by J. M. Barrie
To Lady Cynthia Asquith, Barrie wrote about his fascination with a film version of Peter Pan and its endless possibilities. As he worked on the screenplay, he imagined that “one could go on doing this until doom cracks, and then put in the crack.” Barrie’s elaborate scenario contains not just subtitles but also rich visual descriptions of each sequence, with many fantastic flourishes that would have been a challenge to film. For the first sequence, for example, Barrie wanted to show Peter riding a goat through the woods, flying up to a tree and then over a “romantic river,” and finally realighting on the goat. Barrie’s high-voltage demands on the new medium may have led to Paramount’s decision to put the play on-screen as a filmed performance.
Below I discuss a number of screen versions of the Peter Pan story, along with Steven Spielberg’s Hook and Marc Forster’s biopic Finding Neverland. These adaptations mark important milestones in the reception of Barrie’s work, each time reminding us of how the story has moved from the literary to the mythical, with each generation creating its own Peter Pan.
Bruce K. Hanson’s The Peter Pan Chronicles: The Nearly One-Hundred-Year History of the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up documents the theatrical history of Peter Pan, with chapters on the many actresses who played Peter Pan: Nina Boucicault, Cecelia Loftus, and Pauline Chase in London and Maude Adams, Eva Le Gallienne, Jean Arthur, and Mary Martin in New York. He includes cast lists for productions in both cities and offers a wealth of information about the staging of Peter Pan. A new, updated edition of Hanson’s book, Peter Pan on Stage and Screen, 1904–2009, is scheduled for publication in 2011.
Peter Pan, dir. Herbert Brenon, 1924
It took Hollywood nearly two decades to persuade J. M. Barrie to sign over the film rights to Peter Pan. Paramount, attracted by both the plot and the possibilities of aerial action, finally won out, with a contract that gave Barrie the final say on casting. When the author saw Betty Bronson’s tests, he cabled her immediately—not the studio—to let her know that she would be the next Peter Pan. With stunning cinematography by James Wong Howe (The Thin Man) and powerful performances by Betty Bronson as Peter Pan and Ernest Torrence as Captain Hook, Brenon’s film—the only silent version of Peter Pan—has a fresh, glowing spirit even nearly a century after it was produced. It contains a range of impressive special effects, in particular the close-ups of Tinker Bell, the scenes of flying, and a sequence in which the lost boys magically gather around Wendy. The film was introduced with a note from J. M. Barrie:
Mary Brian plays Wendy Darling to Betty Bronson’s Peter Pan. In the nursery of Paramount’s Peter Pan (1924), a fascinated Wendy sews the shadow back on the feet of an animated Peter. (By permission of Paramount Pictures, Photofest)
The difference between a fairy play and a realistic one is that in the former all the characters are really children with a child’s outlook on life. This applies to the so-called adults of the story as well as the young people. Pull the beard off the fairy king, and you will find the face of a child.
This then is the spirit of the play. And it is necessary that all of you—no matter what age you may have individually attained—should be children. PETER PAN will laughingly blow the fairy dust in your eyes and presto! You’ll all be back in the nursery, and once more you’ll believe in fairies, and the play moves on.
Brenon’s silent film, restored from the original nitrate print and tinted, is visually stunning. Peter Pan is very real in this version of the story, and in the early part of the film, both Mr. and Mrs. Darling inspect the shadow he has left behind. Placing emphasis on Wendy’s failure to persuade Peter to become something more than a “son” to her, the film ends with Mrs. Darling’s agreement to allow Peter to return each year and fetch Wendy for spring housecleaning. Young romantic love has been defeated, but the Darling family proves resilient and expansive, embracing the lost boys.
The film may be set in Neverland, but the Darlings live in the United States rather than in England, and there are numerous moments of patriotic fervor and sentimental zeal in the film. The Stars and Stripes are hoisted on the mast, replacing the Skull and Bones. Michael warns the lost boys to treat Wendy as if they were “American gentlemen.” Wendy tells the lost boys and her brothers that their mothers hope they “will die as American gentlemen,” at which point all the boys break out into a rendition of “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.” And Peter himself decides to return to Neverland, refusing to become the president of the United States. Mrs. Darling sings “Home, Sweet Home” right before the children return, and we see the sheet music on-screen as she accompanies herself on the piano. Perhaps the patriotic pride of the postwar generation led to the conversion of the British characters into American children.
In a nursery modeled on F. D. Bedford’s illustrations for Peter and Wendy, the Darling children prepare for flight through the window in the background. (By permission of Paramount Pictures, Photofest)
Despite the many allusions to the American flag, American gentlemen, and the sacredness of the American hearth, the film ends with Peter’s refusal to shift allegiance from Neverland to the United States, from Tinker Bell to Wendy, and from adventures to domestic bliss. Clearly outnumbered by the Darlings, Nana, and the lost boys, he stands alone in his resolve to return to mermaids and redskins (the pirates have been defeated).
The last remaining copy of the film was located by James Card, who learned of its existence while working after World War II for the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. Considered today one of the great heroes in the field of film preservation, he learned about the famous vault containing prints of Peter Pan, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other treasures. He persuaded Iris Barry, the film preservationist at the Museum of Modern Art, to help restore the film from the original nitrate print, which had been decomposing in a Kodak vault, and he tells the full story in his book Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film.
Anna May Wong plays Tiger Lily in Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan. No one found it odd at the time that an Asian American was cast as a Native American, nor that the “redskins” have slain a beast of the jungle. The tribe triumphantly holds weapons in the air—bows and arrows, tomahawks, and knives—as the dead lion lies at their feet. (By permission of Paramount Pictures, Photofest)
Peter Pan, Disney Studios, dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1953
Walt Disney was convinced that film was the best medium for Peter Pan: “I don’t believe that what James M. Barrie actually intended ever came out on the stage. If you read the play carefully, following the author’s suggestion on interpretation and staging, I think you’ll agree. It’s almost a perfect vehicle for cartooning. In fact, one might think that Barrie wrote the play with cartoons in mind. I don’t think he was ever happy with the stage version. Live actors are limited, but with cartoons we can give free rein to the imagination.”
Peter and Tinker Bell lead the way to Neverland as the Darling children soar over the rooftops of London. (By permission of RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., Photofest)
Disney began negotiating the film rights to Peter Pan in 1935 and finally came to an arrangement with Great Ormond Street Hospital four years later. The project was put on hold during the war years and did not move forward with story line and character development until well after the war. The Disney version adheres closely to the play (the original plan had Nana traveling to Never Land with the children) and deviates from its terms mainly through elaboration and embellishment. Technological innovations that included the use of a multiplane camera added liveliness to the flying sequence, with the children soaring over the rooftops of London and around Big Ben.
Peter Pan was the film that created a recognizable Disney style. As a critic for the New York Times pointed out: “The well-bred Wendy is a virtual duplicate of the prim Snow White; the pirate, Smee, is the same as the dwarf, Happy, and Baby Michael is a Dopey who talks. Captain Hook, the horrendous villain, is J. Worthington Foulfellow in plumes and Peter himself is rem
iniscent of some of the boys in ‘Pinocchio.’ As for the famous Barrie fairy, the crystalline and luminous Tinker Bell, she is as nubile and coquettish as the maiden centaurs in Fantasia (Crowther).
Peter dons a headdress and smokes a peace pipe just before the Indians break into song, asking: “What Makes the Red Man Red?” The lost boys and the Indians revel in the music and dance, while Wendy, who is ordered to fetch firewood, leaves in a huff. (By permission of RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., Photofest)
Disney’s John and Michael may not have real weapons, but the lost boys, in a manner self-consciously aggressive and both cocky and kooky, march steadily forward, ready to do battle. (By permission of RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., Photofest)
Wendy threads a needle and prepares to sew Peter’s shadow back on his feet. Peter’s shadow stands against the wall, detached in both senses of the term, while Peter himself is absorbed in his pipes. (By permission of RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., Photofest)
The film begins with a voice-over pointing to the cyclical nature of the events depicted: “All of this has happened before and it will all happen again.” It takes the children from their home in Bloomsbury to a Never Land populated by redskins and pirates. Particularly controversial is a musical number answering the question “What Makes the Red Man Red?” by tracing skin color to the blush of an “Injun prince” when he kissed a “maid” for the first time. The song begins with one of the boys noting how “enlightening” it would be to have that explanation. Indian language is reduced to a series of monosyllabic terms (“How?” and “Ugh!”), along with broken English phrases, in sharp contrast to the sophisticated language of the lost boys and the Darling children. Yet the sequence also shows the boys striving to mimic the life of the “savage” and “cunning” redskins even as Wendy rebels against the constraints of becoming a “squaw.”
Disney’s film keeps the focus on Wendy as well as Peter, and on how Wendy grows up, abandoning the dreams of youthful imagination. At the end of the film, she declares herself ready to grow up, and the ship that returned the children home slowly fades away. Surprisingly, the Disney film emphasizes that Never Land exists only in the imagination, and it never invites its audience to affirm its faith in fairies by applauding.
The sequel Return to Never Land (2002) begins when Wendy has grown up, and follows the adventures of her daughter, Jane, in Never Land. Set in World War II London during the Blitz, the film charts Jane’s renewed belief in “faith, trust, and pixie dust” as she navigates Never Land in search of a way back home. In 2008, the Disney fairies franchise released a prequel called Tinker Bell, giving audiences the backstory to the character of the film’s title.
Peter Pan, dir. Jerome Robbins, 1954
The 1954 American musical version of Peter Pan featured Mary Martin (the consummate Broadway star who had charmed U.S. audiences in Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific) as Peter Pan and Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook. After 152 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, NBC broadcast the musical live and in color on Producers’ Showcase. “The mail has never stopped coming in asking that we do it again,” Mary Martin stated, and the original cast was gathered for an encore television performance in 1956. The show attracted a record numbers of viewers. It was revived on Broadway in 1979, with Sandy Duncan in the lead role, and again in 1990 with Cathy Rigby as Peter. The music and lyrics, by Moose Charlap and Carolyn Leigh, includes “I’m Flying,” “Pirate Song,” “Hook’s Tango,” “Never Never Land,” “I Gotta Crow,” and, most famously, “I Won’t Grow Up.”
Mary Martin reported that her “honest desire” was to be part of a production that would “stand up so it can be put on year after year, all over the country with lots of people playing Peter Pan, like the English pantomimes, because generation after generation have never seen Peter Pan” (Hanson 173). Leonard Bernstein was briefly involved in the production, but his desire to incorporate an earlier score, combined with heavy commitments to other projects, prevented him from collaborating.
The musical opened to awestruck enthusiasm, with expressively eloquent reviews. “Miss Martin is a smashing Peter Pan, boyish, eager, touching. . . . She swings through the air with a pleased grin . . . and at times and under all conditions may be put down in theatre history as one of the truly great Peter Pans of all time,” the Morning Telegraph reported (Hanson 211). The New York Times described the show as “bountiful” and “good-natured” (Hanson 213). Despite a flying accident (“I nearly killed myself,” Mary Martin reported), the play continued with 152 performances after its opening night, on October 20, 1954.
Mary Martin as Peter Pan teaches the Darling children how to fly. (By permission of NBC, Photofest)
Cathy Rigby crosses swords with Captain Hook in a 1990 Broadway revival of Peter Pan. Pirates, Indians, and children form a tableau of breathless witnesses to the contest between boy and man. (By permission of Photofest)
Sandy Duncan plays Peter Pan in the 1979 Broadway revival. (By permission of Photofest)
A listing of Broadway performances, with cast members, is available at www .broadwaymusicalhome.com/shows/peter pan.htm.
The Lost Boys, dir. Rodney Bennett, 1978
With a script by Andrew Birkin, author of J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, this award-winning docudrama was a miniseries produced by the BBC. Using voice-overs that bring in quotations from Barrie’s correspondence and also provide imaginative re-creations of conversations and letters, the biopic takes us inside Barrie’s mind even as it shows us the outer circumstances of his life. The script brilliantly suggests how events and relationships in Barrie’s life inspired the words he put on the printed page.
Producer Louis Marks provides, in the link below, a lively account of how the docudrama came into being. “Andrew’s problem,” he reports, “was that he had hit a goldmine. During that winter he had been introduced, through his co-researcher Sharon Goode, to the last surviving Llewelyn Davies son, Nico, then in his seventies. At first suspicious of anyone who might want to capitalize on his family’s tragic story or in any way misrepresent ‘Uncle Jim,’ Nico soon warmed to the project and made available a wealth of material: diaries, hundreds of letters, photographs, his late brother Peter’s unpublished memoirs, and, not least, his own memories. Some of this had been used before in biographies of Barrie, but most had not. And Andrew soon discovered that much of what had been used had often been misunderstood or even mistranscribed.”
With Ian Holm playing J. M. Barrie to perfection, The Lost Boys debuted in 1978 to highly favorable reviews. Janet Dunbar, Barrie’s biographer, praised the work as “the definitive recreation of J. M. Barrie in dramatic terms.” Punch described it, quite accurately, as a drama that advances “from competence to brilliance to deep compassion and mastery of touch, and which, for intensity of characterization and economy of writing, was a masterpiece of the televisual form.” Brilliant, haunting, lovely, and disturbing: these were the terms repeatedly used to describe this televised masterpiece.
The film begins in Kensington Gardens, when J. M. Barrie meets the two oldest Llewelyn Davies boys and entertains them with his dog and games. We see the balloon lady in Arthur Rackham’s illustration for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens come to life on-screen. With sensitivity and tact, the film moves us through the years, from the death of the boys’ parents and Barrie’s painful divorce to the death of George in World War I and Michael’s presumed suicide at Cambridge. A complement to Birkin’s biography of Barrie, The Lost Boys is a finely calibrated portrayal of the writer and his relationship to the five boys he adopted. The script is available online at http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/abpage/TLB%20SCRIPTS/TLB.htm.
Hook, dir. Steven Spielberg, 1991
Years after Peter Pan had been performed at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, Barrie toyed with the idea of writing The Man Who Couldn’t Grow up or The Old Age of Peter Pan. What Barrie never executed, Steven Spielberg carried out, with a slightly different twist, in his film Hook, which brilliantly dramatizes what hap
pens to Peter Pan when he falls in love and leaves Neverland. Peter Pan has turned into Peter Banning, a successful corporate lawyer with children of his own—he has crossed over to the dark side and become a pirate. With his wife, Moira, and children, Jack and Maggie (the names are tributes to Wendy, to Jack Llewelyn Davies, and to Barrie’s mother, Margaret), Peter Banning returns to London for a charity event honoring Wendy Darling, Moira’s grandmother and the woman who arranged Peter’s adoption. Hook spirits Jack and Maggie off to Neverland, and Peter must recover his youthful verve, lost identity, and inner child to rescue the children and become a real father, a man who will keep the promises he makes to his children.
Spielberg once declared, “I have always felt like Peter Pan,” and his films are filled with allusions to flying (Catch Me If You Can) and to the story of Peter Pan (E.T.: The Extraterrestrial). He had considered making a musical version of Peter Pan with Michael Jackson and instead turned his attention to a live-action film. The film’s ending mimics the close of Disney’s Peter Pan and shows the Banning family on the balcony, watching Tootles fly over London with the precious marbles he had lost as a child and finally recovered. The family has been reconstituted and strengthened now that Peter Banning cheerfully proclaims: “To live will be an awfully big adventure.”