The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry
A Scholarly Edition of Lowry's 'Tender is the Night'.
To a remarkable extent the filmscript of Tender is theNight, which Malcolm Lowry wrote in 1949-50 with the help ofMargerie Bonner Lowry, is less an adaptation of F. ScottFitzgerald's novel than an extension of Lowry's own fiction. AsMiguel Mota and Paul Tiessen show, Malcolm Lowry's script containsimportant passages which are really "cinematic" restatementsof parts of Lowry's novel Lunar Caustic, and of shortstories such as "Through the Panama" and "StrangeComfort Afforded by the Profession."
The editors note also the many direct and indirect allusions toelements from Lowry's master-work, Under the Volcano(1947), a novel that is regarded by many critics as one of the most"cinematic" prose works of the twentieth century. A closestudy of the text reveals that Lowry took on the Tender is the Nightproject partly as a means of reopening his Under the Volcanonarrative, of re-exploring its plot and problems and its characters andthemes, and of carrying as far as possible the "cinematic"style he had begun to examine in that work.
Lowry's Tender is the Night manuscript is important, then, notonly as a completed, 455-page text in its own right but also as a texthaving a direct bearing on Lowry's own reading of Under theVolcano and of his sense of artistic direction after that work.Indeed, the editors consider the significance of the filmscript as akey - hitherto almost entirely overlooked - to understanding hisprojected multiple volume work, The Voyage That NeverEnds.
This scholarly edition of Lowry's script presents 38 passages ofvarying length - from less than one page to over 100 pages - in whichLowry writes with a freedom and creativity that lead to a textnarratively and stylistically quite separate and distinct fromFitzgerald's original. It excludes passages where Lowry adheresmore or less slavishly, at 37 intervals, to Fitzgeralds' novel,though it provides brief narrative summaries of and comments on thoseomitted sections.
Lowry's achievement in his filmscript demonstrates the nature ofhis life-long commitment to and extensive knowledge of theinternational cinema from the 1910s to the 1950s and also the nature ofhis view of the novelist's responsibility to participate in thedevelopment of film as an art.
The script also illustrates Lowry's relationship with F. ScottFitzgerald as one in a series of literary kinships, and as the editorspoint out, the work becomes a criticism and analysis of bothFitzgerald's novel and of Fitzgerald himself.
Hollywood's loss is our gain. Lowry has written a movie-novel rather than a shooting script for a movie. It is breathtaking prose, a fascinating mixture of Russian montage, German expressionism, and music by Bix Beiderbecke.
The screenplay is crammed with luscious detail about Paris, New York, a French freighter at sea, the beach at Antibes. Lowry's style, freshly honed on the Dantesque bulk of his greatest novel, is so visual it situates us directly in the midst of a three-dimensional whirl of activity.
This volume is an important addition to the published Lowry canon, exposing a major link between his cinematically conceived masterpiece and the montage and experimentalism of his late fiction.
