The Scarlet Letter (1995)
Directed by Roland Joffé
Set in puritanical Boston in the mid 1600s, the story of seamstress Hester Prynne, who is outcast after she becomes pregnant by a respected reverend. She refuses to divulge the name of the father, is "convicted" of adultery and forced to wear a scarlet "A" until an Indian attack unites the Puritans and leads to a reevaluation of their laws and morals.
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What critics compared The Scarlet Letter to
The film is also (very loosely) based on "The Scarlet Letter," which winds up being less an inspiration for the plot and more a source for one of the film's funniest gags wherein various characters mockingly refer to the 1995 adaptation of the novel starring Demi Moore.
But this is, after all, a high school flick inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," so even though I didn't really buy the words coming out of the mouth of a precocious 17-year-old, I still enjoyed knowing somebody uttered them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter inspires the high-school comedy Easy A, in which Olive (Emma Stone) finds herself excoriated by the entire student body when word mistakenly gets out that she is the campus harlot.
Here he adolescentizes The Scarlet Letter; the title refers to the stigmatic A for Adultery worn by Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne.
The reference, of course, is Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," which she's reading in a class taught by the school's coolest teacher (Thomas Haden Church, in perfect casting).
Not only does it contain various literary references to Sylvia Plath, Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne (whose novel The Scarlet Letter forms the basis of Easy A ) but it also mentions Judy Blume, Say Anything… and all of John Hughes’s films.
Even "The Scarlet Letter" understood that the most piously bland audience-stand-in Everyman protagonists still need a bit of kink to keep them interesting.