I thought the film adaptation of THE AFRICAN QUEEN was quite faithful to the book, except for the ending, which I think the Hollywood version was even better than the book. The book just kind of dribbles to an end. The movie has a nice cliffhanger with a clever twist.
It’s also the only Oscar Humphrey Bogart ever won, and he was quite out of character - a drunken weakling who grew into a stronger man.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Personally, I feel that the Heinlein estate has perfectly good grounds to sue the makers of the movie ”Starship Goofers”, erm, “Starship Troopers” for defamation of his original book.
The 1959 book is a very good book, by a VERY good author.
The 1997 movie…is not.
“All heroes have grey-blue eyes”–Michael Gilbert
The omission of powered body armor alone was a grievous error. The Iron Man movies have shown it can be done well…
Oh, sorry. In the movie, Mitch discovers that the big thing he can hang on the firm is mail fraud, because they overbilled clients through the U.S. mail. I hardly think a firm of that stature and power is going to be afraid of a little mail fraud charge. In the book, I don’t recall the details, but there was no overbilling and no mail fraud, the big get was totally different. The two version diverged significantly from this point to the ending.
I thought that the point of the “overbilling and mail fraud” charge is that “mail fraud” gets them in trouble with the feds, but the “overbilling” gets them in trouble with the mob - and the combination of the two puts them in deep trouble indeed (I could be wrong - I read the book, but only saw snippets of the film).
Shaw DIDN’T leave it open. He explicitly has Eliza going off with Freddy at the end.
To drive this home, when he published the play, he added a length postscript (as opposed to the lengthy preface he usually provided) telling what happened with Eliza and Freddy afterwards.
He definitely didn’t have her going back to Professor Higgins at the end. It’s impossible to imagine Shaw, being the kind of writer he was, allowing that to happen.
It’s been so long the details are fuzzy but the point is that the movie betrayed its source material. I think they dumbed down the legal technicalities for the audience.
we are not all legal scholars. I think it’s fine when movies simplify a complex point that a novel spends three to thiry pages explaining - just never, ever see a movie about medical products regulation with me.
I have not read Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, but my understanding is that a few named characters and a boat are approximately the sum total of what it has in common with the 1944 movie.
Excellent example.
I agree with your overall point, but I am not a legal scholar and have only a casual grasp of the subject but I understood the book perfectly well.
Now I have to reread the novel.
Not to beat a dead horse further about Bond being white, but Bond mentions being pleased to re-associate with the character Quarrel in the novel Dr.No because Quarrel, who is black, is his entry into lower-class Jamaican “colored” life, which would be otherwise closed to Bond. Also, in Live and Let Die , Bond and Felix Leiter go to Harlem, and the author mentions a couple of nasty looks that they get from the locals. There is also (in the British version of the novel) a lot of unpleasantly racist stuff of what they overhear before they go to the nightclub from a nearby woman and her semi-pimp boyfriend. And Felix Leiter’s advice to Bond on where to hit ‘those people’ - “Shins, groin, stomach, throat - hit them anywhere else and you just break your hand”. Then Bond hits a black criminal on the head with a gun, and it gives a klong as if he hit a door. :rolleyes:
I wanted also to second the mention of The African Queen. The movie ending was quite different from the book ending, and is one of the rare instances where the movie was better than the book. The book ending was very anti-climactic; the movie ending was both romantic and ironic.
My nom for departure from the source is The Hobbit. The book was a cozy adventure, and the movie tried to be an epic. It was a good movie, but…
Regards,
Shodan
Maybe, but 014 wouldn’t be licensed to kill, he would have to be 0014.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox was only marginally similar to the book, but I ended up liking it a lot anyway.
Another Roald Dahl book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, got to be betrayed twice. The first betrayal made for a pretty good movie, thanks in large part to Gene Wilder. The second made an awful movie, thanks in large part to Johnny Depp, but really, who could have done anything with that screenplay?
It’s been a while since I was able to bring up the betrayal which was…
Contact
… so here I go again.
The novel was thematically about one womans search for evidence of God’s existence.
As in the movie, they get the transmissions, she goes on her voyage (6 others are with her in the book, but don’t exist in the movie. No big deal, ya’ gotta cut a LOT with only 2 hours to tell the tale.) She comes back, subjective time on Earth is as shown in the novel, other than a bunch of static on her recording, there is no evidence the voyage even happens.
CUE END OF NOVEL: So there’s a govt inquest, the only evidence is the static, Ellie takes her lumps and, when done, programs her computer to figure out Pi to the n’th degree because her “father” said that’s where the evidence will be.
And she finds it. finis.
Really, the sort of ending one would expect from Sagan, a noted agnostic (if not atheist, but this isn’t the thread to quibble).
CUE END OF MOVIE: Govt inquest. Ellie bombarded by questions from Kitz, doesn’t have answers, finally comes up with a retort worthy of a 7th-grader on a message board “You have to take me on faith”. She walks out to an adoring audience, signs and all, “We believe you”, while Angela Basset reveals the not-so-shocking news that’s there is static on the tape which corresponds to the amount of time Ellie says she spent on the journey. FADE TO BLACK.
THE BETRAYAL: The book was about what it would take for a scientist to believe in a creator of the universe. Ellies father-alien said “we have found evidence of builders, here is how to find that same evidence.” Ellie goes out and finds it, but the book ends prior to her releasing it.
The movie was apparently about what it would take for a congressional enquiry to not charge you with crimes if you concocted some scheme which cost the governments billion$. The “evidence of God” issue… the central theme to the novel… was jettisoned for a cutesie line about “Well, I guess YOU have to take ME on faith, hyuck-hyuck”, with the adoring… and ignorant… masses falling behind Ellie as if she is a modern day Jesus.
So, the ending was changed. The character was changed. The theme, the central message of the novel, was not only ignored, it was, in fact, the opposite of Sagan’s intentions.
So Contact gets my vote here. At least the LOTR movies kept with the anti-industrialism/people are fucking cruel themes of the novels. At least Jaws kept the man vs nature conflict of the novel. At least The Firm kept the “your bosses aren’t looking out for your best intentions” subtext. But Contact? Naw, they f-ed with the central message of the book, made it completely different from Sagan’s intentions, and betrayed him and his work as a scientific-based, religious skeptic.
I agree with you on all counts. Although I thought the film had great effects and acting (especially Jodie Foster, as usual), it was a huge disappointment. Probably a good thing that Saint Carl didn’t live to see it.
The first film was pretty good, but then they got pretty off track and crazy. However, the back story with the White Council vs the Necromancer was excellent.