| Raymond Chandler once said, "If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come." The famous author, who was no stranger to seeing his fiction adapted to the screen (nine of his novels became movies, including the twice-made The Big Sleep), certainly had a point about what makes for good material in Tinseltown.
Oddly enough, great literature has never been a good fit for Hollywood. In a town where The Great Gatsby can be turned into a love story (see the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow vehicle) and The Scarlet Letter can be made into soft-core porn (see the Gary Oldman-Demi Moore film), the more fertile literary material has often been a mix of pulp hits, genre classics and popular (if not critically beloved) bestsellers.
Sure, Hollywood may never have quite figured out the best way to handle Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Joyce or even Ernest Hemingway on-screen, it’s done quite well with people like Chandler, Patrician Highsmith and Daphne Du Maurier. In that spirit, here’s a look back at some of the books that will forever be better known as films.
· Psycho – While Hitchcock is best known as a master of suspense, the director was almost equally as masterful at spotting a good story in often forgettable books. Whether working with an old standby like Du Maurier (who penned the novels that The Birds, Rebecca and Jamaica Inn were based on) or turning a lesser known French novel into Vertigo (his masterpiece) Hitchcock knew the best books to work with were the ones that had stories he could make all his own. With Psycho, based on Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name, the director forever changed filmmaking as we know it. Whether you want to point to the fact that he convinced generations to always think twice about getting in the shower or the fact that he created a genre all its own (the slasher flick), Psycho may have started out as a book, but you’d probably be hard pressed to find someone who remembers that.
· Bladerunner – Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by sci-fi giant Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott’s adaptation stands as one of the finest sci-fi films ever made. Whether you want to point to his stunning sets – or the brilliant noir undercurrents (in which androids stand in for the racial-sexual "other"), Blade Runner is a pitch-perfect film. The only question here is whether you ascribe to the director’s cut or the original release.
Jaws – Peter Benchley’s book may have been a bestseller, but Steven Spielberg and Jaws did for the ocean what Hitchcock did for showers. With John Williams, famous score forever emblazoned in every moviegoer’s head, in or out of the water, it’s hard to imagine this shark tale having more bite in print.
· Terms of Endearment – Say what you will of Larry McMurtry, who’s no slouch as a novelist, but this James L. Brooks adaptation of McMurtry’s book of the same name stands as one of the most unsentimental sentimental movies ever made. Powered as it is by three unforgettable performances –from Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson and Debra Winger – this story of a cancer-stricken woman who uncomfortably reacquaints with her estranged mom tugs at the heartstrings like no other. No one with a heart beating in their chest can get through that hospital goodbye between Winger and her two young sons without crying.
The Shining – Another director who had a penchant for turning to books for source material, Stanley Kubrick (who had his fair share of successful and unsuccessful stabs with books, from the wonderful-but-slow Barry Lyndon to the uneven Lolita) was at his commercial best with this take on Stephen King’s book. For his part, King, whose work has been brought to the screen countless times, never got so stylized and tight an adaptation as he did here. One of the best horror films ever made, Kubrick perfectly plays on the inherent spookiness of King’s plot – a father going insane as the off-season caretaker of a New England hotel – to create a film that frightens through manipulation as opposed to cheap gore.
The Godfather – While Mario Puzo’s saga of an Italian immigrant family that rose to become the most powerful mafia clan in America was a sensation among readers, Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic adaptation is the thing that drilled its way into our cultural psyche. Perhaps sparking more imitators than any other film ever made, The Godfather not only took the gangster genre and re-established it as the standard story of American immigrants, it also featured the quintessential performance by any American actor – Marlon Brando as the pouchy-cheeked head of the family, Don Corleone. Puzo’s book gets extra points, since it also spawned Coppola’s sequel, The Godfather Part II, one of the only sequels in American cinema that not only matches, but exceeds, its forebear. |
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