SOURCE: French, Warren. “‘The Secret Sharer’: Film Confronts Story in Face to Face.” In Conrad on Film, edited by Gene M. Moore, pp. 93-103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, French compares Conrad's “The Secret Sharer” with the film adaptation included in the two-part movie Face to Face.

In 1952, RKO Radio Pictures produced a commercial cinematic adaptation of “The Secret Sharer” that has often escaped attention because it was presented alongside James Agee's adaptation of Stephen Crane's short story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” in a feature-length film with the collective title Face to Face. Wallace S. Watson has expressed reservations about this treatment of Conrad's story, arguing that while it is an “intelligent, well-acted ‘reading’ of the story,” it illustrates “the limitations of film adaptation that sticks too literally to the text of the source.”¹ This attempt to be literal is indeed suggested by...