In the novel, Rose goes back to her upper class life, and Charlie to his lower. She is quite embarrassed to have been involved with Mr. Allnut.
Oooh. I had completely forgotten that part.
However, in this case, it was an improvement as McGuire’s ending (hell, the last 1/4? 1/3d? of the book) is gibberish.
Happy ending or not, at least the musical had a coherent story and ending.
(IMO, of course)
There’s a BAEN Books edition (trade paperback sized) where Baen (or maybe Pournelle?) combines the two endings.
[spoiler]
She’s probably going to die, but there’s a glimmer of hope she’ll survive. Uncle Tom still rants at the parents. Clark starts to become human.
It’s remarkably satisfying—the original is a hair too gloomy, the revised happy version is icky-sweet. The combined version is the right downer note without being completely bleak)[/spoiler]
Yeah, that seems to be a Maguire hallmark. His need to end a book with as much ambiguity as possible makes things very hard to understand. It’s present throughout his Oz cycle, at least.
A) I would need a cite for that considering I’ve never seen anyone else write that.
B) Dudley Nichols refused* his for 1935, three years before Shaw won.
*He would ultimately accept it many years later.
In the movie, the Shire pretty much sleeps thru the war. I’ll bet most Hobbits don’t know anything happened, other than that 4 guys disappeared for a while.
In the book, after Saruman the wizard is vanquished, he rounds up a squad of big men (regular humans) and takes over the Shire, pretty much just to be an asshole. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippen come back and organize a militia to fight off the invaders. Saruman is eventually killed by Wormtongue, who is himself shot by some Hobbit archers.
Army of Darkness had an original ending where Ash gets lost in time a bit and ends up in a dystopian future which was changed to having him end up back at S-Mart in his original time.
I found the book at the library once. It’s quite different. The Mob is protecting Mayor Vaugn, and starts to threaten Chief Brody when he starts looking into the mayor’s business dealings.
When Hooper started having an affair with Brody’s wife (yes, really) I decided to skip to the end. After eating Hooper, the shark just kinda leaves. Like maybe he was full, or he decided to have pity on Brody or something.
Really, the movie is better by many orders of magnitude.
Yeah, the ending of the book wasn’t so much sad as confused. By the time it ended I couldn’t care less about the characters because I didn’t even understand what was going on by that point. The play at least made the story make sense. It could have been happy or sad, but it would have been an improvement.
And if I remember correctly the quite poor sequel follows on from the US ending.
The shark doesn’t “leave.” Quint kills it, but since Quint is tangled up in the line connected to the harpoon, he gets dragged to the bottom by the sinking, dead shark, and drowns. Brody is the only survivor.
Hooper in the book is a studly blond WASP, nothing at all like Richard Dreyfuss.
As you say, this is one case in which the movie was better than the book in almost every way.
Let me ask you two Chaney experts a silly question:
Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen
Doin’ the werewolves of London
I saw Lon Chaney Junior walking with the Queen, uh
Is he talking about seeing both Junior AND Senior?
Huh? according to wiki *"Rose and Allnutt agree that when they reach the coast they will ask the Consul to marry them. The story ends with the narrator’s comment that “Whether or not they lived happily ever after is not easily decided.”
*
Most of the book was gibberish & a travesty, for the life of me, I cant see why it’s so popular.
AFAIK, the elder Chaney never played a wolfman or werewolf.
In the Universal films, Henry Hull first played a werewolf in 1935. Hull didn’t want to sit still for the full makeup that makeup diva Jack Pierce came up with (he’d used something very much like it in 1932’s island of Lost Souls on Bela Lugosi’s Speaker of the Law), so they had to settle for an abbreviated version.
They did a reboot, essentially, in 1941, I which Lon Chaney Jr. played the titular Wolfman*, in full wolfman makeup. Screenwriter Curt Siodmak wanted it left up in the air as to whether he really WAS changing into a wolfman, with the makeup only visible near the end when you had a Point-of-View shot of him seeing himself reflected in a pool of water as The Wolfman. But the powers That Be decided that, yep, he really was changing into a real Wolfman, and cinematic history was born**. Chaney Jr. went on to play the beast in four more films for Universal, IIRC.
- Chaney’s character was an Optical Engineer! In the original script he was brought to England to install a telescope for Claude Rains’ character, but they rewrote the script to make him Rains’ son. Why an Optical Engineer? I wrote a column about it for Optics and Photonics News entitled “I was a Teen Age Optical Engineer”.
** And, although it wasn’t the right artistic decision, it certainly was the right one financially. The Wolfman was a popular character, as the later four appearances make clear. Do you remember The She-Wolf of London? The Bride of the Gorilla? Curucu, Beast of the Amazon? They’re films in which they played the “Is s/he or isn’t s/he a monster?” game , and in which the answer is “No”. Nobody remembers them. The last two were scripted by Siodmak himself. She Wolf was a Universal film from 1948 that starred June Lockhart. June Lockhart! Timmy’s mom! Maureen Robinson from Lost in Space! Seeing her in female Wolfwoman makeup would’ve been worth it. Alas, we didn’t even get it as a fantasy sequence, or as a POV look in a pool. The only reason I even know about this flick is that they included it in the Universal Wolfman Legacy collection to round out the pack.
In the book, as the shark is eating Hooper, Brody shoots his gun at the shark and (accidently) hits Hooper in the throat! :eek:
Well, to be honest, the whole “escaping the monsters only to have them show up grinning evilly in the last scene”, of which this is a subset, is a horror movie trope that needs to die. It’s just jerking the audience around for cheap effects. I’d be super annoyed if I watched the movie and saw the hallucination ending. Then again, I’d be super annoyed if I had to watch any part of that movie for any reason, so maybe I’m not the right person to ask.
Another example: Plague Dogs, a book about escaped lab-experiment dogs written by the author of Watership Down. Spoilers ahoy.
In the book, the dogs–hunted by all Britain after tabloid stories suggest (incorrectly) that they’re carrying some new super-mutant plague–run to the water and swim out to sea, their strength failing. Then, in the last chapter, the author happens to be out yachting about, pulls the dogs onto his boat, dries them off, and saves their lives, turning them into celebrity mascots for the animal welfare movement.
There’s a great animated movie adapted from the book. It leaves off that last chapter, much to the story’s improvement.
I always thought that *Brazil *did have a happy ending.
Escaping into your own mind is about the best you can expect in that world.