Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Collier, John - John Updike (essay date 20 August 1973)

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John Updike (essay date 20 August 1973)

SOURCE: Updike, John. “Milton Adapts Genesis; Collier Adapts Milton.” New Yorker 49, no. 26 (20 August 1973): 84-86, 89.

[In the following essay, Updike explores Collier's interpretation of Milton's “Paradise Lost.”]

No clue is offered, on the jacket flap or in the author's rather testy “Apology,” as to what possessed John Collier to turn John Milton's “Paradise Lost” into a screenplay. Was this a commercial, practical project—after all, Cecil B. De Mille mined Exodus and Judges for a pretty penny—from whose shipwreck the writer salvaged his script? Or was it always to be a curiosity purely literary—a “Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind,” as the title page advertises? Milton's Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (sumptuously produced by Knopf in a kind of Loew's Orpheum Art Deco) begins as space opera, “2001”-plus: “We are moving upward into a...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Josiah Titzell (review date 5 April 1931)
   2. Dudley Carew (review date 5 May 1931)
   3. Herschel Brickell (review date 1931)
   4. Basil Bunting (review date August 1932)
   5. Rolfe Scott-Thomas (review date 20 October 1932)
   6. New Statesman and Nation (review date 12 November 1932)
   7. The Spectator (review date 18 November 1932)
   8. David Garnett (review date 8 April 1933)
   9. Iris Barry (review date 7 May 1933)
   10. John Cournos (review date 28 June 1933)
   11. Wyndham Lewis (review date 8 June 1934)
   12. William Rose Benét (review date 4 August 1934)
   13. The Nation (review date 8 August 1934)
   14. Fanny Butcher (review date 22 September 1934)
   15. C. J. Eustace (review date September 1934)
   16. Geoffrey West (review date 12 December 1934)
   17. Ben Ray Redman (review date 1 February 1941)
   18. Otis Ferguson (review date 3 February 1941)
   19. Paul Theroux (essay date 26 November 1972)
   20. New Republic (review date 9 December 1972)
   21. Jay Martin (review date 23 June 1973)
   22. John Updike (essay date 20 August 1973)
   23. Anthony Burgess (essay date 1973)
   24. Tom Milne (essay date spring 1976)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Updike