Chaucer and the Moving Image in Pre-World War II America.

Published: Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, eds. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the "Canterbury Tales" (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 69-87

Description: Describes the limited presence of Chaucer in the early American films, commenting on a Motion Picture Academy educational promotion and a "distorted" version of PardT, "On Borrowed Time" (1939). Offers five reasons for this scarcity: "Americanization," Chaucer's lack of concern with "futurity" in heterosexual coupling (children), his association with the past, a lack of "massification" of his works, and Hollywood's disregard of key audiences--academic, women, and children--in favor of the appeal of Douglas Fairbanks's "vigor."