Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice is not only a modern, cross-cultural version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; it also adapts Bollywood musical traditions to create a film that embodies its message of multicultural understanding in its very form.
John Boorman’s Excalibur claims to be adapted from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, but is in reality drawn from several sources, many of which contradict Malory’s version of the legend; however, by adapting Malory in this way, Boorman is in fact following directly in his footsteps, for Malory also claims to draw from one source but uses many, in addition to his own imagination.
The two major film versions of Shakespeare’s Henry V, one directed by Laurence Olivier in 1945 and one by Kenneth Branagh in 1989, use nearly the same script of the play but end up with very different attitudes toward war, each being influenced by their cultural and historical context.
