There’s a particular nervous feeling that can take a person over when their favorite book is turned into a film. Movie history is liberally littered with film adaptations that didn’t live up to readers’ expectations (mention The Hobbit or The Dark Tower to certain bookworms, and you take your life into your own hands). Here are nine films that assuaged readers’ fears with magnificent adaptations.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
9 In a Lonely Place (1950)
Santana Productions
This 1950 film noir repeatedly makes “Best of” lists across film categories, and that’s because it’s a masterful adaptation of a classic noir novel of the same name, written by Dorothy B. Hughes in 1947. The always inimitable Humphrey Bogart is Dixon Steele, an underemployed screenwriter with a nasty temper, playing opposite Gloria Grahame as his neighbor, Laurel Gray. A new script for Dix coincides with the police suspecting him of murder; and it is against this backdrop that Dix and Laurel fall somewhat uneasily in love. The film was directed by Grahame’s then-husband Nicholas Ray, and the two were in the process of acrimoniously separating at the time, although no one else on set was aware. The film sticks pretty closely to the source material, with the noted exception of the ending, but it captured the spirit of Hughes’ hard-boiled text so well that a reader would be hard-pressed to mind the change.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
8 Death in Venice (1971)
Dear International
Dirk Bogarde is heartbreaking in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella. The story is of a lonely and aging composer dying of heart disease, visiting Venice for his health. His trip unfortunately coincides with an outbreak of cholera, but he finds himself unable to leave the city after becoming transfixed by a beautiful young Polish boy named Tadzio. The main character in the novella is a writer rather than a composer, but the switch allowed for the logical insertion of a sweeping classical score. It’s a quiet, subtle film that leaves you breathless, just like the book.
7 Brideshead Revisited (1981)
ITV Studios
Admittedly, this 1981 production is a television miniseries rather than a movie, but it is a masterclass in how to adapt a novel for the screen. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews lead an all-star, pitch-perfect cast that includes Claire Bloom, Laurence Olivier, and John Gielgud; each character seemingly sprung to life from Evelyn Waugh’s sumptuous 1945 novel. What was originally conceived as a six-part series was eventually expanded into 11, following the tangled relationships between a young Englishman and a wealthy family from the 1920s to the 1940s. From the acting to the period clothing to the locations to the dialogue (director Charles Sturridge estimated that 95% of the dialogue was taken straight from the text), there’s not a single wrong step. Thirty-five years after its release, it was still earning rave reviews, with The Telegraph naming it television’s greatest ever literary adaptation, remarking that it is “utterly faithful to Evelyn Waugh’s novel, yet it’s somehow more than that, too.”
6 The Hour of the Star (1985)
Kino International
Brazilian director Suzama Amaral went out on a limb adapting Clarice Lispector’s 1977 novella The Hour of the Star. It’s an elusive little book that never hits 100 pages, and like all of Lispector’s work, intense and formally challenging. The book examines differences and difficulties between rural and urban Brazil, inevitably focusing on a poor and uneducated young woman, utterly ignored by society, who is still deserving of a story of her own. Although it works beautifully in the book, Amaral dispensed with a narrator, Rodrigo S.M., and focuses solely on Macabéa, a girl hopelessly dreaming of a better life. Lead actress Marcélita Cartaxo deservedly won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 36th Berlin International Film Festival in 1986 for the role.
5 A Room with a View (1985)
Curzon Film Distributors/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
When it comes to British costume dramas adapted from books, it’s impossible not to mention the films of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. Any one of their co-productions could have made this list (perhaps most notably The Remains of the Day, Howard’s End, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Maurice, and Heat and Dust), but there is something undeniably special about A Room with a View, the first of three E.M. Forster adaptations the pair brought to the screen. A mix of up-and-coming young actors (Helena Bonham-Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis, Rupert Graves) and screen veterans (Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Denholm Elliott) along with breathtaking Florentine scenery create a sparkling atmosphere that matches the wit and charm of Forster’s 1908 tale of a young English girl transformed by a trip to Florence, right down to the use of chapter titles to make sure you know what’s coming next.
4 Sátántangó (1994)
Movies Inspired
Not for the faint of heart, Béla Tarr’s black-and-white adaptation of fellow Hungarian László Krasznahorkai’s novel Sátántangó, clocks in at around seven and a half hours. As in the novel, the film’s 12 parts move back and forth chronologically in the form of a tango, but whereas the novel moves along at a fair clip with long paragraphs and no line breaks, Tarr’s signature long shots (think eight minutes of cows, just cows) give the viewer the feeling of living the book in real time. The postmodernist plot focuses on a tiny village in the aftermath of their collective farm’s collapse, the monotony broken only by the expected return of two former co-workers. Even though there was an initial screenplay, the film is largely improvised, with Tarr commenting, “We have a story, but I think the story is only a little bit of the whole movie.” And yet, every single scene in the book appears in the film, with a voice-over narrator often quoting directly from the text.
3 Trainspotting (1996)
PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
It was a pop culture phenomenon in every way: Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel took on a group of Edinburgh heroin users in the ’80s and rotated narrators in what was essentially a group of short stories about the same people. It was violent, crude, and graphic, but also hilarious, thoughtful, and tragic. While it was nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize, the stream-of-consciousness Scots vernacular and unorthodox punctuation put off some readers. Danny Boyle’s 1996 film sensation brought Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, and Begbie to life both for those who’d loved the book and those who’d found it difficult. The energetic soundtrack intersperses music mentioned in the novel with earworm Britpop and electronic dance tracks from the ’90s, and the loving care with which Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner, and Robert Carlyle brought the lovable, yet despicable characters to life solidified their future careers (and included a sequel), along with both the film and the book’s place in history.
2 Kamikaze Girls (2004)
Toho
If you’ve ever seen a girl dressed Gothic Lolita-style (link), then you can thank Novala Takemoto’s 2002 novel Kamikaze Girls, and the 2004 film adaptation (it also got a manga treatment the same year as the film.) It’s not widely known outside the US, but both the novel and the film tell a charming, light-hearted story of a couple of oddballs. Momoko (played by Kyoka Fukada) is an outcast in her rural village, obsessed only with obtaining the Lolita-style clothes that make her stand out even more. Ichigo (Anna Tsuchiya) is a member of a female motorcycle gang. The unlikely pair meet when Momoko tries to unload some of her father’s old bootleg fashion to finance her own wardrobe. It’s a candy-colored dream of a film that goes down easy and ends happily, just like the book.
1 La Moustache (2005)
Pathé
French writer Emmanuel Carrère directed this film adaptation of his own 1986 novel. It starts with the apparently simple story of Marc (Vincent Lindon), and his wife Agnès (Emmanuelle Devos). One day, on a whim, Marc shaves off the mustache he realizes Agnès has never seen him without. When she sees him next, she doesn’t mention it, and later in the evening, neither do a pair of friends they visit for dinner. Marc is increasingly annoyed at what he takes to be a joke at his expense, and angrily wants to know why no one mentioned he shaved off his mustache. The movie shifts into something else entirely as a confused Agnès tells him he has never had a mustache. The world Marc knew begins to slip away along with his grasp on reality, spiraling out of control, hinging on whether or not he indeed had a mustache. Carrère’s novel was that rare thing, a horror novel with no blood or jump scares, just psychological terror, and he accomplished the same with the film version.
