Forever Amber

Forever Amber (1947)

Amber St Clair, orphaned during the English Civil War and raised by a family of farmers, aspires to be a lady of high society; when a group of cavaliers ride into town, she sneaks away with them to London to achieve her dreams.

Date of release
1947-10-10
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (34)
Runtime
2h 18m
Genres
Drama, History, Romance
Director
Otto Preminger

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Forever Amber
  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Forever Amber is a 1947 American romantic historical drama film starring Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde. It was based on the book of the same title by Kathleen Winsor. It also starred Richard Greene, George Sanders, Glenn Langan, Richard Haydn, and Jessica Tandy.

Production

Forever Amber was adapted from Kathleen Winsor's debut novel published three years earlier. Macmillan, which had published Gone with the Wind, was excited about the book's commercial possibilities and launched it with an initial run of 175,000 copies. William du Bois of The New York Times called Winsor a "born storyteller". The same paper called the book "one of the most expertly packaged bundles of literature in years".

Before the novel was published, Winsor's agent suggested she should not submit her manuscript into a competition MGM was holding for first-time authors because the agent felt they could get more than the $125,000 prize money.

In November 1944, 20th Century Fox bought the screen rights for $200,000, one of the largest amounts paid for a novel. (By way of comparison, Edna Ferber received $175,000 for Saratoga Trunk; MGM paid $125,000 for Green Dolphin Street and $200,000 to A. J. Cronin for The Green Years; Ernest Hemingway was paid $150,000 for For Whom the Bell Tolls).

The following month, Winsor announced she had signed a contract with Fox to adapt her novel into a script with screenwriter Jerome Cady and producer William Perlberg, act as a technical advisor, and shoot a screen test. Cady finished the script by March. By August 1946, Philip Dunne had written another draft and John Stahl was hired to direct the film.

In a 1986 interview with Patrick McGilligan, Dunne later called the novel "worthless" and believed any adaptation "would be foolish to try to recover the intent of the author which is to please that part of the public that likes to lick its lips while reading." To placate the Production Code Administration (PCA), Amber's lovers was reduced from over 30 in the novel to five in the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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