My favourite example of this has to be H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. It has been made into multiple movie versions; all suck, as far as I have seen.
Another would be Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
What are your favourites?
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – vehicle for Bing Crosby and Will Rogers, indifferent cartoons, lame PBS version. Just once I’d like to see it played even close to straight.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – some have been pretty decent, but they never realy captured the spirit of Verne. A lot of them were downright awful. Verne, Wells, and Poe have fared pretty badly when it comes to faithfulness of adaptations. Which b brings up:
The Mysterious Island – Curiously, the silent version of 20,000 Leagues has a faithful portion of this book. Most adaptations pretty much jettison the book, though **
Casino Royale – I haven’t seen the latest, yet, but , good as it may be, by this point in time it can’;t be all that faithful. Certainly the two previous versions took considerable liberties.
The Puppet Masters – done twice already. The first version wasd an unauthorized rip-off, the second tried, but ran into the Hollywood machine. One day they’ll do it right. I hope.
Oh, yeah, a science fiction short story – Fredric Brown’s Arena. They only really officially adapted it once, as an episode of “Star Trek” (TOS), but it’s been ripped off many times (like the “Outer Limits”: episode “Fun and Games”. Even the Star Trek version changed it, especially the ending. With CGI and intelligent writing and directing, you could do a great job on this.
Arguably, I, Robot. The Will Smith movie, as we all know by now, wasn’t even originally an adaptation of the book. IIRC, one of the British 1960s SF shows did this (Out of this World or Out of the Unknown), but with their limited time (short episode) and legebdarily low budget it can’t have been all that good. And amn asimov-blessed script was written (by Harlan Ellison), which I liked (although YMMV)
Alice in Wonderland – been done many time, never particularly well. The problem is that Alice really has no plot and no character, just incidents. In addition, you end up having to put bits from Through the Looking Glass into it because people expect things like Jaberwocky and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. This means major adjustments to squeeze them in. The closest anyone came to a decent version was the 1999 TV version, but that just barely rises above mediocre.
Another short – Asimov’s classic Nightfall has been made into two appallingly bad movies. I’m sure it could be done well. I’ve done it in my head.
I’ve just finished reading Solaris, and I’ve seen both film versions. They’re both well-made, but they ain’t the book by a long shot.
I don’t thionk that either the Kubrick film nor the TV movie did justice to Stephen King’s The Shining.
I haven’t seen many of them myself, but my father (an English writing teacher and playwright) feels that attempts to make Huckleberry Finn into a movie always fall flat when they run into the Dauphin, because finally, some interesting characters, and the writing goes off on a wild tangent and they never get back on track.
Heh. Two of my five favorite books of all time:
Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham. Each time (three times, most recently in 1964), the casting has been poor and the plot butchered.
Dune, by Frank Herbert. I’m not even talking about faithful adaptation (Weirding Module, anyone?). I’d just like to see an entertaining movie with not-distractingly-bad special effects.
Dracula. At least with this one they keep approaching “good” by stages. Stoker’s weird, multilmedia novel has too many characters and too many scenery changes, and adaptations invariably condense scenes and characters. The Coppola version is the only one to give us a taste of that multimedia sense, along with usually-jettisoned characters like Quincey Morris, but it also gave us Van Helsing played as a loon, an emphasis on the erotic that went well beyond the book, and that goofy bit about Lucy being the reincarnation of Drac’s wife that was lifted from other flicks (like Dan Curtis’ TV version, or the original Mummy movie), and ain’t in the book at all. Too many versions either try to duplicate the stage play (not a good strategy), or are simply dull (the much-vaunted Louis Jordan PBS version). PBS is having another go at it in FDebriary. Maybe they’ll get it right this time.
I enjoyed the movie, but it had a very different flavor to that of the book.
I guess we need to specify “well made” (for purposes of this thread) as either “faithful to the book” or “made into a good film.” I know we already had a recent knock-down, drag-out thread in CS where we debated which was more important.
Although updated (and it takes some considerable liberties with some of the characters) it is surprisingly faithful to the gist of the story, including Bond having to outplay Le Chiffre (in Texas Hold 'Em, rather than baccarat, which actually makes more sense as the former is a game of skill as well as chance) in order to make his superiors (The Organization rather than the deprecated Smersh) turn against him, buying back into the game thanks to Felix Leiter, the duplicitous Vesper, the car accident, et cetera. In fact, with the exception of the first couple of Bond movies and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, this is probably the closest any Bond movie has come to both the story and spirit of the literary Bond.
I haven’t seen the 1954 episode of Climax based on Casino Royale (which swapped the allegances of Leiter and ‘Jimmy’ Bond), but the David Niven-headed spoof was an awful, awful movie by any standard and shouldn’t be considered a Bond movie at all, even in the non-canon sense.
Go see the new film; I think you’ll be pleasently surprised.
Stranger
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was, as I recall, a pretty faithful adaptation of the book. Right up till the last scene. I have only watched it once, it is an abomination now.
I don’t demand slavish imitation of the book, but the movie ought to be true to its spirit and feel. The Shining wasn’t. From what I’ve heard, Casino Royale might be. I’ll see.
Branaugh’s Frankensdtein , like Coppola’s Dracula, came close, but didn’t quite make it. For both Drac and Frank there are low-budget versions that came close, too – Jess Franco’s 1970 Count Dracula was awesomely good and eveb faithful – for the first 1/3 to 1/2. Similarly, the independent Victor Frankenstein (AKA Terror of Frankenstein) was remarkably true as well, but eventually petered out before the end. We’re approaching the True Vision, I think.
What does he think about the Roger Miller stage musical, Big River?
<kaylasdad99 writes Stranger On A Train’s name on a slip of paper, places paper into an envelope marked “Naughty”, and heads to the Post Office…>
You’re in for it, now.
Dumb story anyway. The celestial event is plausible. The psychological effects are not.
Good point. I myself had in mind a mixure of both - that is, failthful to the atmosphere of the original (I won’t demand slavish obedience to the book, because I know that can make filming difficult/impossible) and at the same time an entertaining, good film.
Another example of one done repeatedly but not well - Wells’ War of the Worlds. I’d love to see a good version of the original story in all its late-Victorian glory. The less said of the most recent attempt, the better. 
Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water is a rather distant interpretation, but it is good.
Tarzan. Johnny Weismuller’s versions really ruined the character, but I don’t think Hollywood ever really capturecd the essence and feel of Burrough’s hero properly. Oddly enough, the very first Elmo Lincoln silent version was pretty close, much of the time. The 1980s Christopher Lambert version was visually stunning and sometimes faithful, but actuially managed to get boring. And Disney’s version, while very true at times and at least not dull, went off into distinctly non-Burroughs-land as well.
I haven’t seen them, but Haggard’s She (as well as King Solomon’s Mines) has been filmed about half a dozen times, as has Benoit’s l’Atlantide, and I understand none of them comes close to the books.
Gotta agree about **war of the Worlds[p/B] Even if Harryhausen had made his Victorian-era version, I doubt if it would’ve been true Wells. But, as I said, wells hasn’ty, in general, fared well at the hands of fiilmmakers. They did a wonderful job with the Man Who Could Work Miracles. They also were faithful with Things to Come, which had Welles himself at the helm. Unfortunately, that was the problem in this case.