Walter Scott on AllMovie

Sir Walter Scott was the most popular English novelist of the late 18th and early 19th century, and the most enduring of his books -- Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and Quentin Durward -- have become the sources for notable adventure movies and television shows. Additionally, as a poet, he was one of the most popular of his age, and work in that area also inspired filmmakers since the second decade of the 20th century.

By his mid-twenties, Scott was a popular storyteller, even as he earned his living as an attorney. He spent his spare time tramping around the countryside collecting ballads and mementos of wars fought long ago, and became a popular visitor in the hinterlands. Scott was still developing a successful practice when literature beckoned; he published translations of works from other languages and some ballads that were well received. It was in 1800 that he began work on the project that would establish him in literary circles -- he assembled a collection eventually known as the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, printed by his longtime friend James Ballantyne in 1802. Two volumes from Ballantyne led to interest from a much bigger house, Longman, which bought out the rights -- for the huge sum of 500 pounds -- and those to a third volume, all of which were successful printed during the early years of the 19th century.

By 1804, Scott had decided to turn the focus of his life from law to literature. His work now had a major following and was bid on and bought as fast as he produced it, songs, ballads, poems, and stories alike. The most notable of these was The Lady in the Lake (1810). He and Ballantyne became partners in a publishing concern that became Scott's undoing over the next decade. By sheer luck, in the early months of 1814, Scott had found a manuscript that he'd abandoned nearly a decade earlier and was impressed with the work he'd previously shunned. This was Waverley, published under a pseudonym, as were all of his books for the next decade. Scott's aliases included Jebediah Cleisbotham, Crystal Croftangry, Malachi Malgrowther, and Lawrence Templeton.

Set against the background of the Scottish rebellion of 1745, and telling a heroic tale of patriotism, his nine Waverley novels proved extremely popular. Across the ensuing decades, the books became a cash cow for Scott and his publishers and associates. All of Scott's writing during this period was tremendously popular, and remained so for centuries -- Rob Roy (1817) for one, and The Bride of Lammermoor (1818), based on the real-life Miss Janet Dalrymple, found new life on the operatic stage when it served as the basis for Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Scott's greatest success, however, was Ivanhoe (1819). Set in medieval England and telling of the struggle between Saxon and Norman Britons, it became Scott's biggest success in England. Over the next few years,he authored other books like Quentin Durward , but none of them matched Ivanhoe in popularity.

The first-known adaptation of one of Scott's novels came in 1909 with The Bride of Lammermoor: A Tragedy of Bonnie Scotland, by J. Stuart Blackton, with Annette Kellerman and Maurice Costello. Lochinvar and Kenilworth followed that same year, and the first film versions of Rob Roy and Ivanhoe (retitled Rebecca the Jewess for the United States), the latter starring Lauderdale Maitland and Ethel Bracewell, appeared in 1913. There were also several films inspired by the poem The Lady in the Lake, starting in the teens. The notable adaptations of the sound era came much later, in the postwar period. Piero Ballerini directed a film version of the Donizetti opera Lucia di Lammermoor in 1946, with a young, uncredited Gina Lollobrigida in the cast, but the best screen adaptation of Scott came six years later when MGM and director Richard Thorpe adapted Ivanhoe to the screen, starring Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, and George Sanders. That movie was not only a huge critical and financial success, but was arguably the best costume drama ever released by MGM, and one of the finest ever produced by Hollywood (though it should be said that it was filmed in England). MGM's success proved more the exception than the rule, however, and a pair of less critically and commercially successful Scott adaptations, Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue and King Richard and the Crusaders (based on Scott's 1825 The Talisman) (both 1954) dampened Hollywood's enthusiasm for the author. A short-lived television series based on Ivanhoe, produced by Sir Lew Grade and starring Roger Moore, also failed to capture the imagination of viewers.

The social changes of the 1960s and the heightened degree of cynicism that permeated Western society, especially in the United States, left Scott's work, with its tales of heroism and injustices righted and redeemed, quaintly out-of-fashion. Subsequent adaptations have been confined to television, mostly from England. One suspects, however, that somewhere a producer may someday come out with a Xena- or Hercules-type version of Ivanhoe, though if they do, it's likely they'll give it a more impassioned title such as "The Saxon Avenger." Ironically, it fell to two filmmakers usually thought of as too sophisticated to bother about Scott, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, to provide the most sophisticated use of his poetry onscreen. In their magnum wartime opus A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946), at the denouement, a heavenly judge played by Abraham Sofaer quotes Scott by name, and the lines, "Love rules the court, the camp, the grove/And men below, and saints above/For love is heaven, and heaven is love," from The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), giving the movie an unexpectedly reassuring and witty conclusion.