Timeless taboos: why 19th-century novels appeal to film-makers

At press previews, to which movie critics are lured on weekday mornings by platters of complimentary croissants and fruit segments, a special mood of resentment greets the unspooling of a franchise in its later instalments: the ninth Nightmare on Elm Street, say, or the 12th Friday the 13th. Relentless repetition of the same characters or set-up is viewed as proof of imaginative poverty and commercial opportunism.

But recycling of storylines is not necessarily evidence of low artistic ambitions. Three films currently in production from admired directors – Mike Newell, Andrea Arnold and Joe Wright – might be billed, in line with Hollywood's numerical tendency, as Great Expectations 16, Wuthering Heights 17 and Anna Karenina 25, if we include even a rough estimate of the previous significant film and TV versions of these novels.

It's true that – with some exceptions, such as a 1998 Great Expectations, updated to modern New York – these remakes tend to tell exactly the same story each time. What a relief it is to the reader that the literary franchises do not follow the Elm Street/Friday the 13th habit of moving the action slightly on. Thus we have been spared Wuthering Heights XI: Great-Great-Grandson of Heathcliff or Anna Karenina XIV: The Train-Driver's Trial.

Yet the fact that the basic narratives have been told so often makes it even more striking that these 19th-century fictions should be the stories that some of the 21st century's leading cinematic talents want to tell next.

Few admirers of the dark contemporary dramas of Andrea Arnold – Fish Tank and Red Road – would have bet on a future project being the Emily Brontë story of ghostly romance made musically famous by Kate Bush. (Although this transition has an interesting precedent: Peter Kosminsky, best known for political and topical dramas and documentaries, also made a movie of Cathy and Heathcliff's story.) And, while Mike Newell has often worked on dramatisations of novels, these have been first takes on tales by contemporary writers (Gabriel García Márquez, JK Rowling, Timothy Mo) rather than an engagement with characters as familiar as Dickens' Pip and Magwitch (Newell has cast Ralph Fiennes), who pop up in TV adaptations about as often as the Olympics.

Joe Wright's desire to direct Keira Knightley as Tolstoy's adulterous heroine is possibly less surprising – director and star have period and mock-period form in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement – but, in choosing this project, they are only a decade away from a high-profile, award-winning Channel 4/PBS mini-series.

This surge of versions is also odd because, in one crucial and possibly ruinous sense, none of these 19th-century classics is well suited to cinema. In a standard edition, Wuthering Heights runs to around 300 pages, Great Expectations to more than 400 and Anna Karenina to almost 900. And yet a truly faithful movie can only be produced from a novella of around 100 pages. Filming a Victorian blockbuster automatically demands filleting, omission and simplification, which is why Dickens, Brontë, Austen and Tolstoy have traditionally been better served by television, which routinely offers multi-episode slots of between four and six hours, although even this medium is now becoming keener on the one-off film.

Despite this starting disadvantage, cinema keeps coming back to these same yarns. And the reasons for these frequent remakes reveal much about both the novels themselves and the culture of movie-making.

The negative way of looking at this repetition of familiar fictions would be that it exposes cinema's creative conservatism. And, certainly, the visual endurance of these three novels is merely an extreme example of a general tendency among film-makers to take a small number of agreed classics out of the library several times. There have, for example, been 10 major Pride and Prejudices on small and big screens, while Baz Lurhman is currently preparing the fifth look at The Great Gatsby. And it is now a routine weekly complaint from reviewers and more eclectic film-goers that almost everything on offer in multiplexes is either a remake or a continuation of a franchise.

It's also a proven rule of the entertainment industry that familiar material becomes even more appealing during economic difficulties: for obvious and understandable reasons, both producers and consumers prefer, when cash is tight, to risk it on projects that have already shown they can give value for money. In this respect, an additional advantage for producers in hard times is that a play by Shakespeare or a book by Dickens or Brontë will be out of copyright, avoiding an often expensive tussle for the rights.

This canny and cautious commissioning is by no means restricted to film. Of the 45 shows listed in newspapers by the Official London Theatre Guide, almost everything is a revival or an adaptation of a famous movie or literary property: only three productions (In a Forest, Dark and Deep; Ghost Stories and The Holy Rosenbergs) are original scripts that have no connection with a previously existing project. In the case, though, of the latest Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations and Anna Karenina, there is a more charitable analysis than the benefits of selling established brands.

All of the performing artforms have rapidly established the concept of a canon: an agreed list of stories that merit re-telling. In theatre, this trove contains Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov and, latterly, Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter. In television, the works of Dickens and Jane Austen have become the reflex refuge of both the BBC and ITV, especially at times when the networks' cultural credentials are being questioned by regulators or at Westminster.

The cinematic canon is most apparent in the populist characters who have been reanimated by successive generations of film-makers – Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock, King Kong, Batman, Superman and so on – but there was also, from very early on, a clear shelf of literary set-texts that would periodically be offered for examination. Many of these overlap with the favourites of theatre and TV: Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen and the various Brontës, with the addition of Tolstoy as a pet foreign-language novelist. Apart from the many Anna Kareninas, War and Peace has also been filmed and there has even been a biopic about the novelist: The Last Station.

But the movie industry can also be seen to have copied from theatre the idea of canonical works as a benchmark against which new generations of directors and actors must be measured.

In playhouses, it is not considered unimaginative programming for Zoë Wanamaker to portray Madame Ranyevskaya in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, when the role has already been played with distinction by Judie Dench, Joanna Lumley and others, nor is a director accused of running out of ideas when announcing that Simon Russell Beale's or Jonathan Pryce's King Lear will closely follow those of Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen. These are landmark parts that a theatrical career must properly contain.

So, in this context, it's necessary and even inevitable that Knightley should commit to film her interpretation of a Russian heroine previously played by Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh, while the young northern newcomer James Howson, Arnold's choice for her Wuthering Heights, follows Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and Timothy Dalton into the part of Heathcliff, just as younger theatre actors subsequently took over their roles as Shakespearean princes and kings.

The directors of the new films can also reasonably argue that they can bring to these stories advantages denied to their predecessors: whether the digital possibilities for convincingly depicting the supernatural in Wuthering Heights or the greater availability of genuinely Russian locations in a post-Soviet Anna Karenina.

But the fundamental reason that fiction from a pre-cinematic period has proved so attractive to the cameras is that these are compelling narratives filled with fascinating characters. It also helps that each of the books fits neatly into at least one genre that has become standard in Hollywood.

Brontë's gothic Yorkshire chiller is both a story of thwarted love and a ghost story, forms that occupy well-filled portions of the DVD store. The romantic element of that book – involving sexual attraction that is prevented or restricted by class or social conformity – overlaps with Tolstoy's novel, which, with a heroine who places her sexual fulfilment ahead of community approval, also contains a prototype for what has become a recurrent figure in films.

Magwitch and Pip are also archetypes – the vulnerable child, the crook on the run – who have numerous celluloid echoes, while Miss Havisham, the sinister spinster Pip encounters in her nerve-racking mansion, is a striking instance of Dickens's ability to create people who demand to be seen as well as read. Prophetically, the writer even pays close attention to the lighting effects in the Havisham house as, in another easily filmic scene, Pip plays an alarming game of cards with Estella, the strange lady's ward.

However, beyond the narrative satisfaction of the stories, I think there's another reason why these 19th-century classics are so regularly revisited; and one that holds a warning for contemporary film-making and fiction. At their simplest level, each of these books features a couple whose union is impossible or dangerous: Cathy and Heathcliff face the bar of class and propriety, Anna and Vronsky challenge the adultery taboo, and Pip and Estella are thwarted not only by their starkly different social backgrounds but by her bizarre guardian.

That 1998 contemporary rewriting of Great Expectations tried to pretend that social barriers still exist – Pip becomes a poor artist called Finn who is looked down on by wealthy socialite Estella – but the jeopardy never felt real. In the modern world, there is little reason for an heiress not to marry a penniless artisan and, in fact, a cursory reading of Heat and Tatler suggest regular hitchings between Pips and Estellas and Cathys and Heathcliffs. Equally, a modern Anna Karenina could take Vronsky as her second husband with no more trouble than a decent divorce lawyer.

Fiction is driven by friction and taboo but, in most parts of contemporary society, we have created a society in which there are few obstacles to people doing what they want or being with the person they desire. Numerous traditional narrative triggers – a sexual secret, the threat of bankruptcy, a spell in prison – now result in no more than a few months' embarrassment, an expensively maintained anonymity injunction or a tearfully confessional TV interview.

This generally more tolerant society has usefully reduced the prevalence of suicide and blackmail but is problematic for modern storytellers trying to construct a plot. Lionel Shriver recently wrote in these pages of her surprised delight at locating a new taboo – a mother who struggles to love her son in We Need to Talk About Kevin – but it is very hard in a modern novel to create an occasion of disgrace or ostracism, the engines of much great Victorian fiction. Only in certain very strict religious communities do the old plotlines of forbidden relationships still apply and such subject-matter often brings off-putting sensitivities for mainstream movies. At a time when there are public discussions over differing severities in rape cases, the only broadly agreed social no-no is paedophilia: which is why, with such depressing regularity, child abuse turns out to be the solution to so many crime novels and TV dramas.

This problem of achieving genuine moral hazard in a contemporary setting is the reason that so many high-profile novels and films are either historical stories or biopics: the past is more dramatic and morally complex.

And, for the same reason, the classic novels become increasingly attractive to film-makers and actors seeking meaty material. Out of copyright, containing presciently camera-ready narratives and characters who may face social or actual death in pursuit of what they want, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina and Great Expectations give modern cinematic talent access to a world that is, in many ways, more appealing than their own.