This Day in Literary History (Danner, Moriarty Shine in TV Adaptation of Updike Stories)

March 12, 1979—Overlooked because of an American Film Institute tribute to Alfred Hitchcock broadcast on CBS was another career summary of a sort—and, in the bargain, one of the finest television movies ever made—running at the same time on NBC: Too Far to Go, an adaptation of heavily autobiographical short stories by John Updike depicting the gradual disintegration of the two-decade marriage of Richard and Joan Maple.

Critics heaped so much praise on the family drama starring Michael Moriarty, Blythe Danner, and Glenn Close (in a couple of brief but significant scenes) that two years later, Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios arranged to have the production released on the big screen with only a few changes (a new musical score by Elizabeth Swados and a few scenes edited out for TV). 

Lacking the high-profile casting and bigger budgets of contemporary films like Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People and Shoot the Moon, Too Far to Go still holds its own with them as a painfully honest dissection of a fracturing upper-middle-class WASP family. 

In his prolific career spanning nearly a half century, Updike wrote more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short-story collections, even a play. You would think that a number of those would have been filmed. 

But, like contemporary Philip Roth, Updike could count only about a half dozen properties adapted for the large or small screen: the little-remembered, James Caan-starring 1970 movie Rabbit, Run; public television showings of the short stories "The Music School," "Pigeon Feathers," and "A and P"; and the much-ballyhooed but cartoonish 1987 movie The Witches of Eastwick, with Jack Nicholson chewing up every bit of scenery in sight as satanic Daryl Van Horne.

That slender track record makes this unexpectedly successful adaptation all the more striking, then.

In effect, this collection functions as Updike’s version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. Melodrama is blessedly absent, though the couple’s serial infidelities figure throughout. Updike demonstrates that impulses, acted on or not, make all the difference to a couple and to those (especially children) in their orbit.

Reaction was overwhelmingly positive to the lithe and luminous Danner, somewhat less so to Moriarty. In fact, David Denby of New York Magazine wrote: “Pale as Banquo’s ghost, slender but puffy, with no visible eyebrows…, he talks in a cobwebby, fey manner that sounds like Daniel Patrick Moynihan imitating Truman Capote.”

Updike himself, speaking at a library showing of the film 20 years later, allowed that his opinion of Moriarty’s performance had risen upon this second viewing. Even though Danner’s character also commits multiple affairs, audience sympathy shifts decidedly toward her at the expense of Moriarty. 

If what ended up in the final product turned out to be so acute, it might have been because several of its collaborators had experienced something like these events: not just Updike, but also Moriarty and director Fielding Cook had recently undergone wrenching divorces.

The writer of the teleplay, William Hanley, used the Maples’ impending divorce as the central narrative device, with frequent flashbacks to show them in both happy times and moments when the fractures in the marriage began to show. What makes all this so moving is that, despite how they miscommunicate, wound, and ultimately betray each other, some residue of affection and love remains.

Part of creating a teleplay or screenplay involves not just what to include, but what to leave out. For instance, one of Updike’s stories, “Marching Through Boston,” about the couple’s participation in a civil-rights demonstration spearheaded by the visiting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would, if included, have dated the action indelibly, and an annoyed Richard’s resort to African-American dialect at one point would have been politically incorrect.

On the other hand, several other scenes work as well on film as they did on the printed page: 

*An early scene, set in Greenwich Village when the Maples are only married a few years, when Moriarty accompanies family friend Rebecca (played by Glenn Close, in her first film credit) back to her apartment and manages to barely put aside temptation; 

*Another when Danner’s Joan explains how “the properly equipped suburban man” has a wife, a mistress, and a “red herring”; 

*And a searing scene toward the end, when Moriarty’s Richard falls emotionally apart when the couple break the news of their separation to their children.

A book tie-in to the TV film, featuring the same title as the made-for-television movie, collected the stories for the first time. Thirty years later they were reassembled and renamed as The Maples Stories, featuring a foreword by Updike and a coda, the story “Grandparenting,” which catches up on the divorced couple—remarried to new partners—as they witness the birth of their elder daughter’s son.

I had heard about the film long ago but never had a chance to watch it at the time. I was reminded of it when I came across the 1956 short story that began the saga, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," in a very fine New Yorker anthology, Wonderful Town, and I resolved to see the movie at long last. 

It was not easy for me to find this film. I can’t recall any TV listings for it in the last 20 to 30 years, either on network TV or cable stations. I finally found one DVD copy in my suburban library system. Ideally, it would make for great viewing on my local PBS station, Channel 13, in its Saturday night “Reel 13” series of classics and independents.

Oh, heck, just make it easy on yourself. Buy a copy of this made-for-TV gem on Amazon. You won’t regret it.