Since my last blog about the French, I've received numerous e-mails seconding my opinion and recounting stories of French friendliness.  So let me say one unkind word: of the four years I've taught abroad (in Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Morocco, in addition to France), the French faculty were by  the far the least friendly or helpful.  In every other country, I made many friends among my colleagues and however unorganized or resource poor the university was my colleagues were invariably friendly and helpful.  Even in the poorest of countries or situations, I was always invited many times to colleagues' homes.  Not so in France.  No one greeted  me, and certainly no one helped me get settled in Metz.  I made no close friends among the faculty.  It wasn't that my colleagues were unfriendly; it's just that they showed no interest in my presence.  Only once was I invited to a colleague's house: at the end of the year, the chair was going to teach in Texas for a year, and he had numerous questions about the mechanics of getting settled.  I remember that car insurance was a particular concern.  (The VCR began recording while we were eating dinner.  He was taping "Santa Barbara," which was a huge soap opera hit in France that year.)  That was my only dinner invitation.

I'm not sure what accounted for the distance.  I would think that my Parisian friends were right when they warned me that people in the East of France weren't warm like Parisians, but I made so many close friends in Metz and returned for the holidays to be with my "family" there for the next twenty years so that stereotype doesn't ring true.  Perhaps because I did make so many friends outside the university so quickly, I was the one who didn't make the effort.  The faculty seemed a particularly querulous group: they complained constantly about their work load, though none of them came to campus for any reason but to teach and none of them was doing research.  When I gave my students my office hours, none of them knew what office hours were or that it was even possible to meet with their professors.  Maybe there were physical reasons as well.   There was no central English office for colleagues to meet, and there was no cafeteria or canteen on campus.  There were only vending machines for coffee, so there was no place for faculty to congregate.  The students were nice, and several of them became friends.  But Metz was the only place I taught abroad where I felt invisible to the faculty.  And that's my unkind word.

This weekend I watched Victor Sjøstrom's marvelous 1926 version of "The Scarlet Letter," which I had recorded a couple of months ago from TCM.  One of the favorite courses I sometimes taught was a special topics course called The American Novel into Film.  The cliché had always been that the best American movies had been made from grade-B novels.  The idea was that major novelists had such a complete vision or found such a perfect union between form and content that the novels would be severely diminished by a transition to film.  I wanted to see whether some classic American novels could do more than survive but rather become first-rate films on their own.  I settled on six choices.  After "Scarlet Letter," we read Henry James's ghost story "The Turn of the Screw," which was made into "The Innocents" with a script by Truman Capote and a brilliant performance by Deborah Kerr as the governess.  The movie manages to maintain the delicate ambiguity of the novella.  That was followed by John Huston's mutilated version of Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage."  Crane's novel is short, but it feels much longer, as characters remain nameless for long stretches, as we, like the soldiers, never have a  firm sense of where we are or what the battle means, and as territory is gained and lost with no apparent movement--just as Henry Fleming's character vacillates without any clear growth or direction.  The studio added patriotic flourishes to Huston's final version and cut the film mercilessly, but Huston's genius still shines through.

Perhaps the greatest of the films was Erich von Stroheim's much more severely mutilated version of Frank Norris's novel "McTeague."  The last time I taught the course, as a senior seminar, none of the students had even seen a black-and-white film, let alone a long silent one.  They were engrossed from the opening scenes to the final struggle in the desert.  We watched the only decent version of a Faulkner novel, Clarence Brown's "Intruder in the Dust," and concluded with Stanley Kubrick's witty "Lolita" with its great performances by James Mason, Peter Sellers, and Shelley Winters.

Finding a copy of "The Scarlet Letter," the first of the six films I usually showed, became a major problem.  When I started teaching the course, I showed it on 16mm.  But then for years, it wasn't available on VHS or DVD.  No matter how much I tried to assure companies that no, I didn't want the Demi Moore version, the Library of Congress was very slow to preserve the film.  But it's now available again, and it's a brilliant version with Lillian Gish giving a sublime performance as Hester Prynne.  Sjøstrom makes some interesting choices: the first 35 minutes of the film take place before the novel opens and trace the romance between Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale.  We see the prologue to the adultery.  And Roger Chillingworth makes his entrance much later, so his parasitic relationship with Dimmesdale is undeveloped.  But the dark heart of the novel is preserved.  Hawthorne's story of guilt and shame and redemption takes on an equal depth of understanding of Puritan morality.  It's an amazing film that deserves attention when TCM next shows it.