Assassination of a literary character by means of movie or television

[Anglachel]

@Thudlow_Boink

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). Some fans defend 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.

I would’ve preferred that Jackson delete (or replace) him completely (like Glorfindel for instance). He’s a minor character compared to many, but his arc was the most satisfying for me.

[Czarcasm]

Would you say total elimination was pretty bad treatment for a main character of a book? I am a big fan of Preston and Child’s “Pendergast” series of books, the first of which was Relic. Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast was an incredible character, and when I heard that the first book was going to be a movie, I looked forward to it. In 1997 the move The Relic hits the big screen, and I am watching waiting for Agent Pendergast to appear. And I wait. And I wait. Nothing. They didn’t rename him. The didn’t integrate his traits into the other characters, because all the other characters were pretty much the same as they were in the book. It was if someone made a Superman movie and just removed Superman without any explanation whatsoever.

[Colibri]

Speaking or LOTR, Gimli was largely reduced to comic relief in the movies, even being subjected to dwarf-tossing.

[markn_1]

I’m not sure there is a single character in LOTR that wasn’t changed for the worse in the movies. Faramir obviously, and Denethor, and Theoden (whose malign influence by Wormtongue was changed from cleverly crafted bad advice to some kind of magic spell that Gandalf could remove with his staff), Gimli (who as mentioned changed from perhaps the grimmest of the Nine walkers to comic relief, I guess because short people are funny), Gandalf (telling Frodo to “run” when Black Riders are at hand???), Frodo himself (no way in hell he would have turned against Sam like he did in the movie), Saruman (whose argument with Gandalf prior to the latter’s capture was changed from a revealing exchange of words to a stupid magic duel), etc etc.

[gdave]

Speaking LotR, and Faramir, I thought Boromir got a bit shafted in his death scene in the movie.

In the book, he got the full Song of Roland ending - he blew the Horn of Gondor so hard that it shattered, and was heard hundreds of leagues away, and died of dozens of wounds, surrounded by piles of the orcs he killed. He died a truly epic death, in every meaning of the word.

In the movie, he killed a couple of orcs, took a couple of arrows, and then got finished off by a single arrow from an orc boss. He blew the horn loudly enough to alert Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, but not really any more loudly than you’d expect a real horn to sound. He got the partial redemption in dying to protect the halflings, but nothing like the epic death he got in the book.

I understand why the movie took the approach it did - what comes across as a literary epic in the book would probably look like a scene from a Zack Snyder movie in live action. Peter Jackson’s LotR generally took a more grounded approach to the material. But if we get Mumakil surfing from Legolas, we could definitely could have gotten something grim-n-gritty for Boromir’s death.

[Senegoid]

@Colibri

In both the book and the 1951 film, Alice is brave, adventurous, and challenges authority, standing up to the Red Queen even as she threatens to execute her.

Nitpick: It was the Queen of Hearts who threatened to execute Alice (and just about everyone else), twice: At the croquet game and again (IIRC) at the trial. I don’t recall that the Red Queen ever threatened to execute anyone.

The animated movie may not have assassinated Alice’s character all that much, but it sure made a mishmash of the story, first by interweaving the Wonderland and Looking Glass scenes, and then by mangling it all nearly beyond recognition.

@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.

Moreover, and with slightly more historical accuracy, is Thailand’s displeasure with the various versions of Anna And The King and The King And I which have been banned in Thailand as being ahistorical and insulting to King Mongkut. The original book on which these were based was Anna And The King Of Siam by Margaret Landon, 1944, semi-fictionalized after the memoirs of Anna Leonowens.

@markn_1

I’m not sure there is a single character in LOTR that wasn’t changed for the worse in the movies.

I think Samwise got a good treatment. I don’t recall how accurate all the details were, but he was presented as perhaps the most heroic and loyal character in the books, and likewise in the movies.

Merry and Pippin were portrayed as goofballs, but that was pretty much how they were in the books too. Doofuses with nothing better to do in life than poach a neighboring farmer’s mushrooms, but when the shit started getting real, they were able to rise to the occasion.

@gdave

Speaking LotR, and Faramir, I thought Boromir got a bit shafted in his death scene in the movie.

iswydt.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Senegoid

The animated movie may not have assassinated Alice’s character all that much, but it sure made a mishmash of the story, first by interweaving the Wonderland and Looking Glass scenes, and then by mangling it all nearly beyond recognition.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the animated movie, so I don’t know how fair this criticism is. But the story isn’t really the point of Alice. Complaining that the movie made a mishmash of the story is kind of like complaining that Spamalot made a mishmash of the story of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

[Senegoid]

Total character assassination beyond recognition but for the character having the same name:

Doctor Dolittle (1998) with Eddy Murphy as the doctor. Beyond having a doctor coincidentally named Dolittle who coincidentally talks with animals (and a cameo appearance of the pushmi-pullyu) this movie had not hint of a trace of a semblance to Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle. Hey, there are other literary characters who talk to animals too. (See: Hiawatha. This character isn’t that either.)

I mean, you could transpose the story line from Victorian Puddleby-on-the-Marsh to contemporary San Francisco, and you could even have a modern-day black Doctor, and conceivably still have a recognizable Doctor Dolittle character and a movie with a recognizable Doctor Dolittle back-story and overall story line. This movie wasn’t that.

Entirely separately from that, you could also have made a good movie, even if it wasn’t remotely Doctor Dolittle.

But no, this movie stank. The dialog with the animals consisted of little more than a compendium of scatological toilet jokes. Apparently, reviews were mixed and the movie was a box office success :smack: but Rotten Tomatoes didn’t exactly gush over it. (42% Tomatometer, 34% Audience reviews.)

It wasn’t just me who thought so badly. When TIME Magazine did their annual issue with the lists of 10 best (and 1 worst) of all kinds of things, guess what their pick for worst movie of the year was? Yep, Doctor Dolittle.

Okay, people are entitled to their opinions, and apparently some people liked it. I sure can’t imagine that. De gustibus non est disputandum. But Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle it warn’t!

[Jonathan_Chance]

@Thudlow_Boink

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). Some fans defend 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.

Yes, in the narrative, Faramir’s character stands for the rest of the world of men. He shows that men can still be worthy of being saved where almost every other senior character of the race of men - Boromir, Denethor, Theoden - were all corrupted either by the power of the Ring or it’s associated magics (Saruman’s influence after he falls to Sauron). Aragorn is one of the Dunadain and the blood of Numenor takes him out of the running for being that narrative instrument. He’s filling another role.

Without Faramir’s ability to resist we would have no indication that mankind deserved to survive the Ring and prosper. The elves were bugging out, the dwarves didn’t really give a damn, the hobbits were just fucking oblivious.

[Colibri]

@Senegoid

Nitpick: It was the Queen of Hearts who threatened to execute Alice (and just about everyone else),

Right. I just had a brain fart when I wrote the name.

The animated movie may not have assassinated Alice’s character all that much, but it sure made a mishmash of the story, first by interweaving the Wonderland and Looking Glass scenes, and then by mangling it all nearly beyond recognition.

That’s not true at all. The 1951 movie is almost entirely based on Wonderland. It follows the plot (such as it is) fairly closely, although it leaves out a lot. The main elements it incorporates from Looking Glass are Tweedledum/Tweedledee/The Walrus and the Carpenter, the talking flowers, and looking glass insects, which are not key plot elements in either book but can go anywhere. (Remind me if there are others.)

In contrast, the 1933 live action film is a complete mish-mash, including the King and Queen of Hearts, the Red and White Queen, the White Knight, and a complete hodgepodge of characters from both books. The 2010 film is even worse, combining the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts into one composite character, and making the Jabberwocky, from a poem in Looking Glass, the major threat. It really is an abomination in every respect, which is a shame because I like Burton’s vision of a lot of the individual elements.

The 1951 film is actually one of the most faithful US adaptations of Wonderland; most are much worse. Its main fault is in making everything cutsified in the Disney manner, rather than whimsical and clever as in Carroll.

@Thudlow_Boink

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the animated movie, so I don’t know how fair this criticism is. But the story isn’t really the point of Alice. Complaining that the movie made a mishmash of the story is kind of like complaining that Spamalot made a mishmash of the story of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Right. The narrative thread in both works is basically just an excuse for Carroll to introduce amusing characters, make mathematical and linguistic jokes, and have fun with illogical logic. Most of the episodes don’t refer much to others or have a lot to do with the plot per se. It doesn’t matter if you shuffle their order a bit or exchange them between tales. Looking Glass is a little more coherent since Alice is a pawn in a chess game, but a number of characters don’t have anything to do with the plot.

[mbh]

In the movie Zulu, Private Hook is portrayed as a drunkard, a goldbrick, and a barracks-room lawyer, who enlisted in the army to avoid debtor’s prison. He redeems himself with battlefield heroics.

In the real world,

from Henry Hook (VC) - Wikipedia
In the film Zulu, Hook is depicted as an insubordinate malingerer placed under arrest in the hospital, only to come good during the battle. However, Saul David writes in his book, Zulu: The Heroism and Tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879,[4] that he was there as the hospital cook, subsequently as part of a small guard detail assigned to protect the patients. Saul David continues that far from the miscreant portrayed, Hook was actually a teetotaler, Methodist preacher and model soldier.

Further to this, he had been awarded Good Conduct pay shortly before the battle[citation needed]. His elderly daughters were so offended at the way their father had been depicted in the film that they walked out of the premiere.

[CalMeacham]

Arguably the most maligned literary character is Uncle Tom from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

from Wikipedia:

Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.[1] The character was seen by many readers as ground-breaking humanistic portrayal of an African-American slave, one who uses non-resistance and gives his life to protect others who have escaped from slavery.

…

At the time of the novel’s initial publication in 1851, Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe’s melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for white audiences by portraying Tom as a Jesus-like figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because he refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who had escaped from slavery.

However

However, the character also came to be seen – especially based on his portrayal in pro-slavery dramatizations – as inappropriately subservient to white slaveholders. This led to the use of Uncle Tom – often shortened to just Tom – as a derogatory epithet for an exceedingly subservient person, particularly one aware of their own lower-class racial status.

Of course, that was long before TV and the movies, but depiction of Uncle Tom in mocies and evenb cartoons in the first half of the 20th century were not at all what Stowe had in mind.

Nonetheless, although white activists like William lloydGarrison approved of Stowe;'s character, he didn’t sit well with black activists:

James Weldon Johnson, a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, expresses an antipathetic opinion in his autobiography:
For my part, I was never an admirer of Uncle Tom, nor of his type of goodness; but I believe that there were lots of old Negroes as foolishly good as he.

In 1949, American writer James Baldwin rejected the emasculation of the title character “robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex” as the price of spiritual salvation for a dark-skinned man in a fiction whose African-American characters, in Baldwin’s view, were invariably two dimensional stereotypes.[2][7] To Baldwin, Stowe was closer to a pamphleteer than a novelist and her artistic vision was fatally marred by polemics and racism that manifested especially in her handling of the title character.

Uncle Tom

There’s also this, which describes what happened to the character in dramatizations:

MARTIN: What is it that African-Americans hate about this story?

Prof. TURNER: Many African-Americans don’t hate the real story that Stowe wrote. The Uncle Tom character that she gives us is extraordinarily Christian. The climax of the story really comes when Uncle Tom is asked to reveal where two slave women are hiding, who had been sexually abused by their master. And he refuses. Knowing that he is going to be beaten to death, he refused to say where they are. And African-Americans who have read the novel can appreciate what kind of heroism that took for a black man to sign away his life to save two black women.

Unfortunately, the stage depictions don’t include that part of the story. They grossly distort Uncle Tom into an older man than he is in the novel, a man whose English is poor, a man who will do quite the opposite, who will sell out any black man if it will curry the favor of a white employer, a white master, a white mistress. It’s that distorted character that is so objectionable to African-Americans.

MARTIN: How did that happen? It is quite remarkable that this is a book which was intended to, and in many ways succeeded in revealing to people who were not aware or chose not to pay attention to the horrors of slavery, I mean, the unimaginable brutality, the exploitation of women, the physical violence, all of that. It was meant to reveal this, and somehow or other this character, who is meant to be very brave and an example of, you know, Christian forbearance, turned into this - the sell-out. How did that happen?

Prof. TURNER: The producers of the early stage shows didn’t think that they could attract an audience for the Uncle Tom as he was depicted by Stowe. They couldn’t sell tickets to a theatrical production, the climax which would have been this man dying, rather than the revealing the whereabouts of these women.

They could sell tickets, as they had been successful by showing blacks in minstrel depictions, showing them liking to dance more than they liked to work, showing their insensitivity to each other, showing their willingness to tell the master or mistress what he or she wanted to hear. That sold tickets, and so those were the shows that they produced, staged and circulated throughout the world.

Why African-Americans Loathe 'Uncle Tom'

Here’s what happened when they started filming the story:

Evolution of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in film[edit]

Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film production, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Slavery Days, was based largely off of the theatrical productions of the same story common during that time. The movie lived up to racial stereotypes in wide circulation, and scenes were included to showcase slave dances. While African-American extras made appearances, white actors in blackface played the main slave characters. The film storyline strays widely from the plot of the novel, as exemplified by a scene completely independent of the novel depicting a steamboat race. The film assumes the audience is generally familiar with the plot due to the story’s long running popularity.[2]

Universal Studio’s 1927 release of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an epic film and a step forward for Stowe’s work. While certain stigmatic similarities remained, such as scenes depicting outlandish slave dances and Topsy’s flamboyant unruliness, this version was less outmoded in its characterization of slaves. More than earlier adaptations, this film took care to accurately follow the book, and some lines in the movie are direct quotes from the text. Integral characters omitted from previous films were brought to the forefront, such as George Harris. While the overall story remained intact, the writers did take some liberties. For instance, after escaping to freedom, Eliza and Harry are captured by the lawyer Marks and runaway slave tracker Tom Loker and sold down the river as opposed to receiving aid from kindly Quakers. Harry is separated from his mother when purchased by a nameless slave-owner before eventually being reunited with his father. Eliza is sold off to Simon Legree at the same auction as Uncle Tom. This alteration omits the entire subplot involving the Harris family’s escape to Canada, weaving the story into one coherent plot. Another twist in the storyline occurs when Union soldiers on the march through the south liberate hundreds of slaves along the way, including the residents of Legree’s plantation. The director moved the story forward historically to capitalize on the public’s patriotic sympathies.

Socially, this film was more progressive than previous versions. Fewer characters were portrayed in blackface (Topsy is an outstanding exception) and less of an emphasis was put on exotic slave customs. Still, the majority of the screen time is dedicated to the white actors. African American actor James B. Lowe played the character Uncle Tom, but was on screen for less than 9 minutes and speaks less than a dozen lines.[12]

Film adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin

[solost]

Does it have to be character assassination of a fictional character? I thought of the movie Amadeus, in which the composer Salieri was depicted as a bitter rival of Mozart who was hugely jealous of and enraged by Mozart’s superior talent. He continually plots against Mozart and vows to destroy him.

In reality, though they may have had minor professional rivalries, they were generally friendly colleagues who supported each other.

[TonySinclair]

@solost

Does it have to be character assassination of a fictional character?

If not, then Richard III surely has a grievance.

[zamboniracer]

@TonySinclair

If not, then Richard III surely has a grievance.

I understand that Immanuel Kant objected to being referred to as a “pissant” by a certain British comedy team too.

[Czarcasm]

@solost

Does it have to be character assassination of a fictional character?

I prefer that it be limited to fictional literary characters or, at the very most, highly fictionalized characters loosely based on a real person.

[TonySinclair]

Not really an assassination, but my first thought when I watched the Jack Ryan miniseries on Amazon was that they could have saved themselves some money by simply renaming the character, because no jury in the world would convict them of stealing any character or plot points from Tom Clancy.

[CalMeacham]

@solost

Does it have to be character assassination of a fictional character? I thought of the movie Amadeus, in which the composer Salieri was depicted as a bitter rival of Mozart who was hugely jealous of and enraged by Mozart’s superior talent. He continually plots against Mozart and vows to destroy him.

In reality, though they may have had minor professional rivalries, they were generally friendly colleagues who supported each other.

Boy, you could say the same about a lot of historical characters in popular plays.

Peter Shaffer more than once used historical characters to depict the RElationship Between God and Man, and freely played with historical facts. So Amadeus isn’t about the historical situation between Salieri and Mozart – it’s about God and Man (why do you think he titled it “Amadeus” = “God Loves” and not “Mozart”, or, better yet, “Salieri”?)

The Royal Hunt of the Sun isn’t about Pizzaro and Atahuallpa – it’s about God and Man. Don’t look to it for historical accuracy.

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is about McCarthyism, not really about the Salem Witch Trials. Don’t get your history about Salem from it.

Even the musical 1776 plays pretty fast and loose with historical facts. I love it, but its depiction of John Dickinson and James Wilson is pretty far off the mark. I’d love for Franklin to have been the witty, adage-spouting character he is in the play, but Franklin was apparently mostly silent in Congress. And even Secretary Charles Thomson is given short shrift by the script. That barely scratches the surface of the topic.

[furryman]

I feel that the movie versions of Alice and James Bond are totally different types of characters from the books. YMMV whether or not one is better than the other. IMHO both the book and the movie characters and portrayals have their strong points.

[kewell_duud]

Since we already have a historical figure in Vlad III, a literal character assassination of a real person in fiction would be George Hearst in the “Deadwood” series. Hearst in the series is a psychopathic, murderous a**hole who would do anything to get his hands on the gold mines. The real George Hearst was a respected businessmann and philanthropist who was generally liked by his workers, because he treated them well and was regarded as a good person. The heinous crimes he commits in the series are pure fiction. I’m a big fan of the show, and the villain character works really well, but given the discrepancy between the character and the real man I wonder why they didn’t just give him another name. This depiction really more than borders on slander.