Perhaps no aspect of filmmaking has been so thoroughly canvassed at every level, from cinema-foyer gossip to learned academic exegeses, as the matter of adaptation of literature into film. It is not as though adaptation is the only kind of relationship that might exist between film and literature, but it is the one that most persistently preoccupies the theorist, the critic, the reviewer, the buff, and the ordinary filmgoer alike. No one feels too awed by it to be willing to risk judgments about the latest adaptation, usually to the film's disadvantage; nor do theorists regard the subject as too simple to engage their attention.

So, to start, I should like to do what I can to dispose of some of the shibboleths that hover about the discourse, both popular and scholarly, relating to film-literature connections. First, it shouldn't be necessary after several decades of serious research into the processes and challenges of adaptation to insist that “fidelity” to the original text (however distinguished) is a wholly inappropriate and unhelpful criterion for either understanding or judgment. It may be that, even among the most rigorously high-minded of film viewers confronted with the film version of a cherished novel or play, it is hard to suppress a sort of yearning for a faithful rendering of one's own vision of the literary text. My italics are intended to highlight the impossibility of such a venture: that every reading of a literary text is a highly individual act of cognition and interpretation; that every such response involves a kind of personal adaptation on to the screen of one's imaginative faculty as one reads. And how is any film version, drawing on the contributions of numerous collaborators, ever going to produce the same responses except by the merest chance?

One of the crucial differences between the Merchant Ivory film version of The Europeans (1979, UK) and Henry James's novel is that the film omits the novel's striking opening chapter. In this chapter James establishes with wonderful exactness the differences between a brother and sister in their approaches to America. This brother and sister – Felix, who earns his living precariously “by going about the world and painting bad portraits” and Eugenia, the Baroness Munster of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein – are “the Europeans” of the title, though they are actually expatriate Americans returning home. The title is thus ironic: they are not so much Europeans as Europeanized and must learn again to be Americans if they are to find their niche in the closely organized world of New England.

This opening chapter establishes with wit and subtlety what this pair of siblings is up to. Eugenia is in retreat from an unsatisfactory marriage: she has been the morganatic wife of a minor German princeling, and she has come to America quite explicitly to seek her fortune. Felix has come seeking entertainment: if the Wentworths, the New England cousins they have come to visit, are rich, so much the better, but this is not a condition of his entertainment. To him, it will be merely “pleasanter” if they are rich (they are), whereas Eugenia can ask rhetorically, “Do you suppose if I had not known they were rich I would ever have come?” (13).