The Black Tulip
Alexandre Dumas · first published 1850
Dumas without the swords — although the 1964 film gave him some anyway.
4 versions · 1920–1964
Christian-Jaque’s version of 1964 starred Alain Delon in a dual role and turned a story about horticulture and a wrongful imprisonment into a swashbuckler, on the sound commercial ground that Dumas sells swords. A Turkish version came in 1920 and an English one in 1937.
The novel is stranger and quieter: a man in a cell trying to grow a flower, with a lynching in the first chapter that Dumas took straight from history and did not soften.
Holland, 1672 — a lynching Dumas did not invent
The novel opens with the murder of the de Witt brothers by a mob in The Hague, torn apart in the street and their bodies mutilated. It happened, in front of witnesses, in the year the French invaded and the Dutch republic came close to collapse.
Against that, Dumas set a man in a cell trying to grow a flower. Tulip mania had been forty years earlier and was still a byword for the speculative fever that grips a whole country — which is why a prize for breeding a black tulip is a plausible thing for a nation to lose its head over.
On screen
4Film and television, earliest first.
- 1920 Kara Lale Bayramı Muhsin Ertuğrul
- 1921 The Black Tulip Frank Richardson
- 1937 The Black Tulip Alex Bryce
- 1964 La Tulipe noire Christian-Jaque
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.