The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry

To a remarkable extent the filmscript of "Tender is the Night", which Malcolm Lowry wrote in 1949-50 with the help of Margerie Bonner Lowry, is less an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel than an extension of Lowry's own fiction. As the editors Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen show, Malcolm Lowry's script contains important passages which are really "cinematic" restatements of parts of Lowry's novel "Lunar Caustic", and of short stories such as "Through the Panama" and "Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession." The editors note also the many direct and indirect allusions to elements from Lowry's master-work, "Under the Volcano" (1947), a novel which is regarded by many critics as one of the most "cinematic" prose works of the 20th century. Lowry's "Tender is the Night" manuscript is important, then, not only as a completed, 455-page text in its own right but also as a text having a direct bearing on Lowry's own reading of "Under the Volcano" and of his sense of artistic direction after that work. Indeed, the editors consider the significance of the filmscript as a key, almost entirely overlooked, to understanding his projected multi-volume work, "The Voyage that Never Ends".
This scholarly edition of Lowry's script presents 38 passages of varying length, from less than one page to over 100 pages, in which Lowry writes with a freedom and creativity that lead to a text narratively and stylistically quite separate and distinct from Fitzgerald's original. It excludes passages where Lowry adheres more or less slavishly, at 37 intervals, to Fitzgerald's novel, though it provides brief narrative summaries of and comments on those omitted sections. Lowry's achievement in his filmscript, as the editors explain in their introduction, demonstrates the nature of Lowry's life-long commitment to and extensive knowledge of the international cinema from the 1910s to the 1950s and also the nature of Lowry's view of the novelist's responsibility to participate in the development of film as an art. The script also illustrates Lowry's relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald as one in a series of literary kinships and, as the editors point out, the work becomes a criticism and analysis of both Fitzgerald's novel and of Fitzgerald himself.
"The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry" will be of particular value to those with an interest in twentieth-century literature, Malcolm Lowry studies, film studies, and film-literature relationships. Miguel Mota is a doctoral candidate in the English department at Queen's University, Ontario and co-editor, with Paul Tiessen, of a series of manuscripts by Lowry's friend, novelist and radio-dramatist Gerald Noxon. Paul Tiessen is a professor in the English department and coordinator of communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He is also the editor of "The Malcolm Lowry Review" and of "The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon, 1940-1952" (UBC Press, 1988).