The Lord of the Rings seemed like it would be up for the title after the first movie, but I’ve noticed quite a bit of mouth-frothing from fans about the second.
So anyone have some other nominations for most faithful adaption? Which may have nothing to do with the actual quality of the movie… I’m not asking for the best adaption.
It was “written” by buying a couple of cheap copies of the book, & taking a razor blade & slicing out passages & pasting them in a notebook. This notebook was the “first draft”. Sections that would not work on film were simply omitted, & a small ammount of suplimentary dialoge was added, as were stage directions, lighting, & camera angle notes.
Greed (the original, lost, 8-hour version, of course). Not only is every scene in the movie in the book, but single paragraphs of the book often led to several minutes of screen time.
The Princess Bride was very faithful to the book. In fact, the book may have been just an expanded version of the script… Certainly in the copy I read the author commented on shopping it around in Hollywood.
Two things: the author and the screenwriter were the same person: celebrated Hollywood scribe William Goldman. Secondly, all of the authors comments in the novel were fictional. All of 'em. In fact, they’re part of the novel, meant as counterpoint to whimsical fairy tale portions of the book. Since they were almost entirely excised from the movie, and since they change the entire tone of the story so dramatically, I wouldn’t consider Princess Bride to be an especially faithful adaption. A very, very good adapation, but not necessarily faithful.
Another vote for the Maltese Falcon … though they still did manage to cut out one of my favorite parts of the book (Spade’s story about the man who went out for the paper and never came back.)
A couple of hefty but not very interesting subplots were cut from The Godfather. And tons of stuff was added, like actually rounding out Sonny and Fredo’s characters.
David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s “Crash” was very faithful in my opinion (I couldn’t believe he included the leg penetration scene), although a friend of mine insists it was not.
The awesome TV version of Brideshead Revisited was perfect. I was reading the book at the same time as I watched the series, and each scene, much of the VO narrative, and each line spoken, was word-for-word the same as the book the book.
Either they were really lazy, or it’s such a well-written novel that nothing had to be changed to make it suitable for the screen (I opt for the latter).