Ever see the Bill Murray movie Quick Change? It’s hilarious. We tracked down the book. It sucks donkey. If I ever meet the screenwriter, I want to shake his hand for taking that enormous pile of horse dung that was the book and turning it into one of my favorite movies.
Oh, and I’ll second Fried Green Tomatoes, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Alastair Sim.
Oh, all right. And Gone with the Wind. 
I thought the film version of American Psycho was much better than the book, it cut out a lot of fat. The Virgin Suicides was also by the book.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And John Huston’s adaptation of the short story “The Dead” by James Joyce proved to me that nothing on the page is unfilmable, if the right person has their hand on the material.
Sense and Sensibility is one of the few films that arguably improves on a great novel.
The original was Jane Austen’s first published novel and the weakest of her major works. Emma Thompson’s adaptation feels as if Austen herself had given the story one more polish.
I try not to. Oh, the pain, the pain…
But yeah, I have high hopes for the LotR film (even if I am a drooling fangirl).
Also must second the vote for To Kill a Mockingbird. Sense and Sensibility was a great movie, too, though I haven’t actually gotten around to reading the book so I can’t speak to the quality of the adaptation (though my sister, an Austen fanatic, assures me it’s quite good).
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Branagh’s Henry V is my all-time favorite movie…and I also loved the Loncraine-McKellen Richard III, though I don’t love it quite as much as I did, now that I’ve seen the RSC’s new production of the Henry VI/Richard III cycle, which is absolutely astonishing.
Of course, I’m frequently taken to task by friends for being far too uncritical of any Shakespeare film, but they’re full of crap.
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RealityChuck wrote:
Huston did change the ending, though! In C.S. Forester’s book the Louisa does not succeed in her mission. I can understand him changing it for the movie, though – it would be pretty anticlimactic, after all that buildup, to have the plot fizzle at the end. (Huston also changed Charlie Allnut from a Cockney to a Canadian, I suppose to accommodate Humphrey Bogart’s lack of a Cockney accent.)A lot of Forester’s books take that sort of anti-sentimental turn, which is why I suppose they end up either not filming them, or else re-writing them for movie consumption. In Forester’s books terrible things happen even to his protagonists. When the filmed The Gun they had to completely rewrite it. Even in his Horatio Hornblower novels, in which he let himself be uncharacteristically nice to his characters, the result was too harsh for the filmmakers. They softened events and the characters for the Gregory Peck movie Captain Horatio Hornblower, and they’ve been toning things down for the Hornblower adaptations that they’ve done for the A&E network.
Not that I’m complaining, mind. I love the C.S.Forester adaptations, and I’d like to see more of them. I do feel, though, that thewy’ve been a little sentimentalized for public consumption.
No mention of the #1 truest adaption of all time, “Rosemary’s Baby?” The book was the scene play!
Well, I’ve been enjoying the A&E Hornblower movies. Mmmmm…Ioan Gruffudd… drools
Of course, now I’ve forgotten the other good example I had for this thread. Damme!
(From the less-weighty literature department: I just saw Bridget Jones’ Diary – haven’t read the book, but the movie was really cute.)
Oh, and a couple of things from DRY’s post:
I’m also a big fan of I, Claudius. The BBC Shakespeares I’ve seen have varied vastly in quality, though, and they’re generally very “orthodox” interpretations. I like weird-ass takes on Shakespeare! 
(I will point out, though, that the BBC Richard II is fantastic – the best BBC Shakespeare I’ve seen.)
I think Gone with The Wind is great, of course. Though they had to leave a lot of stuff out (two of Scarlett’s kids, a lot of the storyline involving her two sisters, the courtship of Scarlett’s mom and dad, etc.
Course, if they didn’t, the movie would have been a week long!
By RSC, do you mean the Royal Shakespeare Company, or some such? Who starred in it? Was it modern dress? I’m curious about this.
I’d be interested in your opinions on which BBC productions you liked and didn’t like. I personally have usually found the BBC productions to be superior to all others (Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, Taming of the Shrew, Richards II and III, Henry’s IV through VI.)
Maybe Titus Andronicus wasn’t as good as the recent Titus…
I thought Anthony Minghella did a great job adapting The English Patient. The casting was perfect too.
The short story by Barbara Gowdy, “We So Seldom Look on Love”, was made into a movie, entitled “Kissed”. I was hesitant to see it, for fear it would shame the story, but it is amazing. Molly Parker is a babe, too.
Howard Hawks made a few good adaptions of pretty bad stories. The first was Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Another was Raymond Chandler’s (?) The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Hmmm.
The Big Sleep was a bad story!?!
The Big Sleep was not a bad story. Good book, good movie.
I just re-read “The Short Timers”, after re-watching “Full Metal Jacket”. Although it was condensed, I felt Kubrick definitely captured what Gustav Hasford was going for in the novel.
I do mean the Royal Shakespeare Company – their new (well, kinda new) production of the three Henry VI plays and Richard III. The stars are David Oyelowo as Henry VI and Aidan McArdle as Richard III – but everyone in it is amazing.
Oh, and it’s not really in modern dress, although it’s not in strict period costume either – the clothes are meant to evoke the time period without portraying it exactly. (There are a few photos at the Michigan Residency website.)
I take it that this is a live production, and not one sold on videotapes? I’m always on the lookout for movie productions of Shakespearean English History plays. Regrettably, the BBC versions of the three Henry VI plays, Richard III, and most shockingly, Richard II (an excellent production with Derek Jacobi) haven’t been released in the US.
It is indeed a live production. Still running, in fact.
And what do you mean ‘haven’t been released in the US,’ exactly? They’re available, but in general they’re really hard to find. Some libraries have them – I believe the U-M library carries all of them. (That’s how I saw the BBC Richard II – I didn’t want to write a thesis on it without ever having seen it performed. I agree, it’s fantastic.)
Sorry, Katisha, I meant “released for sale”. If I’m wrong and you know of a place where I can purchase these tapes, I would pay you to tell me about it. Seriously.
Yeah, libraries have them. I’ve seen all the plays I cited earlier at the UCLA media lab.