You've read the book - now try to make the movie

Henry James is tricky. Proust is easier than you might think. But as for Wilkie Collins, forget it. Matthew Sweet on the perils of bringing classic novels to the big screen

The movies have been sucking the juice out of literature for over a hundred years. It didn't take long for film-makers to work out which authors were most ripe for processing. Between 1896 and 1915 alone, there were six Jane Eyres, nine Dr Jekyll and Mr Hydes, 10 Uncle Tom's Cabins, 10 East Lynnes and 17 Rip van Winkles. And The Hound of the Baskervilles has rehearsed its familiar business of pilfered boots and booming bitterns in over 20 screen adaptations.

The movies have been sucking the juice out of literature for over a hundred years. It didn't take long for film-makers to work out which authors were most ripe for processing. Between 1896 and 1915 alone, there were six Jane Eyres, nine Dr Jekyll and Mr Hydes, 10 Uncle Tom's Cabins, 10 East Lynnes and 17 Rip van Winkles. And The Hound of the Baskervilles has rehearsed its familiar business of pilfered boots and booming bitterns in over 20 screen adaptations.

There are some novelists, however, who have remained relatively untouched by cinema's voracious appetite for narrative objets-trouvés. Nobody has successfully adapted Wilkie Collins for the screen. Proust remained off-limits until 1984. Martin Amis has proved impervious to adaptation (as the imminent Dead Babies will demonstrate). And it took Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplays for Merchant-Ivory ( Howards End, A Room with a View) to warm up film's relationship with Forster, and push the medium's interest in Henry James beyond a handful of early works.

The trouble with much of James's fiction, it seems, is that it's just too Jamesian. Truffaut, while he was filming La chambre verte (1974), his take on The Altar of the Dead, reflected that "the problem with James is that nothing is ever stated, and film doesn't allow that kind of vagueness." And the vaguest of all his novels is The Golden Bowl. James dictated the book from his chaise longue in Rye, and his amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, included all his hesitations and restatements - which helped supply the obliquities and ellipses to which it owes its depth. For the prospective screen adaptor, fiction doesn't get more slippery than this. Which isn't the reason why Ruth Prawer Jhabvala elected to be the first to turn it into a movie.

"About 20 years ago it was our dearest wish to make a film of The Portrait of a Lady," she explains. "But Jane Campion beat us to it. Then we decided to do The Wings of a Dove. But someone else [Iain Softley] did that before we could raise the money." Of James's late novels, this left only The Ambassadors - rejected, apparently, because its hero was too middle-aged - and The Golden Bowl - a book which James's contemporary Vernon Lee found so obscure that she suspected he was practising a kind of natural selection among his readership.

The novel is the story of four characters caught in a kind of love parallelogram. There's Maggie Verver (played in the movie by Kate Beckinsale), a Mississippi moneybags who marries Prince Amerigo, an impecunious but impressively escutcheoned Italian (Jeremy Northam). And there's Maggie's dad (Nick Nolte), the real object of her affections - whom Maggie pairs off with her school chum Charlotte Stant (Uma Thurman), unaware that her girlfriend has been wearing the chintz thin in the arms of her newly-wed Prince.

" The Europeans and The Bostonians were much easier books," reflects Prawer Jhabvala. " The Golden Bowl is so interior. Nobody in it speaks out. After Mr Verver marries Charlotte, there are no scenes of them together in the book at all. So we had to make scenes that were not in the book."

Indeed, only a handful of sequences in Jhabvala's script have what might be termed a conventionally faithful relationship with the source text. The novel contains nothing resembling the film's scenes set in Prince Amerigo's mouldering palazzo, or its soft-focus flashbacks to his bloody family history. But it does contain this sentence, from which Prawer Jhabvala extrapolated this original material: "The Prince's dark blue eyes were of the finest, and, on occasion, resembled nothing so much as the high windows of a Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old designers, thrown open upon a feast-day to the golden air." "How else do you show that in a film?" she asks.

It is this focus upon interiority that has scared film-makers away from James's inheritors: Woolf, Joyce, Proust. But works by some of these authors scarcely deserve their reputation for being unfilmable. Proust's ÿ la recherche du temps perdu, for example, is usually assumed to be a monolith that will collapse upon writers presumptuous enough to try chipping it into screenplay form. This isn't, I think, to do with any particular quality of the text. It's more a function of the book's reputation (among those who haven't read it) as a monstrously distended description of a hypochondriac reminiscing about that time he dunked a sponge finger in his cup of tea. Those who have read it, however, will know that it's a million-and-a-quarter words of ding-donging melodrama. It has scenes of S&M brothel-creeping, the odd fist-fight, and more All About Eve-ish cocktail bitchery than you could shake a madeleine at. Turning it into a cycle of movies or a TV series would be a piece of cake.

No, the problem with Proust - as the Bolton Choral Society discovered in an episode of Monty Python, when they attempted to précis the book in a 15-second madrigal - is that he's very difficult to summarise. Which is why the tiny band of directors who have attempted the task have tended to bite off less than they can chew. Volker Schlöndorff's Swann in Love (1984) attacks the beginning, Raul Ruiz's Time Regained (1999) the conclusion, and Chantale Akerman's new version of The Captive (screening soon at the London Film Festival) the middle section.

Film-makers have also been dissuaded by Proust himself, who - a little nervous, perhaps, that his juxtapositions of times and spaces had such an obvious analogue in cinematic effects such as montage, close-ups and cross-fades - made a thinly-veiled threat to any film-maker who might dare to reincarnate his fiction as moving pictures. "Some critics," he sniped, in the final volume of ÿ la recherche, "now liked to regard the novel as a sort of procession of things upon the screen of a cinematograph. The comparison is absurd. Nothing is further from what we have really perceived than the cinematograph."

Though Prawer Jhabvala is happy to heed Proust's warning to back off, she suspects that James would have been pleased to see his work transposed into other media. In the preface to The Golden Bowl, for instance, he asserts the artistic independence of a series of photographs that were commissioned to illustrate scenes from the novel.

And, warns, Prawer Jhablava, just because some fictions have to be dragged, kicking and screaming before the camera, doesn't mean that they're not worth tackling.

"Quite recently I was given a book and was told it would make a wonderful film. It was all about people walking about having delicate conversations, looking at the sky. You could imagine it very easily. But its structure wasn't strong enough. It was a certain kind of film already. The novels of James and Forster aren't films already. That's why they're worth doing. We take books that we love and treat them with disrespect."

'The Golden Bowl' (12) is out on Friday