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

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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