Ethan Frome & Through a Glass Darkly spoilers.


After Through a Glass Darkly, we saw Ethan Frome (1993), which was watchable, but had a lot of things that weren't done well, so I read the original Willa Cather story. The movie didn't explain very well why the protagonist Ethan got married to his wife Zeena, older than he was, and it didn't portray her as nasty as the original. It fails to explain the relations between Zeena and Mattie after what the movie portrays as an accident that leaves Ethan crippled, although in the story it's a suicide attempt. Finally, most egregiously for me, although the story is set in the early 1900's, Mattie and Ethan actually have sex in the movie, although this does not happen in the story. Ironically, Cather herself did have an affair while she was married to an older man, so maybe it's not that egregious. (I didn't mention I thought the incest in Through a Glass Darkly was a little much. Maybe that's a Bergman thing.)