Is the Movie Always Better than the Book?

By Nicholas Stix

@NJ Transit Commuter

“My only worry is that I find when I really enjoy a novel, the film version never lives up to my expectations, no matter how good a move it is.”

N.S.: The “really enjoy” part is impossible for me to rebut, NJ, but I know of stories whose film adaptations were superior to the written word: e.g., Shane, High Noon, Big Fish and High and Low.

The novel Shane was the stuff of natural fascism: Shane was a strapping 6-feet tall, with dark hair, and was superhuman. Conversely, in the year of casting against type (1953; see also Montgomery Clift and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity), the Super Chief, George Stevens, cast blond, slender, 5’5” Alan Ladd as Shane, who in this incarnation was vulnerable. In the end, Shane, though victorious, has been wounded by a back-shooter, and his fate is ambiguous. He refuses to go back to the Starretts’ house for Marian to treat him, because it’s time to go, and Shane is one end of an unconsummated love triangle with Marian and Joe Starrett. And so, we get one of the most famous (and oft parodied) endings of all time, as little Joey Starrett implores him to come back.

The ending is so towering because Laddie plumbed previously untapped levels of talent, Vic Young’s music gave him a proper send-off, and little Brandon de Wilde was sensational as Little Joey.

And, of course, the Super Chief was at the peak of his powers.

In Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952), Carl Foreman was working off John W. Cunningham’s short story, “The Tin Star,” which was no great shakes. However, Foreman had seen a brilliant, 20th Century Fox Henry King Western, The Gunfighter (1950), which had made the ticking clock a central motif. Time was running out on the eponymous protagonist, Jimmie Ringo (in a laughable attempt at uglying up the prettiest face in Hollywood, Greg Peck).

But in addition to a great comeback performance by Coop, and a brilliant script by Foreman, High Noon has an amazing theme song and score by Tiomkin, with lyrics by Ned Washington (which google's ai butchered, turning “or his’n” into “or his”), which set up the whole story in the first five minutes, thereby transcending pictures’ fundamental words/images conflict.

Big Fish (2003), directed by the notoriously inarticulate Tim Burton, was based on the eponymous short story by Daniel Wallace, and scripted by John August. (Yeah, it was sold as a novel, but with puffed-up typeface and tiny pages.)

The story was so revoltingly bizarre—with a character missing fingers, because a vicious dog periodically bites them off—that my chief of research, who was reading aloud to me, only got to around page 50, before we both quit on it.

The picture is heartbreakingly beautiful, if uneven. The unevenness is due to the Finney Factor.

Albert Finney plays the protagonist, traveling salesman Edward Bloom, as a dying, old man, and he’s a grand, old ham. However, Ewan McGregor, who plays him as a young man, is very good, but not good enough. He’s just not large enough.

Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange play the love of Edward Bloom’s life, Sandra, as a coed, when he courts her, and as his middle-aged wife, Sandra.

In spite of my as yet unrequited love for Jessica Lange, the role that breaks your heart is that of Jenny, played by Hailey Anne Nelson, as an eight-year-old, and by Tim Burton’s lady love, Helena Bonham Carter, as a young and then middle-aged woman. (Carter also plays a witch.) Jenny falls in love with Edward when she’s eight, and he promises to wait for and return for her when she’s grown, but he’s late.

I see I’m not doing this masterpiece any sort of justice.

The story of Edward Bloom is a story of fantastical whimsy, a picaresque of a man who wanders from one adventure to another, of a magical town of barefoot folk hidden from the world, whose shoes have all been tossed onto telephone lines by a beautiful little girl, of underwater detours, of a circus impresario who is now man, now beast.

I had hoped that Big Fish would get Finney his Oscar, but it did poorly at the box office, and got only one nomination, for frequent Burton collaborator Danny Elfman’s moving score.

I haven’t seen it in a while, and must see it again.

(One inaccuracy is that Billy Crudup plays the protagonist’s literal-minded, ap reporter son. If only ap operatives were literal-minded! I’m looking at you, Tom Hays!)

Big Fish is a personal though hardly auto-biographical work for Burton, in which he shows how a story-teller starts out with reality, and embellishes on it.

Big Fish (2003), directed by the notoriously inarticulate Tim Burton, was based on the eponymous short story by Daniel Wallace, and scripted by John August. (Yeah, it was sold as a novel, but with puffed-up typeface and tiny pages.)

The story was so revoltingly bizarre—with a character missing fingers, because a vicious dog periodically bites them off—that my chief of research, who was reading aloud to me, only got to around page 50, before we both quit on it.

The picture is heartbreakingly beautiful, if uneven. The unevenness is due to the Finney Factor. Albert Finney plays the protagonist, traveling salesman Edward Bloom, as a dying, old man, and he’s a grand, old ham. However, Ewan McGregor, who plays him as a young man, is very good, but not good enough. He’s just not large enough. Alison Lohman and Jessica Lange play the love of Edward Bloom’s life, Sandra, as a coed, when he courts her, and as his middle-aged wife. In spite of my as yet unrequited love for Jessica Lange, the role that breaks your heart is that of Jenny, played by Hailey Anne Nelson, as an eight-year-old, and by Tim Burton’s lady love, Helena Bonham Carter, as a young and then middle-aged woman. (Carter also plays a witch.) Jenny falls in love with Edward when she’s eight, and he promises to wait for and return for her when she’s grown, but he’s late.

I see I’m not doing this masterpiece any sort of justice. The story of Edward Bloom is a story of fantastical whimsy, of a magical town of barefoot folk hidden from the world, whose shoes have all been tossed onto telephone lines by a beautiful little girl, of underwater adventures, of a circus impresario who is now man, now beast.

I had hoped that Big Fish would get Finney his Oscar, but it did poorly at the box office, and got only one nomination, for frequent Burton collaborator Danny Elfman’s moving score.

I haven’t seen it in a while, and must see it again.

(One inaccuracy is that Billy Crudup plays the protagonist’s literal-minded, ap reporter son. If only ap operatives were literal-minded! I’m looking at you, Tom Hays!)

Big Fish is a personal though hardly auto-biographical work for Burton, in which he shows how a story-teller starts out with reality, and embellishes on it.

One last example. Salvatore Lombino’s procedural, King’s Ransom (1959).

It’s a very good novel about a kidnapping, engineered by a self-styled criminal mastermind, in which everything goes wrong, which was published during the heyday of the heist movie.

Somebody passed along the novel by Lombino, better known as both Ed McBain and Evan Hunter, to Kurosawa, who identified with the protagonist, a man rich and powerful, but who started out at the bottom of the corporate ladder in the shoe business, and had to learn every job in the factory on the way up, just as Kurosawa, who had studied art, and then apprenticed as an assistant director, had to learn every job (save composer) involved in making a movie.

Kurosawa and his collaborators took Lombino’s story of corporate chicanery and kidnapping, and crossed it with a Dr. Mabuse story. Kurosawa’s version (and vision), High and Low (1963), is a story of class hatred, and the role of intelligence and team work in society, and how they can outwit a diabolical criminal. Kurosawa also does amazing things with motion and spacing in consecutive scenes set in a jazz club and outside in a seemingly enclosed space of heroin addicts. It’s around #50 on my list of the 100 Greatest Pictures.

Spite Lee has announced that he plans to destroy High and Low this year in an unmake.