Excerpt by Essay:
Shawshank Redemption Novella and Film Compare and Contrast
The 1994 film The Shawshank Payoff takes it inspiration from the Stephen King novella “Rita Hayworth as well as the Shawshank Redemption, ” the first of four stories accumulated in his 1982 book Different Seasons. Even though the film retains much of the novella’s plot and structure, this non-etheless moves away in key areas, just like by adding, trimming, or conflating characters and scenes. The film makes these changes for a number of reasons, and by analyzing the differences and similarities between the film as well as the novella a single will be able to learn how casting decisions, time limitations, and an attention to visual drama exclusive to the film medium informed the major variations between the storia and the future film edition.
Before evaluating the film and novella in better detail, will probably be useful to initially address the critical reception of the novella, both as a means of contextualizing this examination as well as identifying the major particulars which educated the reception of both text in order to discover whether the primary reception from the book educated the changes which would afterwards be seen in the film. The collection of novellas was evaluated twice by The New York Instances, once in the regular conventional paper and once inside the supplemental book section. The two reviews consider King’s publishing to be low quality, or at least unpolished, but they non-etheless give “Rita Hayworth as well as the Shawshank Redemption” high represents. In his August 11, 1982, review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt calls the storia “a brilliant and triumphant account of a prison avoid, ” remembering that “the first and third tales [of the collection] – that is, the prison avoid and the memoir – be based upon conventions of horror, but also transcend them with a considerable margin” (Lehmann-Haupt 1982). (The additional story described by Lehmann-Haupt is called “The Body, ” and was eventually adapted into the film Stand By Me).
The later review by simply Alan Cheuse notes this same disruption of horror tropes and style, remarking that “the first big surprise comes early on: the beginning prison story titled “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” shows all of us that the creator of such studies in the criminal head as “The Shining” and “The Useless Zone” may effectively handle innocence and also guilt” (Cheuse 10). Nevertheless , Cheuse is definitely not quite as appreciating of the history as Lehmann-Haupt, claiming that “the all-natural narrative power that recently has helped Mr. King overcome his often awkward prose and sophomoric philosophizing churns through these internet pages stronger than ever before” in order that “it’s hard to imagine virtually any reader feeling a sense of awe at the way Mr. Full bullies his way through this tough-guy novella about Dufresne’s fight to establish his innocence and free himself by any means likely, ” set up story “does give off a specific warmth” (Cheuse 10). These types of criticisms are crucial to note, since some of the most remarkable changes obvious in the film serve to minimize some of this kind of “bullying” by simply altering the smoothness of the narrator and upgrading some of the “sophomoric” philosophizing with additional emotionally resonant plot innovations.
Having known the criticisms leveled at “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, inches one may at this point examine the alterations present in the film in order to see how these kinds of alterations can be related to the criticisms with the original tale. The most obvious big difference between the storia and the film is the narrator, Red. Available, he is a white guy with what was once “a big mop of carroty red hair” that his play name derives (King 54). In the film, yet , Red is definitely played by simply Morgan Freeman, and he explains his nickname somewhat cryptically by simply saying “It must be since I’m Irish. ” Yet , the modify may possess less related to race plus more to do with Freeman’s particular skills as an actor, since the casting decision seems to have helped erase a few of the “tough-guy, inches bullying nature of the first novella’s fréquentation. As The modern York Moments noted in the 1994 report on the film, “Mr. Freeman is so calmly impressive below that there’s reason to desire Red’s function had even more range, inch a role that Variety promises allows Freeman “a elegance and dignity that come the natural way, ” attributes unlikely to appear in the novella’s version of Red, even if he preserves the same position of confidant and good friend
