Faithful film adaptations of books

[CalMeacham]

Day of the Jackal was pretty faithful to Frederick Forsyth’s novel, except for some cutting (I assume to keep the length short enough and the pacing good), which is all to the good. I was very disappointed with the way they changed The ODESSA File a couple of years later (although, in retrospect, it could’ve been far worse).

That’s pretty surprising. I’ve noticed that espionage novels and science fiction/fantasy generally have the most changes between novel and movie – look at the various Jason Bourne movies, or James Bond moviees, or Ludlum’s The Osterman Weekend or MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra. As far as fantastic fiction, the 19th cdentury authors – Wells, Verne, Poe, Haggard, and (by courtesy) Lovecraft get changed the most.

Surprisingly faithful SF/Fantasy:

**The Call of Cthulhu

The Whisperer in Darkness

When Worlds Collide

The Man Who Could Work MIracles

The Thing** (1982 John Carpenter Version with Bill Lancaster script – up until they find the craft near the end)

The Day of the TRiffids (1981 TV version only – The Day of the Triffids (1981 TV series) - Wikipedia )

I think The Man Who Fell to Earth might be pretty true to the original novel, but I confess that I haven’t read the novel.

The TV movie Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders was pretty true to Robert H. van Gulik’s The Haunted Monastery. And I wish they’d done more of the Judge Dee novels.

The Hawksworth productions BBC/WGBH Sherlock Holmes adaptations (starring Jeremy Brett) were extremkely faithful to the times and the stories, and the changes were all to the good, at least until mthe end, when Brett’s illness and the need for more material lead to over-padded scripts with not enough Holmes in them. But the early ones were superb, the best Holmes adaptations I’;ve seen.

[bmasters1]

I thought that the Ramona film w/Joey King was pretty close to Cleary’s stories.

[CalMeacham]

I’ll add that often TV episodes of anthology series can be very faithful. A lot of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, and sometimes the Outer Limits were very faithful to the original short stories.

Although they could be incredibly bad at this, too – look at how Abbott’s classic Flatland became Behold, Eck! on the original Outer Limits.

[CalMeacham]

Of Mice and Men (both versions, I think, though I haven’t seen the more recent one) are faithful to Steinbeck. But then again 1.) It’s really short and 2.) he wrote it with a film in mind, and admitted that he wrote it so that it could be filmed.
You could sday the same about Shaw’s Pygmalion, which he wrote extra scenes for if it were to be filmed, although to this day I don’t understand why the ending of the Wendy Hiller version diverges from Shaw’s (and agrees with My Fair Lady). Evemn though Pygmalion isn’t a book.

[RealityChuck]

Greed (the uncut version). Von Stroheim seemed to have filmed every scene in the book, and then some. It ran eight hours.

[Archergal]

@CalMeacham

Although they could be incredibly bad at this, too – look at how Abbott’s classic Flatland became Behold, Eck! on the original Outer Limits.

I like “Behold Eck”. :eek: I saw it first when the series was originally broadcast in the 60’s, and it blew my little mind.

Maybe “little mind” is the operative term here, though.

Although I agree it was nothing like Flatland, except for the 2D part.

[Annie-Xmas]

Stephen King’s nonfiction work about horror, Danse Macabre has a marvelous writing about how Roman Polanski was a new director when he made Rosemary’s Baby–so new he thought you had to film the novel as it was written, so he made it as true to the book as possible. He went so far as to call author Ira Levin to ask the date of the New Yorker magazine that had the advertisement for the shirt Guy bought (a throw away detail in the novel). Levin admitted he had just tossed that in, thinking any edition of the magazine would have an ad for a nice shirt. But the one for the time frame didn’t.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

The film version of the Civil War novel Cold Mountain is quite good, and stuck to the book pretty closely. In fact, I’d kind of hit a wall while reading the book and wasn’t inclined to go on, but then I saw the movie, and it really opened my eyes. I picked up the book again and it just flew by. Only time that’s ever happened to me.

@Busy_Scissors

I thought the Watchmen film was a very faithful working, which is prob uncommon for graphic novel adaptations. It was the worse for it IMHO, film was quite good but pretty stodgy. Could have done with less reverence for the source material, so sort of the inverse of previous Alan Moore adaptations.

Well, it was a faithful adaptation right up to the ending, which I really didn’t like.

Instead of a telepathic interdimensional beast and just New York being blasted, Dr. Manhattan is thought to have caused the destruction of several cities around the world? And now the U.S. and Soviets are going to team up against him? Ugh.

@CalMeacham

…The Hawksworth productions BBC/WGBH Sherlock Holmes adaptations (starring Jeremy Brett) were extremkely faithful to the times and the stories, and the changes were all to the good, at least until mthe end, when Brett’s illness and the need for more material lead to over-padded scripts with not enough Holmes in them. But the early ones were superb, the best Holmes adaptations I’;ve seen.

Strongly agree. Brett is still, for me, the definitive Holmes.

[astorian]

It’s worth noting that SOMETIMES a movie can be so faithful to a book as to be boring, predictable and a waste of celluloid.

And sometimes a movie adaptation that changes things drastically can end up being very faithful to the spirit of the original novel. The movie version of ***L.A. Confidential ***is not at all faithful to the novel, but James Ellroy loved it and thought it captured the essence of his work perfectly.

[Hampshire]

@NDP

The Road - the only difference I recall is that several of the more horrific scenes in the book were toned down or omitted.

I didn’t like that the movie version created a role for the mother complete with scenes and lines in flashback form. These didn’t exsist in the book.
The book also took care to make the cataclysmic ‘event’ extremely vague. The movie seemed to want to explain it and even show it.

[CalMeacham]

@astorian

It’s worth noting that SOMETIMES a movie can be so faithful to a book as to be boring, predictable and a waste of celluloid.

And sometimes a movie adaptation that changes things drastically can end up being very faithful to the spirit of the original novel. The movie version of ***L.A. Confidential ***is not at all faithful to the novel, but James Ellroy loved it and thought it captured the essence of his work perfectly.

Agreed. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a very different animal than Clarke’s short story The Sentinel, and better suited for film. They are different media, after all.
But when people go to a film adaptation of a work they really liked, and are presented with something vastly different, I think they have a right to be annoyed. And if I bring up Starship Troopers or I, Robot, I’ll be opening old wounds, but in a good cause.
Despite all the protestations about film being its own thing, I don’;t know of anyone who complained that Gone With the Wind or Day of the Jackal was TOO faithful to the book. There’s a time when that is a valid concern.

[CalMeacham]

It was done for television, and is not easy to find, but there’s an adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s short story The Careful Man that is absolutely true to the story. And wonderful.

[astorian]

@CalMeacham

Agreed. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a very different animal than Clarke’s short story The Sentinel, and better suited for film. They are different media, after all.
But when people go to a film adaptation of a work they really liked, and are presented with something vastly different, I think they have a right to be annoyed. And if I bring up Starship Troopers or I, Robot, I’ll be opening old wounds, but in a good cause.

I think ***I, Robot ***could have changed all kinds of things about Asimov’s work and still made for a good movie- even a movie that Asimov’s most devoted fans might have liked.

But when the changes show that the filmmakers either don’t undersand Asimov’s philosophy, don’t care about his philosophy, or actively reject his philosophy, then of COURSE his fans are going to be outraged.

Asimov believed a world of robots could be a much more rational and hence much more moral world. The moviemakers completely upended that premise in favor of a more conventional “We perfect machines are going to kill you imperfect, irrational carbon-based life forms” story.

If that’s the story they wanted to tell, fine- but why bring Asimov’s book into the equation?

Or to use a different example… Michael Crichton’s ***Rising Sun ***was a murder mystery written for one specific purpose: to sound the alarm bells about the threat Japan Inc. posed to the American way of life. The WHOLE message was “Wake up, America- Japan is about to destroy us!” If moviemakers didn’t share that opinion, they shouldn’t have made the film. But what did Hollywood do? They made the movie but chnaged the killer from a Japanese exec to a white guy!

Again, moviemakers can and should make changes- but if they reject the whole premise of a book, why make a movie version at all?

[BrotherCadfael]

The recent The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was extremely faithful to the book, adding only one sequence (river rafting on the ice sheet) which wasn’t in the book, and changing little if anything else. The second movie, not quite so much, and the less said about the third, the better.

[Fuzzy_wuzzy]

@CalMeacham

Of Mice and Men (both versions, I think, though I haven’t seen the more recent one) are faithful to Steinbeck. But then again 1.) It’s really short and 2.) he wrote it with a film in mind, and admitted that he wrote it so that it could be filmed.
You could sday the same about Shaw’s Pygmalion, which he wrote extra scenes for if it were to be filmed, although to this day I don’t understand why the ending of the Wendy Hiller version diverges from Shaw’s (and agrees with My Fair Lady). Evemn though Pygmalion isn’t a book.

Not a book but a Play. Kennth Brannagh’s 4 hour version of Hamlet comes to mind. I dont think he cut any of the original text from the film.

[TommyTutone]

Going back to Stephen King, Pet Sematary was almost a perfect adaption of the book, really the only thing missing is mentioning that the priest at the funeral looked uncannily like Stephen King himself.

[RealityChuck]

@astorian

Asimov believed a world of robots could be a much more rational and hence much more moral world. The moviemakers completely upended that premise in favor of a more conventional “We perfect machines are going to kill you imperfect, irrational carbon-based life forms” story.

If that’s the story they wanted to tell, fine- but why bring Asimov’s book into the equation?

They thought “I, Robot” was a great title, so they had to buy the rights from the Asimov estate to avoid legal issues. They then tacked on a few references to the book.

As to why: no one complained when they did the same thing with Blade Runner.

[TV_time]

The Maltese Falcon

[LaurenIpsum]

@Annie-Xmas

Stephen King’s nonfiction work about horror, Danse Macabre has a marvelous writing about how Roman Polanski was a new director when he made Rosemary’s Baby–so new he thought you had to film the novel as it was written, so he made it as true to the book as possible.

This is what I came here to mention. I read the book after having seen the movie and was amazed at how much was kept exactly the same. For example, pieces of dialog were used almost verbatim throughout the movie. I almost felt like I was reading a copy of the screenplay.

[well_he_s_back]

Although this topic has been done before, it has made me think again about what it means to be a “faithful adaptation”. Using Peter Jackson’s LOTR films as examples - they were faithful in mood, in details (I loved the casting and directing by the way) but changed aspects of main characters so much that it’s hard to say they were faithful. More of a mixed bag.

Shane was a faithful adaptation of the book, I think. I like them both.