It's worthy of being remade with the same script.
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Steve Crook — 10 years ago(January 10, 2016 08:00 AM)
It's actually very different from the original Clouston novel
See
http://www.powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/39_SiB/TheStory.html
for the differences. Pertwee just used the novel to make the first draft of the script, to be directed by someone brought in by Korda. When Powell was brought in he so admired Pressburger's treatment of the script that he formed a partnership that lasted for 20 years and a friendship that lasted for life.
Powell then went on to record (in
"A Life in Movies"
) how:
Emeric produced a very small piece of rolled-up paper, and addressed the meeting. I listened spellbound.
Since talkies took over the movies, I had worked with some good writers, but I had never met anything like this. In the silent days, the top screenwriters were technicians rather than dramatists. They knew that things had to move and they moved them. In the America of those days, only the screenplays of D.W. Griffith indicated a wide knowledge and a general culture, both in the image on the screen, and in the titles which accompanied the silent film and involved the spectator in the action. I was familiar with all this from my years in France, for the European cinema remained highly literate and each country, conscious of its separate culture and literature, strove to outdo the other. All this was changed by the talkies. America, with its enormous wealth and enthusiasm and it technical resources, waved the big stick. Films must talk! And they must talk American. Famous writers and dramatists all over the world from Nobel Prize winners to Edgar Wallace, were hurried to Hollywood, put into rabbit hutches and told to write dialogue. Three years of confusion and agony followed, at the end of which eight men in Hollywood and New York had the whole world's film market in their pockets. The European film no longer existed. The national film was a thing of the past, or existed only on sufferance, or because Paris is a nice place to live. Only the great German film business was prepared to fight the American monopoly, and Dr Goebbels soon put a stop to that in 1933. But the day that Emeric walked out of his flat, leaving the key in the door to save the storm-troopers the trouble of breaking it down, was the worst day's work that the clever doctor ever did for his country's reputation, as he was soon to find out. As I said, I listened spellbound to this small Hungarian wizard, as Emeric unfolded his notes, until they were at least six inches long. He had stood Storer Clouston's plot on its head and completely restructured the film.
Steve