[By Truffaut's creative re-doing of Henry James's story "Altars of the Dead" into La Chambre verte (The Green Room)] he has offered what James himself considered the ideal form of criticism: "to criticise is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticised thing and make it one's own." (p. 78)

"The Altar of the Dead" is the only serious fictional attempt by James to present his idea of an afterlife which he thought of as an extension of the lives of the dead through relations with the living, depending for its force on the consciousness of the remembering person. (p. 79)

[A] view of the immortality of the soul is beautifully conveyed to us by Truffaut's variation that gives a dazzling reality to the American writer's notion of the only kind of immortality possible—our conscious attempt to keep "them" within a continuing relation with us.

Truffaut does this by a blending of James's views with his own predispositions. By building up the character of the woman in the story as young and in contact with people, he makes the tensions between the necrophiliac hero and the healthy life-oriented heroine more dramatic. (pp. 79-80)

One of Truffaut's major changes was to alter the time and the setting to motivate his hero and to rationalize his almost psychotic fixation by invoking the horrors of war…. The additional alterations in the names of the characters and the introduction of a housekeeper, her young ward and the auction house scene are devices to enrich the visual field and to dramatize the story through episodic variety by using recognizable icons from Truffaut's films. (p. 80)

Truffaut has made very effective the chapel scene which in James's story had been but part of a church in a London suburb, for the filmmaker has put it directly in the cemetery so the characters move in it as if it were their total world. As night is their time, as candle light their illumination, so the city of the dead is their landscape…. [In] spite of close adherence to James's main thrust, Truffaut has converted a story, usually thought to be lugubrious and generally unpleasant to read, into a film of interesting liveliness. He has made certain changes which bring into visual focus the largely introspective consciousness of James's main character which relies chiefly on language and metaphor for its expression.

The title, La Chambre verte, "The Green Room," is taken from the color of Cecilia's room which she has made into her kind of shrine, filled with portraits of her former lover. The nameless woman's room in "The Altar of the Dead" has "dark red walls" which give it "the flush of life." The change to green might be the kind of change that Truffaut recorded in the film made just before this one, "The Man Who Loved Women," where the little girl's red dress is changed to blue after the novelist converts his experience into a work of art. It might also reflect the feeling that green was a color more consistent with Cecilia's "flush of life" than "dark red" and more indicative of healthy growth.

But the fact that the green room creates the title of the film gives it an importance beyond these two possibilities. [The title] invokes the green room in the Comédie Française, the salon in which the actors of the company act as hosts, rather than as performers, for distinguished spectators. It is also consistent with Truffaut's obvious immersion in James's fiction that he is probably remembering a crucial scene in The Tragic Muse, James's great novel of the theatre, actors and artists, which takes place in that famous green room—the "spacious saloon, covered with pictures and relics and draped in official green velvet … among portraits and scrolls, the records of a splendid history." Cecilia's room, too, is both a salon and a shrine, a place filled with mementoes of her lover, the chief actor in her life. It also fits in with Truffaut's interest in shrines and altars in The 400 Blows and The Story of Adèle H.

By making his hero restore a "dead" building, right within the precincts of the cemetery, the city of the dead becomes the important landscape of the film. He makes a ruin come to life, which is a preparation for making his dead friends come to life through flame. By multiplying the candles in the small chapel and creating a mass of light in the city of the dead, night is made into day. (pp. 81-2)

More important than the minor changes are the similarities and sympathies between the two creators. James and Truffaut, passionately devoted to their craft, had the same early immersion in literary models, having both reaped the advantage of irregular schooling, which permitted full-time devotion to intensive reading. (p. 82)

The success of Truffaut's version of the James story is not merely a happy accident, for it depends on his concept of author-director. By being personally responsible for all the aspects of a film, Truffaut makes the analogy between himself and James—"the filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen"—a reality. (p. 83)