Harrison, Stephanie.  Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005.

Harrison’s book neither deals directly with Roeg’s film, nor with du Maurier’s short story that inspired it, but it is essential to any analysis of Don’t Look Now.  The process by which a director adapts a short story into film is important, because a short story is just that, short.  A director must take something that rarely lasts over fifty pages and turn in into a film that usually lasts over two hours.  A director must take the story and ‘run with it;’ in some ways making the story his own.  Harrison analyzes 35 short stories and the films they spawned.  She separates the films and analyses into sections based mainly on genre (Horror, Western, etc.).  Don’t Look Now is a hybrid film, so it would not snugly fit in any of the genres that Harrison chooses, but it does have horror, drama, erotica, and auteur elements to it.  Harrison describes four different auteurs (Altman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Kazan) and their individual styles of adaptation.  She calls Altman, for instance, the “translator” (3), because he attempted to stay as true as possible to the original story.  There is little to no literature written about Nicholas Roeg, so it is impossible to know whether or not he would fit in with any of the different auteurs.
    One point I found very interesting in Harrison’s analysis is her idea that audiences are less hard on films based on short stories for being true to their source material, because “few short stories are embedded in the public’s consciousness in a way that popular novels are” (xvi).  In the case of Don’t Look Now, both the story and the film seem to have been lost from the public consciousness (due, in part, to the success of The Exorcist, which was released the same year as Roeg’s film).  Harrison’s book, as I said above, never mentions Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but by looking at the process by which other writers have adapted short stories, we can get a sense of the different approaches to it and how Roeg many have gone about doing it.  Roeg took a fifty-four page short story about a man’s blindness to his abilities and his fate and refashioned it into an unsettling drama/thriller about a married couple and ...

Hutchinson, Tom. Horror & Fantasy in the Movies.  New York: Crescent Books, 1974: 13-36.

Hutchinson goes beyond merely mapping out the history of horror cinema, and dedicates the first chapter of his book to revealing the deeper meanings beyond certain horror films.  Behind the blood and monsters, Hutchinson sees social commentary and much more, which the average viewer is completely unaware of.  He events of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and concludes that its underlying message is, “that we ought to co-operate or else” (23).  Hutchinson writes that Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), another 1950s sci-fi film, “carries a warning about loss of identity, an all-too-grim idea in a world where individuality is ironed out into uniform characteristics of thought and yes-saying” (23).
Hutchinson begins his analysis with the birth of cinema and the fantasy shorts of George Meliès.  He moves into German Expressionist films, such as Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) (19-21).  He also refers to Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) as further examples of horror films with social messages (23).  Hutchinson argues though, that one cannot simply voice these messages, or warnings, to the audience directly.  As he says, they must be “wrapped up in trappings of tinsel before they will be accepted” (28).
Don’t Look Now (1972) is one of those films whose meaning is “wrapped in trappings of tinsel” (28).  Hutchinson explains that, “[Donald] Sutherland here carries the seeds of his own destruction within himself, but will never know it” (29).  Reflexively, we are placed in the same position as Sutherland, because we are also unable to interpret the signs to recognize the future (e.g. our doom).  Hutchinson’s argument is that, “[Sutherland] is time-trapped in the way that we all are, unable to move beyond his three-dimensional context” (29).  Hutchinson ties into a theme explored in other sources I have encountered, that of time and space (in Don’t Look Now).  He, unfortunately, does not give the theme an adequate explication (quickly moving to the next film), but he does place the film in relation to other horror films that do more than just scare.  One is easier able to understand Don’t Look Now, when placed in the context of other horror films...

Dempsey, Michael.  “Review of Don’t Look Now.”  Film Quarterly 27(3) (1974).

Dempsey begins his review by comparing Roeg’s film to the source material, Daphne du Maurier’s short story.  He blames the film’s “creaky plot” on Du Maurier, who (he claims), “specializes in romantic sludge” (39).  Dempsey understands that the film’s weak plot is not the fault of Roeg, so he is not too harsh in his criticism of Roeg’s handling of the plot.  He states that, “too often the gears grind when Roeg tries to shift from this old-hat storyline to the subtext of fear and uncertainty that he has built into it” (39).  Dempsey actually compliments Roeg for creating a fascinating film from a plot, which he is admittedly not fond of.  The saving grace of the film, according to Dempsey, is Roeg, more explicitly, his style.  Dempsey writes that, “Roeg’s style pitches us headlong into [John and Laura’s] disorientation” (40).   Dempsey allocates most of his review to explaining of Roeg’s style, which Roeg achieves through editing.  Dempsey goes so far as to compare Roeg to the famous Russian montage filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, because Roeg too “lean[s] heavily on editing for his effects” (40).  The effect that Roeg produces with montage is the same effect described by James Palmer in his essay, “Seeing, Believing, and “Knowing” in Narrative Film: Don’t Look Now Revisited.”  Using montage, Roeg “undercut[s] our total allegiance to reason” (41); in effect, making us mistrust out vision the same way that John mistrusts his.  Roeg’s use of montage has the opposite effect of Eisenstein’s, undermining the action, instead of reinforcing it.  Dempsey describes, “Roeg’s montage does not say that two shots are connected; it says that they might be” (41).  The idea of not knowing, of being forced to puzzle it out, is the essence of Don’t Look Now and is the same theme discussed in Palmer’s essay.
Dempsey’s review, unlike any other analyses of Don’t Look Now that I discovered, features an in-depth analysis of the love-making scene, which is probably the most well-known scene in Don’t Look Now.  He argues that, the intercutting of sex shots with shots of the couple getting dressed, “makes the sense doubly erotic-yet also melancholy” (41).  We get the sense, from the intercutting, that, “no matter how intense their love or how satisfying their sex may be, John and Laura still cannot save themselves” (41)...

Based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier, Directed by Nicolas Roeg, Screenplay by Chris Bryant and Allan Scott, Music by Pino Donnagio, Starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie