Film adaptations of books that don't work very well

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

I hesitate to criticise the much revered classic noir film The Big Sleep (1946), but having just re-watched it after reading the novel, I think the screenwriters were really struggling in places. Partly that was due to the challenge of cutting all the action of a complicated and multi-stage plot down to something that would squeeze into a 2 hour run time (the book is only around 250 pages but is very fast-moving). Partly it was due to the need to crowbar in a Bacall-Bogart romance that didn't happen between the book characters in question. Most of all though, it was due to the constraints of the puritanical Hays Code, which meant that core elements of the novel's subject matter could barely be hinted at, and the subtlety of the hints in the film makes it possible for some aspects to go pretty much over your head (it being a noted problem with the film that it leaves many viewers simply a bit bewildered), or at least get far far short of the dramatic focus that they should have to give the story its true spirit. You have to ask, if the constraints of the Hays Code cut so deeply into what you can portray, whether it was worth even trying to stick to the original subject matter.

I'm not generally a fan of remakes, generally holding classics in awe and seeing remakes as naff and impertinent, but with the right actors and director etc., the book would make a great subject for a truer to the novel, post-Code, noir remake.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Lord of the Rings was shite, and the Hobbit was worse.

[San Bernardhinault]

To be fair, the Tolkien books are over-rated and bloated, too.

[Snake Plissken]

As a fan of the book and the film of The Big Sleep, I totally get what EEG is saying. IIRC, Chandler was asked midway through filming who actually killed the bookseller and his answer was something like "I have no idea, I was off my head at the time". And the book is much less explicit than if it was published more recently, let alone before getting toned down for 1940s cinema screens.

I'm always surprised that the "horse racing" scene made it through, though I'm glad it did because the screen fair crackles between Bogart and Bacall.

The LOTR films are as good an adaptation of the books as you are likely to get. I'm still not convinced that they are great films, though because of the source material.

Throwing a grenade in... Watchmen? I adore the novel, but I will defend the film as a good go at making a film version of it. The problem that at times it was too slavish and scared to do its own thing (the novel is an experiment in pushing the medium it is written in) and then when it deviate away, too often it didn't pull it off. It just needed to commit one way or another.

I'm also a big fan of V for Vendetta in both forms, but acknowledge that the film version really is a skeleton of the book. Glad they kept the "one last inch" monologue.

[Guy Profumo]

Something Wicked This Way Comes

[Amor de Cosmos]

I'm always surprised that the "horse racing" scene made it through, though I'm glad it did because the screen fair crackles between Bogart and Bacall.

Yeah. The ending's pretty hot too...

Most of Chandler's books are full of random digressions and brilliant but 'WTF how does that make sense?' moments, The Big Sleep more than most. So the film was never going to be fully coherent. It's still brilliant though.

The code was loosening up a bit by 1946, though very erratically. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, released two years earlier is jaw-dropping in comparison, who knows how that got passed.

[elguapo4]

90% of Stephen King films are either badly made, nothing like the book, or usually both.

[WOM]

In The Heart of The Sea takes an excruciating tale of the will to survive and turns it into a bullshit 'man vs killer whale' story, with a dollop of Ron Howard mediocrity thrown in.

[Gert from the Well]

I thought the film of American Psycho overlooked the important theme of the book, namely the critique of the sheer banality of the late 80s yuppie boom. To me the mist memorable parts of the book are the endless discussions and descriptions of dress trousers, the social politics of restaurant reservations and the technical description of a top-end hi-fi system that is used to play Huey Lewis and Phil Collins. The killings, probably imaginary, are there to break the tedium as well as an extreme parody of pornography. The film tries to maintain this balance, but errs towards the shock where what is required is more boredom.

[3 Colours Red]

Pretty much any Roald Dahl adaptation that panders to an American audience.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

A (New York) Winter's Tale was an absolute mess and proved the point thst when books are described as "unfilmable" that's a warning rather than a challenge.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Pretty much any Roald Dahl adaptation that panders to an American audience.

I thought The Witches was pretty decent. Though it depends on what you mean by pandering I suppose.

[Fussbudget]

I thought the film of American Psycho overlooked the important theme of the book, namely the critique of the sheer banality of the late 80s yuppie boom. To me the mist memorable parts of the book are the endless discussions and descriptions of dress trousers, the social politics of restaurant reservations and the technical description of a top-end hi-fi system that is used to play Huey Lewis and Phil Collins. The killings, probably imaginary, are there to break the tedium as well as an extreme parody of pornography. The film tries to maintain this balance, but errs towards the shock where what is required is more boredom.

That's funny, I would have said almost exactly the opposite. The violence in the book is massively more shocking than in the film, because it's crude and detailed in a way that they could never have shown on screen. The book is a satire but also genuinely horrible, whereas the film is pretty much just a black comedy about yuppies (and not a bad one at that, but it's not really American Psycho.)

[Gert from the Well]

Why the book works for me was the extremes of the tedium and worthlessness of his life and the violence that was so extreme as to be pure fantasy. The violence blurs into one and becomes almost pathetic in the way that it is based on male porn fantasies. I can only vaguely remember one of the 'killings' where as the mundanity of his day-to-day life and his fear of rejection by his peers is still vivid. Maybe having subsequently read a lot of Dennis Cooper novels the violence of Easton-Ellis is made to seem meaningless. What remains is a Selby like tale of the descent of man.

[Fussbudget]

See, I remember all the tedium and social embarrassment stuff, but I also remember the unpleasant sexual violence very vividly. The film plays it much more like farce.

[Hot Pepsi]

Lord of the Rings was shite, and the Hobbit was worse.

Wrong

[WOM]

Pretty much any Roald Dahl adaptation that panders to an American audience.

Try 'Where The Wild Things Are'. Eesh. It'll make you pine for any Dahl adaptation.

[Hot Pepsi]

I liked that movie. It doesn’t resemble the book much but I still liked it.

[hobbes]

Wrong

The Hobbit was definitely worse.

[hobbes]

We'll find out next year whether Dune is unfilmable. There have been 3 failed attempts so far.

[Uncle Ethan]

Not sure why people who don't like LoTR or The Hobbit in the first place wasted their time watching the movies.

[Hot Pepsi]

The Hobbit was definitely worse.

The films were definitely worse, though not quite as bad as they are made out to be. They could have done the complete Hobbit in about four hours. Three films required a lot of padding, especially the last one. I liked how they put in a bunch of stuff to connect it to LOTR and added some more female characters, but the Battle of Five armies especially was way too long, CGI heavy and full of nonsense.

As a book, the Hobbit works well as a first chapter in the story.

I have the extended cuts of all six films and watch them all about once a year. I cry at the end every time.

I’ve examined it a lot and think the LOTR films are about as good an adaption as could be attempted. The hardcore fans don’t seem to understand that if they included everything in the book, each film would be seven hours long and be really dull.

Film, especially a film that needs to draw a big audience to make money, needs to move along at a reasonably brisk pace.

Books don’t need to to that. At least not to that degree. To use the Tolkien example, I can enjoy a chapter or two of Frodo and Sam just mulling their plight without advancing the plot much. Because I can get up and go do something else and come back to it whenever I want, and while I’m there, I’m just in the world and don’t mind that it’s not going anywhere for a bit. But you can’t expect adults with other things to do, let alone kids, to sit through all of that in a theater for hours on end.*

And books can introduce minor one-off characters like Erkenbrand, marshal of the West-Mark, and it doesn’t matter that they don’t appear again. In fact, it makes the story feel more authentic because real life history has a lot of cameo appearances like that. If I forget who that is, I can just go back a few pages (or look it up on the Arda app).

But in a film, those sorts of characters are just annoying and cause confusion. They also make the film more expensive to cast, I suspect.

* I think that’s one reason why every Oscar-bait season there are a few films that critics love and audiences generally don’t. Critics may watch over 500 to 1,000 (or more) movies a year, including rewatches. I, for example, have no partner, no kids, don’t usually work long hours and yet even this year, I don’t think I’ll watch more than 200, and even in The Before Times, I probably only went to the theater about 30 times a year. A typical functioning adult sees way fewer than that.

So for a critic, a blockbuster action movie or rom com is boring because they’ve seen them all so the cliches are starting to grate on them and there’s not much worth writing about. But a really boring slog that at least has some interesting cinematography and acting at least offers something to think about and they literally have nothing better to do or anywhere else to be. Watching the film is their job.

But for most people, the same old Hollywood bullshit may actually a welcome break from the same old bullshit at work or at home. The cliches can even be comforting. And for kids, the same old same old isn’t the same old same old because they’ve never seen it before.

[Hot Pepsi]

Not sure why people who don't like LoTR or The Hobbit in the first place wasted their time watching the movies.

I’ve wondered that too. Same with the people who hated Avengers Endgame (aside from the ubernerds who think deviation from the comics is heresy. They have a different problem.)

[Hot Pepsi]

I’m not sure about Dune. I don’t know if each book can be done successfully with one film each.

I thought the 80s Lynch version was ok (as did Frank Herbert, although he was paid handsomely to think that, I guess.) But now it just looks so dated that it’s hard to get into now. The TV series had more time to get into all the nuance, but now it just looks cheap and maybe it dragged it out *too* much.

Like a lot of sci-fi, it’s hard to film because it has so much backstory and exposition that won’t appeal to a broad audience and may even bore the fans who enjoyed reading it. Like I said above, film needs movement.

[Sits]

Dune (book): the literary equivalent of a bloated, self indulgent prog rock album.