From Novel to Hollywood Musical: James M. Cain’s “Unfilmable” Serenade

When Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. purchased the screen rights to James M. Cain’s 1937 novel Serenade, a controversial tale concerning a singer’s struggle with his sexuality and its tragic consequences for both his career and the two people with whom he has relationships, it would take the studio twelve years (1944–1956) to produce an acceptably bowdlerized film adaptation of the work. In the process, Cain’s often‐brutal tale metamorphosed into a radically altered film musical. The 1956 film version of Serenade disposed not only of the novel’s problematic sexuality issue, but transformed the original work’s violence and cynical fatalism into a story of redemption. This article details how the censorship constraints that existed in America during the 1940s and 1950s impacted on Mann’s adaptation, offering a close examination of the principal differences between the novel and the film with regard to thematic elements, plot, and characters, as well as identifying and analyzing departures in the finished adaptation from the film’s (unpublished) screenplay.