TREASURE ISLAND (1883), Robert Louis Stevenson

Searching for Treasure Island

PERRY NODELMAN

Trnorur" Island. was my favorite book when I was young. Or so I've always believed-for when I sat down to reread it as an adult I found I was reading it for the first time. The pirate I'd loved, the one with the parrot on his shoulder and the evil glint in his one open eye, was Robert Newton's Long John Silver; it was the Disney film of Treasure Island (1950) I'd been recalling with such pleasure. Now that I've really read, Treasure Island,I still admire it. In it, Robert Louis Stevenson not only sets up the conflicts that govern all adventure stories; he cleverly refuses to resolve them, so that Treasure Island never tells us how to think about anything that happens in it. More exactly, it insists that we think two opposite things at once. The older Jim who tells the story of his youthful adven- tures is a hypocritical, sanctimonious, and decidedly undeserv- ing recipient of ill-gotten gains. He believes that pirates are thoughtless and unhygienic, and that people like his younger self who seek adventure are just plain foolish. Since Jim learned these very proper attitudes on his own advi:nturous treasure hunt, we shouldn't be surprised that he ends up speaking ofthe place they happened as "that accursed island."1 But we can doubt his honesty when he insists that "from the frrst look onward, I hated the very thought ofTbeasure Island" 1p. 83). In fact, he clearly enjoys not just the frrst sight but much that follows it. For readers thrilled by the events the older Jim describes with such distaste, the younger Jim's un-

rTreasure lslozd (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 2L2, All further references are to this edition. 58 TREASURE TSLAND (1883) 59

deniably less sensible attitudes ring truer. At the beginning,"and bored by his quiet life at home, he has "sea dreams the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adven_ tures" 1p. 48). And later, his enthusiastically unthinking ac_ tions undermine his older selfs priggish caution both by Jaus- ing all the excitement and by eventually saving the day. For ,,delightful readers, Treasure Island is the dreair" (p. Sli) ,lim expected because it allows us both to realize why we shouldn't lust after our own adventures and to neverthele-ss enjoy.limt; tp both hate Long John silver and to enjoy him ro" e*"ctly the same reason-his charming self-indulgence; to both under_ stand the usefulness of Jim's thoughtlessness and to see how dangerous it is; to both enjoy the eiciting danger ofthe island and to be thankful for the boring safety of our own ordinary lives. Almost everyone who talks about Treasure Island. sees it as a combination of something and its opposite. But whatever the terms_ 9f tlre oppositions, the distinguishing quality of Treasure Island is that it doesn't resorvelhem, Joesn,t c"ome down on one side or the other, doesn't even compromise. And that happens because ofthe vast difference in attiiude between the Jim who tells the story and the Jim the story happens to; it is a trick of narrative-technique that makes us come away from the novel feeling only the same delicious ambivarence we,ve felt all along. Films cannot easily duplicate such a technique. According to ,,the Seymour Chatman, in films dominant mode i- ;;;_ sentational, not assertive. A film doesn't say, 'This is the siate of affairs,' it merely shows you that state of affairs. . . . The camera depicts but does not describe."2 Ljnless they resort to the clumsiness of a voice-over narration, firms cannot imply an ironic attitude to the things they show. so I wonderei"u"iiv if a film that contained the ru-" urr"rrt, as Treasure Island. could capture its ambivalence. MGM's 1934 version has none of it. Under Victor Fleming's direction Jackie Cooper's Jim Hawkins and Wallace n""f," Long John silver are unambiguous caricatures of boyish inrio- 2"What Novels Can Do That Films Can,t,,, ia Critical Inquiry, 1980, p. 128. Autumn 60 CHILDRENS NOVELS Al,lD THE MOVIES

cence and unattractive evil. Imperviously innocent, Cooper's Jim perceives a charm in Beery's charmless Silver invisible to everyone else, including the audience. The film has it both ways: it asks us both to despise Silver and to admire Jim's ability not to notice how despicable Silver is. Neither Jim's innocence nor Silver's evil is the least bit ambiguous. But Cooper's Jim is clearly better off in his innocence of Silver's evil than we are in our mature knowledge of it. Jackie Cooper, the ultimate cute, blonde, gnome-faced kid, makes Jim so insufferably loveable that we know we have to admire his determined blindness to the truth. The lighting helps him; he never appears without an angelic halo around his head. Johnny Lee Mathin's script helps him too, by asking him to ((LTpon squeak "Bless my soul" or my soul" every time some- thing surprises him-and he is a surprisable child. But it's not just his cuteness that makes him adorable. He is an orphan; his father is already dead as the film begins, and he seems to seek the father he lacks in Silver. At one point, he endearingly asks Long John if he'd like to come and live with him, and soulfully adds, "We'll always be mates, won't we?" After discovering Silver's treachery he suffers terribly, and milks our sympathy even more terribly. And in an overlong sequence at the end of the film, he allows Silver to sweet-talk him into letting him escape, tries to talk Silver out ofbeing wicked, and dissolves into tears yet once more when he discovers that Silver is trying to make off with part of the boodle. "You promised you wouldn't," he says, but he ends up offering Silver the money so he won't starve. Only the hardest-hearted of moviegoers could fail to be wbn over by all this cute innocence; finally, the film implies that even Silver, Beery's charmless malevolent Silver, has been won over too. Disarmed as sentimental music swells and Jim cries, he gives the poor kid his parrot and promises that some- day they'll go dig for treasure again. This is not the sagacious Silver of the novel, who sees something of his own talent for evil in Jim and says, "Ah, you that's young-you and me might have done a power of good together!" (p. 175). But then, this terminally ingenuous heart-wringer is not the Jim of the novel either. But Cooper's Jim does have a boyish courage that belies his TREASURE tstAND (1883) 61

adorable softheartedness, an astonishing resilience in the face of terror. It is ftis idea to search Billy Bones,s body; later, his theft ofthe ship is a deliberate act, not the accideni it i, i'th. novel. He is playing a game of heroism. When Jim does that in the novel, he quickly discovers the ugly side of such adven- ,,sick, tures; after he shoots Hands, he feels faint, and terrified.,, (p. 162). But Jackie cooper's Jim feels none of that. satisfred at job a well done, he leaves the ship loudly singing,,yo ho ho,' as he heads for the stockade; while he condemns Silrr"" for being so violent, he seems to feel neither guilt nor revulsion for his own murders. This Jim is not an ambivalent mixture of inno- cent tenderheartedness innocently blind to the meaning both of his own actions and those of others; he is merely ro*Jti-"" tender and sometimes not, and he leaves Treasure Island as blind as he was at the start. Thig so depends _ film on adoration of Jim,s innocence, his vulnerability, his childishness, that it totally distorts the story to support it. what attracts cooper's Jim to silver isn't silveri evil, nor silver's dismissal of civilized values-the enticingly dangerous things that attract Jim in the novel. Instead, it i; ; nonexistent niceness in silver that he refuses to stop believing in. Since the whole point of the film is that Jim constanily misreads silver, wallace Beery doesn't have to be attractive; and with his eyes constantly tucked up under his eyebrows, he is anything but. The script supports his one-sided interpretation by con_ tinually making silver obviously bad, and Jim oblivioo" to hi, badness, so that the worse Silver gets, the more we are sup_ posed to admire Jim's obtuseness. Furthermore, the forces of good are as ineffectual and as boring as stevenson himself depicted them, but without that manly courage that grudg_ ingly allows us to admire them in the novel. Finally, ftemingh Treasure Island turns into just another cute story about u n[" kid and a nasty man, tricked out in the standard pseudo-gusto o_f MGM in its heyday-silly jokes about sharks ana pirots that bite, Merrie Olde England country dancing andJolity, pirates suddenly dropping everything piratical in order io sing lustily in unison-a story devoid of taste and deficient of mean] ing, but with a heart as big as all Hollywood. John Hough's Lg72 Treasure Island, with Kim Burfield as 62 CHILDRENS NOVELS AND THE MOV1ES

Jim and a gargantuan Orson Welles as Long John, is just the opposite: it has no heart at all. No matter what dirty trouble he gets into, Kim Burfield's hair is always just as squeaky clean and as angelically backlit as Jackie Cooper's was. But that made Cooper a hero; in this laundered version, not even the pirates are dirty. Orson Welles does sweat a little. But considering his bulk, that's not surprising; his performance gives no evidence that he's exerting himself much. Wearing a strangely Gaugain-ish straw hat, he mumbles his way incomprehensibly through scene after weary scene; and he bulks so large and moves so rarely that he seems more like a cathedral with laryngitis than a pirate. It's no wonder that Jim's response to this Long John is so vague-there really isn't anything for him to respond to. However, the feelings of the characters in this version are rarely clear. The film often downplays or eliminates moments that might reveal emotional conflict or suggest strong feelings. Billy Bones giues Jim his map, so there's no question of corpse-robbing; and although we see Silver get a crewman drunk and then push him over the side of the ship, we aren't allowed to believe he drowns; we see his body lying on some convenient mid-Atlantic shore as the ship pulls away behind hirg-. Later, as soon as he reaches the island Jim runs offfrom the pirates, not on impulse but as part of a cold-blooded plan, for he has arranged to meet his friends at the stockade. This Jim is so well-organized that he seems devoid of the sense of play and disregard for consequence that govern Jim in the novel. His capture of the ship is no fluke, but a deliberate action, explained to Ben Gunn in advance; unlike the novelns Jim, he feels no revulsion for his deeds, and unlike Jackie Cooper's Jim, he doesn't even enjoy them. He calmly shoots Hands, tranquilly steers the ship, and reveals nothing but de- termination and a boring, inhuman competence. Even when Jim might be feeling something, this film doesn't make it clear. He rarely speaks. His attachment to Silver is taken for granted, and they hardly talk alone together until the frnal third of the frlm; and then, Jim merely listens while Orson Welles's Silver incoherently mumbles lengthy ex- planations of the situation in scene after fragmented scene, as TREASURE lSt_AND (1883) 6:t

the Wolf Mankowitz-O.W. Jeeves screenplay descends into chaos. Earlier, Jim tries to explain the sit'atiln to Ben Gunn in another unwieldy pftch of exposition; but since he,s hardly opened his mouth until then, the fact that he can speak more than three words in a row is so astonishing that it's hard to pay attention to what he actually says. without knowledge of what Jim feels, we have nothing but Kim Burfield's boyislly pretty face; and while the priggish words of the older Jim in a voice- over narration are admirably close to the novel, they make little sense without the balance of a younger Jim's enthusiasm and involvement. we begin to suspect tlat maybe the older Jim is right, that maybe pirates aren,t so exciting after all. In fact, under John Hough's direction, this film is so dead that we have no other choice. Like many British rv versions of great classics, its careful and ostentatious craftsmanship con- stantly leeches away excitement. when Jim hides and watche" silver kill a sailor, we see a close-up of the pirate's knife cov- ered with blood, then a falling body; but we don,t see the wounding or the wound, and the composition is so careful and the blood so jewel-like that the scene is more pretty than scary. Again and again the dark bodies of actors form interestirig shapes against lighter backgrounds, and again and again ac:_ tors appear in the background framed by interesting objects in the foreground; again and again shots from below esiabiish the presence ofceilings and the solidity ofthe sets. The film stars its backgrounds, and the nostalgic yellow light it bathes them in turns them into museum pieces, pretty but lifeless artifacts of another time; you can feel the presenceof an invisible rope to keep you out of the display. Similarly, the island itsejf is travelogue country; it's hard to remember that the dark silhouettes moving through these postcards while lush music plays aren't traveling salesmen on a guided tour, but pirates. Beyond arranging themselves into interesting compo- sitions, the characters in this film seem to have no oitt"" fn.r.- tion than to disturb the peaceful nostalgia of ye olde Admiral Benbow or the peaceful solitude ofbeauliful i""uro"" Island; finally, we have to agree with the words of the older Jim on the soundtrack. Pirates ore disgusting, adventure ls overrated, and there's no place like home-particularly if you're fortunate 64 CHILDRENS NOVELS AND THE MOVIES

enough to get as good a decorator as Mrs. Hawkins found for the Benbow. Though neither of these two films capture the ambivalence of Stevenson's novel, interestingly enough, they distort it in opposite directions. The 1934 frlm tells the story from the view- point of the younger Jim; it admires both the good fun and the blindness of innocence without the qualifications of matur- ity. While the 1972 film accepts and proclaims the prigglsh "mature" vision of the older Jim, it lacks good fun altogether. Obviously, then, either of these unqualifred viewpoints can be depicted on the screen; but is a combination that allows the two to mutually qualify each other possible? In some ways, the Byron Haskin directed Disney version I remembered so fondly is the least accurate but most satisfying of the three. It introduces a pistol that Long John gives Jim, and makes it central to the plot. Jim's mother never appears, nor does any other evidence of quiet domesticity. The film opens with a bang, as a vile-looking fellow arrives at the inn to hand Billy Bones the black spot-and rve don't find out exactly who Bones is or what a black spot means. From that point on, exciting event follows exciting event at an ever-increasing pace; the last third of the film, which covers at least the last half of the novel, is a crescendo of hectic-though not always meaningful-action. The frlm sacrifices exposition for action, atmosphere for drama-and in doing so, paradoxically, is a surprisingly accurate rendering ofthe novel; what I enjoyed in this fiIm as a child isn't much different from what I've come to admire as an adult in the novel it was based on. Scene after scene takes place in near darkness, with' brightly lit faces expressing strong emotions or silhouetted figures moving fast, but rarely seen from a distance. Except for two montages, one to establish the boistrous charm of a Bristol suffering a population explosion and the other to evoke the romance of a full-rigged ship at sea, scenery is almost non- existent. The Admiral Benbow is there, and so are the ship and the stockade; but we almost always see them behind emotion- wrought faces and fast-moving bodies. They register as tight, dark places where exciting things happen, not as museum pieces. Even the treasure hunt focuses on the pirates, not the TREASURE TSLAND (1883) 65

exciting terrain they cross; Long John leads Jim tied on a rope, and that makes us more interested in what Jim feels than in palm trees. The camera is always nervous, always creating tension. Few shots last more than two or three seconds, and in exciting moments, we see faces expressing emotion from many different angles, so that we become more interested in reactions to ac- tion than in the action itself. Even in the stockade battle, the emphasis is less on the fighting and more on the way Jim and "Long John respond to it. In avoiding exposition and emphasiz- ing action, this film might easily have lost the ambivalence of the novel. But it doesn't do that; by focussing on reactions to action rather than on action for its own sake, it makes us realize the ambiguity ofJim's situation. We don't need an older Jim to tell us how painful all this excitement is, for we see it and feel it ourselves. The film makes us think carefully about Jim's enthusiasm for adventure. At the beginning, Jim's dealings with Bones show him to be competent, assured, even mature beyond his age; and Bobby Driscoll has none of the Hollywood cuteness of the other two Jims, only a cool, boyish seriousness. Jim picks up his excitement from the squire, a fat, aging man whose boyish enthusiasm is silly enough for Jim's adoption of it to seem a little regressive. When Jim arrives in Bristol and sees a sailor, he apes his walk just as he aped the squire's en- thusiasm, while music on the sound track picks up and cutifres the sailor?s whistling. Once more Jim's enthusiasm for the sea makes him a little ridiculous. He is clearly ripe for temptation by Silver, and we have been carefully prepared to have an ambivalent attitude toward what tempts him. The temptation occupies the middle third of the film, as we see Silver cleverly use Jim's boyish (and by now suspicious) love of adventure to manipulate him. When Jim doubts Silver's honesty after he sees Black Dog in Silver's inn, Silver wins Jim over by offering him a gun, in case he ever sees the villain again. "You mean to keep?" says Jim, with lust in his eyes; flattered by the gift and caught up in the thrill ofadventure, he forgets his qualms. Paradoxically, Silver plays on Jim's child- ish innocence by pretending to treat him like a man. 66 CHILDREN'S NOVELS AND THE MOVIES

While the ship is at sea, the frlm carefully focuses on how Silver enmeshes Jim even more deeply in evil. When the frrst mate finds a gun on George Merry and demands all the weapons on board, Jim mourns the fact he'Il have to give up his own-the one Silver gave him, the symbol of his manhood. But Silver again pretends to treat Jim like the adult Jim thinks the gun makes him, and appeals to his friendship: Silver will be blamed if it's found out that Jim had the gun in the first place. Jim keeps it; Silver has cleverly used Jim's love of adventure to turn him into a liar. Next he turns him into a thief, and an accomplice to mur- der. He talks Jim into stealing rum, in order to make a plum duff to "sweeten" Mr. Arrow, and that leads to the drunken Arrow being washed overboard in a storm. By now Jim sees himself as a man amongst men in the midst of a manly adven- ture. But having seen Silver use his charm and a boy's love of adventure to manipulate Jim outrageously, we know how in- genuous Jim has been. After Jim discovers Silver's villainy, he reverts to a child- ish disdain for Silver's immorality. Asked by the forces of good to play along with Silver and pretend to still be his friend, Jim shows clear distaste. When Silver uses Jim as a hostage in the longboat, but insists he wouldn't harm a hair of his head, Jim tells him he's a liar; he escapes mostly because he can't stand being with him. Soon after, he tells Ben Gunn, "I hate John Silver"; and his self-righteous hatred continues almost until the end. But the frlm still cleverly keeps its ambivalence, for Jim still seems ingenuous; he has forgotten what Robert New- ton's performance makes crystal clear, that Long John Silver' is charming: clever, energetic, far more alive and more in- teresting than anyone else around. When Jim admires Silver, we saw more than he did; when Jim does not admire Silver, we still see more than he does. In the last sequence, Jim frnally admits his own ambiva- lence about Silver, and about the life of adventure he repre- sents. Jim has been genuinely terrified by his encounter with Israel Hands on the ship, and clearly disgusted by his own murder of Hands; the frlm leaves no doubt that Jim's striking ofthe Skull and Crossbones after that grisly scene is a decision mEASURE FHND (1883)

against adventure. But finally, Jim does help Silver get offthe very beach he cleverly grounded him on, and as he makes a small, tentative wave at Silver rowing off into the void in a tiny boat, he reveals a highly ambiguous love for him. Before that, Bobby Driscoll's small, competent perform- ance reveals little in the way of confusion in Jim's feelings for Silver. But it doesn't have to; Robert Newton's Long John Silver is so rich, so detailed, so monumentally right, that it expresses all the ambiguity the film needs. For the last .hundred years, the one-legged Silver with a parrot on his shoulder has been everybody's idea of a pirate; for the last thirty years, Robert Newton in a three-cornered hat, one eye popping and one eye squinting, his mouth half-smiling and half-sneering as he deliciously growls "Arrrrh, me'arties," has been everybody's idea of Long John Silver. It's not surprising that Newton's TV series based on this character was so success- ful, or that I remembered his performance so clearly so many years after seeing it. The film both allows Newton his bravura performance and depends on it. Everything focuses on it. We watch in admira- tion as Long John flatters Jim, in horror as Jim falls for the flattery. The ship sequence deals exclusively with Silver's fas- cinating ambiguity-his need to control the inevitably unruly pirates, but his cleverness in doing it; his sneaky manipulation of Jim, and the despicable way he maneuvers Arrow into drowning himself; the sanctimonious hypocrisy of his loud "Arrrr-men" at Arrow's funeral. During the stockade fight, the camera returns again and again from the action to Silver, who stands offby himself and bloodthirstily shouts, "Board'em, you swabs!" and "Cut the Cap'n down!"-remarks that sum up both the ugliness and the excitement of violence. Finally, Silver joins the fight for the first time as his men retreat and he coolly takes aim and shoots Smollett. But before that, this film shows a key moment of the novel the other two versions leave out: the one-legged Silver un- graciously maneuvered into sitting down for a parley by the Squire, and then left to get up by himself, even though he first made it clear he would need assistance. While Silver acts vil- lainously in this sequence, we can't help but feel some sym- 68 CHILDREN'S NOVELS AND THE MOVIES

pathy for him. Later, scriptwriter Lawrence Edward Watkin has Silver take the map from an unconscious Jim before he saves him from the other pirates; and in the end he cannot shoot Jim, even though it will save his own life and even though he tries to do it. On the other hand, he does try to escape, with a vicious lack ofconcern for the health and safety of others, including Jim; and his brutal temper flares as he not only guns down his colleagues in the empty treasure pit, but malevolently throws his crutch at them. All these actions engender complex reactions. Once New- ton appears on the screen, the film is mostly about Silver, secondarily about Jim's response to Silver, and only about the other characters in a minor way. Finally, it is our own ambiva- lence about Silver, created by Newton's powerful characteriza- tion and the attention the film pays to it, that replaces the conflict in the novel between the younger Jim's enthusiasm and the older Jim's disapproval. A brilliant performance and a careful focussing of attention toward it do much the same thing in the frlm as Stevenson's clever narrative technique does in the novel. I wasn't the only child who loved this film in the early fifties. Encouraged by its success (and by the relative cheap- ness of shooting movies in England), the Disney studios made a series of similar live-action films: .Robin Hood (L952), The Sword and the Rose (L954), Rob Roy (1953). In The Disney Version (1969), Richard Schickel accepts Time's jtdgment that "they were all amazingly good in the same way. Each struck exactly the right note of wonder and make-believe. The mood of them all was lithesome, modest. Nobody was trying to make ir great picture." I can confirm that for one child, sitting in the dark on a Saturday afternoon in the early frfties, Disney's Treasure Is- land did indeed strike exactly the right note-and struck it so profoundly that I never forgot it, and recalled reading a book I'd never opened. Time went on to say that each of these films was "just what a children's classic is supposed to be, a breath of healthy air blown in from the meadows of far away and long ago." For me, seeing this wonderful film again thirty years later was a breath of healthy air blown in from the far away and long ago meadows of my own childhood.