Perhaps the best form to carry the complexity, the density, the drama and the humor of a big novel is the television miniseries. The best example of this is Lewis Milestone's memorable version of "All Quiet on the Western Front." Or think of Martin Ritt's stunning version of "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" with the magnificently bleached-dry Richard Burton. "The Maltese Falcon" is one, "The Postman Always Rings Twice" another.
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The other consistently well-done literary adaptation takes off from a peculiar kind of novel: one so short and of a piece that it's almost a movie already. See it back-to-back with, say, "Fail-Safe," which plays the same story straight (and was itself adapted from a novel), and you see why one has lasted while the other slipped into oblivion.
Stanley Kubrick and his collaborator, the freaky genius Terry Southern, and George himself reinvented the movie as dark farce on the subject of the end of the world. Strangelove" is one the novel, "Red Alert" by Peter George, was largely a straightforward docudrama based on George's excellent knowledge of the inner workings of strategic-defense culture. In the first, filmmakers simply ignore or abandon the original novel and use it as a platform to explore similar themes. Okay, so it was made in 1904.īut still: "It's not as good as the book." Think how many more times you've heard that than "It's much better than the book." That suggests a relentless reality: It may be that the novel isn't the ideal form for translation into the feature film.Ī few adaptations, of course, have been masterpieces, most of those exceptions falling into two categories. The earliest may have been a silent "Frankenstein." I saw it sometime back at the National Institutes of Health, and in it, all the pathologies of the literary adaptation were on display: They took a great 600-page novel and reduced it to seven minutes. The novel or short story - that is, the work of fictional prose with an organic story, a set of recognizable characters and motives, and something wrong with it - has provided material to films for almost a century.
Dick short story), "The Bourne Identity" (from a Robert Ludlum novel), "About a Boy" (from Nick Hornby's novel) and "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" (from a bestseller by Rebecca Wells). Besides "The Sum of All Fears," from the Clancy canon, there's "Minority Report" (from a Philip K. In fact, just looking at the newspaper movie section, we see that a good many of the films in release originated as works of fiction. That still happens, and they still ruin it, as per Tom Clancy et al. He was so happy and rich, he didn't even notice they ruined it. It used to be every novelist's dream to see his book purchased by Hollywood, then projected 25 feet high at the local bijou, with impossibly beautiful people playing the parts that had begun as fractured slivers of the poor schmo's id.
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