The best book to movie adaptations

"Better than the book" department: The Godfather, The Sweet Hereafter, The Ice Storm.

And then there's the champion "dreadful book into good movie" -- AMERICAN PSYCHO.

The Last Picture Show

Gone With the Wind

Don't be boring OP. Let's thread on best movie to book adaptations.

Giovanni’s Room

Other thread ideas:

Bad Book, Bad Movie

Tony Award Winning Play, Movie Disaster

Blockbuster Movie, Toast of Broadway

Pulitzer Award Winning Books Turned into Bad Vivian Vance Movies

Pelican Brief?

More like Turkey Too Long.

Call me by your name

Better than the book OR the play: Cabaret.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

The movie was better than the book!

R9 I agree. The book was waaaaaay too long, and veered into insufferably pretentious territory.

R8 how does The Pelican Brief stink?

Besides the garage scene, the film was pretty good.

CARRIE owns this.

No, R14: The Color Purple.

Who was the contemporary critic that called Spielberg's THE COLOR PURPLE "the Happy Negroes ride at Disneyland"?

PEYTON PLACE

CARRIE

REAR WINDOW

R16 I can agree with that statement. I saw the movie, then read the book. Other than the names of the characters being the same, the film bore little resemblance to the source material. And the unfortunate expense of the male characters. They were a bit more shaded and nuanced in the novel. In the film, they were cardboard cutouts, either buffoons or bullies.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

Auntie Mame

Ben-Hur (1959)

Dodsworth

The Egyptian

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

I Remember Mama

Lost Horizon (1937)

On the Beach

The Razor’s Edge (1946)

The Time Machine (1960)

The Shawshank Redemption

[R16]: Couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, I read “The Color Purple” first. The book was gingham. The movie was Laura Ashley.

And Oh, so calculated. At one point, as I watched Danny Glover slowly walking by his now dilapidated house, I noticed a second story shutter, hanging by one hinge. As I thought, “That’s going to fall,” sure enough, it did.

Spielberg sure can lay it on with a trowel.

MISERY

The Dead wins this thread.

Two come to mind that are, among other things, remarkable for their close fidelity to the original text while also finding aptly cinematic ways to bring it to the screen: ROSEMARY'S BABY and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN.

Valley of the Dolls wins Best/Worst.

The all-time best to my mind is "Rosemary's Baby" because the adaptation is SO exact from the book. Roman Polanski did the screenplay and at the time he had no idea he could take whatever liberties he wanted--he thought he was somehow ethically bound to do it exactly as the author had written the story, which is one of the reasons the movie is so fine.

That's also why the 1940 first version of "Rebecca" is such a great adaptation. Hitchcock wanted to mess around with it and have his own silly bits in it, and David Selznick prohibited it--he said people wanted to see the bestseller they loved up on the screen as exactly faithful as possible. They weren't allowed to have Max be a(n accidental) killer because of the Hays Code, but otherwise it's a very faithful adaptation.

R26 I wish more directors and producers felt this way.

Isabel Allende's beautiful debut novel The House of the Spirits was turned into a steaming pile of dog shit of a movie, starring of course M. Oh wait, wasn't I also in that movie? Fuck, I was.

Never mind.

[italic] Der junge Törless [/italic] .

have they made a film of Giovanni's Room, r6? I thought that's never been done.

Master and Commander - it's based on several of the books by Patrick O'Brian, especially the tenth book - The Far Side of the World. It's not an adaptation of any one novel, as the events of the movie don't match any of the books exactly. However, the movie gets the characters and feel of the novels down perfectly.

Trainspotting - the book is a slog if you don't understand Scottish slang, but the movie is good.

American Psycho - loved Christian Bale in this.

A Room with a View - gorgeous film, gorgeous cast, and a wonderful film overall. But the subtle criticism of class snobbery was missed by most Americans and non-Brits.

Carol - the book is a classic, and so is the movie.

R28 Meryl Streep ruined that movie because we were supposed to believe her earlier scenes as a young twenty something virginal bride…

[quite]Meryl Streep ruined that movie because

Oh go fuck yourself with your boring anti-Meryl lunacy. The director/screenwriter ruined that movie. The entire miscasting of all the main roles ruined that movie. Every fucking thing involved in the making of that film ruined that movie. It was an absolute shit show from start to finish.

[quite]

And I spelled “quote” wrong, so I fucking ruined that post.

But I stand by the points I made.

Learn how to use the quote commands in the forums, r33.

By the way, you’re a CUNT. So you fuck off.

Dr. Zhivago

Dolores Claiborne was a better Stephen King adaptation than Misery.

Gone Girl

Sorry I don’t read books. Ain’t got time for that

The World According to Garp. After reading it, I had no idea how they were going to make it into a movie. It was better than I could have imagined. I know not everyone thinks so....but I fucking LOVED it!!!

A Clockwork Orange - book to movie.

The Talented Mr. Ripley The End of the Affair

Pride and Prejudice - two most recent films, 1995 and 2005

Brideshead Revisited

Lolita, more the first one, but the second was good too, 1962 and 1997

Alice in Wonderland, 1999

The Secret Garden

The Sheltering Sky

Mrs Dalloway

This is Datalounge. I can't believe no one has mentioned The Wizard of Oz!

PSYCHO. The book is poorly written trash. Even the studio was dubious. But the film succeeds entirely because of Hitchcock's brilliant visual storytelling.

R43 The 1992 version of The Secret Garden? If so, that's a really good one.

1993, R46.

R43

R47 Sorry, with Maggie Smith and Daniel Day-Lewis(?) as the uncle?

I disagree re: Psycho. That movie wouldn't exist without the storytelling prowess of Bloch's book. But it did effectively streamline it. The one thing the movie doesn't succeed in (ever) -- and that's probably due to the film's reputation/Perkins's sequels -- is the idea that Norman's mother is actually alive and he's having to clean up after her mess. In the book, it's much more viable that she is alive until the reveal that she isn't. And then there are allusions to witchcraft and occultism -- suggesting that he possibly could have reanimated her. And that whole occult moment was very real during that time. There's even a reference in the book to Crowley I believe.

[quote] "And then there's the champion "dreadful book into good movie" -- AMERICAN PSYCHO."

Ellen Barkin agrees, R2.

The Exorcist

The Stepford Wives

The Accidental Tourist

NB: 1975 Stepford Wives, not the Frank Oz abomination

R49, are you saying that *no one* who watches PSYCHO has *ever* been fooled that it's not actually Mother doing the murdering? That's patently untrue.

LA Confidential wins this thread.

Hunt for Red October.

I preferred the Ripley book to the movie.

Neither is on a lot of “best” lists, but I enjoyed the movie Bird Box and thought the book was pretty stupid.

Jaws - a pulpy novel turned into a movie masterpiece.

[quote]This is Datalounge. I can't believe no one has mentioned The Wizard of Oz!

Because it's a fantastic movie, but it's a so-so adaptation of the L Frank Baum book.

OP didn't specify most faithful, he said best. That's actually ambiguous.

Mary Poppins

Dr. No

Tales of the City (original PBS miniseries)

Querelle

HOTEL & AIRPORT. Both based on novels by Arthur Hailey, both well mounted, glossy productions.

[quote] Don't be boring OP. Let's thread on best movie to book adaptations.

Do it yourself by subscribing, you cheap whiner.

Jaws

Nobody has mentioned To Kill A Mockingbird unless I missed it. Certainly a great movie. Was it a bad adaptation?

R59 Best and most faithful are used interchangeably.

Mars Attacks! was better than the...bubble gum cards.

R67 Yeah, the cards didn't have Glenn Close pretending to be Pat Nixon.

Gone with the Wind

r68, I thought Glenn was pretending more to be Nancy Reagan.

Glenn's First Lady was a bitchy arriviste; Pat was a nice lady (despite the choice of husband) who wasn't fancy.

R70 Maybe Nancy, but Pat Nixon wig.

I'll buy Pat Nixon wig!

The whole Harry Potter series.

Also, The Devil Wears Prada. The book was unreadable.

Coincidentally, I'm reading and loving MILDRED PIERCE right now and I'm fascinated by the changes (some due to censorship, no doubt) they made for the great Joan Crawford film. It was very smart to film it as a noir and not a soap opera like the turgid Kate Winslet HBO mini-series.

Is Albert Nobbs a novel?

This is not the exact topic but my most long anticipated but will never happened adaptation is A Confederacy of Duncs. It is like Garp, which also seemed undoable but Garp was successfully made?

/never "happen" not happened

I hope A Confederacy of Dunces never gets made into a movie. At one point I think Phillip Seymour Hoffman was attached, which I could have seen, but then Will Ferrell was on board, which would have been a complete and utter disaster. As of now there are supposedly no actors attached, but Steven Soderbergh is listed as one of the writers.

Will Ferrell would be an abomination.

John Waters said (years ago) that A Confederacy of Dunces was the only thing he would ever want to direct that wasn't his own writing.

[quote]John Waters said (years ago) that A Confederacy of Dunces was the only thing he would ever want to direct that wasn't his own writing.

I could see someone like Waters respecting the book enough to do the movie version justice. But if he said this "years ago" I wonder if he envisioned Divine as Ignatius J. Reilly. Yikes!

Waters said he would do the film in a serious, straightforward manor, like the way Woody Allen shocked audiences when he challenged himself and did Interiors. It's a shame it's unlikely he will ever be attached, as he could, potentially, add something unique to the project.

Ordinary People. It's pretty faithful to the novel. The only major piece lacking is probably Conrad's romance and sexual connection with Jeanine.

Hard to believe it was Judith Guest's first novel.

The Dead Zone

Bonfire of the Vanities

Valley of the Dolls.

A Passage to India

Doctor Zhivago.

The Wizard of Oz

The Princess Bride

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the best adaptation of any of the Harry Potter novels)

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2015 BBC adaptation)