Calling all rapscallions and scapegraces! This week on “Picture Perfect,” get ready to revel in some freewheeling lack of judgment, with an hour of films based on picaresque novels.
For those of you who weren’t English majors, the picaresque novel is a literary genre often characterized by the presence of rogues or anti-heroes as protagonists, episodic, wayward structures, and, not infrequently, low humor.
We’ll hear music from “The Reivers,” after William Faulkner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a coming-of-age story about a boy swept into automobile theft and illicit horseracing in the American South. Mark Rydell directed the 1969 film, which stars Steve McQueen as the rakish Boon Hogganbeck and features narration by Burgess Meredith. John Williams wrote the breezy Americana score.
Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is frequently characterized as an American picaresque. It’s certainly one of the funniest of “serious” books. A middling film adaptation was made in 1960, directed by Michael Curtiz, with Tony Randall given top billing, shifting the focus of the story to the con artistry of the King and the Duke. It features an evocative score by Jerome Moross.
If Hervey Allen’s “Anthony Adverse” had any humor to begin with, it was definitely lost in translation. (Too bad the novel was written in English.) However, the 1936 screen adaptation certainly does sprawl. One could say it’s picaresque in the worst way. It just doesn’t go anywhere. It does, however, feature a top-notch cast (Frederic March, Olivia De Havilland, Claude Rains, etc.) and an Academy Award-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
While the modern picaresque novel has its roots in the Renaissance, the genre really seemed to hit its stride in the 18th century, with comic novelists like Henry Fielding. Fielding’s “Tom Jones,” perhaps the quintessential picaresque, was made into a film in 1963. It went on to win Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Tony Richardson), Best Adapted Screenplay (John Osborne) and Best Original Score (John Addison). Addison’s music suits Richardson’s quirky virtuosity like an off-kilter powdered wig.
We’re up to no good, with an hour of picaresque adventures, on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
