Commenting on the first film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the reviewer for The Times noted incisively, “From the point of view of the conventional film-maker, the two least important factors in George Orwell's 1984 are the most attractive. They are the love affair between Winston Smith and Julia and the physical torments suffered by Winston in the cellars of the Ministry of Love, while the best things in the novel—indeed perhaps the best pieces of satirical writing Orwell ever accomplished—[the] Goldstein treatise and the appendix called “The Principles of Newspeak,” are obviously unfilmable.”¹

While one might question the reviewer's judgement of the “best things in the novel,” his assessment of the difficulties of converting Orwell's literature into film has proven to be applicable not only in 1956 but in the subsequent 45 years. There is always the temptation to convert Nineteen Eighty-Four's relationships into stock accounts of romance, evil, and tragedy, set in the specific dystopia of the novel. The result is that any adaptation claiming to remain “true” risks trapping itself between a vague attempt to capture the nuances of Orwell's writing and the more accessible stereotypes of Hollywood film. The most successful adaptations have been those which have not aspired to a large-scale reproduction of the world of Oceania but have sought their own distinctive interpretations of the near-future.

Indeed the first adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four drew strength from its limited ambitions. Broadcast live on the British Broadcasting Corporation in December 1954, the work had the advantage that Orwell's treatment of sexuality and torture were not common fare for the new medium. Simply by presenting a relationship between Winston and Julia which was far from a storybook romance and by bringing O'Brien's evil into the living room, the production broke new ground. One marker of its impact was that the drama attracted the largest TV audience since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. Another was that Members of Parliament questioned whether such a programme was suitable for general viewing and called upon the BBC to cancel its scheduled repeat.

The adaptation benefited from a strong cast, including Peter Cushing and the young Donald Pleasance, and the BBC's expertise in production of live drama. Still, it illustrated both the strengths and limitations of an audio-visual presentation of the novel. The Times' reviewer commented that, “concentrating on the action, [the production] reduced the ideological explanation so drastically that it robbed the story of at least half its power,” but “the vividness with which many parts of it came through would, perhaps have pleased the author.” The reviewer noted in particular the “wonderfully riotous orgy of vindictiveness” of the Two Minute Hate.² In a poll by the British Film Institute in 2000, Nineteen Eighty-Four was 73rd on the list of the top 100 British television programmes of all time.³ Despite this acclaim, it has only been re-shown once, in 1977.

Perhaps most significant, however, was the final word of The Times' editorial writers on the controversy over the airing of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Despite their use hundreds of times in newspapers, in broadcasts, and in other ways, such phrases as ‘totalitarianism’, ‘brainwashing’, ‘dangerous thoughts’, and the Communist practice of making words stand on their head have for millions of people suddenly taken on a new meaning.”⁴ Similarly, the first major cinematic production of an Orwell work owed as much to politics as it did to entertainment. With significant assistance from the CIA and Britain's MI6, Animal Farm had made it onto the big screen in 1954. The animated film had received good reviews and enjoyed modest success.

The intelligence services—who were already pressing for a treatment of Nineteen Eighty-Four—and their contacts in the film industry were encouraged, and Columbia Pictures soon began production through the mysterious N. Peter Rathvon, whose only other credit is Tarzan and the Lost Safari (1957). The youthful director was Michael Anderson, who established himself with The Dam Busters (1954), based on a daring British operation in World War II, and was also making Around the World in Eighty Days with David Niven. The screenplay was developed by two little-known writers, Ralph Gilbert Bettison and William Templeton, but the film was boosted by a prominent American and British cast including Edward O'Brien, Michael Redgrave (named in Orwell's notebook of “suspect” left-wingers), and Donald Pleasance, who had played Syme in the BBC production.

Critical reaction was mixed. The Times was willing to forgive the Hollywood treatment: “A certain degree of prettifying and distorting can be forgiven so long as the film preserves intact the essence of Orwell's warning and grasps the importance of what he has to say.”⁵ The film eventually suffered, however, from the changes. O'Brien was renamed O'Connor (to avoid confusion with the “real” Edmund O'Brien), and the British version ends with Winston and Julia overcoming their conditioning and defying the State/Party as they are gunned down, “an ending that cuts clean across Orwell's savage purpose.”⁶

Most serious was the lack of drama in the final production, despite the bizarre U.S. publicity with the taglines “Will Ecstasy Be a Crime … In the Terrifying World of the Future? Amazing wonders of tomorrow! Nothing like it ever filmed!”⁷ Anderson's direction was “honest” but lacked “inspiration” while O'Brien's Winston was “prosaic” and “bewildered” with “his actions and behaviour … revealing enough to ensure that he would be picked up by the Thought Police in the first reel, and Jan Sterling had “not much chance with Julia.” The reviewer for The Times tried to be charitable but could not hide disappointment:

“This version of 1984 is not without merits to balance the weaknesses, if indeed it is fair to call a failure to render into cinematic terms the principles of double-think and Newspeak by so condemning a word.”⁸

The film has largely disappeared from public view, allegedly because the Orwell estate is so unhappy with it that they have refused further release, and it is not available on videotape. For those who can recall it or have been persistent enough to find a copy, some have been kind to it; others have asserted that it is best forgotten.

In the next 30 years, the only renewed attempt to put Nineteen Eighty-Four on screen was a 1965 BBC production. It was part of a “Theatre 625” season in which Coming Up for Air was also shown; the director, Christopher Morahan, continued to work in television and had his biggest success in 1984 with the miniseries Jewel in the Crown. Little else is known about the production.

Unsurprisingly, it would be the attention to Orwell as 1984 approached that would prompt new film versions of the novel. The “truer” and larger-scale release was 1984, directed by the little-known Michael Radford (who also co-wrote the screenplay) and starring Richard Burton and John Hurt. The film was anticipated because of the on-screen confrontation between Burton, in his last role, and Hurt; even this, however, was an anticlimax in a muddled movie which can neither approach Orwell's complexity nor update his vision.

The film falters immediately by trying to force the narrative back into the imagery of the 1940s, with black-and-white newsreels, goose-stepping soldiers, and a rubble-strewn city. Such a portrayal might have resonated with audiences in the 1950s but, even in Reagan's America or Thatcher's Britain, the effect a generation later is of nostalgic caricature. The movie is lifted only by distinctive touches which extend Orwell's depiction, such as the mass salute to Big Brother (arms extended up and out and crossed in an X) and a scientist explaining progress towards elimination of the orgasm, a disruptive force which breeds thoughtcrime.

The film gives up much of the impact of the novel by compressing or altering, sometimes inexplicably, the narrative. Winston's recovery of memory is reduced to stock shots of the Golden Country, and a fleeting, confusing glimpse of his dead mother and rats before one scene, late in the movie, bluntly lays out his betrayal of his mother and sister. Suzanna Hamilton gives Julia depth, despite the film's efforts to recreate the two-dimensional vision of lust offered by Orwell, but she is undermined when the screenplay writes her out of the meeting where O'Brien initiates Winston into the Brotherhood. Julia is apolitical through absence, and the force of the scene in the book, in which Winston and Julia agree to illegal, immoral, and gruesome acts for the sake of rebellion, is lost.

The torture scene has been drained of power even before it occurs. Hurt's Winston is confused and twitching, showing none of the hope or energy present in Orwell's original apart from the token and ineffectual admiration of the “prole” washerwoman. Burton, tired and ill, was only cast eight weeks into production. “Cut off from the rest of the film,”⁹ he gives O'Brien none of the physical presence that attracts Winston; the scenes of affection where O'Brien shows Winston the Golden Country are embarrassing.

An incident surrounding the film's release best illustrates its failure. It was originally scored by the young composer Dominic Muldowney. After test screenings, however, the producers overruled Radford and insisted on a soundtrack by The Eurythmics. (Far from coincidentally, the film was distributed by Virgin, which had started with the distribution of pop music.) The movie was never strong enough to overcome the subsequent controversy.

If 1984 was a disappointment, Terry Gilliam's Brazil was a wonderful surprise, with the swirling, at times, surreal cinematography, and Gilliam's innovative direction. The screenplay is by Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, well-known as a playwright as well as a screenwriter, and Charles McKeown. 1984 is caught between re-presentation and interpretation of the novel; Brazil, although clearly inspired by the novel (Gilliam considered the title 1984 for the film), is free of such restrictions.

The cinematography, set in the present rather than Orwell's past, presents the perils of the machine society not through drab black, white, and grey tones but through a colorful tangle of wiring, tubes, pipes, cubicles, and malfunctioning appliances; through the imposing, sky-high desks of the bureaucrats; and through the inanities of women pursuing endless facelifts and talking about them at endless lunches. Gilliam, best known as a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, highlights evil not by magnifying but by juxtaposing it against the commonplace in a film which is set in “8:49 p.m., somewhere in the 20th century.” The torturer of the story, Jack Lint (played by Michael Palin, another member of the Flying Circus), is a trademark Python creation, chatting about the weather and his children before turning to his tools of cruelty. His “Winston,” Sam Lowry, (Jonathan Pryce), is befuddled and frustrated by the mediocre farce that is his job, but is redeemed by his love for Jill Layton (Kim Greist). Jill is more than a Julia, driving a truck, rebuffing Sam's clumsy advances, and leading the efforts of the “resistance.” Gilliam even offers an extra in Archibald “Harry” Tuttle, the illegal freelance “heating engineer” played to maximum comic effect by Robert De Niro.

Unlike 1984, which simplifies the novel to detrimental effect, Brazil is an extremely complex film, “a brilliant, dizzying fantasy,”¹⁰ to the point where it cannot be appreciated in a single viewing. In a hyper-modernist style, it features overlaps of conversations, background noise, images, and other visual cues, and its narrative moves between “reality,” fantasy, and dream sequences. Indeed, the film is so intricate and the comedy so “black” that Gilliam had to fight the executives of Universal Studios for months before his version of Brazil was released in the United States.

Brazil finds the ending that Orwell's pessimism never allows. Sam's quest inevitably fails but he finds happiness by going insane. Where Winston is crushed by the imposed rationale of an unreasonable system, Sam escapes his torture by dreaming of escape into a brilliant blue sky. (In the version edited on command from Universal executives, the film has a “Golden Country” ending in which Sam and Jill escape into pastoral bliss.)

Even the release of the film offered a tale of power and subversion. According to Gilliam, the studio's refusal to release his version was finally overcome when …

… the L.A. [Los Angeles] critics became very interested in the film and … set up a whole series of clandestine screenings of this film around Hollywood in people's homes. It came time to vote at the end of the year for their films and they realized in their bylaws it didn't say that a film had to be released to be able to be voted upon. And so they all voted upon whether Brazil could be voted upon and they agreed it could be and then it went out and it won Best Picture, Best Direction and Best Screenplay. [The awards were] announced the very night of the premiere of Out Of Africa in New York which was Universal's big film that year.¹¹

THEATER

Surprisingly, given the scope for exploration of psychological and political themes, there has never been a significant theatrical production of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In March 2001, however, the Northern Stage Ensemble premiered a version to tour around Britain. Moving beyond the Cold War environment of the novel, the Ensemble focused on today's society of surveillance in which “government officials, line managers and marketeers could know you better than you know yourself.”¹²

The production combined stage action with music and large-screen projection of film from Newcastle, England, and from Moscow with its “Stalinist architecture, the 1960s Soviet style living quarters, the people, the clothing, the grandeur and the poverty.” Reviews were effusive. Alfred Hickling of The Guardian praised “techno-drama for the digital age, which can make old-fashioned analogue theatre-going seem very tame by comparison,” to produce “a staggering, if slightly stomach-turning, experience.” At the same time, Neil Cooper of The Times, in words that favorably compared the Ensemble production with film adaptations, noted that the “multimedia, computer-enhanced theatrical creation … stays true to the book's bleak sense of austerity” with Winston and Julia in “a closed-off, one-dimensional and terminally self-conscious non-relationship” and O'Brien as “a brutally distant cipher.”¹³

Notes

1. The Times, March 1, 1956, http://www.geocities.com/pleasence/1984/1984-1.html.

2. “‘Nineteen Eighty Four’: Orwell's Novel on Television,” The Times, December 13, 1954, p. 11.

3. Matt Wells, “Fawlty Towers Tops List of TV Golden Oldies,” The Guardian, September 6, 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4059978,00.html.

4. “Nineteen Eighty-Four and All That,” The Times, December 16, 1954, p. 9.

5. The Times, March 1, 1956.

6. Ibid.

7. See http://www.geocities.com/pleasence/1984/1984-1.html and http://us.imdb.com/.

8. The Times, March 1, 1956.

9. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry for 1984 (1985), reprinted in http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~ntucs82/PEOPLE/b2506017/sf/29.html.

10. Paul Howlett, “Watch This,” The Guardian, April 14, 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3985963,00.html.

11. Terry Gilliam on The South Bank Show, ITV (Britain), June 29, 2000.

12. Chris Collet publicity statement, “RIP—Civil Liberties,” December 29, 2000, www.northernstage.com/listfeatures.asp?forkeytrans=5.

13. Alfred Hickling, The Guardian, March 23, 2000, and Neil Cooper, The Sunday Times, March 18, 2000, reprinted at www.northernstage.com/1984/pressrev.asp.