adapt particularly well to the screen has to do with the nature of his writing; he was, in both politics and religion, an arch-conservative who found himself at odds with the progressive spirit of his times and attacked that spirit in a series of bleakly satirical novels. Like many satirists he was not a writer who thought primarily in visual terms (even though he was an art lover); I doubt if anyone reads him for the beauty of his descriptive passages. He had a strong authorial voice for which film-makers often have difficulty in finding an equivalent. Perhaps the best attempt is Tony Richardson's version of "The Loved One", which updated the story from the 1940s to the 1960s and expanded Waugh's satire to take in various aspects of contemporary American life. Although this film has a much more left-wing agenda than Waugh would have been happy with, at least Richardson and his scriptwriters never lose sight of the fact that they are adapting a work of satire.
Like the previous reviewer, however, I felt that the makers of "A Handful of Dust" ignored Waugh's irony and simply turned it into a tragedy made in the best "heritage cinema" style. It was directed by Charles Sturridge who was also responsible for that television "Brideshead". Waugh's novel, a tale of adultery among the upper classes, was intended as a satire on the mores of the British landed gentry and social-climbing bourgeoisie, and also on the eccentricities and hypocrisies of the English legal system, especially with regard to divorce. Waugh himself had gone though a divorce a few years earlier and, like his hero Tony Last, had been obliged by social convention to manufacture sham evidence which would allow his adulterous wife to pose as the wronged party. The title is an allusion to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land":-
I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust,
and Waugh's satire has a bleakness which matches that of Eliot's lines.
Something else which makes "A Handful of Dust" a difficult novel to film is its weak structure. The strange ending, in which Tony is held prisoner in the Brazilian jungle by an elderly eccentric who forces him to read the complete works of Dickens over and over, is quite different in tone to the rest of the book and has the air of something tacked onto the novel from a separate work. Which indeed it is- it was originally a separate short story entitled "The Man Who Liked Dickens" and was pressed into service as an ending for the novel, presumably because Waugh could not think of anything more original. The film keeps this ending (although Waugh did in fact write an alternative one for his American publishers), and it cannot be said that it is any more successful on the screen than it is on the printed page.
In the novel Tony was a rather dull, pedestrian country squire, and part of Waugh's theme was that he was strapped for cash and finding it difficult to keep up his ramshackle, crumbling country house Hetton Abbey. His surname has obvious symbolic overtones with its implication that he is the "last of his line". (His only son is killed in a hunting accident). His glamorous younger wife is referred to as "Lady Brenda" whereas he is a plain "Mr.", suggesting that she comes from a socially more elevated family than he. In the film, however, we get little sense of his financial difficulties or of a family in decline. Tony as portrayed by James Wilby becomes a handsome, youthful aristocrat, living in a magnificent Victorian Gothic stately home- in reality Carlton Towers, the Yorkshire home of the Duke of Norfolk.
The film also stars a number of other luminaries of the British cinema, but few of them make any impression. Kristin Scott Thomas as Brenda and Rupert Graves as her lover John Beaver both have a thankless task; Waugh, still bitter over his own divorce, made both characters completely worthless. Graves has the added difficulty in that Beaver, although worthless, needs to be fascinating enough to be credible as the man who inspires an almost insane passion in a beautiful titled lady. Alec Guinness appears in a cameo as Tony's captor Mr. Todd; it is far from being his best performance, but at least it is not as embarrassing as his role as the Indian professor in "A Passage to India" from four years earlier.
Period pieces like this one were a frequent staple of the British film industry in the eighties and nineties, and this trend was the subject of some criticism as evidence of the British national obsession with nostalgia. I have never accepted the validity of this criticism; a number of these costume dramas, such as Merchant Ivory's "A Room with a View" and "Howards End", were excellent in quality and asked some pertinent questions about Britain's past. I have to admit, however, that at its worst "heritage cinema" could be beautiful but lifeless, and "A Handful of Dust", lacking the savage bite of Waugh's novel, falls into this category. Three years later Sturridge was to make an equally lifeless version of E.M. Forster's "Where Angels Fear to Tread". 5/10
Like the previous reviewer, however, I felt that the makers of "A Handful of Dust" ignored Waugh's irony and simply turned it into a tragedy made in the best "heritage cinema" style. It was directed by Charles Sturridge who was also responsible for that television "Brideshead". Waugh's novel, a tale of adultery among the upper classes, was intended as a satire on the mores of the British landed gentry and social-climbing bourgeoisie, and also on the eccentricities and hypocrisies of the English legal system, especially with regard to divorce. Waugh himself had gone though a divorce a few years earlier and, like his hero Tony Last, had been obliged by social convention to manufacture sham evidence which would allow his adulterous wife to pose as the wronged party. The title is an allusion to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land":-
I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust,
and Waugh's satire has a bleakness which matches that of Eliot's lines.
Something else which makes "A Handful of Dust" a difficult novel to film is its weak structure. The strange ending, in which Tony is held prisoner in the Brazilian jungle by an elderly eccentric who forces him to read the complete works of Dickens over and over, is quite different in tone to the rest of the book and has the air of something tacked onto the novel from a separate work. Which indeed it is- it was originally a separate short story entitled "The Man Who Liked Dickens" and was pressed into service as an ending for the novel, presumably because Waugh could not think of anything more original. The film keeps this ending (although Waugh did in fact write an alternative one for his American publishers), and it cannot be said that it is any more successful on the screen than it is on the printed page.
In the novel Tony was a rather dull, pedestrian country squire, and part of Waugh's theme was that he was strapped for cash and finding it difficult to keep up his ramshackle, crumbling country house Hetton Abbey. His surname has obvious symbolic overtones with its implication that he is the "last of his line". (His only son is killed in a hunting accident). His glamorous younger wife is referred to as "Lady Brenda" whereas he is a plain "Mr.", suggesting that she comes from a socially more elevated family than he. In the film, however, we get little sense of his financial difficulties or of a family in decline. Tony as portrayed by James Wilby becomes a handsome, youthful aristocrat, living in a magnificent Victorian Gothic stately home- in reality Carlton Towers, the Yorkshire home of the Duke of Norfolk.
The film also stars a number of other luminaries of the British cinema, but few of them make any impression. Kristin Scott Thomas as Brenda and Rupert Graves as her lover John Beaver both have a thankless task; Waugh, still bitter over his own divorce, made both characters completely worthless. Graves has the added difficulty in that Beaver, although worthless, needs to be fascinating enough to be credible as the man who inspires an almost insane passion in a beautiful titled lady. Alec Guinness appears in a cameo as Tony's captor Mr. Todd; it is far from being his best performance, but at least it is not as embarrassing as his role as the Indian professor in "A Passage to India" from four years earlier.
Period pieces like this one were a frequent staple of the British film industry in the eighties and nineties, and this trend was the subject of some criticism as evidence of the British national obsession with nostalgia. I have never accepted the validity of this criticism; a number of these costume dramas, such as Merchant Ivory's "A Room with a View" and "Howards End", were excellent in quality and asked some pertinent questions about Britain's past. I have to admit, however, that at its worst "heritage cinema" could be beautiful but lifeless, and "A Handful of Dust", lacking the savage bite of Waugh's novel, falls into this category. Three years later Sturridge was to make an equally lifeless version of E.M. Forster's "Where Angels Fear to Tread". 5/10