SOURCE: Updike, John. “Milton Adapts Genesis; Collier Adapts Milton.” New Yorker 49, no. 26 (20 August 1973): 84-86, 89.

In the following essay, Updike explores Collier's interpretation of Milton's “Paradise Lost.”

No clue is offered, on the jacket flap or in the author's rather testy “Apology,” as to what possessed John Collier to turn John Milton's “Paradise Lost” into a screenplay. Was this a commercial, practical project—after all, Cecil B. De Mille mined Exodus and Judges for a pretty penny—from whose shipwreck the writer salvaged his script? Or was it always to be a curiosity purely literary—a “Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind,” as the title page advertises? Milton's Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (sumptuously produced by Knopf in a kind of Loew's Orpheum Art Deco) begins as space opera, “2001”-plus: “We are moving upward into a region where the blue is lighter and clearer;” a distant...