At the close of the 19th century, films appeared as if by magic, illuminating screens with moving images that gave directors an apparent power over reality. In December 1895, the world looked agog as the Lumière brothers offered France’s first paying public screen exhibition. Within a year the flamboyant Georges Méliès was transporting audiences not to Paris but into fantastical settings bursting with effects undreamed of. Over the next ten years, film studios sprang up, flanked by the emergence of that now familiar, more modest visual sequential medium known as the comic strip. Both media needed stories, and they happened to find them already stacked on their own desks. In the United States most 19th century French novels already belonged to everyone, so their stories were readily available, and no rights had to be bought. It was a business too ripe with opportunity not to be seized upon.
French fiction tended to focus on outsiders, masked men, the underdog and the subversion of oppressive social structures. Many of the most important French novels had first appeared in newspaper installments that ended in suspense. Silent cinema took the same course, and later so did the adventure comic strip after its invention. The appeal was strong for millions who watched these multilayered and allegorical tales, where all passion and every thought were transmitted through written titles.
Sound had a shattering effect on all this.
Sam, one of the four Warner brothers (Harry was president), had been the force behind sound technology and the development of the Vitaphone at Warner Bros. He died the day before The Jazz Singer premiered in October 1927. As sound entered its high adolescence the Hollywood studios began turning out their more “serious” France-based melodramas. Warner Bros. made The Life of Emile Zola (1937). At MGM, Irving Thalberg steered the studio through the early years of sound and oversaw Camille (1936). George Waggner produced Phantom of the Opera for Universal in 1943. Among the bunch, Victor Hugo was the most widely adapted. He had written The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831, the pitiful tale of Quasimodo, misshapen in many ways yet serving faithfully as the bell ringer of Notre Dame de Paris, and Esmeralda the Romani, a dancer and an object of desire for a priest and more. He followed it with his other bestseller in 1862, Les Misérables, an epic saga about ex-convict Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in relentless pursuit.
Both works, of course, found early Hollywood applications. Les Misérables was made by Vitagraph as a three-part silent film in 1909. Universal took on The Hunchback of Notre Dame as a feature in 1923, with Carl Laemmle producing and Irving G. Thalberg supervising. Laemmle saw in the mixture of sorrow and passion the ideal formula, and he paid nothing to the author’s estate for it. Lon Chaney, the man of a thousand faces, designed his own Quasimodo. He padded his body, added the signature hump and molded his own features between brute and sensitive human. The Hunchback role elevated Chaney into Hollywood’s most popular horror star and initiated a legendary run of Universal Gothic films.
Once talkies became a part of filmmaking, Darryl F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century Pictures funded an elaborate 1935 version of Les Misérables, most notorious for the clashes between Charles Laughton’s stone-faced Javert and Fredric March’s emotionally distraught Valjean. This film set the template for American movie translations. In 1939 at RKO, executive producer Pandro S. Berman released a sound version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, complete with distinctively booming bell sound. The movie is typically singled out for Laughton’s tender and sorrowful performance as Quasimodo and Maureen O’Hara’s breakthrough role as the heartbroken Esmeralda.
There are two well-known and exciting novels by Alexandre Dumas featuring brave, rebellious swordsmen whose lives have been disrupted by betrayal and who seek revenge. Both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo had their debuts in 1844 to 1846 as newspaper serials. The three most iconic musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, join forces with the naive but ambitious d’Artagnan to defend the queen against the scheming Cardinal Richelieu. In 1921, United Artists released a silent version featuring Douglas Fairbanks in action. Fairbanks came back to d’Artagnan for his final silent swashbuckler, The Iron Mask (1929), adapted from the concluding portion of Dumas’ The Vicomte de Bragelonne, where the king’s twin is imprisoned behind a riveted iron mask. In 1935, RKO offered a talkie accompanied by Max Steiner’s upbeat score, complete with clearer sound effects, more vivid hoofbeats and the clash of steel, as well as witty banter. Following that, 20th Century Fox produced its version in 1939 and added music and the comic talent of the Ritz Brothers. The same year James Whale directed The Man in the Iron Mask for United Artists, with Louis Hayward in the dual role and the iron mask itself.
The Count of Monte Cristo tells of a falsely accused sailor who escapes prison and reappears as a wealthy count seeking to destroy those who betrayed him. Fox filmed it as a silent in 1922, the year after the Fairbanks Three Musketeers, with opulent costumes and an expansive adventure. The next film version was a 1934 talkie produced by Edward Small for United Artists. It brought Dumas’ novel to the screen for the first time as an English-language sound production, uniting a strong performance from Robert Donat with a sophisticated score by Alfred Newman.
Jules Verne took his fans far from swashbuckling adventures into a new frontier for the fantastic. In Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), a professor, his nephew and their guide went down an Icelandic volcano into a prehistoric underworld and found adventure. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) told of three unlucky men trapped on Captain Nemo’s deadly underwater craft, the Nautilus. Within its awesome depths they beheld nature’s treasures, and they were drawn into Nemo’s war against the warships of a nation Verne never names.
Technology limited most early science-fiction films, but in 1916 Universal’s Carl Laemmle took on Verne’s sea tale with ambitious filming of underwater scenes using a submersible device called a photosphere. The Williamson brothers filmed from the sphere, lowered from a ship by a flexible hose. A thick glass plate gave the camera a view of the sea while keeping it dry inside. Audiences delighted in it, but it would be nearly forty years before either of these two Verne novels appeared again on film.
Émile Zola was a French novelist and exponent of social criticism. He wrote such well received works as Germinal (1885), the tale of a French coal miners’ strike, and the darker La Bête humaine (1890), an exploration of the fatal impulses and jealousies within the French railroad worker community. Since a good deal of his work was in the public domain in the US, filmmakers interested in social issues produced screen adaptations. American studios were enamored of his work across the board. Now lost, Fox Film’s Destruction (1915), directed by Will S. Davis and starring Theda Bara, was modeled after Zola’s Travail (1901), in which a reform-minded engineer transforms a steel mill into a workers’ utopia. D. W. Griffith’s The Struggle (1931) for United Artists is a bleak portrait of alcoholism echoing Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877). Nana (1934), a Samuel Goldwyn film for United Artists directed by Dorothy Arzner, adapts Zola’s 1880 novel about an actress who becomes a high-society courtesan, wrecking wealthy men with the same pleasures they denigrate publicly.
Warner Bros.’ The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a Best Picture winner, centers on Zola’s participation in exonerating Alfred Dreyfus of a false charge of espionage. Columbia’s Human Desire (1954), directed by Fritz Lang with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, reconceives La Bête humaine as an American film noir about a railroad engineer enticed into murder. In U.S. adaptations, Zola’s pro-worker, social-reform bent usually got softened, and personal melodrama moved center stage.
During the 1830s and ’40s, Honoré de Balzac labored on a massive project: a vast series of dozens of interwoven novels, which he collected under the title La Comédie humaine in 1842, envisioning them as a total portrait of the human world. Greedy schemes and desperate ambitions permeated his connected novels with their cast of returning characters.
Filmmakers were quick to tap into his output, even in the silent era. Rex Ingram’s The Conquering Power (1921), a Metro Pictures picture starring Rudolph Valentino, came from Eugénie Grandet (1833), concerning a miser’s daughter whose first love is crushed by her father’s avarice. Norma Talmadge starred in the First National version of La Duchesse de Langeais (1834), released as The Eternal Flame (1922), the tale of a Parisian duchess who retreats to a convent after a devoted general finally stops seeking her attentions. With the advent of sound, many of these figures gained a lively presence through the new medium’s focus on the spoken word. The Lovable Cheat (1949), a breezy Skyline film adapted from Balzac’s 1851 stage play Mercadet, satirizes a hopelessly indebted Paris speculator who duplicitously satisfies his creditors, showcasing the cutthroat morality of boom and bust.
Guy de Maupassant’s short stories dissected the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, and they had the right kind of scale for one-reel silent pictures and shorts during the early talkie years. In Boule de Suif (1880) stagecoach passengers force a patriotic prostitute to sleep with a Prussian officer in exchange for safe passage and then shun her. The Woman Disputed (1928), a late silent with Norma Talmadge released with sync music and effects, revamped the story. RKO’s Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), directed by Robert Wise, combined Boule de Suif with the 1882 Maupassant short Mademoiselle Fifi, in which a local woman, as an act of defiance in miniature, stabs a tyrannical Prussian lieutenant.
Gaston Leroux published Le Fantôme de l’Opéra in the Paris daily Le Gaulois as a serial in 1909 and 1910, with the book following in 1910. It concerns a disfigured musical prodigy living in a hidden part of the opera cellars. He tutors a gifted and alluring soprano, tries to sabotage her romance with another man, and meets his own end in a burst of jealousy and fury. Fifteen years later Universal came up with The Phantom of the Opera (1925), a popular Carl Laemmle production helmed by Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney. His makeup design, along with a two-color Technicolor masked ball scene, made it a sensation. Universal released an updated version with sync music and effects and added footage in 1929. The 1943 remake by Arthur Lubin, with Claude Rains in the title role, won Oscars for its color photography and art direction and took the material more in the mode of operatic romance than gothic horror.
French novels were being plundered for cinematic plots, just as the same material was percolating into a new kind of American narrative: the newspaper strip. Cartoon strips, taking hold with novelty gags in the 1890s, had by the 1920s and ’30s lengthened into serial adventure to suit the American taste. Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, a science-fantasy adventure with ray gun battles and sword fights on the planet Mongo, was a January 1934 King Features success, a clear product of the kind of Dumas- and Verne-inspired cinema Hollywood had churned out for two decades. Around the same time, Eastern Color Printing was publishing anthology “funny books” of reprinted strips, including Famous Funnies (1934).
On this foundation Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson founded National Allied Publications and published the first comic book of original material to become readily available at the newsstand, New Fun (1935). New Fun #6 (October 1935) presented an early example of the sword-fight appeal of the historical adventure tradition: the French swordsman Henri Duval, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster three years before Superman. The same issue also introduced their occult investigator, Dr. Occult. The tradition lives on through these characters. Shuster revealed that Superman’s imposing stance and presence had taken a cue from Douglas Fairbanks, the d’Artagnan of the 1921 Musketeers, and Superman in Action Comics #1 (1938) appears in disguise and fights corrupt officials in a system rigged against innocent people. In short, it is the Dumas narrative without the swords. Upon Doctor Doom’s creation in Fantastic Four #5 (1962) Jack Kirby thought of him as the man in the iron mask and a harbinger of death and that the mask was directly responsible for the armor and hood. The riveted iron face Whale introduced on the big screen back in 1939, had become the face of Marvel’s greatest antagonist.
Meanwhile the pulp mags were taking on dark, sordid themes, and the films carried similarly grim moods. The Shadow resulted from this fusion. He was first heard over the radio in 1930, announced as host for murder mysteries. In 1931 Street & Smith launched The Shadow Magazine, written by Walter B. Gibson under the name Maxwell Grant. The pulp character was presented with stark visuals worthy of The Phantom of the Opera: sharp light and shadow, dark shadowed eyes, and a cape. He expressed the kind of hostile obsession with corrupt systems present in The Count of Monte Cristo, and like Jean Valjean his existence as a fugitive with secret motivations recalled the other great novels’ masked outsiders battling oppressive society. There is no evidence of a direct link to the books here either, but Gibson and his readers shared the experience of seeing all these movies. Batman provides a well-documented, clear descendant of the masked hero. Bob Kane cited Fairbanks’ Zorro as inspiration for the character, and the Batman of Detective Comics #27 (1939) derives from Johnston McCulley’s 1919 Zorro. McCulley in turn drew on the Dumas and Hugo tradition of the secret outsider in a mask battling corrupt officials.
French novels had inspired the scripts of silent and early sound-era filmmakers. The films in turn fed the American newspaper strip and the pulp magazine. By 1939 the mythic archetype of the outcast seeking adventure and battling injustice, from Dumas, Hugo, Zola, Maupassant and Leroux, had moved on and taken on many new, modern guises from Superman to Batman and beyond.
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