The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Wr - Washington Irving [247]
Burton’s film, featuring a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, takes place in 1799. The coming century seems to promise order for the newly minted American nation, but for now, superstition reigns supreme. Ichabod Crane, played by a typically eccentric Johnny Depp, is a Manhattan-based, rational-to-a-fault solicitor, rather than the guileless schoolteacher of Irving’s narrative. Crane is investigating a series of gruesome decapitations, attributed by village locals to the legendary Headless Horseman. Scoffing at what he considers superstitious imaginings, Crane conducts his inquiry with a Holmesian levelheadedness, only to discover that his modern methods and theories are no match for the supernatural phenomena local to Sleepy Hollow. Though the film sags beneath a belabored plot, its heavily atmospheric setting is pitch perfect.
Sleepy Hollow, as its truncated title seems to suggest, is less reverent to its source than are other Irving adaptations. In fact, Burton seems to have cast his eye elsewhere, including at the campy horror films of the 1950s and 1960s produced by the British company Hammer Film Productions Ltd. It is Hammer luminary Christopher Lee playing an imperious New York judge who banishes Crane to Sleepy Hollow in Burton’s film. The Headless Horseman, played by a grotesque Christopher Walken and shown in various flashbacks, is revealed in all manner of gory detail to be a serial decapitator—the ghost of a Hessian soldier who fought in the Revolutionary War on the British side and who was buried sans head. The ensemble cast includes Christina Ricci and Miranda Richardson.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
WALTER SCOTT
I beg you to accept my best thanks for the uncommon degree of entertainment which I have received from the most excellently jocose history of New York. I am sensible that as a stranger to American parties and politics I must lose much of the conceald satire of the piece but I must own I have never read anything so closely resembling the stile of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have been employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. S. and two ladies who are our guests and our sides have been absolutely tense with laughing. I think too, there are passages which indicate that the author possesses powers of a different kind & has some touches which remind me much of Sterne. I beg you will have the kindness to let me know when Mr. [Irving] take[s] pen in hand again for assuredly I shall expect a very great treat which I may chance never to hear of but through your kindness.
—from a letter to Henry Brevoort (April 23, 1813)
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Mr. Irving is by birth an American, and has, as it were, skimmed the cream, and taken off patterns with great skill and cleverness, from our best-known and happiest writers, so that their thoughts and almost their reputation are indirectly transferred to his page, and smile upon us from another hemisphere, like ‘the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow.’ He succeeds to our admiration and our sympathy by a sort of prescriptive title and traditional privilege ...
Mr. Washington Irving’s acquaintance with English literature begins almost where Mr. Lamb’s ends,—with the Spectator,