# Assassination of a literary character by means of movie or television **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 29, 2020, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677 "2020-05-29T15:37:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2020, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/21 "2020-05-29T21:22:28Z")
> [@Quercus](#): > > Well, I’m with you up to the word ‘quite’ (and maybe ‘excellent’). Clearly, Watson is intelligent enough to write well, but I’m not sure there’s any example of him demonstrating any significant intelligence other than that (though of course, he’s obviously modest enough that he’d leave it out, anyway, so we can’t say absence of evidence is evidence of absence in this case). We have the word of the Great Detective himself that Watson is intelligent: From _The Hound of the Baskervilles_, Chapter 12: (Holmes has been having Watson carry out some of the investigation on his own while he secretly hung out on the moor.) > [@Sherlock Holmes](#): > > I must compliment you exceedingly upon the zeal and the intelligence which you have shown over an extraordinarily difficult case. Watson’s fault isn’t lack of intelligence, it’s lack of imagination. He’s able to follow Holmes’s reasoning as soon as it’s explained to him. > [@](#): > > We have no idea how good a doctor he is, either, other than he seems to be able to maintain a medical practice in London. I think that in itself probably indicates a good degree of competence. From [Wiki:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Watson) > [@](#): > > [H]e is considered an excellent doctor and surgeon, especially by Holmes. For instance, in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” Holmes creates a ruse that he is deathly ill to lure a suspect to his presence, which must fool Watson as well during its enactment. To that effect in addition to elaborate makeup and starving himself for a few days for the necessary appearance, Holmes firmly claims to Watson that he is highly contagious to the touch, knowing full well that the doctor would immediately deduce his true medical condition upon examination. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2020, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/22 "2020-05-29T21:22:48Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Well, he’s intelligent enough to be a doctor, at least. He only looks like a bumbling fool by comparison to Holmes, but then, everyone looks like a bumbling fool compared to Holmes. Well, that’s why the Jude Law Watson was more faithful to the canon. Watson was a great help to Holme, even if not in his mental class at all. That is also why I rate Nero Wolfe above Sherlock. Archie is by no means a “Watson” and Inspector Cramer is no Inspector Lestrade. ---
**Author:** ![Oakminster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/77aa72/32.png) [@Oakminster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oakminster)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2020, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/23 "2020-05-29T22:03:14Z")
I don’t think Casey Jones was high on cocaine while he was driving that train… ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 7:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/24 "2020-05-30T07:56:47Z")
I’m a big fan of _The Saint_ series of books by Leslie Charteris. No screen version has ever got it entirely right. But the worst offender is the Roger Moore TV series. It has so completely missed the whole point of the character that its painful to watch. ---
**Author:** ![Asuka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@Asuka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asuka)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 9:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/25 "2020-05-30T09:32:44Z")
The Resident Evil series of movies are infamous for introducing an absolute Mary Sue of a character (Alice played by Milla Jovovich) in the first film who completely overshadows and outlasts the actual canon characters of the video games the few times they show up in the movies. It would be like if in the Star Trek reboot instead of making the main character Kirk or Spock it was an entirely new original character called Captain Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass is now Captain of the Enterprise with Kirk and Spock given B-lister status as Captain Kick-Ass singlehandedly solves every single problem in the Star Trek universe and eventually every single legacy Star Trek character is written out of the show. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 10:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/26 "2020-05-30T10:50:29Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > I’m a big fan of _The Saint_ series of books by Leslie Charteris. No screen version has ever got it entirely right. But the worst offender is the Roger Moore TV series. It has so completely missed the whole point of the character that its painful to watch. Even worse than Val Kilmer’s rendition? ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 11:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/27 "2020-05-30T11:16:40Z")
A lot worse. For all the film’s faults, at least Val Kilmer’s Saint was unrepentantly criminal. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/28 "2020-05-30T11:21:17Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > A lot worse. For all the film’s faults, at least Val Kilmer’s Saint was unrepentantly criminal. Point taken. ---
**Author:** ![Anglachel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Anglachel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anglachel)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/29 "2020-05-30T14:31:38Z")
My nomination is Faramir in the Lord of the Rings movies. In the novels, he is one of my favorite characters. He is completely uncorrupted by the Ring to the extent he tells Frodo and Sam that he wouldn’t pick it up off the ground, let alone take it from them. In the movie, he is no better than Boromir (and corrupted much more quickly). He only lets them go when they are under attack and he (apparently) decides it’s better for them to get away than be taken by Orcs. This violation makes The Two Towers completely unwatchable for me. ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/30 "2020-05-30T15:04:35Z")
For that matter, in the books, Denethor had his share of flaws, but he was not the sadistic ###hole portrayed in the movie. ---
**Author:** ![Anglachel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Anglachel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anglachel)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/31 "2020-05-30T15:08:11Z")
> [@mbh](#): > > For that matter, in the books, Denethor had his share of flaws, but he was not the sadistic ###hole portrayed in the movie. Agreed. He was tormented and had given up hope, but certainly didn’t sit and eat grapes while the world burned. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/32 "2020-05-30T15:33:33Z")
Denethor is a little more forgiveable. In the books, he was tragic, but not evil, but it’s very difficult to convey the nuance of that in the limited time the movie had to show him in. Heck, even in the books, you have to read the appendices to get the full picture of what was going on with him. But yeah, Faramir definitely got a raw deal. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/33 "2020-05-30T15:48:36Z")
Roger Moore’s James Bond was basically a parody of the character in the books. Pretty much every other portrayal (aside from Woody Allen’s) has been more faithful. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/34 "2020-05-30T16:09:19Z")
The nation of Romania has a problem with how Bram Stoker’s _Dracula_ stained the reputation of their national hero Vlad III, Voivod of Wallachia. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/35 "2020-05-30T20:21:48Z")
> [@Anglachel](#): > > My nomination is Faramir in the Lord of the Rings movies. In the novels, he is one of my favorite characters. He is completely uncorrupted by the Ring to the extent he tells Frodo and Sam that he wouldn’t pick it up off the ground, let alone take it from them. In the movie, he is no better than Boromir (and corrupted much more quickly). He only lets them go when they are under attack and he (apparently) decides it’s better for them to get away than be taken by Orcs. This violation makes The Two Towers completely unwatchable for me. He matches what I read in the books. And Faramir wasnt around the Ring as long as Boromir. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/36 "2020-05-30T20:53:50Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > The nation of Romania has a problem with how Bram Stoker’s _Dracula_ stained the reputation of their national hero Vlad III, Voivod of Wallachia. It is a little hard to stain the reputation of someone known to history as Vlad the Impaler. The deeds of the vampire in the book were trivial compared to the mass murders and the brutality of the original. ---
**Author:** ![gdave](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gdave/32/3683_2.png) [@gdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gdave)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/37 "2020-05-30T21:59:37Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > The nation of Romania has a problem with how Bram Stoker’s _Dracula_ stained the reputation of their national hero Vlad III, Voivod of Wallachia. Yeah, except Stoker never actually identified “Dracula” as being Vlad III. Stoker gives Abraham Van Helsing dialogue about who Dracula “must have been” as a mortal, and makes vague references to “that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk”. Some elements of the conjectural biography Van Helsing gives Dracula match Vlad III; others don’t. Stoker seems to have gotten the _name_ of “Dracula” from Romanian history, and cherry-picked some colorful elements for the character from some research into Romanian history, but it’s not actually even clear that Stoker actually knew who Vlad III was. To a Victorian British writer, Vlad III would have been a pretty obscure historical figure, and he doesn’t appear in any of Stoker’s notes. Vlad III was _a_ Dracula, but so was his father. “Dracula” isn’t a proper name, historically, it’s a reference to membership in the chivalric Order of the Dragon (“Dracul” means “dragon” in Romanian). There were more than a few voivodes who “won their names” in battle against the Turks. It was Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally, in their book _In Search of Dracula_, who popularized the identification of Stoker’s Dracula with Vlad III. ---
**Author:** ![Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hilarity_n.suze/32/6223_2.png) [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hilarity_N.Suze)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2020, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/38 "2020-05-30T22:10:08Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#): > > I’m a big fan of _The Saint_ series of books by Leslie Charteris. No screen version has ever got it entirely right. But the worst offender is the Roger Moore TV series. It has so completely missed the whole point of the character that its painful to watch. It has been a long time since I read a Charteris book. I’ve got one on hold at the library, for about six months now and currently it looks like I never will get it–but meanwhile I have been watching Roger Moore as TS and enjoying it. Except…he’s this big criminal. The only thing he does in the series is creatively elude the cops while doing their job for them, and of course the women. So while it doesn’t seem like the book, I have no problems with this one, it’s like a whole different character. ---
**Author:** ![Anglachel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Anglachel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anglachel)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2020, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/39 "2020-05-31T15:02:03Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > He matches what I read in the books. > > And Faramir wasnt around the Ring as long as Boromir. I haven’t seen the movie version in years, but (IIRC) at the very least he took them into custody and began marching them to Minas Tirith. The book was very different. In the movie I think Faramir says that “He’ll bring his father a mighty gift”. In the book, upon his return to Minas Tirith, Denethor used a similar line to indicate that’s what Faramir should’ve done. So similar dialog employed by Jackson was used in both mediums but in very different circumstances spoken by different characters. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2020, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677/40 "2020-05-31T16:08:46Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > He matches what I read in the books. No, Faramir was the first character I thought of in connection of this thread (maybe because I had just happened to be [reading about him](https://www.tor.com/2020/05/14/exploring-the-people-of-middle-earth-faramir-captain-of-gondor/)). Some fans [defend](http://www.theonering.com/reading-room/critical-viewpoints/faramir-is-evil-like-gandalf-is-green-in-defense-of-peter-jackson-apos-s-faramir) the changes that Peter Jackson made to Faramir’s character, some fans attack them, some fans hate them; but it’s pretty clear that there _were_ changes. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-of-a-literary-character-by-means-of-movie-or-television/854677.md?page=3)