user: Film View - RECYCLING BOOKS INTO MOVIES - NYTimes.com

Why take a piece of literature, especially a novel, one that is successful in its original form and that explores regions of the mind not easily penetrated by a 35 millimeter motion-picture camera, and attempt to turn it into a movie that can reproduce only that part of the narrative that can be related through an association of moving images? One answer is money, which comes as no surprise to those o f us who have c ringed through bowdlerized screen versions of everythingfrom the Bibl e to ''War and Peace,'' ''Ulysses,'' ''An American Tragedy,'' '' Decline and Fall'' and ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'' As faras I know, '' Tristram Shandy'' has remained unmolested.

Until now no one has attempted to justify this occasionally profitable recycling process with quite the mixture of literary perception, modesty, candor and self-importance that John Fowles displays in his enthusiastic foreword to Harold Pinter's j ustpublished screenplay for ''The French Lie utenant's Woman'' (Little, Brown and Company), based on the bes t-selling Fowles novel.

''I am not so noble-minded,'' Mr. Fowles writes toward the end of his piece, ''I could deny that money has its attractions; and I am not so modest I will not point out that rather more than my own bank balance is involved.'' He goes on to suggest that it's virtually the duty of every writer to sell as much as he can to filmmakers to help his country's foreign currency earnings.

Then, a few sentences later: ''I think one has to be very sure of one's motives before deciding that one's text is too precious a thing to be risked in the 'vulgarity' of a mass medium. What is really in the scales is not personal public image, or even personal financial reward, but work and wages for a lot of other people...and well beyond our ailing industry proper.''

As Mr. Fowles puts it, it's the writer's patriotic responsibility to make his works available to any reasonably gifted team of filmmakers, in this fashion to provide employment for hundreds and hundreds of little people and thus to do his bit toward increasing the homeland's gross national product.

By simple extension, an argument might be made that J.D. Salinger, who has steadfastly refused to sell the movie rights to ''The Catcher in the Rye'' or to any of his stories about the Glass family, should be nationalized in the public interest, like the post office.

It must be admitted, however, that before Mr. Fowles sounds this rousing call to community commitment and job-making, he has had a number of pertinent things to say about novels-as-films, all tied to Mr. Pinter's adaptation of ''The French Lieutenant's Woman,'' which Karel Reisz, the director, Freddie Francis, the cameraman, Assheton Gorton, the production designer, and the Dorset countryside, have turned into one of the most dazzling looking English movies ever made. It's dazzling looking, all right, but is it really ''The French Lieutenant's Woman''?

I'm not sure it is, nor am I sure that Mr. Pinter's highly touted bold and original approach to Mr. Fowles's novel was really necessary or that it is, in fact, a cinematic equivalent to the original work. As beautiful and entertaining as ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' is, Mr. Pinter and Mr. Reisz seem not to have achieved that particularly seamless transformation that has occasionally distinguished some film adaptations of the past. Three, especially, come to mind: Vladimir Nabokov's ''Despair,'' written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Henry Fielding's ''Tom Jones,'' written by John Osborne and directed by Tony Richardson, and, going way back, Jane Austen's ''Pride and Prejudice,'' written by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin and directed by Robert Z. Leonard.

It isn't too impertinent to suggest, perhaps, that ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' may not be in the same literary class as ''Despair,'' ''Tom Jones'' and ''Pride and Prejudice,'' a thought that Mr. Fowles seems to acknowledge in his foreword when he says that one of the problems that came with his book's critical and public success was that ''its text was in grave danger of becoming sacrosanct.'' In hopes of getting a movie production off the ground, he talked to - and was turned down by - several writers, including Robert Bolt, who told him kindly that the book would always remain ''unfilmable,'' and ''another well-known writer'' who said, less kindly, that ''he could not help propagate a story so biased on the female side.''

What is especially interesting in all this, though, is the conviction, apparently shared by Mr. Fowles and his associates, that ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' was essentially - as they say in Hollywood if not London - such a tough nut to crack. Mr. Fowles refers respectfully to what one literary critic called the novel's ''stereoscopic vision,'' the fact that it is written from both a mid-Victorian and a modern viewpoint.''

This ''stereoscopic vision'' may be what endeared the novel to its initial critics, but to read the book now, approximately 11 years after its publication, as I did, reveals that this is hardly more than a charming gimmick. To go a step further, what period novel, whether one set in mid-Victorian England, as ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' is, or one set in ancient Egypt (Mika Waltari's ''The Egyptian''), or almost anything by Barbara Cartland, is not informed by the hindsight with which it is written? Very few.
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assistant: Why take a piece of literature, especially a novel, one that is successful in its original form and that explores regions of the mind not easily penetrated by a 35 millimeter motion-picture camera, and attempt to turn it into a movie that can reproduce only that part of the narrative that can be related through an association of moving images? One answer is money, which comes as no surprise to those o f us who have c ringed through bowdlerized screen versions of everythingfrom the Bibl e to ''War and Peace,'' ''Ulysses,'' ''An American Tragedy,'' '' Decline and Fall'' and ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'' As faras I know, '' Tristram Shandy'' has remained unmolested.   Until now no one has attempted to justify this occasionally profitable recycling process with quite the mixture of literary perception, modesty, candor and self-importance that John Fowles displays in his enthusiastic foreword to Harold Pinter's j ustpublished screenplay for ''The French Lie utenant's Woman'' (Little, Brown and Company), based on the bes t-selling Fowles novel.