Double Exposure by Joy Gould Boyum (Plume: $14.95, U.S.; $19.95, Canada; 267 pp., illustrated)

“This book” the author tells us, “sets out not only to explore the art of adaptation but also to defend it.” The exploration, the second half of the volume, takes the form of 17 detailed critical readings of films from the “Magnificent Ambersons” to “Swann in Love,” but is much more successful than the opening defense, which should be by now superfluous. Boyum, who used to review films for the Wall Street Journal and who now teaches English at NYU, is a better critic than she is theoretician--which is not meant as faint praise, but as an assessment of her gifts. She knows a good deal about the academic writing on adaptation, but she cares most deeply about her own experience of films and makes us attend to her compelling practical criticism.

The theoretical portion of the text begins reasonably well with a lively retelling of the stories of the love-hate relationship of film and literature (one that goes back to the origins of moving pictures in 1895) and of the struggle of this new art form to overcome cultural, socio-economic, and aesthetic prejudices. These stories have had happy endings, although some snobs will still declare in an unguarded moment, that, say, “The Name of the Rose” should never be made into a film (since to do so would allegely violate the integrity, complexity, subtlety--the very uniqueness--of the novel). Indeed, although elite universities have resisted the establishment of film as a major, all of them have incorporated film teaching into traditional arts and humanities departments, and Princeton, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and other distinguished university presses are increasingly issuing important books on film--American as well as European.

Once, however, Boyum steps out onto the slippery ground of comparing and contrasting elements of literary works (fiction, plays, poems, nonfiction) and their counter-arts in film (narrative, documentary, experimental and animation), her (Boyum’s) feet begin to skitter, and by the time she gets to the question of the nature of film language, slipping becomes, as Emily Dickinson put it, crash’s law: “We know that film isn’t literally a language, or at least that there’s much about its mode of communication that distinguishes it from verbal systems. Still, because it bears so many striking similarities to the verbal, because it is capable of the same discursive function, it is not simply a convenience to think of it in these terms, but an inevitability.” To paraphrase Mae West, “inevitability has nothing to do with it, my dear.”

To shrug off the careful, precise and intellectually distinguished work of Umberto Eco, Christian Metz and Roland Barthes (among others) by appealing to common sense and “inevitability” is but one symptom of Boyum’s weakness as a theoretician. On other important issues she similarly misunderstands or misrepresents a number of other theoreticians, and theories of both film and literature, and the reviews in academic quarterlies will be merciless in their censure.

As turgid, breathless, and fuzzy as much of the theoretical argument is, the specific analyses of the exemplary films go a long way toward redeeming the volume. Her discussions of point of view in “The Innocents” (based on Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw”), “The Great Gatsby,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” and “Apocalypse Now” shed light on both the original fictions and where the films go right and, in the case of “Gatsby” and “Apocalypse,” terribly wrong. Her observations about style and tone in “Women in Love,” “Ragtime,” “Tess,” and “Daisy Miller” are even shrewder.

In the chapter devoted to metaphor, symbol and allegory, she is especially good on “A Clockwork Orange” and “Death in Venice,” and in the most original and difficult chapter on how film renders thought, dream, and inner action, Prof. Boyum is often superb. Her analysis of “Swann in Love” which she sees as a failure, obliged me to change my mind about this film; she knows Proust better than I do, and she led me to see clearly the weaknesses in Volker Schlondorff’s film--in particular, its “failure to bring us inside Swann’s sensibility. . . . “

Boyum’s book may not capture the academic market, but it should be instructive to that larger audience which both reads books and views films for pleasure. Those who have most to gain, alas, will probably not read it at all.