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Recently a friend mentioned how much of a pity it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those secret” classic” reimaginings now like the ones we had growing up. And after a brief moment of reflection, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘ 90s were treated to an embarrassment of treasures when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent pictures. Almost every week seemed to give another development of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all retrofitted with a smile and a push to charm to youth reading much the same writings in high school or university.
However, when one considers the breadth of 1990s film beyond “teen movies,” it was more than just the vehicles starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles that were receiving the traditional treatment. In fact the ‘ 90s, and to a large extent the ‘ 80s as well, was an era ripe with indie studios and Hollywood majors treating classic literature ( if largely of the English variety ) with the sanctity nowadays reserved for comic books and video games. Some of the most creative or ambitious artists in the industry fought against the sluggishness of New Hollywood from a decade or two earlier in favor of the even more terrible considerations of bras and major hats.
We saw some of the most honest and enduring alterations of Dickens or Louisa May Alcott making it on screen, and Shakespeare was unquestionably a bigger company in tinsel area than at any other time during this time. Why is that and can it occur again? This look back at the golden age of time item costumed dramas and colorful artistic adjustments…
Mozart and Merchant Ivory
Since the beginning of the platform, moviemakers have looked up at well-worn and common stories for ideas and market experience. In 1907, Georges Méliès adapted Hamlet into a roughly 10-minute silent short after making his enduring trip to the moon. And of course before Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier had Hollywood falling in love with the Bard… at least as long it was Larry in the tights.
Even so, literary adaptations were often constrained, particularly in Hollywood where filmmakers had to contend with the limitations of censorship via the Hays Code and preconceived notions about what an American audience would enjoy. Therefore, the most well-known costumed dramas were typically vanity projects or something with a more sensational tone, like the biblical or the swords and sandals epics.
So it’s difficult to point to an exact moment where that changed in the 1980s, yet we’d hazard to suggest the close together Oscar seasons of 1984 and 1986 had a lot to do with it. After all, the first was the year Milo Forman’s Amadeus won Best Picture, and the second was the year James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s lush adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View festigt our conception of what a” Merchant Ivory” film could be. Considered by Forster scholars one of the author’s slighter works, the film had critics like Roger Ebert swooning that it was a masterpiece.
In the case of Amadeus, the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ( 1975 ) —a zeitgeist-shaping portrait of modern oppression and control from about a decade earlier —was taking the story of Mozart and making it a punk rock tragicomedy. Forman and Shaffer radically reimagined the story, making it funnier and darker as Forman attempted to pose Mozart as a modern-day rebel iconoclast with his wig resembling Sid Vicious as the Age of Enlightenment, in a play by the same name. Located atop Tom Hulce’s giggling head, it signaled a movie that had all the trappings of melodrama but felt accessible and exciting to a wide modern audience.
It then continued to do relatively well and win Best Picture. While not the first period film to do so, it was the first in a long while set in what could be construed as the distant past ( Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won the year before but that was based on a subject matter in the living memory of most Academy voters ). Otherwise, most of the recent winners were dramas or dramedies about the modern world: Kramer vs. Kramer ( 1979 ), The Deer Hunter ( 1978 ), and Annie Hall ( 1977 ). They were a response to a viewer who wanted to escape the artificiality of their parents ‘ films, which in the U.S. associated historical costumes with the ( grand ) phoniness of Ben-Hur ( 1959 ) or Oliver! ( 1968 ).
However, the British masterpiece A Room with a View, which established this as the start of a well-known trend, was released a few years later. To be sure, the partnership of Merchant and Ivory had been going for more than 20 years by the time they got to adapting Forster, including with several other costumed dramas and period pieces. However, those films were mixed with modern comedies and dramas like rock’ n roll-infused The Guru ( 1969 ) and Jane Austen in Manhattan ( 1980 ). Importantly, all of these movies were typically small chamber pieces made for a select group of people.
Yet as the marketing campaign would later trumpet about A Room with a View—the ethereal romantic dramedy which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis and a fresh-faced Helena Bonham Carter to the U. S. —this movie had the “highest single theatre gross in the country”! ( It’s fun to recall a time when a movie could be a hit in New York if it were just selling out every day. ) The film’s combination of Forster’s wry satire and cynicism about English aristocracy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, coupled with the sweeping romance of Puccini arias and Tuscan countrysides, made it a massive success.
It also defined what became the” Merchant Ivory” period piece forever after, including in future Oscar and box office darlings like the Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and Carter-starring Howard’s End ( 1992 ), and Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in The Remains of the Day ( 1993 ). Remains was an outright tragedy delivered in a hushed whisper, but these were all distinctly British and understated films, which signaled to Hollywood that there was gold up in’em hills. And soon enough, more than just Forman on the American side was going up there to mine it.
Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and the Auteur’s Costumed Drama
In 1990, Michael Mann was one of the hottest creatives working in Hollywood. He helped NBC’s edgy ( by ’80s standards ) police drama, Miami Vice, become the “gritty” and artistic version of American television. Even the episodes he didn’t helm were defined by the standards he insisted upon—such as never putting cool guys Crockett and Tubbs in a red or brown car. It would conflict with Mann’s neon-light-on-celluloid aesthetic, which he created for the series.
As that series was winding down by 1990, Mann was more in demand than ever to make any film project he might have wanted—something perhaps in-keeping with Vice or gritty crime thrillers he’d made in the ’, 80s like serial killer thriller Manhunter ( 1986 ). Instead he sought to adapt a childhood favorite for the screen, James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th century American frontier novel, The Last of the Mohicans. In its original form, the text served as a launching pad for filmmakers to create a gripping, primal, and prestigious film with its imperial-fantasy riff on the French and Indian War ( or Seven Years War ), in which indigenous tribes in what is now upstate New York were either reduced to the noble or cruel savage stereotypes.
He also made a movie that far exceeded its source material with The Last of the Mohicans being an often wordless opera of big emotions played in silence by Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, and Wes Studi, all while Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s musical score looms like thunderclouds across the mountainous landscape. It is a beautiful drama and a high-profile action film, and it did more business in the United States than Tom Cruise’s A Few Good Men and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It also would create a precedent we’, d see followed time and again throughout the rest of the decade.
Some of the biggest and most respected filmmakers of the moment, many of them praised under auteur theory, were looking to literary classics for an audience that craved them. One of Martin Scorsese‘s most ambitious and underappreciated films was the 1993 masterpiece The Age of Innocence, which was an inspiration from an Edith Wharton novel.
It’s a story that Scorsese argues is just as brutal, if not more so, than his gangster pictures. The Age of Innocence, in fact, remains the best film adaptation of the Gilded Age in cinema. It captures the lush pageantry of the most wealthy New Yorkers ‘ heyday as well as how class sectarian prejudice developed into ruthless tribalism, which ultimately led to the romantic apprehensions of one conformist attorney (once again Daniel Day-Lewis ) and this would-be-divorced lover ( Michelle Pfeiffer ).
It might not have been a hit in its time, but Ang Lee’s breakout in the U. S. a year later definitely was. The Taiwanese filmmaker was already the toast of international and independent cinema via movies like The Wedding Banquet ( 1993 ) and martial arts-adjacent Pushing Hands ( 1991 ), but it is when he directed a flawless adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995 that he became a Hollywood favorite who would soon get movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ( 2000 ) and Hulk ( 2003 ) greenlit. Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, and Alan Rickman make a great ensemble, and Sinn and Sensibility benefits greatly from a fantastic cast as well. It also captured the sophisticated satirical and melancholic underpinnings of Austen’s pen that most previous Hollywood adaptations never scratched.
It established a standard by which the best Austen adaptations to this day are measured, whether it be Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s cinematic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow or Netflix’s most recent Persuasion adaptation starring Dakota Johnson.
A Dark Universe of Gods and Monsters
The same studio signed off on its first period piece with Winona Ryder attached to star right before Columbia Pictures approved Scorsese’s film The Age of Innocence and later Gillian Armstrong’s still delightful ( and arguably definitive ) interpretation of Little Women in 1994. And it was Dracula.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula was Francis Ford Coppola‘s wacky and magnificent reimagining of Stoker’s definitive Victorian novel, which was then viewed as a sneer of hubris by rivals who snickered at it. Published in 1897 with on-the-nose metaphors for London society’s anxieties over foreigners, sexual promiscuity and disease, and the so-called” New Woman” working in the professional classes, Coppola saw all of that potential in the well-worn and adapted vampire novel. He also correctly predicted there was a box office hit if he could bring all those elements out in an exciting and anachronistic fever dream for the MTV generation.
One of the most lavish and expensive depictions of Victorian society ever made onscreen, winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka an Oscar for the effort, is whether you like or hate Coppola’s looseness with Stoker’s novel, which is pretty audacious given the author’s name in the title. He also made an unexpected holiday hit that played like bloody gangbusters alongside Home Alone 2 and Aladdin that winter.
It established a standard for what can in retrospect be regarded as a pseudo-“dark universe” of classic literary monsters getting ostensibly faithful and expensive adaptations by Hollywood. Coppola himself produced Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1994 ), a film that is actually in many ways closer to the thematic letter of its author than Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever was. It was also a worse movie that flopped, but it looked spectacular as the only major Frankenstein movie to remember Shelley set the story during the Age of Enlightenment in the late 18th century.
Tom Cruise and Neil Jordan would be successful in adapting Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire in the same year as Frankenstein did, despite the failure of the film. The book admittedly was recent, having been published in 1976, but the story’s roots and setting in 18th and 19th century bayou occultism were not. In a scene dripping in homoeroticism, the actor who played Top Gun‘s Maverick would stick fangs into a young Brad Pitt’s neck.
This trend continued throughout the’ 90s with some successes, like Tim Burton’s wildly revisionist ( and Coppola-produced ) Sleepy Hollow in 1999, and some misses. For instance, did you remember that Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom appeared in a revisionist take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where she played the not-so-good doctor’s maid? By the way, it’s called Mary Reilly ( 1996) ).
Shakespeare’s Resurrection
Of course when talking about classic literature and storytelling, one name rises above most others in the schools and curriculums of the English-speaking world. Yet curiously it was only in the 1990s that someone really lit on the idea of making a movie directly based on the Bard tailored almost exclusively for that demographic: Baz Luhrmann in 1996, who reconfigured the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet into the visual language of MTV. He even altered the title to reflect William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.
That proved the tip of an anachronistic iceberg whose cast included Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his heartthrob powers as Romeo and real-life teenager Claire Danes as his Capulet amore. With hyper music video editing and frenetic neon-hued melodrama, they created a Neverland composite of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and the nightly news. Some older scholars viewed Luhrmann’s anachronisms as an abomination, but as a Millennial, I can attest we loved this thing back in the day. Many still do.
But Shakespeare’s work did not quite make it to the top of the box office in the 1990s. When the decade began, the helmer of another cinematic Romeo and Juliet classic from a different era, Franco Zeffirelli, attempted to make Hamlet exciting for “kids these days” by casting Mel Gibson right in the midst of his Lethal Weapon popularity as the indecisive Dane. It’s difficult to remember Gibson as a heartthrob of sorts in the 1980s and early 1990s or as a star-dwelling hero worthy of heroic leading man roles in today’s world.
Nonetheless, there is quite a bit to like about Hamlet ( 1990 ) if you can look past Gibson’s off-screen behavior in the following decades, or the fact Zeffirelli cuts what is a four-hour play down to less than 2.5 hours. Gibson actually makes for a credible and genuinely mad Hamlet ( perhaps not a surprise now ), and Zeffirelli mines the medieval melancholy of the story well with production design, costumes, and location shooting at real Norman castles. Helena Bonham Carter is also still the best screenplay ever made. Hamlet ( 1990 ) would eventually be overshadowed, though, both by Gibson’s awful behavior and because of a much grander and bombastic adaptation from the man who became the King of Shakespeare Movies in the’ 90s: Kenneth Branagh.
Aye, Branagh might get the most credit for the Shakespearean revival in this era, starting with his 1989 adaptation of Henry V, which featured Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, and of course his future wife ( and ex ), Emma Thompson. Together the pair would mount what is in this writer’s opinion the best film ever based on a Shakespeare play, the divine and breezy Much Ado About Nothing ( 1993 ), a perfect encapsulation of perhaps the first romantic comedy ever written that features Branagh and Thompson as the sharp-tongued, dueling lovers Benedict and Beatrice. It also features Denzel Washington as a dashing Renaissance prince, Kate Beckinsale in her breakout role, and a gloriously over-the-top score by Patrick Doyle.
In the 70mm-filmed, ultra wide and sunny adaptation of Hamlet he helmed in 1996, Branagh’s following 1990s efforts would be defined by their direction whether they went off-the-rails like in the aforementioned Frankenstein or right back on them. Avoiding the psychological and Freudian interpretations of the Danish prince chased by Olivier and Zeffirelli, Branagh turns Hamlet into a romantic hero spearheading an all-star ensemble cast. Hamlet ( 1996 ) is indulgent at its full four-hour length. Yet somehow that befits the material. Branagh would also star as Iago in Oliver Parker’s Othello ( 1995 ) opposite Laurence Fishburne and reconfigure the Bard as a musical in his own directorial effort, Love’s Labour’s Lost ( 2000 ).
By the end of the decade, Julie Taymor’, Titus ( 1999 ), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream ( 1999 ), in which Kevin Kline turns into an ass and pretends to be Michelle Pfeiffer, were all paved the way for more unconventional Shakespeare films.
The Teenage Shakespeare Remix ( and Austen, Chaucer, and others ): The Birth of the…
As popular as the Shakespeare movie became in the’ 90s, what’s curiously unique about this era is the simultaneous rise of movies that adapted either the Bard or other highly respected literary writers and turned them into a pure teenage dream. We’re talking moving past modernizing Romeo and Juliet like Luhrmann did, or repurposing it for high New York society like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim aimed with West Side Story.
These were straightforward, unapologetic youth movies that also served as clever rehash of traditional storytelling techniques. Among the best directly derived from Shakespeare is the movie that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger Gen-X icons, 10 Things I Hate About You ( 1999 ), a happily campy update of The Taming of the Shrew set in a fairytale high school also populated by future Christopher Nolan favorites like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz. In fact, Tiles would do this kind of remix a few times in the more serious-faced modernization of Hamlet ( 2000 ), the third Hamlet film in ten years, but this one set in turn-of-the-century NYC, and Othello, O ( 2000 ), which also starred Mekhi Phifer as a tragic distrusting high school sports star instead of warrior.
Ledger also returned to the concept by adapting another, even older literary giant, in this case the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for A Knight’s Tale ( 2001 ), an anachronistic blending of the medieval and modern where peasants grooved in the jousting tournament stands to Queen. There was also the strange attempt to turn Pierre Choderlos de Laclos ‘ Dangerous Liaisons from 1782 into an erotic thriller for teens ( the’ 90s were weird, huh? ) via 1999’s Lusty Cruel Intentions.
However, easily the best of these remains Amy Heckerling’s Clueless ( 1995 ), a pitch perfect transfer of Jane Austen’s Emma from the Regency period to a fairytale version of 1990s Beverly Hills. Cher ( Alicia Silverstone ), a charmed SoCal princess who is so well-intentioned in her matchmaking mischief, defies any attempts to detest her entitlement or vanity by avoiding modern trends and simply inventing her own. You kind of are even low-key chill that the happy ending is she hooks up with her step brother ( Paul Rudd ). It’s a classic!
And the Rest
There are many, many more examples we could examine from this era. These can include the sublime, like Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and Kirsten Dunst in the 1994 film Little Women, or the depressing, like the pathetic in the Demi Moore and Gary Oldman-led The Scarlet Letter ( 1995 ). There were more plays adapted, a la Arthur Miller’s The Crucible ( again with Ryder and Day-Lewis! ), and then those that just had some fun with playwrights, as seen in the <a href=””>over-celebrated Shakespeare in Love ( 1998 ). Mel Gibson even made the appearance of the sword and sandals ‘ resurgence in 2000 by going completely medieval ( and ahistorical ) on the costumed drama in Braveheart ( 1995 ).
More than a few of these won Best Picture Oscars as well, including Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and James Cameron’s little 1997 movie you might have heard about elsewhere: Titanic. And yet, by and large, this kind of film has vanished. Once in a while one comes along that still works, such as Greta Gerwig’s own revisionist interpretation of Little Women. That beautiful film was a good-sized hit in 2019, but it did not exactly usher in a new era of literary adaptations.
These projects are currently largely relegated to long-form stream series, just like everything else that studio bean counters don’t consider to be four-quadrant intellectual property. Which in some cases is fine. The BBC production, which many would argue was the best version of Pride &, Prejudice, would be, in my opinion. But whether it is original period piece films or adaptations, unless you’re Robert Eggers ( who arguably isn’t making films for the same mainstream sensibility the likes of Gerwig or, for that matter, Coppola were ), period piece storytelling and “great adaptations” have been abandoned to the small screen and full-on wish fulfillment anachronisms like Bridgerton.
This seems due to studios increasingly eschewing anything that isn’t reliably based on a brand that middle-aged adults loved. In that case, it might be worthwhile to remind them that children from the 1990s are getting older and having own children. There may again be a market beyond the occasional Gerwig swing, or Eggers take on Dracula, for classic stories, a new audience being raised to want modern riffs inspired by tales that have endured for years and centuries. These tales are primarily published in the public domain. And recent original hits like Sinners suggests you don’, t even need a classic story to connect with audiences. So perhaps once again, a play’s the thing in which they can catch the conscience of the… consumer? Or something similar.
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