The compression of the time frame in James Ivory's 1993 film of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Remains of the Day"

James Ivory's 1993 film of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Remains of the Day" compresses the time frame of Ishiguro's story. In the novel, the events recalled in 1956 by Mr. Stevens, the butler-narrator, run from a 1923 international conference put on by Stevens's employer, Lord Darlington, to another meeting at Darlington Hall in about 1937. In Ivory's film, the initial conference takes place in 1936, with a secret meeting "three years later" about the Sudetenland crisis in September 1938. While the compression of the timeline might make sense in the film version, Ivory and his screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala could have been more careful about the actual dates of historical events. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 April 2024)