SOURCE: Mars-Jones, Adam. “Mauve.” New Statesman 112, no. 2885 (11 July 1986): 27-8.

In the following review, Mars-Jones discusses the flaws in both the novel The Color Purple and Spielberg's film adaptation, arguing that the two works rely “heavily on the plot-machinery of melodrama.”

Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple is based ‘upon’ Alice Walker's novel, and the reverence of the preposition is eloquent; but every film of a book is an involuntary act of literary criticism. Faults of structure tend to stand out rather starkly when the words are stripped away.

Spielberg's difficulties with tone, particularly in the early scenes, are revealing. He films the heroine's childbed in the dead of winter with so much realism that the newborn baby steams, then in the same scene shows her father—also the father of her child—snatching the baby from her arms with a brutality that would make even the villains from silent...