Jaws

There has never been a good screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. There have been plenty of films with plots and characters vaguely based on her work, many of them excellent. Who could forget Matthew Macfadyen’s trembling Mr Darcy confessing his passion to Elizabeth Bennet in the lashing rain, or Colin Firth’s entry to the Mr Wet Shirt contest 1813? Yet people who have only seen the screen adaptations think of Austen as the writer of dull, silly stories where nothing much happens. Now imagine that you had to watch, with no context, someone slowly, patiently defusing a bomb. You would have no idea how much every tiny movement mattered; how high the stakes were for the smallest slip. Hollywood keeps mistaking Austen for a writer of Regency romances. She is not.

For some people it’s Star Wars; for others it’s Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For me not a year goes by without watching Chinatown and the first two parts of The Godfather. This urge to repeatedly live through familiar narratives surely starts with bedtime stories; and though it diminishes in early adulthood as we push ourselves out into the world, the habit returns before long. So, although The Last Kings of Hollywood, Paul Fischer’s partial history of American movie-making focusing on Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, tells a familiar story, it will be read by the same people who have already worked their way through the holy scriptures on the period.