That night, in his little flat, Smith pulls a chair into an odd angle of the room in order to conceal himself from the television screen that observes his every move. At high points they stand and, clenching both fists, cross their wrists with arms extended in what seems a combination of the Communist and fascist salutes. People alternately scream with rage and cheer madly, all in a peculiarly mechanical, arbitrary way. A banner marked INGSOC (English Socialism) first appears on the screen, then a series of battle newsreels. The opening scene is a kind of rally in which perhaps a thousand people, men and women, all dressed like Smith, are being shown a propaganda movie. He has a wretched little apartment in a block where discolored paint peels off the walls and corridors are filled with litter. Smith himself is scrawny, sallow- skinned, dressed in an ill-fitting jumpsuit of Peking blue. Faucets drip, elevators don't work, windows are broken. (When the novel was published, in 1949, the year of the title was still 35 years away). Winston Smith (John Hurt), the movie's protagonist, lives a squalid life in a grimy, greenish-gray, unrecognizable London of the future. Orwell's mordant verbal evocation of the horrors to come is simply not translated into visual terms. If all we knew of Orwell was this movie, he would be considered a futuristic writer of pessimistic temperament and mediocre talent.
Have the makers of the film ''1984'' succeeded in transposing into cinematic form the startling originality of one of the 20th century's most famous novels? For those who have not read George Orwell's classic book, the story we see on the screen is, frankly, meager.
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