As any film-goer might know, Hollywood has a tendency to get inspiration from books on a regular basis. What many of them probably realize is that Hollywood has been doing that since as long as the moving picture has existed. It’s nothing new. The only dig in this system would be that you would have to do a really good job with the adaptation since much of your audience would be fans of the books. This holds most true for adaptations of novels regarded as literary classics, which would have to appease not only fans of the novels but would also have to impress literary critics as well.

Warner Bros. Studios is no stranger to adapting classic novels and has done a pretty good job with it. The studio has just released its Literary Classics Collection to highlight some of its successes.

Billy Budd

War destroys all notions and beliefs of morality. And more importantly, one often has to fight oneself in addition to fighting against the enemy. Fighting the opposite side is the easy battle. The fight to balance the rights and wrongs of duty, war, and one’s own honor is the hardest one.

Peter Ustinov’s film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd takes this balance and flips it upside down. Right and wrong could not be less binary, and the world is revealed to exist in a consistent grey tone rather than the more simple black and white system.

Billy Budd is the story of a ship in the Royal Navy in 1797 when Great Britain is at war with France. On guard at all times, the “Man O' War” is battle-ready and battle-weary under the command of Captain Vere (Ustinov). One of his officers is the cruel Master d’Arms John Claggart (Robert Ryan) who is despised by not only the ship’s crew, but also the captain.

Floggings are regular, plunging the crew’s morale to mutinous levels. Their morale is given a boost when Billy Budd (Terence Stamp in his film debut) joins the ship. Billy’s innocent nature (Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird comes to mind) quickly gains him the favor of everyone on board, except for the Master d’Arms. The conflict between the contrasting personalities of Budd’s good to Claggart’s brutality is the film's backbone, and from this, conflicts between one’s duty to one's country and oneself sprout.

What intensifies these conflicts is the sense of isolation. The ship sails alone for the king (who is thousands of miles away) and under the burden of defending his country (that the crew hasn’t seen in months). Ustinov uses many close shots to focus on the characters as human beings trying to maintain their individuality through the haziness in their responsibilities to the ship and to each other.