One of film’s most iconic moments and not in the original at all.

My Top 10:

1. Dr. Strangelove
2. High and Low
3. Harakiri
4. Mary Poppins
5. The Americanization of Emily
6. The Best Man
7. The Night of the Iguana
8. The Chalk Garden
9. Goldfinger
10. My Fair Lady

Note:  There are 20 films on my list.  Only one of the other ten is reviewed below as a WGA nominee (Seven Days in May).  The other nine are all listed towards the bottom of the post.

Consensus Nominees:

1. Becket  (200 pts)
2. Dr. Strangelove  (160 pts)
3. Mary Poppins  (120 pts)
4. My Fair Lady  (80 pts)
5. The Servant  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• Becket
• Dr. Strangelove
• Mary Poppins
• My Fair Lady
• Zorba the Greek

Note:  The only year in the 5 BP Era (1944-2008) in which the five Picture and Adapted Screenplay nominees lined up.  There were some years where four of them matched up and the fifth Picture nominee was eligible (1957, 1966, 1972) but this is the only year where they perfectly matched.

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• Becket
• The Best Man
• The Night of the Iguana
• Seven Days in May

Nominees that are Original:  One Potato Two Potato

Comedy:

• Dr. Strangelove
• Topkapi
• The World of Henry Orient

Nominees that are Original:  Father Goose, The Pink Panther

Musical:

• Mary Poppins
• My Fair Lady
• The Unsinkable Molly Brown

Nominees that are Original:  Kissin’ Cousins, Robin and the 7 Hoods, Roustabout

BAFTA (Best British Screenplay):

• Becket
• Dr. Strangelove

NYFC:

• The Servant

My Top 10

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The Film:

How did this film ever get made?  How did it manage to earn Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay nominations?  At once one of the most critical satires ever made and one of the funniest films ever even conceived, it was the start of a stellar time of critical recognition for Stanley Kubrick (for this and each of his next three films he would earn Oscar nominations).  Yet, think of how daring it was at the time.  It had a British star who had never been nominated for an Oscar (but would for this film) and an American actor who still can’t enough recognition (I just Googled “best actor never nominated for an Oscar” and went through several pages and still never saw Sterling Hayden’s name).  It is widely heralded as one of the greatest films ever made and if somehow, by some bizarre chance, you’re reading this and you have never seen it, you need to stop reading and watch it right now.  Baring that, you can read a much longer review here.  Since this is a year where all five Picture nominees were also nominated for Adapted Screenplay, you’ll also find reviews of the other four nominees as well, but I’ll go ahead and link to it again down below anyway.

The Source:

Two Hours to Doom by Peter Bryant  (1958)

This is a little pulp novel about what would happen if a general managed to subvert the chain of command and send off American bombers to go bomb Russia and help bring about peace (albeit, with the Soviet Union having been destroyed).  It’s a bit of a thriller, with the President trying to stop the bombers and wondering what he will have to do if he fails.  It bounces back and forth between the base where the orders originate, the Pentagon and one of the bombers itself (which is hit by flack and is unable to respond when the recall code is sounded).  At the end, the President is faced with the knowledge that one of the bombers makes it through and then has to quickly decide how things will play out with the Soviets.  It’s a neat little “what-if” story with a mostly happy ending.

note:  The reason the title and author are different than listed in the credits is because that’s how the novel was originally published (and the pseudonym that Peter George used when publishing it).

The Adaptation:

“I started to work on the screenplay with every intention of making the film a serious treatment of the problem of accidental nuclear war.  As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous …  But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was throwing out were the things which were most truthful …  So it occurred to me that I was approaching the project in the wrong way.  The only way to tell the story was as a black comedy, or better, a nightmare comedy, where the things you laugh at most are really the heart of the paradoxical postures that make a nuclear war possible.” (Stanley Kubrick quoted in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips, p 97)

In fact, Kubrick actually keeps fairly true to the concept of the book, jumping back and forth between the three locations and focusing on the same main characters as in the novel (though the hilarious names come from Kubrick and Southern and weren’t in the original).  While very little dialogue comes straight from the book, what is serious in the book is simply played as humor in the film, especially in the Ripper and Turgidson characters.  You can read the book and totally see the movie even though one is serious and the other isn’t.

The ending, of course, is very different.  The bomber does get the bomb off but it ends up doing very little damage and without its commander going down riding the bomb and it certainly doesn’t herald the end of the world.  Oh, and there’s no equivalent character for Dr. Strangelove – he’s pure Kubrick.

The Credits:

Directed and Produced by Stanley Kubrick.  Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern & Peter George.  Based on the book Red Alert by Peter George.

High and Low
(天国と地獄)

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the best films of 1964, even though, technically, it’s a 1963 film that is just now receiving a U.S. release (which is actually much quicker than almost all of Kurosawa’s previous films, a sign of his reputation by this point).  It’s a bit of a change of pace for Kurosawa, a mystery thriller which seems to build up Toshiro Mifune as the lead role but then leaves him out of the majority of the second half of the film when it becomes more of a police procedural.  But it does give us Tatsuya Nakadai in a prominent role.  In fact, with Mifune disappearing and Nakadai ascending in the second half of the film, it’s almost a metaphor for the later Kurosawa career when he would stop working with Mifune but Nakadai would give phenomenal starring performances in Kagemusha and Ran.

The Source:

King’s Ransom: An 87th Precinct Mystery by Ed McBain  (1959)

I used to own this in a pulp mass-market edition that had been my college roommate’s grandmother’s (she used to have an enormous wall of books when we would visit in college and at one point she let me take a bunch).  I read it once and then eventually got rid of it because it just wasn’t very good, a far cry from the fantastic Kurosawa film (which I had already seen by that point – unlike the next film, I had seen most of Kurosawa by the time I was out of college).  It’s a standard police procedural, the story of a kidnapping, except that the kidnappers have kidnapped the wrong child (they wanted the child of a man who runs a shoe company but got his chauffeur’s son instead).  Then, there is the suspense of whether he will pay the ransom, whether the child will be rescued and what will happen with the planned takeover of the company that the man is planning.

The Adaptation:

This is one of those wonderful examples of how to take a pre-existing novel and then use it to tell the story you want to tell.  How, for example, do you take a police procedural from a series of them and make it stand completely on its own?  By only taking the beginning.  Most police procedurals have to establish the new case and King’s Ransom is no exception.  But that’s all that Kurosawa and his co-writers take from the original novel.  The entire 87th Precinct aspect of the novel is dropped – the police characters are created by the screenwriters and nothing about what happens after the initial kidnapping is the same, including the identity of the kidnappers and even what happens to King himself after the kidnapping.  You can read the early parts of the book and everything about it is recognizable but if you were to start after the kidnapping, you’d never realize it was the same story.

The Credits:

Directed by Akira Kurosawa.  Written by Hideo Oguni, Eijiro Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa.
Note:  Credits courtesy of the Criterion DVD.  If the McBain novel is mentioned in the credits, it is not translated by Criterion.

Harakiri
(切腹)

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the five best films of the year.  It is, to my mind, easily the best Samurai film not made by Akira Kurosawa and by far the best film from Masaki Kobayashi.  Since Harakiri wasn’t nominated for any awards (at least ones that I track), I think I saw it the first time when I was watching my way through all the films ever put out on DVD by Criterion.  That’s a great way to make a film checklist but it also meant that I didn’t see it until I was well into my 30’s (based on the apartment I was living in, I saw it between 2007 and 2009) and that’s really putting off a film that’s this great far too long.

The Source:

Ibun rônin ki by Yasuhiko Takiguchi (1957)

I have been unable to track down the original novel, which wouldn’t probably matter, since it doesn’t appear to have ever been translated into English.

The Adaptation:

There is a dissertation listed online titled Film adaptations of written narrative : Kobayashi’s Seppuku and Takiguchi’s Ibun ronin ki.  I wish I could have read it, but it doesn’t appear to be available from any library.  Interestingly enough, the person who wrote it, Andrew Nakatani, seems to have become famous working in manga, which would certainly be appropriate.

The Credits:

Directed by Masaki Kobayashi.  Original Story by Yasuhiko Takiguchi.  Screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto.
Note: I watched this on TCM and that is where the credits translation is from.

Mary Poppins

The Film:

If you think you are too old for this film, that you have somehow outgrown it, then just wait.  You will come back around to it.  When you watch the film, when you let songs like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “Chim Chim Cher-ee” or “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” back into your life, when you see the wonderful art direction and costumes, when you watch the incredible Oscar winning performance from Julie Andrews, you will remember why you loved this film so much when you were younger.  As I said in my review, the most important thing to take out of the film is that Mary isn’t there to raise the children; she’s there to help the parents find what made them become parents in the first place and find a way to connect to their children again.  I wrote that review in 2010, three years before Saving Mr. Banks, but the idea is similar to one presented in that film: she’s not there to save the children, but to save the father.

The Source:

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers  (1934)

“If you want to find Cherry-Tree Lane all you have to do is ask the Policeman at the cross-roads.”  That’s the opening line of the first book of the Mary Poppins series.  If it sounds vaguely familiar in tone that’s because it is the predecessor to such books as The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter.  They all have that particular tone of British fantasy books for children.  It’s a nice book, the story of a stern nanny who comes to stay with the Banks family and watch over the children, at least until the wind changes.  They have a few adventures, but I can’t say that there’s anything specific that liberates Mary to feel like she can leave.  She just leaves and we are left to wait for the next adventure (which will come in the next book, when she returns).  I can’t say there’s much in the book for adult readers without children unless they want to revisit their childhood, but they are nice books for children themselves.  Perhaps I lost a little something by not having read them when I was a child.

The Adaptation:

It’s easy to find references that state that the film is based on parts of the first four Mary Poppins books (all of which had the rights sold to Disney).  But, of the three major parts of the film, two of them (the excursion into the chalk drawing and the tea party on the ceiling) are both taken from the first book.  I haven’t read the other three books, but it doesn’t seem, from descriptions of them, that the third major part (the trip to the bank and the fallout from that) actually occurs in any of the other novels, which seem to focus mostly on Mary and not on the parents.

The most interesting thing about the adaptation from the book to the film is that, like the transformation of Red Alert into Dr. Strangelove, it’s less a question of changing the details than of changing the tone.  Many of Mary’s lines come straight from the book but while in the book she is more stern, here, the subtle intonations that Andrews’ puts into her lines and her expressions make her seem less stern and more caring.

There are a lot of changes of course (the Banks’ actually have four children in the book) and the parents don’t actually bear that much of a resemblance to who we meet in the film.  The film really gives them a lot more personality and if Travers’ goal was for Mary to be there to save Mr. Banks, that actually becomes a lot more apparent in the film than, at least, in the first book.

The Credits:

Directed by  Robert Stevenson.  Music and Lyrics by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman.  Screenplay by Bill Walsh, Don Da Gradi.  Based on the “Mary Poppins” books by P. L. Travers.

The Americanization of Emily

The Film:

I first saw this film sometime in the early 2000’s as I was making my way through the long list of films that earned Tech nominations at the Oscars.  This film was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction, and while both of those are solid, it mainly earned the nominations because by 1964 there were a lot fewer black-and-white films being made and it was harder to fill those categories at the Oscars.  But I discovered a hilarious film, a darkly cynical satire on how people act during war.

There are two keys to this film, but to say that is not to minimize a few other things about the film.  The first of those other things is a solid supporting performance from Melvyn Douglas as the Admiral in charge of everything.  The second is a much stronger supporting performance from James Coburn.  Coburn ends up in 6th place at the Nighthawk Awards, for a performance which sees him constantly roused out of bed with a beautiful woman by his best friend.  Those scenes are some of the best of the film, partially for the way they interact, and partially because of everything else going on in those scenes (namely, the way the women react).  There is also Julie Andrews, in might be her sexiest performance.  She plays a war widow who is working as a driver and manages to fall in love with the last man that she should fall in love with.  But, fall in love she does and it’s believable for a couple of reasons, those two keys to the film that I mentioned above.

The first is the script.  The script is smart and cynical and a great satire.  We are presented with a cowardly man, determined to survive the war, and survive it in style, who constantly bursts in on his best friend in bed with women, who is going to be forced to storm the beach at Normandy whether he likes it or not, even if it means his best friend will have to shoot him and who makes us laugh even when we want to cringe.  Yet, even the script wouldn’t be enough if they hadn’t found the perfect person to play this role.  In a year like 1964, it’s hard to get into the Best Actor race, so James Garner, in what might be his finest film performance, lands in 6th place (just like Coburn and Andrews).  We believe him when he talks, his performance brings the film to life and we want him to succeed in his romance and survive the war even when he says things that make us want to just smack our heads.  Yes, he’s a coward, but he fully admits it, because, in the end, he just wants to live, and really, who can argue with that?  This is not the kind of film I expected when I went to first watch it, but it was definitely the kind of film I needed.

The Source:

The Americanization of Emily: A Novel by William Bradford Huie (1959)

This novel was considerably disappointing.  I had expected a brilliant satire, something on the level of the film, which I had seen more than once and really loved.  I didn’t realize that the novel was actually a sequel of sorts (to The Revolt of Mamie Stover, which was made into a rather unmemorable film), so we’re dealing with a character who has already related some of his experiences during the war.  The narrator is Charlie Madison, a “dog robber”, a man who gets all the supplies for the top brass.  He’s in England in the lead up to D-Day and he flaunts that he can get anything he wants while the native English have been pretty much without since the start of the war.  He starts a relationship with an English driver who eventually, against all reason falls in love with him, even as he is caught up in the events surrounding D-Day.  He is sent to make a film about the events and after his return he marries the driver.  It is a mostly serious novel with some comic aspects, a far cry from the satire the film is (and what I was expecting).

The Adaptation:

As mentioned, the novel, while similar in many events, is vastly different in tone.  There are significant differences that are detailed on Wikipedia, but the main thing is that the film is a satire, one which deals with the very concept of cowardice and its place in life and society while the novel is mostly straight forward and is essentially a wartime romance with some comic aspects.  Most of the best scenes in the film revolve around the satire and therefore aren’t in the original novel.

The Credits:

Directed by Arthur Hiller. Screen Play by Paddy Chayefsky. Based on the Novel by William Bradford Hue.

The Best Man

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as the under-appreciated film of 1964.  That’s actually kind of ironic, because it misses out on a number of Nighthawk nominations, including Adapted Screenplay (obviously).  It has 7 Top 10 finishes at the Nighthawk Awards but only earns 3 nominations.  But it is a great film and should be appreciated as such, with a very smart and witty script.

It was a bit difficult to watch it this time though.  I was watching it in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election at a time when I just didn’t want to think about politics at all.

The Source:

The Best Man: A Play About Politics by Gore Vidal (1960)

I have never been much of a fan of Vidal’s writing but this play is really first-rate.  It understands politics, understands the kind of men who run for president and what they might try to do to each other in the course of a presidential campaign.  It would be easy, looking at when the play was first written and performed, to look at it as an allegory for the 1960 Democratic nomination, with John Kennedy as the younger, more ruthless Joe Cantwell and Adlai Stevenson as the older, more statesman-esque William Russell who lacks the killer edge necessary to win the office with Harry Truman as the hick of a former president trying to find a worthy candidate.  But Vidal writes the characters well enough on their own that we don’t have to take it as an allegory.  As it turns out, while Stevenson and Truman were in fact inspirations for their characters, it was Richard Nixon that the ruthless young Cantwell was based on.  Vidal, in an essay on the play in United States: Essays, 1952-1992, mentions how one columnist who used to hint at Stevenson being gay claimed that Cantwell would never survive being smeared as gay.

Moreover, Vidal is rather prescient in the way he writes about the characters.  In the introduction, he discusses the two key plot points – the things that Cantwell and Russell would discover about each other to try and knock each other out of the race.  In his introduction to the published version of the play, Vidal talks about the idea of a candidate with a nervous breakdown in the past: “A presidential candidate can have many faults, but even a hint of mental instability is disqualifying.”  What a thing to have written years before the 1972 election in which first Ed Muskie, then Thomas Eagleton had their political aspirations crushed for that very reason (in the essay in United States, Vidal, who was writing the essay in 1973, mentions that very thing).

The Adaptation:

The script was adapted by Vidal, so most of the play makes it intact to the screen.  Sometimes things have been changed around (the confrontation between Cantwell and Hockstader, for instance, is moved from Cantwell’s suite to Hockstader’s).  The play has been opened up to allow for a lot more smaller scenes, with some things broken away from the main action and some little side bits added in.  There is also one particular topical change (in the play, the convention takes place in Philadelphia, while in the film, it is Los Angeles, adding to the idea that this is the 1960 campaign, when the Democrats had their convention in LA).  There is also more about Cantwell’s anti-Communism, making him more of a McCarthy-esque character.

The Credits:

Directed by Franklin Schaffner.  Screenplay by Gore Vidal.  The only mention of the source is the title card: “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man”

The Night of the Iguana

The Film:

Sometimes when you think about great actors you can think about them in that sense and not think about what makes them different.  Looking at the big films made from Tennessee Williams plays, you see names like Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, Paul Newman, names that stand out for the kind of acting that they brought to the screen.  They were method (and American) and Williams was almost kind of made for that.  But Richard Burton?  Well, he was method if he was playing an alcoholic.  Yet, somehow Burton dives in an inhabits this role in a way that a lot of actors have struggled with on-screen and he seems more made for Williams than others you would think of who weren’t as successful with Williams on-screen like Montgomery Clift or Warren Beatty.  Perhaps it’s because Reverend Shannon, a man who isn’t allowed to preach anymore because of his railing against god and who is now being accused of sleeping with a teenager is a man on the edge and Richard Burton has always been a man on the edge.  When things start to fall apart for Shannon, you can see Burton sitting back, taking hold and saying to John Huston, let me at it, I’ve got this.

Of course, as good as Burton is, railing against the world, tied in a hammock, screaming to be let free, he’s not alone in this film.  The support comes from three very different actresses who all do magnificent jobs.  The first is Ava Gardner as the recently widowed owner of a hotel who wants to sink her hooks in Shannon.  By this time, Gardner’s famous looks had started to slip and she was forced to actually rely on the acting that she didn’t show a lot of evidence for early in her career and she rarely would have better results.  But she’s got to play off the lonely, odd spinster artists who arrives at the hotel and that Shannon lets stay there.  This is Deborah Kerr and if Kerr is playing a spinster, she’s still Deborah Kerr and she brings everything to the role just like she did in every film and you begin to wonder which way Shannon should turn.  But all of that is dependent on what happens with the teacher in charge of the students on the tour, the woman who is accusing Shannon of statutory rape.  She is played by Grayson Hall and her career was nothing like those of Gardner and Kerr, yet she gives what is perhaps the best performance in the film (certainly far better than the Oscar winning performance from Lila Kedrova and indeed Hall wins the Nighthawk).

Which way should Shannon turn?  Should we believe him?  Should we believe in him?  All of these questions that the audience grapples with as we watch the tour de force acting in front of us.  The best thing about Williams plays when they were turned into films, which happened a lot more than for the other two great American dramatists, O’Neill and Miller, is that the acting is always so amazing to watch.  Williams delighted in writing flawed and distressed characters and it allowed actors to sink their teeth into the roles and this is no exception.  Richard Burton might not have seemed like the proper actor for a Williams adaptation but it turns out he’s just what we needed.

The Source:

The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams  (1961)

It’s pretty easy to see where this play ranks among the work of one of the country’s greatest and most important playwrights.  Signet Classic has already done the work for us.  It’s not in the first tier, because if it was, it would have been printed on its own like Streetcar, Menagerie and Cat.  Instead, it’s in the second tier, published in one book with Sweet Bird of Youth and The Rose Tattoo.

It’s a strong play about a man who is still technically a reverend (he has not been de-frocked but has been locked out of his church) but who is in disarray.  He’s not allowed to preach because of what he was preaching and now he’s reduced to running a tour bus.  To top that off, he’s been accused of sleeping with one of the tourists, who is only sixteen.  With that in the background, he is forced to deal with the woman who runs the hotel where he and the tour are now staying (whose husband has recently died), a strange artist who is traveling with her grandfather and then there is the teacher who is accusing Shannon in the first place.  All of this combines to push Shannon to the absolute edge.

It’s easy to see why actors would love this play.  Shannon is a plum role, as is Maxine, the woman who runs the hotel (who was played by Bette Davis in the original Broadway run).  At the end of the play, you don’t how much has really been resolved with any of the characters but while the action is going on you can get a tour de force.

The Adaptation:

“Tennessee and I had several discussions in Vallarta about the ending. He had written the character Maxine with considerable affection, then, at the end, turned her into a spider woman who devoured her mate. This was done to make his point that animalism and brutality will inevitably prevail over sensitivity and breeding. For this point to make sense, it should have been a tragedy that Maxine kept the Reverend Shannon with her. But Maxine was written too well – she was too real – and in fact to be taken in by Maxine was the best thing that could happen to Shannon. I felt Tennessee had perfunctorily changed Maxine’s character for his own dark purposes, as a means of expressing his own prejudice against women, and I called him on it. I argued for a happy ending.” (An Open Book by John Huston (1980) p 311)

“I accused [Tennessee] of hating women and of twisting her to his own devices and purposes. He said maybe there was that, and agreed my changes were permissible. I wanted his approval, as I have too high a regard for him to have just gone blindly in another direction.”(John Huston, quoted in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute, ed. George Stevens, Jr, p 355) – this quote follows him saying something similar to what he says in An Open Book, referring to her as a “great bloated spider”.

Those are not the only changes that Huston made from the original play.  Indeed, we’re a good half hour into the film before we even reach the text of the play.  Since he didn’t need to be constricted by the one setting of the play, Huston expanded and showed us things in the film that were only discussed in the original play.  It allows us to get a much better take on Reverend Shannon that we are able to see what happens along the journey to the hotel instead of him just arriving at the hotel.

The other main difference is that in the play there are Nazis because this is Mexico in 1940.  In the film, they update the time to the present and thus get rid of the Nazi characters and drop any references to them.

The Credits:

Directed by John Huston.  From the Play by Tennessee Williams.  Screenplay by Anthony Veiller and John Huston.

The Chalk Garden

The Film:

This was another film that I came to because of a couple of things.  The first was that there was a quote in my book You Ain’t Heard Nothin Yet from the film and I had been slowly checking off films from that book for years.  The quote though was hard to understand outside the context of the film: “The last time we met I died. It alters the appearance.”  There was a picture as well, with Deborah Kerr staring at Felix Aylmer, but that didn’t help.  I wondered if Kerr was supposed to be playing a ghost, not knowing what the context could be.  I also wanted to see it because it was an Oscar nominee (Best Supporting Actress), and though it was also nominated for several other awards, the Oscars were the original group I was interested in.  In spite of all that, it took me years before I finally saw this film (sometime in the early 00’s, I believe).  I was surprised by what I saw because this was a well-constructed fascinating drama filled with really good performances.

How exactly did Deborah Kerr die the last time the judge saw her?  Simple: he sentenced her to death.  Yet, her appeal won out and she was not executed.  Instead, she got a second chance for life and now, upon her release from prison, has managed to secure a job as a governess to a very troubled girl.  Kerr gives a fascinating performance as a woman determined to hide her past, but also to learn from it and to allow others to learn from it as well.  She sees this girl and she wants to help her.

That’s where the dynamics of the household come in and the logistics of the casting.  The household is ruled by the grandmother, played regally by Edith Evans in one of her really good performances (she was Oscar nominated and she certainly deserved it far more than the actual Oscar winner) as someone who always believes that she is right.  The troubled girl is played by Hayley Mills in one of her best serious roles.  That’s partially because she gets to play against her father John Mills, who gives a solid performance as always, but he’s playing a servant, not her father and their chemistry together brings an added dimension to the film.  They can see through each other and that allows for some of the best scenes in the film.  Deborah Kerr could always be counted on for a good performance of course, but it’s the whole cast that really comes together in this film.

You might not have ever seen The Chalk Garden.  There are currently only two external reviews on the IMDb, an astoundingly low figure for a film that is this good (very high ***.5) and one that has really been overlooked for far too long.

One last thing to note.  I don’t know if I thought about this the first time I saw this film, but this time I definitely noticed the score.  It reminded me of the score to Elmer Gantry, in that, if you heard it outside the context of the film (like on a soundtrack), it wouldn’t be too bad of a score, but it’s terribly used in the film.  It’s got overly dramatic cues that come in any moment that’s the least bit dramatic and it completely undercuts the film.  I had already decided that before I saw this quote from director Ronald Neame on the trivia page of its IMDb listing: “I also hated the music. The play is filled with epigrams. Every time one was uttered that crashing music would swell up.”

The Source:

The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold (1962)

This is a solid play about a woman who comes to a nice estate to be the governess for a troubled young girl.  It turns out the governess is hiding her past, but the experiences that she is hiding make her well suited to be governess for the girl, allowing those experiences to help guide the girl to a better life.  In order to do that, she must negotiate the overbearing grandmother that is currently taking care of the girl and find a way to repair the relationship between the girl and her mother.  It’s a good play with solid dialogue but I wouldn’t have imagined it could be as good as it the film without the film performances.

The Adaptation:

The premise of the film is exactly the same.  Many of the lines are exactly the same.  But there are a lot of small changes, from opening up the play (allowing for a lot of small scenes that take place outside the house, while in the original, all the action takes place in the house) and various additional dialogue that really plays up the relationship between the girl and the servant Maitland, for reasons that it’s easy to understand given who was hired to play the roles.

The Credits:

Directed by Ronald Neame.  Screenplay by John Michael Hayes.  From the play by Enid Bagnold.

Goldfinger

The Film:

When I wrote about this film for my For Love of Film piece I mentioned that this, until the advent of Daniel Craig as Bond, was the ultimate Bond film (and the best of the Bond films).  It had great quips (“Do you expect me to talk?”  “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”), great gadgets (the car), a great Bond girl (who was also the only Bond girl more than a year older than Bond) and a great Bond villain (complete with great henchman).  In fact, it is more than just a great James Bond film.  It is the first great English language Action film.  That’s not hyperbole.  The only films I classify primarily as Action (as opposed to Adventure or Western, where there is cross-over) that earn **** before this film are all Samurai films.  This helps bring in a new genre, one that would eventually see such films as The French Connection and Die Hard.  But this is the first and the way it manages to blend the comedy with the action actually sets the stage for many stars who would rise in the 70’s and 80’s.

The Source:

Goldfinger by Ian Fleming  (1959)

Though Goldfinger is the third film in the Eon Bond series it was the seventh novel (the novel following Dr. No, in fact).  While all of the Bond books had kind of followed a formula of some early stuff that kind of sets the stage for the book followed by actually getting the assignment and then what happens in the course of the assignment, this book like a couple of the others, actually breaks it into three parts.  Over the course of the book, Bond will first meet, then follow and eventually have to take out the man Goldfinger who is planning to steal all the gold in Fort Knox.  The book introduces the fascinating character of Pussy Galore, the lesbian gang leader.  She’s the most interesting Bond girl since Vesper in the first book in that she actually has some personality and without her Bond wouldn’t have be able to succeed but she’s also problematic in that she’s a lesbian because she was raped by her uncle when she was twelve and being with a real man like Bond allows her to enjoy men again (ugh!).  All in all, it’s an enjoyable Bond book (like all of them) and a very quick read.

The Adaptation:

Goldfinger got moved to the front of the line because Fleming was in court over the screenplay to Thunderball (which had been written as an original script but Fleming would then use the script as the basis for the novel).  As with many of the Bond films, both before and after this one, it takes the basic outlines from the book and changes a lot of the details, including the death of Jill Masterson (only described in the book).  The biggest change from the book is probably the goal of Goldfinger.  In the book he actually manages to steal the gold from Fort Knox.  In the film, Bond points out that it would take twelve days to steal all that gold (a plot hole in the book) and instead Goldfinger is lying about stealing the gold and really wants to irradiate it so that no one can use it and all of his own gold will rise dramatically in value.  Many of the things added into the film (like all the gadgets on the car) were also a result of the vastly increased budget, thus allowing the filmmakers to have more flexibility.

The Credits:

Directed by Guy Hamilton.  Screenplay by Richard Malbaum, Paul Dehn.
note:  The source is only mentioned in the title card: Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.

My Fair Lady

The Film:

I have discussed this film before, both in the 1964 Best Picture post where I reviewed it and in the 1994 Nighthawk Awards, where it got mentioned because it was a film I saw in the theater that year.  Watching it this time, more than any other time, I really wished Julie Andrews had been in the film.  Aside from that, I actually timed “Get Me to the Church on Time” and it just feels really long and isn’t actually very long, whereas my complaints about the Ascot Gavette are definitely spot on – that scene runs over 10 minutes from start to finish.  It’s nice to think that I originally went to see this film, at least partially, to impress a girl and I ended up loving it enough that I bought it on video.

The Source:

My Fair Lady: A Musical Play in Two Acts based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, Adaptation and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner  (1956)

If you want to read what I had to say about the original Pygmalion, you can go here to my Adapted Screenplay 1938 post.  A lot of that carries over to this play and I don’t know if you can really give credit to Lerner for just keeping what Shaw had written in the first place.  The original play is really rather brilliant, one of the very best stage comedies not written by Shakespeare.  What Lerner (and Lowe) did was bring in some truly wonderful songs that fit perfectly into the action without bringing the action of the play to a grinding halt.  While there are songs I am not particularly fond of (once again, I’m looking at you “Get Me to the Church on Time”), there are so many wonderful songs, from “Why Can’t the English” to “The Rain in Spain” to my own personal favorite, “Show Me”, a great song that cuts right to the point.  I own the original Broadway version on cd, that same cover that made every gay child confused about god (go to 3:30 here, but really, watch the whole clip because it’s one of my all-time favorite hilarious film scenes).  It ran on Broadway for six years (a record at the time but not even in the Top 20 today).  One thing I should also point out comes to me courtesy of The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays Into Film: “My Fair Lady broke the mold of romantic musical fable by giving its one love song (“On the Street Where You Live”) to a peripheral character, pointing up the struggle of the main characters to find each other.”  (p 510)

The Adaptation:

There are a few tiny changes and they are rather interesting.  For most of the first two scenes, you can read along with the play with barely a single word being different.  Then, at the end of Scene 2, suddenly there’s an entire song that is pushed until later in the film (“With a Little Bit of Luck”).  There are other moments like that, with some songs pushed to slightly different spots (because you didn’t the stage and could just edit them together) but for the most part, it is a very faithful adaptation.  There is actually one scene, Scene 6 that is completely cut (the one with Pickering and Mrs. Higgins at the racetrack) which makes it even more surprising how damn long the racetrack scene actually is.  One other interesting pacing change – in the play, the division between Act One and Act Two (and thus, the intermission), is after the ballroom scene, instead of just before it.

The Credits:

Directed by George Cukor.  Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner.  Music by Frederick Loewe.  Based upon the musical play as produced on stage by Herman Levin.  Book and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, Music by Frederick Loewe.  From a play by Bernard Shaw.  Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Becket

The Film:

Just like when a film succeeds you have to look around to see who deserves the credit, if a film doesn’t, you have to wonder where the fault is.  On some levels, this film absolutely succeeds, as it was nominated for 12 Oscars, but as my review makes clear, I don’t think it succeeds on the artistic level.  Given the talent involved and what is done with it (curiously flat performance from Richard Burton and not a much better one from Peter O’Toole, uninspired cinematography from Geoffrey Unsworth and editing by Anne V. Coates that makes the film drag), it would seem the fault must really fall on Peter Glenville.

The Source:

Becket or the Honour of God by Jean Anouilh  (1959)

Would this play (and the film made from it) sit better with me if The Lion in Winter had never been made?  There is much written about how this play is all talk and no action, yet The Lion in Winter is very much the same with some of the same characters.  Like this play, it used the history as a backdrop and kind of made up the story but it is much more historically accurate and much more interesting as well.  It’s because it relies on wit and not historical, political and moral arguments that seem like they go on forever.  The irony, of course, is that The Lion in Winter opened on Broadway and didn’t last long (83 performances) while this play was a success in Paris, London and New York.

The play is about the friendship between Henry II and Thomas Becket that was torn apart when Henry made Becket the Archbishop of Canterbury and it ended, of course, with his death.  It is still relevant in some ways (James Comey) but it really just kind of sags along, at least when reading it.  Perhaps if I had seen Olivier as Becket, I would have a different thought on it.

The major historical inaccuracy in the play I can actually forgive.  Anouilh wrote the play based on the idea that Becket was a Saxon and that it caused problems with his position, which isn’t the real case and Anouilh learned it shortly before the play opened and left it in because it was part of the central conflict of the play and I agree with him.  But to make Eleanor of Aquataine as a dowdy, uninspired character is yet another thing that is undercut by her lively (more historically accurate) persona in The Lion in Winter.

The Adaptation:

Because Glenville had been the play’s director on Broadway, he left a lot of the play intact when he directed the film.  There are a few changes, with scenes opened up because they were making a film while the play had very little in the way of scenery and this time they could use big open cathedrals and outside spaces.  There are also some moments in the film where Glenville allows us to see what is happening (like Becket turning his back on the king) while it was only described on stage.  But mostly, it is a fairly faithful adaptation of the original play.

The Credits:

Directed by Peter Glenville.  Based upon the play BECKET by Jean Anouilh.  As translated by Lucienne Hill and produced upon the New York Stage by David Merrick.  Screenplay by Edward Anhalt.

The Servant

The Film:

As is obvious to anyone who has read much of what I have written on film, my opinion on directors can vary.  There are some where I go completely with the critical consensus (Kurosawa, Kubrick, Scorsese), there are some where I go against it (Godard, Linklater).  Then there is the kind of middle range where people who have built up a solid critical reputation just leave me in the middle.  I think their films are, for the most part, pretty good, but I don’t really see in them what others do.  Ken Loach is an example, as is John Cassavetes.  Our case for this film, of course, is Joseph Losey.  I have seen 19 of Losey’s film and in spite of the critical attention he has received, none has earned higher than a 73 from me.  His films are, for the most part, good (with Boom and The Assassination of Trotsky as notable exceptions) but they don’t ever seem more than that, at least to me.

Perhaps in this case, the issue isn’t Losey but Harold Pinter.  The noted playwright was providing just his second screenplay, an adaptation of a novella by Robin Maugham.  Pinter’s work has always left me cold and, of course, I think it’s supposed to.  Even his most acclaimed plays (some of which I read as an undergraduate) seem designed to leave you cold and disturbed.  In this film, we have a wealthy young Londoner, played by James Fox, who hires a new servant, played by Dirk Bogarde.  The relationship between the two develops as such relationships do, with the class difference always standing between them.  But the addition of, first, Fox’s girlfriend, then Bogarde’s “sister” starts to complicate things and before we know it we’re knee deep into some psychosexualdrama without any clear idea where it’s going.

Perhaps the reason this film never rises above a mid *** for me is the presence of Dirk Bogarde as the servant.  There are a number of British actors who would earn acclaim over the years at the BAFTAs without really achieving the same kind of success in the states (Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle) that I really like but Bogarde is a notable exception.  Something about his acting has never worked for me and when we get deep into this film, with the roles slowly being reversed, with Fox increasingly relying on his servant, getting caught up in sexual games with someone who may be a sister and may be a lover and may be somewhere in between with both men, I could never really sink into Bogarde’s performance the way the BAFTAs did (Bogarde won Best Actor over Albert Finney for Tom Jones).  Or perhaps part of the problem is that I’m not British and so this role reversal in the class difference never quite works for me.  Or it’s just Pinter’s inherent coldness.  Or maybe the film is not as great as some would make out.

The Source:

The Servant by Robin Maugham  (1948)

The first novel from Somerset Maugham’s nephew, who would eventually have a very successful writing career, with novels, plays and travel books.  But, unlike his more famous uncle, his books aren’t as widely available and I wasn’t able to get hold of it.

The Adaptation:

“It was Losey who first showed Robin Maugham’s novelette The Servant to Bogarde in 1954.  Originally separately commissioned by director Michael Anderson, Pinter stripped it of its first-person narrator, its yellow book snobbery and the arguably anti-Semitic characterisation of Barrett – oiliness, heavy lids – replacing them with an economical language that implied rather than stated the slippage of power relations away from Tony towards Barrett.”  That’s a quote from a Sight and Sound article that you can find here but it’s the extent of what I know about what they did in adapting the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Joseph Losey.  Screenplay by Harold Pinter.  Based on the novel ‘The Servant’ by Robin Maugham.

Oscar Nominees

Zorba the Greek

The Film:

When I first saw this film, back in the 90’s, I didn’t think much of it.  It certainly didn’t deserve to be nominated in all the major categories at the Oscars.  When I saw it again in 2010 for my Best Picture project, my opinion of it had not improved.  It’s a cliche of a film, not well written or directed and rather boring with some very good music that gets overplayed and thus minimizes its impact.

The Source:

Βίος και Πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά by Nikos Kazantzakis  (1946, tr. 1952)

So, when did the cliche begin?  In my review of the film, I talked about now knowing if it was already a cliche in 1964 for the young man to learn about life from the free spirit from another culture.  In the original novel, it’s not quite the same (see below) so it’s less the man from another culture than just meeting the free spirit that will let you into another idea of life and the person that you will never forget.  As I write this, it reminds me of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, except that I much prefer Capote’s prose (and character) to the one I read about here.  To me, the book was just as boring as the film.  I didn’t have particularly high hopes, as I had read Kazantzakis before (I read Last Temptation of Christ years ago) and found him to be a bit dense and boring as a writer, though, it always seems like that could come from the translator.

The Adaptation:

In the film, there is much made over the half-British aspect of the character, the stuffed shirt who is learning from the Cretian that he befriends.  In the book, though, the narrator isn’t half-British (of course, because Kazantzakis was Greek and writing in Greek, unlike the film, made in English) so it’s less the fish out of water routine of learning from a man from another culture and instead just learning from the free spirit whose character stays with you forever.

The other main difference is that the whole thing with the logs, which leads to the climax of the film, doesn’t exist in the book.  It’s in there to provide a more suitable climax to the story (which the book doesn’t really have – he leaves and has some communication with Zorba over the years before Zorba dies).

One thing that did strike me.  I was reading the book while re-watching the film and when I got to the death of the widow, I sat there thinking, I don’t remember that happening.  Then, a few minutes later, I got to that point in the film.  The film is so boring in my memory that the one really dramatic (and tragic) event had totally escaped my memory.  But this is something that is actually done fairly true on-screen as to how it had been done on page.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Michael Cacoyannis.  From the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis.  Screenplay by Michael Cacoyannis.
note:  Only the Kazantzakis credit is in the main titles.  The directing and writing credits come from the end credits.

WGA Nominees

Seven Days in May

The Film:

In my Best Adapted Screenplay: 1954, I wrote about Executive Suite, an ensemble film that starred, among others, Fredric March.  I discussed how that film, in spite of March (and William Holden) just felt boring.  This film, also with March, doesn’t have that problem, even though, in some ways, it’s similar, with a lot of people talking about who is going to be in charge.  It’s not a great film, and some of that is the direction from John Frankenheimer, which really doesn’t do a lot with the material.  But the writing is much more solid than in Executive Suite, and of course we have a much more interesting story.

The story itself is about a coup, or really, an attempted coup.  It’s about what happens when a bunch of generals decide that they know better what needs to be done to insure the safety and security for this country.  That it goes against everything that went into the founding of this country doesn’t seem to bother them.  It does bother Colonel Jiggs, played by Kirk Douglas.  They haven’t included him but he has stumbled across it and he feels his most important duty is to his president and his country and he warns the president.  The president is played by Fredric March.  March was always one of the greatest of film actors and he is very solid here as a president whose approval ratings are falling but who believes he is doing the right thing.  The general in charge of the attempted coup is played by Burt Lancaster in of his most domineering self-righteous roles.  The three actors play off each other in great ways, even though they never all appear on the screen at the same time.  The film mostly consists of conversations between two of them or between several of the other talented cast members (Edmond O’Brian as an alcoholic senator, Martin Balsam as March’s aide).

The film works as well as it does partially because of the content, partially because of the sharp, biting dialogue that often has several layers and because of the performances that all work well, especially when they play off each other.  It’s not a great film, but it is a smart, interesting film about an important subject.  So much more interesting than a film about who gets to take over a business after the CEO dies.

The Source:

Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II (1962)

As I wrote above, this had a much more interesting story to deal with than Executive Suite.  I have never cared about business, but I am fascinated by politics.  But only part of this is politics and a lot has to do with the military, and I’m not that interested in the military.  And that’s kind of where the book doesn’t quite hold me and never quite works for me in the same way that the film does.

The novel is broken down by days (with certain parts of certain days broken down even further into smaller chapters like “Thursday Afternoon”).  It deals with a potential coup lead by a prominent general (who is also head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) who feel the president has become too weak in dealing with the USSR.  The president’s name is Jordan Lyman, which seems like a nod toward Lyndon Johnson, although Johnson was only Vice President when the novel was written and the character of the president is very different than Johnson.

The very notion of the plot could make for an effective thriller, but this novel is written less as a thriller than as a treatise and it gets really bogged down in the details and never really keeps things moving at a crisp pace.  It only runs 330 pages, but that still feels like far too long when looking at effective thrillers from Fleming or le Carre.

The Adaptation:

The film finds the thriller inside the novel, hoping to get out.  It does that in two ways.  The first is in the performances as mentioned above.  The second is in the writing process.  Most of the novel makes it intact to the screen (the ending is altered somewhat, as General Scott pretty much commits suicide at the end of the book), but is in the ways where the novel cuts down on the speeches, on the detailed instruction about how this all could work where the film keeps things moving in a way that the original novel does not.  The best lines in the film, the ones that kind of sum up the characters for both the president and the colonel, come straight from page 67 of the novel:

“So you stand by the Constitution, Jiggs?”

“Well, I never thought about it just that way, Mr. President. That’s what we’ve got, and I guess it’s worked pretty well so far. I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to say we ought to change it.”

The Credits:

Directed by John Frankenheimer.  Based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey II.  Screenplay by Rod Serling.

Topkapi

The Film:

There are actors whose allure eludes me.  Just yesterday I endured a trailer for a Gerard Butler movie and my first thought was “Who think this person should be acting in movies?”  For today’s lesson, we are Melina Mercouri.  Clearly it wasn’t just that she was married to Jules Dassin because she did earn an Oscar nomination for Never on Sunday.  But, for the most part, I think she’s a terrible actress, I find her annoying and I don’t find her attractive.  But clearly some people do (and not just Dassin), so here we have her as the leader of a group of thieves planning a heist at the Topkapi in Istanbul.

She’s got Maximilian Schell and he’s playing against the type established in Judgment at Nuremberg, so we don’t realize at first what kind of film we’re in.  But then she also has Robert Morley among her crew and when they disembark in Athens they recruit Peter Ustinov (well, not really recruit, but more trick him into working for them) then we start to get the idea.  We’re looking at something like Beat the Devil again and these are definitely desperate characters.  Yes, they have a heist planned and it’s audacious but this is also a Comedy that we’re looking at and things won’t get exactly as they were planned.

That’s actually part of what never really works for me in this film (apart from Mercouri’s performance).  The film wants to be a Comedy and a lot of it is meant to be funny, but the heist scenes are also done with an earnest seriousness and it’s only the last couple of minutes in the film where things revert back to being comedic and things fall apart for our band of thieves.  It earned a WGA nomination but the writing falls flat for me.  Morley is entertaining and Ustinov is good, though the idea that this was an Oscar worthy performance is ridiculous enough to suit this film.

The Source:

The Light of Day by Eric Ambler  (1962)

This is a decent thriller about a semi con-man (he works as an unlicensed guide and a journalist among other things, but he also rips off the people he is guiding) who gets wrapped up in a much bigger plot to rob the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul.  In over his head, trapped both by a man involved in the plot and by the police who discover the guns he’s driving into Turkey without realizing it (as part of the plot), we follow him just desperately trying to extricate himself alive.

The Adaptation:

Dr. Strangelove changed Red Alert to a Comedy with dialogue.  Mary Poppins changed Mary in the film with a performance.  Here, Light of Day, a serious thriller, becomes a heist comedy simply through casting.  After all, with Melina Mercouri and Robert Morley are we supposed to believe this is going to be a serious thriller?  Ustinov could go either way, but once he’s got this other company, it’s clear we’re headed for more comic means of delivery.

A lot of the plot does come straight from the book, though in the book, we’re getting the entire thing as first person narrative from Ustinov’s character, so while in the film we know about the heist planned and we even know Ustinov is barking up the wrong tree in trying to rip off Schell, that information we only learn in the book as Ustinov’s character does.  To that end, all of the book is much more serious.  The ending is also very different, with Ustinov’s character managing to take off at the airport and let the police know (though the gang gets away) and he’s certainly not part of any future heist and no one is in jail.  While I can see someone reading the book and following along with the film for the most part, the ending must have just thrown them.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Jules Dassin.  Screenplay by Monja Danischewsky.  Based on the novel “The Light of Day” by Eric Ambler.
The directing credit is only from the end credits.  The opening credits have no credits for director or any of the actors.

The World of Henry Orient

The Film:

John Colapinto, a New Yorker staff writer is obsessed with this film.  That’s not hyperbole, as he basically admitted it in a 2012 piece where he talked about watching it constantly over the last 40 years and set out to find out what happened to the two young actresses that so entranced him.  This reminds me of my RCM series, an idea of revisiting films that I watched a lot as a child and trying to get an idea, as an adult, what I should critically think of them.  I can understand being entranced by a film and being unable to let it go (like here).  But there’s a difference between liking a film and thinking that two rather bad teen acting performances deserve to have the actresses looked up decades later.  Because, let’s face it, this is not a particularly good film and neither of the actresses ended up having particularly long acting careers for a reason.  It gets even more complicated if you read his actual piece and realize that Tippy Walker, who was 16, playing 14, and looking about 12, was actually in a relationship with director George Roy Hill.  Now we’re faced with the idea that a mediocre early comedy made by a man who hadn’t really found himself as a film director yet (that would come later when he would start teaming up with Redford and Newman) is also quite creepy at its core.

But let’s try to focus on the film that we are watching and leave what’s going on behind the scenes alone.  This is the story of two precious girls who are obsessed with a concert pianist by the name of Henry Orient (who is named because author Nora Johnson based him on her crush on Oscar Levant growing up and levant in French means the same as orient in English and has nothing to do with East Asia in spite of the terrible sight gags thrown into the film).  The problem is that Orient, one is kind of nuts (he’s played by Peter Sellers and while Stanley Kubrick knew exactly how to make use of Sellers and Blake Edwards could get him to focus his madness into Poirot, Hill just lacks the control of a polished director and lets Sellers go at it), two is having an affair and three, thinks these two girls he keeps spotting (spying on him in the park, going to his concert) are spies for the husband of his mistress.  So, what we eventually end up with is that Henry instead starts having an affair with the mother of one of the girls after she learns about her daughter’s obsession with him.

Is that enough to melt your brain yet?  I can keep going.  If you were raised in the 80’s like Veronica and I were, there is the extra weirdness of Angela Lansbury having an affair (yes, I can think of her as a great actress divorced from stupid Murder She Wrote but lots of people our age can’t) and that her cuckolded husband is none other than Tom Bosley, who, in spite of everything you would believe about him after all those years of Happy Days, is actually a fairly neglectful parent for most of the film.

So, yes, sadly, I bring baggage to this film while Colapinto probably brings euphoria from seeing it as a kid.  But I also bring a critical eye to two girls who seem to live in an unreal world, to poorly written characters, to direction that can’t hold in the “star” while trying to pass over the fact that the real stars of the film are two young actresses who really don’t know what to do on-screen.  George Roy Hill would go on to direct a lot more films (14 in total, all of which I have seen) and almost all of them are better than this one so go see one of those instead.

The Source:

The World of Henry Orient by Nora Johnson  (1958)

It’s always interesting to see what the local libraries have.  I couldn’t get The Hustler from any library in the system (or even in the state) but this book came straight from the Concord Free Public Library, just two towns over.  They shelve it in regular fiction, perhaps because they’ve had this copy since October of 1958 (there’s a bookplate) and there probably wasn’t a Young Adult section back then.  Johnson was just 25 when the book was published, a book inspired by her own experiences growing up in Manhattan and a crush on pianist Oscar Levant.  It probably didn’t hurt that her father was a film director whose latest film had just won Best Actress (Three Faces of Eve).  It’s not badly written, but it’s a fairly typical example of what today would be considered Young Adult Fiction, with an eighth grade narrator talking about her friendship with another girl and the bizarre crush they develop on a concert pianist named Henry Orient and the hijinks that ensue, especially in regards to the parental relationships in the friend’s household.  Like Little Women, I’ll use the excuse that I was never a 13 year old girl, although Johnson is in no ways close to Alcott as a writer.

The Adaptation:

“The screenplay originally submitted was largely written by Nunnally with the help of Nora . . .  As is his custom, Hill did much of the rewriting of the script himself, though screen credit remains with Nora and Nunnally Johnson.”  (The Films of George Roy Hill, Andrew Norton, p 42)

It would certainly not be surprising if Nora Johnson’s contributions weren’t that much, which isn’t intended as criticism but a reflection of the fact that she never again received credit for a screenplay and, more importantly, because there are a lot of changes, which would be surprising if she was heavily involved.  Indeed, the novel focuses on the two girls and the whole notion of Henry Orient is really a concept and they barely interact with him at all.  In the film itself, Orient is a major part (because his was the star role) and he becomes involved in the girl’s private lives as well.  The bare bones of the original novel survives in the film (two precocious girls become friends, become obsessed with pianist, one girl has family struggles) but almost everything else is different.  One item in particular I found interesting.  They go to the recital and one of the girls looks at the other girl’s legs.  I thought (I wasn’t up to that point in the book and it had been years since I had originally seen the film) she was going to say the other girl had nylons on, which it turns out is what she remarks on in the book, but no, it’s that the other girl has actually shaved her legs.

The Credits:

Directed by George Roy Hill.  Screenplay by Nora Johnson and Nunnally Johnson.  From the novel by Nora Johnson.

The Unsinkable Molly Brown

The Film:

There was an episode of Top Gear when Jeremy Clarkson claims that they don’t have the budget to do certain things, but then he drives around looking for a location and you realize that they’ve flown him all over the world, with shots on front of the Sydney Opera House and the Taj Mahal and such.  It’s very funny.  I thought of that scene during this film when, what is the end of the first Act on stage (with Molly and her husband doing a polka) becomes a polka around the world, with gratuitous shots in front of the Acropolis, Parliament, the Eiffel Tower and a couple of other European places I couldn’t quite place (which is also stupid, because who goes from the Continent then to London, then to Paris?).  This film supposedly had to cut the budget all over the place, but they managed to find the money to go get some shots of people dancing all over the world.

I had seen this film before but didn’t remember it at all.  I remembered that Debbie Reynolds was good but not nearly good enough to have deserved an Oscar nomination (she’s #11 on my list) and of course I knew the Titanic got in there somewhere because that’s how Molly got her nickname, by surviving when so many did not.  But none of the songs had penetrated my head, even a little.  Watching the name Meredith Willson come up on the screen and thinking of how much I love every song in The Music Man, I pondered how that could be.  But then I remembered how much I love My Fair Lady and all the songs and how much I don’t like basically any Lerner and Loewe song that’s not in My Fair Lady and I accepted it and moved on.

There are problems with this film and me not caring about the songs is really only a minor one.  The bigger problem is that a 128 minute Musical only uses a handful of songs from the original Broadway production and didn’t bother to replace them with anything new (well, they did add “He’s My Friend” and then apparently were actually going to cut that as well because MGM was moving all the money over to Doctor Zhivago but instead filmed it and made it last way too long).  This may sound like an odd complaint when I don’t much like the songs, but there is not enough singing in this film.  But I make that complaint because the story itself gets rather trite (Molly wants to escape her humdrum life, marries a man who strikes it rich, they argue, she’s rejected as uncouth), most of the dialogue isn’t very good and aside from Debbie Reynolds, most of the performances are fairly un-notable (it’s nice, I suppose, after a film like 12 Angry Men to see Ed Begley with a smile on his face, but he’s just so out of place).  At least when the songs are going on, even if they’re too long, they bring the film a semblance of life.  “Belly Up to the Bar Boys” is a perfect example because it feels like it lasts forever but at least it’s showing signs of life.  Charles Walters was never much of a director but he at least was used to Musicals and he fails to bring any drama (or comedy) to the rest of the film.  They needed more songs, not extending the few songs they kept so long that you want to start slamming your head on a wall.

The Source:

The Unsinkable Molly Brown, lyrics and music by Meredith Willson, book by Richard Morris (1960)

Though this Musical wasn’t a hit on the same level as The Music Man, it was a hit on Broadway.  Willson’s songs in this play don’t have the same level of playfulness and humor that they had in his first hit and they never really draw me in.  The book itself isn’t very interesting and it lacks the wit and humor that made The Music Man such a great play to watch.

The Adaptation:

The film had to add in more dialogue because they managed to make it last 128 minutes while only keeping five of the original seventeen songs.  Musicals have songs added and dropped all the time when adapted for film, but keeping less than a third of the original stage music is really an astounding change from a successful Broadway production.  As was often the case, a new song was added, the big ensemble number “He’s My Friend” that eventually concludes with an enormous fight and a ridiculous grinning Ed Begley smashing a cream pie in the camera’s face.

The Credits:

Directed by Charles Walters.  Based on the Musical Play “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”.  Music and Lyrics by Meredith Willson.  Book by Richard Morris.  As Presented on the Stage by The Theatre Guild and Dore Schary.  Screen Play by Helen Deutsch.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10 (in descending order of how I rank the script):

• The Pumpkin Eater  –  If this had been released in 1963 it would have been #8 and in 1963 it would have been #5 but it’s in 1964 and it comes in 11th.  The script is very strong but it’s really Anne Bancroft’s amazing performance that is the reason to watch it.  Based on the novel by Penelope Mortimer.
• A Shot in the Dark  –  Adapted in two completely different ways.  First, it’s an adaptation of the play L’Idiote by Marcel Achard.  But then they decided to make it a sequel to The Pink Panther and they inserted Clouseau (a pre-existing character) into it and thus made it an adaptation in a different way.  Either way, it’s the funniest Clouseau film ever made.
• Zazie in the Subway  –  Louis Malle’s charming surrealistic comedy based on the 1959 novel by Raymond Queneau.
• Fail Safe  –  Sidney Lumet’s solid thriller is based on the 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler.  The film (and novel) were so similar to Dr. Strangelove and Red Alert that they were sued and their release was delayed until months after Strangelove.  This is the more serious version of Strangelove.
• The Idiot  –  Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film version of Dostoevsky’s classic finally makes it to the States.  You can read a full review of the film and the novel here because I ranked the novel at #54 all-time.
• From Russia with Love  –  The second James Bond film didn’t make it to the States until early 1964 six months after it played in London (where it was the biggest film of the year).  One of the best Bond films and adapted from one of the most enjoyable books.  A full review can be found here.
• The Life of Oharu  –  Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1952 film based on the 17th Century novel The Life of an Amorous Woman by Ihara Saikaku.  Very good.
• Guns at Batasi  –  A BAFTA winner for Best Actor (Richard Attenborough) and not that easy to find but a solid ***.5.  Based on the novel The Siege at Battersea.
• Billy Liar  –  The story of the undertaker’s clerk who dreams of something more which helped make a star of Tom Courtenay, this is the third of five versions of the story following the original novel and play and preceding the television series and West End musical.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Séance on a Wet Afternoon  –  Richard Attenborough also won the BAFTA for this film but it was Kim Stanley’s performance that was more acclaimed (NYFC, NBR wins, BAFTA, Oscar noms).  Based on the novel by Mark McShane.
• The Masque of the Red Death  –  The seventh and best of the Corman-Poe films.  In fact, the best film ever released by AIP.
• The Long Ships  –  Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier team up again, this time for a Viking movie very loosely based on the novel by Frans G. Bengtsson.
• 7 Faces of Dr. Lao  –  The first film to ever win an award for its makeup is an adaptation of the novel The Circus of Dr. Lao.
• The Killers  –  The Hemingway story gets a second film adaptation, this time directed by Don Siegel and starring Lee Marvin.
• Cheyenne Autumn  –  John Ford’s last Western is much more enlightened about Native Americans than his earlier films.  Based in part on a historical event but also on Howard Fast’s novel about it, The Last Frontier.
• My Life to Live  –  One of Godard’s better films is a study on prostitution actually based on a non-fiction book called Où en est la prostitution.
• The Carpetbaggers  –  Given that it’s based on a Harold Robbins novel, this is actually a fairly solid film.
• Good Neighbor Sam  –  A Jack Lemmon comedy based on a novel by Jack Finney, the man who wrote the original novel The Body Snatchers?  Can that be right?  Yes, it can.
• Girl with Green Eyes  –  The rare film to earn appreciation from multiple groups (NBR win, Globe win, BAFTA nom) but nothing from the Oscars.  In fact, it was the first ever film to win a critics award and a Globe and not earn at least one Oscar nom and was only the second film to earn a critics win, a Globe nom and a BAFTA nom and not an Oscar nom (Raisin in the Sun was the first).  For all that, I’m with the Oscars, giving it a 70 (solid ***) but no awards attention.  Based on the novel The Lonely Girl by Edna O’Brien.
• All the Way Home  –  A film I watched for this project because it was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Death in the Family (and the Pulitzer Prize winning play All the Way Home adapted from the novel in 1960).  Solid drama with Robert Preston and Jean Simmons.
• Marriage Italian Style  –  One of the most annoying films in Oscar history because it was nominated for Best Actress in 1964 but for Best Foreign Film in 1965 (the only time a film has earned a Foreign film nomination in a year after earning its other nomination).  It’s also annoying because it stars Sophia Loren.  Adapted from the play Filumena Marturano.
• Joy House  –  A film I saw not because it was directed by Rene Clement but because it starred young Jane Fonda in her first French film.  Adapted from the novel by Day Keene.
• Gate of Flesh  –  The second of four adaptations of the novel by Taijiro Tamura and probably the best known at least in part because it was released on DVD by Criterion.
• Joan of the Angels?  –  A Polish film about demonic possession of nuns that covers similar ground to Ken Russell’s later 1971 film The Devils.  A 1961 film by Jerzy Kawalerowicz earning its US release and based on a novella by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz.
• The Evil of Frankenstein  –  The third Hammer Frankenstein film with Peter Cushing.
• Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow  –  I suppose I shouldn’t have complained about Marriage Italian Style because that’s the better of the Vittorio de Sica directed films starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in this year.  This one, which won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars (over Woman in the Dunes and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) is an anthology film and one of the three parts is based on the novella Troppo Ricca.
• Nothing But the Best  –  A British black comedy based on “The Best of Everything”, a short story by Stanley Ellin.
• The Luck of Ginger Coffey  –  Early film from Irvin Kershner who would eventually go on to direct The Empire Strikes Back with a solid performance from Robert Shaw.  Based on the acclaimed Canadian novel by Brian Moore.
• Behold a Pale Horse  –  A real oddity in that it’s based on Killing a Mouse on Sunday,  a novel by Emeric Pressburger, the noted screenwriter who worked with Michael Powell but this film was directed by Fred Zinnemann and Pressburger wasn’t involved in the film at all.  A lull in Zinnemann’s career as it followed two Best Picture nominees (The Nun’s Story, The Sundowners) and his next film would win Best Picture (A Man for All Seasons).
• Siberian Lady Macbeth  –  Not based directly on the Shakespeare play but rather Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  A 1962 film from noted Polish director Andrzej Wajda.
• Any Number Can Win  –  French crime film based on the novel The Big Grab.  We’re now down to low ***.
• Family Diary  –  Another Mastroianni film but this one is directed by Valerio Zurlini.  Based on Two Brothers by Vasco Pratolini.
• Kiss Me, Stupid  –  At a low ***, the worst film ever made by Billy Wilder which tells you how good his films were.  Based on the play L’ora della fantasia which had already been made into a film once in Italy.
• Man’s Favorite Sport?  –  Another weak outing from a great director, one of the worst films ever made by Howard Hawks.  Based on the story “The Girl Who Almost Got Away” by Pat Frank.
• Eva  –  Joseph Losey wasn’t nearly as great a director as Wilder or Hawks but this is still a weak effort from him.  Based on the noir thriller Eve by James Hadley Chase.
• The Avenger  –  The Aeneid gets the sword and sandal treatment.  It could have been worse.
• Twin Sisters of Kyoto  –  Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film in 1963, based on the novel The Old Capital.
• Rio Conchos  –  Weak Western based on the novel Guns of Rio Conchos.  Bizarrely nominated for Best Actor – Drama at the Globes.
• Sex and the Single Girl  –  The title comes from the famous book by Helen Gurley Brown but the film really just takes the idea and nothing else.
• Fate is the Hunter  –  This film was killing me for years trying to track it down.  It was Oscar nominated (Cinematography) and won the MPSE.  Ostensibly based on the non-fiction book by Ernest K. Gann about aviation disasters but really an original story created for the film.
• The 7th Dawn  –  Weak William Holden Drama that was BAFTA nominated for Cinematography.  Based on the novel The Durian Tree.
• Woman of Straw  –  British thriller with Sean Connery adapted from the novel by Catherine Arley.
• Lilith  –  The last film from Robert Rossen and the lowest *** film on this list.  Based on a novel by J. R. Salamanca.
• Tintin and the Blue Oranges  –  Based on the characters and not an actual Herge book.  You can find a full review of it here.  We’re into **.5 range now.
• Marnie  –  Not the worst Hitchcock film but it’s down there.  Based on the novel by Winston Graham.
• First Men in the Moon  –  Weak adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic.
• Mothra vs. Godzilla  –  Released as Godzilla vs. Mothra on video in the US (as it should be – Godzilla deserves top billing) after being released in theaters as Godzilla vs. The Thing, it’s the fourth Godzilla film and the second Mothra film.
• Sunday in New York  –  A weak film based on a Norman Krasna play but it’s young Jane Fonda again (and this time she’s in color).
• Goodbye Charlie  –  Adapted from a George Axelrod play, I saw this during the Oscar director completion because it was directed by Vincente Minnelli.
• Robinson Crusoe on Mars  –  Sci-fi version of Robinson Crusoe which I originally saw because Criterion released it on DVD.
• Paris When it Sizzles  –  With William Holden and Audrey Hepburn this really should have been better.  Based on a French film (Holiday for Henrietta).
• Tamahine  –  Another ridiculous BAFTA Cinematography nominee, this one is based on the novel by Thelma Niklaus about a Polynesian woman at a British boys school.
• Send Me No Flowers  –  This is a Rock Hudson-Doris Day romantic comedy so it shouldn’t be better.  Based on the play.
• The Thin Red Line  –  Yes, the James Jones novel has been filmed before.  And yes there’s a reason it’s been forgotten.  Mid **.5.
• Children of the Damned  –  Village of the Damned gets a sequel.
• Of Human Bondage  –  I don’t like the Maugham novel in spite of its supposed greatness but Leslie Howard and Bette Davis had already done a first-rate job in 1934 so why bother doing it again with Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak?  Weak **.5.
• The Cool World  –  Preserved in the National Film Registry since 1994 because its “culturally important” and I agree with that, since it’s a film directed by a female African-American in 1963 (though Oscar eligible in 1964) but that doesn’t mean it’s all that good.  Originally a novel by Warren Miller then a play by Miller and Robert Rossen.
• Flight from Ashiya  –  From director Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days) comes a weak military adventure film.  Based on the novel by Elliot Arnold.
• Black Sabbath  –  Another culturally important film that’s not actually very good.  In fact, we’re in ** range now.  An anthology film that’s based on a variety of stories and it’s easier to link to the Wikipedia page that details all of them in the “Pre-Production” section than to list them all.
• Youngblood Hawke  –  The Herman Wouk novel becomes a lame Delmer Daves film.
• The Outrage  –  Martin Ritt remakes Rashomon and totally botches the job.
• The Last Man on Earth  –  The first film version of I Am Legend and though it has a strong cult reputation, I am not among its fans.
• Ensign Pulver  –  Since he didn’t get to film his own play back in 1955, Joshua Logan decided to film a sequel and it just sucks.  Low **.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• The Ballet of Othello  –  A 1960 Soviet ballet version of the Shakespeare play by Vakhtang Chabukiani.
• Night Must Fall  –  Not only a version of the hit Emlyn Williams play (filmed quite well in 1937) but also the only Karel Reisz film I haven’t seen.

“You realize who this linen girl Tanya is?” (p 612 – Pevear / Volokhonsky translation)

My Top 9:

1. Dr. Zhivago
2. The Pawnbroker
3. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
4. The Collector
5. A Thousand Clowns
6. King Rat
7. The Human Condition: Part III
8. Thunderball
9. The Train

Note:  That’s it.  After years and years of a list longer than ten, I can only come up with nine films and one of those, The Train, was actually nominated in the Original Screenplay category even though it was based on Rose Valland’s book.

Consensus Nominees:

1. Dr Zhivago  (144 pts)
2. A Thousand Clowns  (120 pts)
3. The Collector  (112 pts)
4. The Pawnbroker  (80 pts)
5. The Sound of Music  (80 pts)
6. Cat Ballou  (80 pts)
7. Ship of Fools  (80 pts)

Note:  The Golden Globes finally add their own Best Screenplay category this year.

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• Dr Zhivago
• Cat Ballou
• The Collector
• The Pawnbroker
• Ship of Fools

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• The Pawnbroker
• The Collector
• A Patch of Blue
• Ship of Fools
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

Comedy:

• A Thousand Clowns
• Cat Ballou
• That Darn Cat

Nominees that are Original:  The Great Race, What’s New Pussycat

Musical:

• The Sound of Music

Golden Globe:

• Dr. Zhivago
• The Agony and the Ecsatsy
• The Collector
• A Patch of Blue
• The Slender Thread

My Top 9

Doctor Zhivago

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the Best Picture nominees of 1965.  From the day I first saw it, back in high school, I have loved it.  David Lean was one of the first directors that I got interested in and whose films I sought out and I have been a huge fan ever since and this film is one of the reasons why.

The Source:

До́ктор Жива́го by Boris Pasternak  (1957)

I am less a fan of the novel.  I have read it twice now – once in its original translation and once in the Pevear / Volokhonsky translation.  The writing is beautiful but there really isn’t that much there.  In fact, Richard Pevear, in the introduction that latter translation, explains precisely why it doesn’t quite work for me:

“It was criticized for not being what it was never meant to be: a good, old-fashioned, nineteenth-century historical novel about the Russian revolution, an epic along the lines of War and Peace.  It was also praised for being what it was not: a moving love story, or the lyrical biography of a poet, setting the sensitive individual against the grim realities of Soviet life.  Western Marxists found that Pasternak failed to portray the major events and figures of the revolution – something he never set out to do.  Others devised elaborate allegorical readings of the novel, though Pasternak stated explicitly, in a letter to Stephen Spender (August 9, 1959) that ‘a detailed allegorical interpretation of literature’ was alien to him.’  Critics found that there was no real plot to the novel, that its chronology was confused, that the main characters were oddly effaced, that the author relied far too much on contrived coincidences.  These perplexities are understandable, but they come from a failure to pay attention to the specific composition of the novel, its way of representing reality, its was of making experience felt.” (p xiii-xiv)

So, I have an understanding of what Pasternak was attempting to do, but that doesn’t mean that what he does works for me.  It’s essentially six hundred pages of beautiful language without much to it, or, in other words, the world’s longest prose poem.  I found a perfect paragraph on page 101 that gives you an idea of what Pasternak does: “From grief, long standing on his feet, and lack of sleep, from the dense singing and the dazzling light of candles day and night, and from the cold he had caught during those days, there was a sweet confusion in Yura’s soul, blissfully delirious, mournfully enraptured.”  I can understand why the Nobel Prize went to Pasternak, with his beautiful grasp of language (especially given how that must read in Russian) but it doesn’t necessarily make for a great novel, at least for me.

The Adaptation:

“As a matter of fact, the first edict that Lean gave Bolt was to focus on the love story and downplay the politics.  Lean stressed that he was not interested in making a political statement about war and revolution.” (Beyond the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean, Gene D. Phillips, p 328)

“Lean and Bolt also added to the screenplay two brief incidents that, like the prologue, are not in the book.  These are the first meetings of Yuri and Lara on a trolley car and Yuri’s last sight of Lara from a streetcar as she walks down a Moscow street at film’s end.  These rhyming episodes provide a narrative frame for the romantic story, which is central to the plot.  By centering the film on the love story, Lean and Bolt drastically contracted Pasternak’s narrative.” (Phillips, p 329)

” ‘The story of Doctor Zhivago is very simple,’ says Lean.  ‘A man is married to one woman and in love with another.  The trick was in not having the audience condemn the lovers.'”  (David Lean, Stephen M. Silverman, p 153)

Those quotes really kind of sum up what the writers did.  As Bolt is quoted saying in the Silverman book, you can really only get about 1/20 of the book on to the screen, so almost all of the dialogue from the novel was sacrificed and created by Bolt himself.

The Credits:

Directed by David Lean.  From the Novel by Boris Pasternak.  Screenplay by Robert Bolt.

The Pawnbroker

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the five best films of 1965.  This is the kind of film that fills me with rage in my love of film.  That’s because it was nominated for exactly one Oscar, which it lost to Cat Ballou.  It was passed over for Picture and Adapted Screenplay in favor of Ship of Fools and it was passed over in Director and Editing, both of which were won by The Sound of Music.  The Pawnbroker is an amazing film, an unforgettable experience that is not only a Holocaust film but a film about what happens after, specifically, after everything you have is taken from you and you do not die.  It is not a film for the light of heart but it is such a serious film that it was approved for bare breasts at a time when that was still very much taboo in American film.  See this and remind yourself why Sidney Lumet was such a great filmmaker and marvel at the fact that Rod Steiger didn’t win the Oscar for it.

The Source:

The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant  (1961)

What can make you stop feeling?  The sense of loss after everything you have ever loved has been taken from you and yet you don’t die.  If you survive the Holocaust when all of your family does not, if you find yourself stumbling towards America and finding a job in which people come in and beg you for a little money while handing away their goods, a job not too far from the traditional Jewish profession of usury that was all that Jews were allowed to do for so many years, how can you even allow yourself to feel?  What would be the point?  You would only need to continually turn it off in order to do your job with any shred of ability.  So do not feel.  Shut the world off, no matter the people asking for charity, no matter the entreatments towards physical affection, no matter the young man who just wants to learn from you and whose rejection will push him towards more desperate measures.

All of this, of course, is what we endure when we read The Pawnbroker.  In reading it, we are at least spared some of the brutal visual images on the screen, but since we force ourselves to picture what might have been happening, that could actually be worse.  To add even more tragedy into the story, Edward Lewis Wallant, after such an amazing second novel, would die the next year at the age of 36 of a brain aneurysm.

The Adaptation:

The basic premise and many of the specific scenes from the film come directly from the book.  There are definitely lines that didn’t exist in the original book (specifically, I don’t remember reading the key line “I didn’t die.  Everything that I loved was taken away from me and I did not die.” although I might have just missed it).  There is also less in the book about what is going on with the actual pawn brokerage in the first place because the narrative of the novel rarely ever strays away from Sol himself.  So the film opens that up and gives us more things to help understand the tragic ending that perhaps will make Sol rediscover what it is like to feel.

The Credits:

Directed by Sidney Lumet.  Screenplay: Morton Fine, David Friedkin.  Based on the novel by Edward Lewis Wallant.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

The Film:

The first time I saw this film, I thought it was a good film.  It was an interesting, but kind of slow spy film with a remarkable performance from Richard Burton.  But, when I went back to it several years later I had started reading John le Carré and I had understood how his books were a counterpoint to the Ian Fleming novels, that this was a much more realistic way of looking at how intelligence agencies actually operate.  Suddenly, I was looking at this film again from a new viewpoint and it had gone up quite a bit, all the way to a high ***.5 film.

Alec Leamas is weary.  He is waiting in West Berlin for an agent to come in, the last of his agents in East Berlin.  The rest are all dead.  So the man comes, trying to get across on a bicycle and when the lights come on him, he panics and tries to make it, but is gunned down.  So Leamas is brought back to England, brought out of the Cold War to push some papers around.  He eventually leaves the service, ends up broke, meets a young Communist woman while working in a library and ends up in jail after beating a grocer.  It turns out this is part of a plan though, a plan to take down the main East German who had picked apart the British spy network.  So, Leamas is enticed by the East Germans and ends up on the other side of the Iron Curtain playing a very deadly game of cat and mouse, trying to take down a man, although it might not be the man that he thinks it is.

John le Carré had published two books before this one, but this was the one that made him a huge success.  Ian Fleming was dead by this time, but Bond was going like gangbusters at the cinema, so filmmakers decided to try the le Carré approach, the spy who works slowly, deliberately, who uses his intelligence rather than his fists, for a film that is suspenseful without being action packed.  It works for a variety of reasons.  The first is that le Carré book is first-rate, showing the masterly direction he could take a spy thriller that would eventually lead to his masterpiece, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  The second is that le Carré not only does a great job of writing the character of Alec Leamas, so beaten down by his job that you get totally sucked in when you think he is down on his luck and ends up in prison only to be rescued by a lovely young woman who has clearly fallen hard for him.  But the really smart thing was the casting of Richard Burton.  Burton, with his great Welsh accent, was one of the greatest actors who ever lived.  He so embodies the world weary agent, the man tired of being out in the cold, yet with just enough faith to fall in love at the exact wrong time bringing on the only conclusion that this film can possibly have.

I wonder what would have happened if this film was made today.  Would they have changed the ending?  This film, like the novel before, ends in the only way it really can.

The Source:

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré (1963)

The first two novels by le Carré had been interesting.  They had both revolved around George Smiley, a recently retired member of the “Circus”, the British Secret Service that was still officially denied at this point in history.  In the third book, we focus on a different character: Alec Leamas, the beleaguered head in Berlin whose agents have all been wiped out by the Eastern Germans.  So he is brought home to work at a desk, which he hates and decides not to do.  While we think we are watching the collapse of a once capable agent, we finally discover that Leamas has now been working with Smiley on a plan to be discredited so he will be recruited by the East Germans and he can go in and hopefully set things up against the man who killed his agents.

Smiley has a small supporting role in this book, being mentioned several times but only making a small appearance a couple of times (which would really only be obvious to careful readers of the first two books, or later, to readers of other Smiley books, because of the description of the character: “One was short and rather plump. He has glasses and wore odd, expensive clothes; he was a kindly, worried little man and Liz trusted him somehow without knowing why.”) before showing up at the very end of the book.

This was the novel that really cemented le Carré’s reputation as kind of the anti-Ian Fleming, the man who wrote more realistic spy fiction that steered away from the fisticuffs and action heroics of a man like James Bond.  It helped, of course, that le Carré had actually been a spy and was writing from his own experience.  But it is his stories, complicated, dense stories in which sometimes very little happens until you suddenly realize that a lot has been happening and you just don’t know it yet that are so masterful.

It is a very good book and a perfect gateway into reading le Carré.  I actually enjoy reading Fleming as well, but it is very clear that le Carré is the much more talented writer.

The Adaptation:

This is one of those really great adaptations.  By that I don’t mean that the script is of very high quality, although that of course is true.  What I mean is that the film does a magnificent job of adapting the book.  There are very few changes made from the original novel (the primary one being the name change given to the main female character so as to avoid any publicity comments about “Liz Gold” the character and the very real Liz Taylor then married to star Richard Burton).  The opening scenes do a magnificent job of sticking exactly to the book (I re-watched the film just before re-reading the book for this post and I could hear Burton saying his lines in my head as I was reading the opening scenes).  A few of the overall descriptions of how things work are truncated a little bit to make things flow more smoothly.  Most importantly, the ending of the film sticks to the ending of the novel, not going for the typical happy ending that could have easily been tacked on by less interesting filmmakers.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Martin Ritt.  Based upon the novel “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” by John Le Carré.  Screenplay by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper.

The Collector

The Film:

While I don’t have The Collector as a **** film (it’s close), it is, in the weak year of 1965, still good enough to be #5 for the year and earn a Nighthawk nomination for Best Picture, which also means I have already reviewed it.  Watching it this time, it was not long after writing about Alfie and that Terrence Stamp turned down the film role after playing the stage role.  Watching him in this film, I also see that he is only a few degrees off from Alex in A Clockwork Orange and I realized that his Frederick Clegg falls kind of somewhere in between Alfie and Alex, a disturbed young man whose obsessions run over his ability to think clearly.  This is the last really good William Wyler film and is a film that shouldn’t be missed, also as an example of a really good book being turned into a really good film.

The Source:

The Collector by John Fowles  (1963)

The books that John Fowles would write after the 60’s weren’t all that good.  They sometimes could hold my interest but they got pretty boring and I eventually gave up on all the ones I attempted.  However, he had already established himself as a really talented, powerful writer with the three novels that he published in this decade: The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  The Collector was his first novel and if you were to read it after reading the other two, you would be stunned that Fowles could write something that was so much shorter, so much less intricate, riding those boundaries between modernism and post-modernism that would be the hallmarks of the other two novels and yet still be so powerful.  It’s the story of an obsessive man who has come into money and uses it to buy an isolated house out in the country that kidnaps a beautiful young woman and holds her captive.  This isn’t a thriller about the young woman’s escape or a horror story about what he does to her.  It delves into each character and allows us to understand them and see how they both fail to understand each other.  The first part of the novel gives us his point-of-view while the second part gives us her diary while in captivity, a different, but no less essential point-of-view.  What makes it all the more fascinating is that this isn’t the early first novel that Fowles wrote before developing his style.  The bulk of The Magus was actually written before this but he languished on it and it still wasn’t published when he turned to this shorter work, writing it and publishing it before going back to the work that was really speaking to him.  The Collector didn’t end up making my Top 200 list but it came quite close.

The Adaptation:

Fowles had already, in a sense, done any film adaptation of the novel a favor.  Even short books can have a lot more than can fit in a two hour film.  But this novel, while still fairly short (255 pages), actually has two overlapping narratives.  So, really, in the narrative sense (and in adapting it), you can cut out almost half the book right away.  That meant that the filmmakers already had an easier task.  However, some of that overlapping narrative doesn’t really overlap since the kidnapped female, Miranda, tells the story of her relationship with her boyfriend.  The filmmakers considered using that and actually filmed the scenes but they got dropped.  Kenneth More was originally the third biggest character in the film, playing the boyfriend but Wyler ended up deciding against it.  ” ‘When I ran the rough cut for Willy, the pace seemed too slow,’ [Editor Robert] Swink recalls.  ‘We also knew it was too long.  So we pulled out the first flashback.  It ran better.  Willy said, ‘Why don’t we take out the second one?’  It ran much better.  Eventually we decided to eliminate all of them.”  (A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, Jan Herman p 427)

One other thing of note in the adaptation that is more implied than explicit.  Terrence Stamp had the idea that his character was impotent but once Miranda was dead, he could actually fuck her.  Wyler initially didn’t like that idea but decided later that he was more okay with it and he ended up filming the scene.  Nothing like that is ever explicitly stated in the book but it is actually a very reasonable deduction to make based on the way Fowles wrote the character.

The Credits:

Directed by William Wyler.  Screenplay by Stanley Mann and John Kohn.  Based on the novel by John Fowles.
note: These are from the end credits.  The title is the only thing in the opening credits.

A Thousand Clowns

The Film:

I probably should try not to have to see this film again.  I had really enjoyed it the first time I saw it, back around age 20, but by the time I watched it (and reviewed it) for the Best Picture project, it didn’t do nearly as well.  This time, I focused less on the carefree aspect of it and how it had appealed to me originally but on how it looks as a film and it’s pretty weak.  The editing is disjointed, the sound is all over the place and the direction is clearly lost.  As I said before, what it really has going for it is the spirit, the art direction in the apartment, and most importantly, the lead performance from Jason Robards.

The Source:

A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner (1962)

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Robards does so well in the play as he had played the lead role on Broadway.  In fact, four of the six characters carry over from their original stage performances (the only changes are Barbara Harris and Martin Balsam).  The play was a big hit on Broadway, mostly because of the carefree spirit.  It’s got some nice dialogue and a great role for Robards.

The Adaptation:

Herb Gardner, adapting his own play, kept almost all of the original dialogue.  The only real difference between the film and the play is that in the film, because they weren’t confined to one set (Murray’s apartment), it ranges all over the city.  We get numerous shots of walking through New York and vista shots of New York (a lot of times we are getting the sights with the dialogue spoken over it and it’s a little jarring) and there are a lot of scenes with no dialogue whatsoever, but just designed to show off Murray’s carefree lifestyle.

The Credits:

produced and directed by Fred Coe.  screenplay by Herb Gardner based on his original play.

King Rat

The Film:

Because of timing and availability, I tend to watch films from various years at the same time.  As a result, I was watching King Rat in the same weekend that I watched The Great Escape and it seemed like the films were two very different views on the same concept.  It’s not just that The Great Escape was based on non-fiction (with a lot of fictional details) and that it was set in a POW camp in Germany while this was based on a novel (though inspired by Clavell’s actual war experiences) and set in Singapore.  It’s the experience of the men.  In The Great Escape, we have an entire camp working together, trying to get out, get back to fighting the war.  In King Rat, we have a camp of men with any hope or desire beaten out of them.  James Garner’s scrounger in The Great Escape is a good man, working with the group, getting them what they need so that they can all succeed together.  George Segal’s King is a brutally selfish man, out only for himself (though he will sometimes come through for some of those closest to him, although it’s hard to describe it as friendship) and is the constant nemesis of Grey, the hard-nose man determined to keep everyone following the rules in this harsh environment.

Who are you supposed to root for?  Segal’s King is charming and a bit suave, in spite of his circumstances and he uses every resource at his command to make life better for himself and those close to him.  He is an example of what some would say makes America great.  Grey is viewed as the rigid, unbending voice of the rules, the man who does what he is supposed to instead of what might be right, the very epitome of being British.  Caught between them is young Lt. Marlowe, a Brit who is repulsed by Grey (partially due to class differences, since Marlowe is a gentleman and Grey has risen from a working-class family) and finds himself intrigued by the King.  And, played by Tom Courtenay (in the same year that he also played Pasha, a man who, as I pointed out to my mother, is so rigid that he would rather fight the Czar than doink Julie Christie), in the best performance in a film that is not short of strong performances, he is a man designed to invoke no sympathy or empathy.

All of this is set against the fading days of the war, as we move through V-E Day and towards V-J Day.  We see John Mills as a high-ranking officer who has been reduced to his basic needs and Denholm Elliot in a strong early performance.  We watch men who demand death for a pet dog because it killed a chicken and men who would eat the dog gleefully because at least it’s a chance for some meat.  This film is a reminder that while war, for some, could bring out the best, it could just as easily bring out the basest of human emotions that would tear at others just to survive.

The Source:

King Rat by James Clavell  (1962)

Unfortunately, while you can unlearn things (like that Pluto is no longer a planet or that Ayn Rand’s first name is not pronounced like the name Anne), you can’t un-know things.  Like, for instance, I can’t forget that James Clavell was an ardent admirer of Rand and her “philosophy”. For the most part, that’s not a problem, because I’m not about to sit through hundreds and hundreds of pages of Shogun and Noble House (and those were tv mini-series, so I don’t have to care about them for this project).  But I did force myself to read King Rat and it colors my reaction to the King, since he so clearly is the kind of model that Rand loved, the selfish man looking out only for himself and showing that rugged individualism.  All of that having been said, the novel is okay but could have been a lot shorter, though at 479 pages, I should be glad that it’s not like his later novels.

The Adaptation:

The film follows the original novel fairly closely and almost every major scene in the book makes it to the screen intact.  It’s really a surprisingly strong adaptation.  In spite of being repulsed by the King when I think about him, it doesn’t color my view of the film because it’s quite well made, quite well written and has a very strong ensemble cast.  So I suppose I should give some credit to Clavell, since it really does come mostly from his original novel.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen and Directed by Bryan Forbes.  Based on a novel by James Clavell.

人間の條件 完結篇
(The Human Condition: Part III)

The Film:

In some ways, it perhaps feels wrong to only review one of the three films in this series.  In one very real sense, they are one film, though they were released over the course of three years originally (and came to the States further apart, which is why we’re only getting to this film now).  It’s the story of one man, Kaji, a pacifistic socialist who falls in love, tries to find humanism working in Manchuria in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II then being drafted into the army and finally, on a mission to return home, finding nothing but despair and dismay.  The first film (also known as No Greater Love) chronicles his romance with his wife and his work in a labor camp that leads to him being drafted into the army.  The second film (Road to Eternity) chronicles his time in the army fighting in the war against the Soviets and ends with him killing one of his own men with his bare hands to keep himself from being discovered by the Soviets.  Now we get to the third film, which in my opinion is the best of the trilogy and is the reason that it makes it into my Top 10 while the others didn’t (though, to be fair, in many previous years, it still wouldn’t have made the Top 10 but as I have said, this is a weak year).

At the conclusion of the second film, Kaji had killed a man with his bare hands and was left with the idea that he had become a monster in his desperate attempt to stay alive.  Not long after the third film opens, he is forced to actually bayonet a Soviet soldier in order to escape.  The humanism that had been the core of his beliefs in the first film (and were what lead to his being conscripted in the first place) was quickly seeping away.  This film is a journey for Kaji, literally, as he tries to escape the war and flees not only the Japanese soldiers themselves (he’s looked on as a deserter) but also the Soviets and even the Chinese (though his journey pauses here as he seeks vengeance for the death of a woman).  But it’s also a journey for Kaji within himself.  He’s still trying to hold on to any of his beliefs, both the humanism that made him kind and the socialism that made him seek equality for all.  These will be tested, however, when he ends up in a Soviet labor camp, a prisoner who agrees with their ideology (in theory) but is repulsed by their actual lives.  Watching it again I was reminded how, when I first learned about the basic tenants of socialism in junior high I realized that it was the ideal system in theory but would never work in practice because human beings are too inherently selfish to ever live in such a system the way it’s designed to work (which is why you get totalitarian communist governments).

In the end, what we get is a man who has lost everything.  He knows his wife is still out there somewhere and he has hopes of returning to her.  The last ten minutes of the film are just Kaji, walking through the wilderness as the snow continues to build.  Yet, like with so much of this long film series (if viewed as one film, it lasts almost ten hours), it doesn’t feel that long because Kobayashi has done such a good job of directing it and Tatsuya Nakadai (who has been seen in this project before in High and Low and Harakiri, but in films that were actually made after this series) gives such an intense performance that it never feels like we’re just killing time.  Out there, in the snow and nothingness, there is nothing left for him.  I am reminded of The Pawnbroker again and his famous line, the difference being that everything has been taken away from him and so he dies.  What else can he do at this point but die?

The Source:

人間の條件 (Ningen no jōken) by Junpei Gomikawa  (1958)

The original novel, published in six parts, was based in part on Gomikawa’s experiences during the war (though obviously his life didn’t have the same ending).  When it was published in 1958 in Japan it was a massive best-seller and was critically acclaimed (though also attacked for its politics).  However, it has never been translated into English, so it’s not even possible for me to read it.

The Adaptation:

While I haven’t been able to read the original novel, I can say, based on interviews available on the Criterion set that it is incredibly faithful to the original novel.  Masaki Kobayashi was so determined to keep close to the source that he would actually add in scenes before filming that had been in the book but weren’t in the working script.

The Credits:

Directed by Masaki Kobayashi.  Based on the Novel by Junpei Gomikawa.  Screenplay by Zenzo Matsuyama, Koichi Inagaki and Masaki Kobayashi.
note:  As always with languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet, I am forced to rely on translations for the credits.  Credits courtesy of Criterion.

Thunderball

The Film:

I have already written a full review of Thunderball when I did my for For Love of Film series on James Bond.  As I mentioned in that review, this is one of the better Bond films, a solid ***.5 (not great, but very good) and the last of the strong early run.  But, the caveat for that, is that it depends on how indulgent you are willing to be about underwater scenes because they take up a lot of the film.  I mentioned in the review that Thunderball and Goldfinger were both the #10 films of the year in spite of Goldfinger being the better film (it’s in a significantly better year).  The same is true in Adapted Screenplay where Goldfinger is most assuredly the stronger film but Thunderball actually ranks higher in its year because, hell, I couldn’t even manage a full Top 10 in this year.

The Source:

Thunderball by Ian Fleming; This story is based on a screen treatment by K. McClary, J. Whittingham and the author.  (1961)

In some ways, no matter what you think of the quality of Thunderball (the novel), it is the second most important of the Bond books after only Casino Royale.  That’s because it’s the novel that introduced SPECTRE, the terrorist organization made up of former SMERSH members, Mafia, and other assorted villains and, of course, its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Of course, it’s also the one that belongs the least to Fleming, as should be obvious from the title, which I pulled straight from the title page of my copy (sadly, I don’t have the copy on the right, I have the movie cover copy).  In fact, Fleming was actually sued for publishing it because he had worked with McClary and Whittingham and then turned around and rather than wait for the film to be made, turned it into one of the Bond novels.  The issue was still in the courts when Fleming died in 1964 but eventually McClary ended up with the producer’s credit and remake rights (which he did in 1983 as Never Say Never Again).  It is a solid Bond adventure, with him going up against SPECTRE to recover a purloined nuke and of course, going up even closer against Domino.

The Adaptation:

Even though it was originally written as a screenplay, the film version still differs in some considerable ways from the Fleming novel.  The main two things are the use of the double for the pilot that is seen at the health farm by Bond (not in the book) and the continued use of Fiona Volpe, the deadly (and sexy) SPECTRE agent who first kills the agent who was humiliated by Bond (that part is in the book but his killer is not female and is not extensively used again) and then tries to kill Bond himself before dying in the attempt (none of that is in the book nor is the character).  Much of the time in Nassau, however, is fairly faithful to the book.

The Credits:

Directed by Terence Young.  Screenplay by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins.  Based on an original screenplay by Jack Whittingham.  Based on the original story by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and Ian Fleming.

The Train

The Film:

Lots of films are about a race against time.  But most of those films, whether they be James Bond stopping a bomb or Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star, involve death as the consequence.  This film is also a race against time, but it’s to keep the Nazis from plundering French museums and taking many of the greatest works of art known to Western civilization and either stealing them or even destroying them.  The Nazis are working against the clock because they’re losing their Western Front and they have a limited time to get themselves out of Paris.  The French Resistance are also working against time, because they know if they can delay the Nazis just enough, the Allied forces will come in and the art will be saved.

So who can save the art?  Well, Burt Lancaster can, of course, because he’s the star of the film, working against Paul Scofield.  There’s a typical difference in class here, as Scofield’s Nazi colonel knows the great works of art he’s trying to take, knows their worth, both figuratively and literally.  Lancaster is just a train guy and he doesn’t know or really care about art.  In fact, he’s unwilling to help out until an old conductor that everyone knows and loves is executed after trying to stop the train from leaving.  Seeing that sacrifice, Lancaster is finally pushed too far and leads the movement to secure the art, first by stalling the trains, then derailing them.  Anything to keep the art from getting away.

Unlike what we would later see in a film like The Monuments Men (I mention it several times below because of the historical connections), this film doesn’t really care that much about the art itself.  We get a few glimpses of some paintings at the beginning and after that, it’s really just a catalog of names: Renoir!  Van Gogh!  Picasso!  Never mind that only one of those was actually French.  We must save the important art!  We never get a sense of why the art is so great and important because that’s not really what this film is about.  It’s a race against Nazis, an action thriller that continually pits Lancaster against the Nazis, against bullets and explosions, against trains, with Lancaster always coming out ahead in the end.

This is an effective thriller (of the 16 films I have seen by Frankenheimer, I rank it 5th), partially because of the story at the heart of it, partially because of Lancaster’s action driven performance and partially, at least, because of some accidents.  Lancaster hurt himself during filming and so they had to add in a scene where he is shot so as to explain his limp, but that adds pathos to his character’s arc.  Michel Simon was unavailable for later filming so they had him killed off and that helps Lancaster’s character’s growth after he tries to stop the execution.  Penn leaving the film helped allow it to become more of an action driven film and that might be what would work best for this story.  In the end, we get a fairly good, enjoyable film.

The Source:

Le front de l’art by Rose Valland  (1961)

Rose Valland, the art historian who was responsible for keeping track of famous works of art for the Resistance and helped to keep it all from falling into Nazi hands or being destroyed would write this book about her experiences specifically in stopping a train from leaving Paris just ahead of Allied forces.  She is portrayed at the beginning of the film, noting the art being taken and passing the information to others in the Resistance.  If she seems familiar, that’s because the role that Cate Blanchett plays in The Monuments Men is based on her as well.  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Valland’s book has never been translated into English, so I am unable to read what she has to say.  But you can read about her (a little bit) in The Monuments Men and (much more so) in The Rape of Europa, both fascinating books that deal with the Nazi looting of art.

The Adaptation:

“(After Arthur Penn was fired), Walter Bernstein immediately resigned from the film and declined screen credit for his work.  In the commentary track for the film’s 1994 laserdisc release, Frankenheimer said that Nedrick Young and Howard Dimsdale wrote the script he shot, not Coen and Davis but that Young and Dimsdale (both of whom had been blacklisted) were denied credit in Writers Guild of America arbitration.” (Arthur Penn: American Director, Nat Segaloff, p 274 (fn 5)

One of the things that becomes clear, in anything you read about the film, is that once Penn was out, Lancaster pushed it for it to be a much more action based film.  Even without reading Valland’s book, I know that the events dramatized in the film contain much more action (and explosions) than what actually happened in the true story of keeping the art from ever making it far from Paris.  Like The Monuments Men would later do, with some of the same story, it would tell a much more film based story than the dramatic events which actually ensued.

The Credits:

Directed by John Frankenheimer.  Screen Story and Screenplay by Franklin Coen and Frank Davis.  Based upon “Le Front De L’Art” by Rose Valland.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

The Sound of Music

The Film:

I have seen this films more times than I would wish to.  I saw it any number of times as a kid (my mother is one of those people who really loves it, e-mailing me the other day thinking she had owned it which thankfully she does not, because I would have been forced to watch it even more as a kid) and while some of the songs would fondly stick with me (“Do-Re-Mi”), others would be the stuff of waking nightmares (“Climb Every Mountain”).  There are people who love it and I will never be able to convince them otherwise (you can get an idea from the comments in the post where my original review ran) but it is just not a great film no matter how much people might love it.

The Source:

The Sound of Music, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (1960)

This musical was inspired the story of the Trapp family singers (it says so right on the title page of the book – “Suggested by THE TRAPP FAMILY SINGERS by Maria Augusta Trapp).  But, as I mentioned in my review of the film, it was not adapted from more classical literature like other Best Picture winning musicals of the era like Gigi, West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Oliver.  As a result, the story of this musical is a bit thin, even for a musical.  It relies primarily on the songs to pull it through (and the romance, once that starts to come to life).  Luckily for them, it has more memorable songs than almost any musical to come before it with the exception of West Side Story (just because I don’t much like the songs doesn’t mean I can’t remember them).

It is, as Robert Wise will note below, a really cheesy and sticky sweet musical.  That this was the only Best Picture winner between 1948 and 1997 not to earn a writing nomination really says more about the original musical than the adaptation that was made from it.

Even though the film isn’t based on The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp, I took a stroll through it anyway, as I generally do with original sources for stage musicals (it’s called OCD – look it up).  The Sound of Music is definitely not history, let’s just say that.  How long does it seem like between the time Maria and the Captain are married and when they flee Austria?  I asked both Veronica and my mother that question and they both said around a few months.  Turns out it was 11 years.  The stage musical took the basic story of their life (young nun in training moves to big estate house to care for children, ends up marrying father, they become famous singers and end up leaving Austria to flee the Nazis) and crafted their own story.  The basic story is accurate and almost none of the details are.  It also only covers part of the book – Part I of the 300+ page book ends on page 124 when they leave Austria.  Maria actually wrote much more about their life after leaving than she did about their life in Austria.  But that’s fine.  Rodgers and Hammerstein never claimed to be giving us a history lesson and we shouldn’t take this as one.

The Adaptation:

Well, the original stage musical does not begin with a young Maria belting out “The hills are alive with the sound of music” on a mountaintop.  The musical actually begins with the nuns singing their Dominus.  Much as I find the opening to be too sickly sweet, it’s the right move for this film.

There are other changes, of course.  As with lots of musicals, songs are dropped (“An Ordinary Couple”), songs are added (“I Have Confidence”, “Something Good”) and songs are moved (“My Favorite Things” on stage is sung before she leaves the abbey as a duet with the Mother Abbess rather than to the children in the nursery – they wisely dumped that as Ernest Lehman explains in Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute, ed. George Stevens, Jr, p 492 – “it seemed somehow inappropriate for the mother abbess to be singing ‘My Favorite Things.’ I felt how much more appropriate it was for Maria to try to pacify the children, who were frightened by the thunderstorm, and to tell them what she does when she gets upset. She thinks about some other favorite things, and before you know it you’re into the number.”).

But the most remarkable thing is what the filmmakers tried to do.  Just look at this quote from Robert Wise in the book Robert Wise on His Films: “Right from the beginning, we felt that whatever we could do to diminish the overly saccharine aspects of it, and still not hurt the basic bottom line of the story and the emotional parts of it that touch and affected people, we would help ourselves. We made every effort to find ways of not getting too cute.” (p 180).  Think of that!  Think of what kind of film they might have made if they hadn’t tried to do that, given the results when they did do it.  Now, another quote from Wise in that book does point out perhaps part of the reason is so damn long: “Ernie rewrote dialogue leading into songs in several instances so they could go smoothly in and not have that sense of embarrassment of suddenly going from dialogue into song.” (p 182)

The Credits:

Directed by Robert Wise.  Music by Richard Rodgers.  Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.  Additional Words and Music by Richard Rodgers.  From the Stage Musical with Music and Lyrics by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II.  Book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.  Originally Produced on the Stage by Leland Hayward, Richard Halliday, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.  Screenplay by Ernest Lehman.

Cat Ballou

The Film:

When I did a list of the sexiest performances in film history, there were no appearances by Jane Fonda on the list.  How can that be, you say, when I am constantly preaching about how she is so unbearably sexy, the sexiest kitten who ever walked across the screen?  Well, that’s because when I made the list, I made a specific point that the acting was a considerable portion of what went into my ranking.  If given a choice, I would chose Jane Fonda in the 60’s over any beautiful actress who has ever appeared on screen but it wasn’t until 1969, with They Shoot Horses Don’t They that Fonda really learned how to act.  Before that, she was beautiful and sensual and desirable but there was also something missing there.  So it makes it somewhat conflicting to watch any of her 60’s films, because she’s amazing to look at but she’s heard to bear.

If Fonda’s performance was the only thing lacking in Cat Ballou, it wouldn’t be so much of a problem.  But it’s a comedic Western and those types of films usually don’t go so well (though, ironically, Lee Marvin would star in one of the best of those the next year in The Professionals).  It tries to deal with serious subject matters (people being driven off their land and murdered) while keeping it all very silly and light.  It’s badly written, mostly badly acted and badly directed.  Very little of it is actually funny.

So what does this film have going for it aside from Jane Fonda looking really really good?  Well, it has an Oscar nominated song that continually tells the story throughout the film that was the last performance from Nat King Cole who would actually die of cancer before the film was released.  It also has an Oscar winning performance from Lee Marvin as both the drunken gunslinger hired by Fonda to help keep her father alive (which he doesn’t) and the villain, who it turns out is the gunslinger’s brother.  While Marvin’s performance (at least as the drunk) is entertaining, it in no way shape or form deserved the Oscar, especially in a year where Rod Steiger was nominated for The Pawnbroker (and Marvin expected Steiger to win and told him so at the Oscars).  So, while Marvin is the best thing about the film (everyone else in the film is simply terrible), he also brings the film down by having won an undeserved Oscar.

The Source:

The Ballad of Cat Ballou by Roy Chanslor  (1956)

This is a bit of an odd Western, the story of a young woman named Cat who becomes an outlaw after the death of her parents and eventually falls in love with a two-bit swindler.  The novel isn’t all that good but it has an interesting rhythm to it.  While there are constant little refrains from the “ballad”, the style of writing itself also lends itself to a more musical style, with short little paragraphs throughout the book that feel like they are just a larger, more prosaic part of the ballad.  Chanslor was already known for writing Johnny Guitar, which had become a film two years before this novel was published.

The Adaptation:

This is one of those films that takes the basic idea of the plot (a young woman turns outlaw after her parents are killed and gets involved with a gunslinger named Kid Shelleen) and then re-invents almost everything else in the film (including the entire character of Tim Strawn, let alone that he’s Kid’s brother).  Even the song in the film, though named after the novel’s title, is completely new, using none of the lyrics that appeared in the original novel.

The Credits:

Directed by Elliot Silverstein.  Screenplay by Walter Newman and Frank R. Pierson.  Based on a novel by Roy Chanslor.

Ship of Fools

The Film:

I have reviewed this film already as a Best Picture nominee.  You can read that review or you can just be assured that this film is not particularly well directed or well written and in spite of strong performances from Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret and Vivian Leigh (her final performance) is still far more boring than it has any right to be.

The Source:

Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter  (1962)

The first thing I knew about this book was that the author was older when it was published.  “When the New York Times asked Marvin if he had read Katherine Anne Porter’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel before making movie, he retorted, ‘Hell, no.  A book by a seventy-two year-old broad?  Not me.'”  Reading that, some 25 years ago when I first bought Inside Oscar (the book the quote comes from, on p 382), it put a low opinion of Lee Marvin in my head.  I still have a low opinion of Marvin for skipping a book just because the author’s age but to skip this book?  Well, he lucked out in that regard.  (By the way – that quote is also an example of what is wrong with Inside Oscar, and I’m know talking about the missing “the” in the quote, which is their mistake, not mine, but that Porter won those awards for her Collected Stories, not Ship of Fools).

Porter started work on this novel in 1940 but it wouldn’t end up being published until 1962.  She didn’t spend the time idly, given the copyright page though because there are seven earlier dates before 1962 and several magazines carried portions of the book.  But in the end, there are 500 pages of novel and not much going on.  It’s the story of a very large cast of characters who are traveling by ship from Mexico (and Cuba) to Germany in 1931 with the looming spectre of Nazism about to rear its head.  You struggle to keep track of all the characters in spite of a list at the beginning of the book (29 named characters and a number of unnamed ones).  The book is much like the film, taking a diverse group of characters and shaking them up in the hope that something interesting will happen, but it’s not really Porter’s style to actually have anything happen.  The book was a smash hit (supposedly the best selling book of 1962) but it really is a dud.

The Adaptation:

“Katharine Anne Porter’s story takes place in 1931. I moved mine forward to 1933 because that was when Hitler came to power. Even though we never mention him in the picture, his ascendancy is an ever-present factor.” (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood, Stanley Kramer, p 204)

There are certain aspects of the book which are kept quite faithful.  We get to watch the develop relationship between the doctor and the Condessa, for instance.  But much of the film actually came from the pen of Abby Mann, not Porter.  The Greek chorus dwarf?  Not in the book.  The former ball player played by Lee Marvin?  Not in the book.  The death scene at the end of the book handled so poorly?  Not in the story.  They kept the basic premise and they definitely kept the anti-semitism (because it played into Kramer’s theme of moving it up to 1933) and they invented a lot of their own characters because apparently Porter hadn’t given them enough to work with.

The Credits:

produced and directed by Stanley Kramer.  screenplay by Abby Mann.
the only mention of the source is in the title card: in a film based on katherine anne porter’s ship of fools.

Multiple Nominations

A Patch of Blue

The Film:

Social progress has growing pains, especially when it is reflected in art.  The best example of that is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a movie made by and for liberals who were moving towards racial equality.  But it’s graceless and clunky and painful to watch and there were some who thought so even in 1967.  This film came two years earlier, a film just as clunky.  It means well in what it is trying to do, but it doesn’t have the grace to really do it well.  It also has the added layer of dealing with two different issues at once.

The first issue is the one which becomes obvious right at the start.  The main character in this film is blind.  It will turn out that she was blinded by her mother in an accident when she tried to throw acid on her husband.  The mother has raised the daughter, with the help of her own father, although neither one has ever done much for the daughter.  She has a small little job stringing beads while her mother works as a prostitute and her grandfather drinks their money away.  One day she goes to the park and she meets a nice man, one who interacts with her out of kindness rather than pity and that helps set up the next issue.  He’s black.  But, being blind, she doesn’t know that.

What will follow will be the really clunky part, although the WGA apparently didn’t agree since they nominated the script for Best Written Drama or the Academy, which hoisted 5 Oscar nominations on the film.  The film does have some decent acting, though Shelley Winters didn’t deserve to win a second Oscar for this film and Elizabeth Hartman definitely didn’t deserve an Oscar nomination.  Sidney Poitier is solid because he’s Poitier and he seemed made for films like this, films that moved the social progress barrier just a little bit further.  He plays the role with dignity and grace, which makes it all the more odious, of course, when the relationship is discovered.

This film goes places you could pretty much guess it would go.  It’s not particularly good (I have it as actually a **.5 film).  It’s just another example of painfully trying to make some progress through art.

The Source:

Be Ready with Bells and Drums by Elizabeth Kata (1961)

If the film is clunky, what does that say about the book?   The book doesn’t have the saving grace of Sidney Poitier or Shelley Winters.  The book is clunky in the extreme, awkwardly moving forward.  It’s also written in the first person from the blind girl’s perspective, so for most of the book we only know that there is some man who treats her kindly when he meets her in the park.  It is only in the last line of the penultimate chapter that we finally found out that he is black.  Then we get one final chapter where everything gets quickly wrapped up and he arranges to get her sent off to a school for the blind so that she can improve her life and escape her situation.  The writing isn’t any good, but thankfully it is fairly short (just over 200 pages).

The Adaptation:

Most of the film follows decently along with the book.  There are more scenes in the man’s apartment than there are in the book and the discovery that he is black is not made by the girl’s boss, as in the book, but rather by her mother.  There is also much more of a confrontation scene in the film than there is in the book.  And, of course, the film had to be upfront with us that he is black, while the book was able to suppress this information until almost the end.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen and Directed by Guy Green.  Based on “Be Ready with Bells and Drums” by Elizabeth Kata.

WGA Nominees

That Darn Cat!

The Film:

Over the course of a half-decade, Hayley Mills starred in six films for Disney.  She aged from the girl in Pollyanna to the late teen who has a surfer boyfriend practically living in her house in this, her final Disney film.  She became one of the most popular film stars in both America and her native Britain partially because of her Disney work and her hit song “Let’s Get Together” from The Parent Trap but much of her success in Britain, it must be said, is from the much more adult films she starred in (doing a much better job of showcasing her acting talent) like Tiger Bay, Whistle Down the Wind and The Chalk Garden.  Mills would be the star of this film but she would have to share her screen time with Dean Jones, who would take the baton from her and be the new Disney star for over a decade as well as DC, that darn cat that is the focus of the story.  If Jones had his charm, he didn’t really have Mills’ talent and that’s in evidence as his films aren’t nearly as good as the ones that starred Mills but that’s neither here nor there.  Here, while they share the majority of the screen time, it’s Dorothy Provine as her sister that would take home Jones at the end of the film.

The basic premise of the film runs as thus: two bank robbers kidnapped a teller when they pulled their last job, though why they would do so is never made clear and that’s odd when you remember that kidnapping was still a capital crime in many states back in 1965.  But, she manages to attach her watch to the stray cat that wanders in through the window of the apartment they are staying in (yes, this plot is as utterly as ridiculous as it sounds) and when the cat returns home, the two young women (how young is never quite clear – they both look late teens, early 20’s though in real life they were 19 and 30 when the film was released) see the watch, realize what it means and contact the FBI.  That brings Jones into the film as the young agent assigned the case which involves following the cat (to which he is allergic, of course), not only in the neighborhood, but also around the house (which brings out the imagination of the nosy neighbor next door), constantly having to track down the darn cat (that really is the cat’s name) and try to get it outside so they can find out where the bank robbers are.

In the last years of Walt Disney’s life, the company had really started producing more and more live action films aimed at kids.  The year before he had hit the peak with Mary Poppins.  But mostly there were more and more films like this one, silly little films with one of his stars.  This would be one of the most successful of the later Disney films (he would die the next year) but in no way is it one of the better ones.  If you’re going to watch a Hayley Mills Disney film, you’re much better off with Pollyanna or The Parent Trap.

The Source:

Undercover Cat by The Gordons  (1963)

The Gordons were a husband and wife team that would write suspense and mystery novels together.  This one, I suppose, qualifies as such, but it really feels more like a novel for kids.  It’s the story of how a cat manages to climb in a window where two thieving kidnappers are hiding out with their hostage and she attaches her watch to the cat.  When the cat returns to its “owners” (it’s really a stray), they discover the watch and get the FBI involved.  From there, it’s kind of a silly story about how one intrepid young FBI agent manages to capture the bad guys and even start to romance one of the young girls who “owns” the cat.

The Adaptation:

This is an example of an adaptation where they kept the general idea and changed a lot of the particulars.  Those particulars include a younger brother (deleted for the film), a surfer who kind of serves as a love interest (added for the film), a befuddled husband for the nosy next-door neighbor (added for the film), the ending (the next door neighbor is still with his chosen because the FBI agent goes for the other girl with no surfer in the book).  We also don’t meet the kidnappers and their victim until much later with the cat first appearing with the watch around its neck at the beginning of the book.  Even the name of the cat is different as “DC” in the book stands for “damn cat”.

The Credits:

Directed by Robert Stevenson.  Screenplay by The Gordons and Bill Walsh.  Based on the book “Undercover Cat” by The Gordons.

Golden Globe Nominees

The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Film:

Did the producers of this film think they might have a potential side business of cutting the first twelve minutes off this film and selling it to schools?  Before we get to the business of an actual film, we have a 12 minute lecture on the greatness of Michelangelo, showing off many of his most famous sculptures, although, ironically, not giving us anything of the Sistine Chapel.  They want to save that for the film itself.

Although that brings up an interesting “truism” that I have been thinking about which is well suited to discussing this film.  That’s the idea that biographies of writers are more to interesting to read than those of artists but biopics of artists are more interesting to watch than those of writers.  Now, that’s not always going to be the case and as it so happens this isn’t exactly the most interesting film in the world.  The reason for these things is because writers are interested in the written word and it’s easy to make that flow on the page (which is also why writers like to write fiction about writers, not only because they already know the life but because they can intermix in the fiction within fiction).  For an artist, reading a biography without actually getting the art is like getting less than half the story.  But then go to the screen.  Watching a writer sit there with pad in hand, or typing out the words doesn’t really provide a lot for the screen.  I don’t know that it adds a lot more to have an artist with brush in hand (or chisel) but at least we get the art on screen.  It gives us something to look at.

All of that being said, while the art in this film is impressive to look at because of course Michelangelo was one of the world’s foremost artists, the film only really comes to life when we have the Pope on the screen as well and we get some actual drama and not just the creation of art.  This isn’t really a biopic like say Lust for Life or Moulin Rouge (which were better films but also had much better performances from the actors playing the artists) but is rather just the dramatization of the four years (1508 to 1512) when Michelangelo was entrusted (and bribed and cajoled and basically forced) with painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  This allows for arguments with the Pope.  Michelangelo is played by Charlton Heston with his typical straightforward stoicism, with the notion that sticking his chin out and making proclamations counts as acting.  The Pope, much more intriguingly, is played by Rex Harrison.  It’s only when Harrison comes on-screen that the film itself actually comes to life (as opposed to just the art).  Indeed, by far the best scene in the film takes place nowhere near Rome itself, as the Pope and his painter stand in the middle of a war discussing the plans while the Pope’s armies wait for his signal to advance.  But the battle is held up in the name of art.  That scene is so much better than everything else in the film that you wonder how it managed to end up in the film in the first place.

The film is far from great but it isn’t bad either.  It looks good, with nice sets and costumes, has a nice (Oscar nominated) score and a fine performance from Harrison.  It was directed by Carol Reed and Heston thought it would help revive Reed’s career which had been floundering in the years since The Third Man (surely helped along by the rumors that Welles had directed it) but the irony is that Reed directed two films in Britain in between that were much better but faired poorly at the box office (An Outcast of the Islands, Our Man in Havana).  In the end, you could say Heston got it right because Reed’s next film, three years later, Oliver, would win him the Oscar, and to be fair, that is a considerably better film than this one.

The Source:

The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo by Irving Stone  (1961)

So, yes, this isn’t even an actual biography.  It’s worse.  It’s a biographical novel, which is what the writer does when they want to insert dialogue into it (or not do enough research).  If that sounds familiar, that’s because I made this complaint in my 1952 post about Moulin Rouge and then made it again in 1956 when writing about Lust for Life and even pointed out in that one that I would probably do it again here because Lust for Life was also written by Irving Stone.  If you’re going to write a biographical novel about an artists then put some of the god damn art in the book!  The whole point of their life is the art.  I don’t want to read well over 700 pages on Michelangelo’s life and then have to go search out his art myself.  Actually, I would just prefer not to have read the book at all and that’s what I recommend for others.

The Adaptation:

While the film is based, ostensibly, on the Stone novel, it was not the only source.  As Peter William Evans’ book on Carol Reed notes on p. 145, screenwriter Philip Dunne looked at a variety of sources.  The most notable was Giorgio Vassari’s Lives of the Artists, which helps provide the structure for the film as well as some of the actual dialogue.

Of course, if you have made the mistake of reading through all of Stone’s novel then you would have probably guessed this already.  That’s because while this is a 138 minute film made from a 776 page novel, the action in the film only covers 50 pages of the book, as Pope Julius II commands Michelangelo to paint the ceiling on page 499 and he dies on page 550 and there’s not even a whole lot of dialogue in those 50 pages.

To be fair to the filmmakers (and I don’t know if this was Dunne’s plan or if he did what he was told to do), this was the wise move.  Why bother to make an entire biopic when the main drama in the film is not just painting the ceiling but the friction between the Pope and his painter.  So limit yourself to those four years of Michelangelo’s life rather than the entire thing and you can actually have a dramatic arc for the film.  It doesn’t make for the strongest film ever (obviously) but it could have been a lot worse.

The Credits:

Directed by Carol Reed.  Based on the novel The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone.  Screen Story and Screenplay by Philip Dunne.

The Slender Thread

The Film:

A university student bikes across the UW campus to his car and heads off to an evening shift manning a suicide prevention hotline, something that I imagine was still a pretty new concept in 1965.  That the student is played by an actor fifteen years after he was already playing a doctor is something we can pretend to ignore since the actor in question, Sidney Poitier, not only looked younger than his years but also was an actor of such exquisite skill that he could pull playing a younger man.  That the student is also black is something we don’t have to pretend to ignore.  In spite of it still being only 1965, the race of the student is ignored.  This isn’t Poitier being asked to again play a noble young man who must overcome the question of race (thankfully, since I’ve already gotten through A Patch of Blue).  Instead, he gets a chance to shine in a different kind of role, one which asks him to play off another actor who never even appears on screen with him.

The student takes a call from a woman who starts talking about barbiturates.  As he tries to talk her down, she reveals that she’s not asking questions about the drugs; she’s already taken the drugs and just wanted a voice to talk to her while they take effect.  As he keeps her talking, keeping her alive, he rallies people around him (a psychiatrist, the police who are trying to trace the car), uses clues from things she lets slip to try to figure out where she may be and listens to her story.  Played by Anne Bancroft, she’s a tragic woman whose husband has realized that their teenage son is not his and is now seeking to divorce herself not from her marriage but from her life.

In a lesser film, this might have been a psychological drama, the deep insights into what caused this woman to make this choice.  Or it might have been more of a thriller, that desperate race against time to save her.  But Sydney Pollack, directing his first film, finds a path between those two things and keeps things from boiling over with drama or suspense.  There is certainly tension in the film as Poitier is forced to use everything in the book to keep her talking and Bancroft and Poitier are forced to play off against each other’s voices without ever being on-screen at the same time.  It’s about what people will do to try and save another person, even a person they have never met.  It’s about lending a hand because someone has fallen and helping them to stand.

This is far from a great film and it wasn’t much of a success when it was released.  Indeed, I first saw this film back in 2005 and thought it was a solid film with quite good lead performances from Poitier and Bancroft and was stunned when I first read Pictures at a Revolution in 2008 to discover what a low reputation it had.  In that book you can read about how Poitier didn’t think much of it, how Pollack thought he did a bad job with the direction, how writer Stirling Silliphant was advised to get another writing gig before the reputation of the film harmed him (which he did, working with Poitier again on In the Heat of the Night and winning the Oscar).  But I still think this is a solid film, one which manages to do something with feeling the need to beat us over the head with a message.  A man is trying to save a life and he will do everything he can to do it and when it’s Poitier on-screen doing that, you believe him.

The Source:

“Decision to Die” by Shana Alexander  (LIFE Magazine, May 29, 1964)

An interesting little piece on a woman who is both trying to kill herself and trying to find someone who will save her, it documents the day of a woman as she goes from place to place just trying to find someone who can help her and then in desperation, takes a handful of pills and calls the VA hospital where her husband has been a patient.  A nurse at the hospital manages to keep her talking long enough that the police are able to find her and save her life.  There is a kind of plea made at the end of the story in support of suicide hotlines in the hopes that the next person to go through such an ordeal would be spared the effort to find someone who will help.  The original issue of LIFE is available online through Google Books and you can actually read the entire article there.

The Adaptation:

In light of the plea at the end of the original article, it’s clear that part of the goal in the film is to make it clear that there are such places that you can call, that you don’t have to feel completely alone.  That alone is a massive change from what happened to the original woman.  Another change of course is that it isn’t a nurse who keeps her talking for over an hour but a volunteer at the hotline.  Many of the details are different as well (her problems in the original article stem from problems with her husband as a traumatized veteran) and while much of the film is made of the search for her, they are also trying to track down her husband but in real life he was at the hospital and knew what was going on fairly early in the call and was deliberately kept off the actual call for fear that if she talked to him she would consider her call complete and would hang up.  The original LIFE article seemed like a little bit of life that also was a call for a social change.  In the film, it’s almost as if it’s trying to make people aware that the change has happened and there is something you can do in this situation.

The Credits:

Directed by Sydney Pollack.  Suggested by a LIFE Magazine article by Shana Alexander.  Written by Stirling Silliphant.
The IMDb lists David Rayfiel as an uncredited writer, which is corroborated in Pictures at a Revolution.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Othello  –  On the one hand, it has Olivier in blackface.  On the other hand, it has not only Olivier, but Maggie Smith and strong performances from Frank Finlay and Joyce Redman as well.  The best acted film version of Othello of the five I have seen.
• Kwaidan  –  The second Masaki Kobayashi film on the list (he also directed Human Condition).  Based on various Japanese folk tales, the writing isn’t that strong but the direction is and this is a ***.5 film.
• The Hill  –  Based on the play by Ray Rigby, this low-level ***.5 film is directed by Sidney Lumet and stars Sean Connery.  Connery’s best non-Bond performance until the mid 70’s.
• The Ipcress File  –  Beloved in Britain and the film that helped make Michael Caine a star.  Based on the novel by Len Deighton (in which IPCRESS is an acronym) in which the main character wasn’t named, in the film he became Harry Palmer, who he would play twice more on film and then twice more again on television.  High ***.
• Diary of a Chambermaid  –  Based on the scandalous 1900 novel which had already been filmed by Renoir in 1946, this version was directed Buñuel and starred Jeanne Moreau.  It would be remade again in 2015.  While a high ***, it’s still kind of a weak link in Buñuel’s French period.
• The Cincinnati Kid  –  The novel by Richard Jessup (trying to do for poker what The Hustler had done for pool) becomes a big starring role for Steve McQueen even if McQueen is too old to be called “The Kid”.
• The Sons of Katie Elder  –  A complicated history that could technically qualify as original.  Began life as a true story about the Marlows (ridiculously detailed on the film’s Wikipedia page) that became an 1891 book Life of the Marlows that was reprinted in 1931, bought for screen rights in 1953, turned into a script that had little resemblance to the original story and then was made into the film with no credit to the book.  By far the best movie made by Henry Hathaway in his last 20 years as a director, it stars John Wayne and Dean Martin.
• Baby the Rain Must Fall  –  The team that brought you To Kill a Mockingbird (producer Alan J. Pakula, director Robert Mulligan, writer Horton Foote) adapt one of Foote’s plays (The Traveling Lady) into a film with Steve McQueen and Lee Remick with strong performances from both.
• The Hallelujah Trail  –  An epic Western comedy from John Sturges based on the novel by Bill Gulick.  At a high *** I rate it higher than many do.
• La Tía Tula  –  The Spanish submission for Best Foreign Film in 1964.  Based on the novel by Miguel de Unamuno.  Given that Unamuno quarreled with Franco before his death it’s interesting that the Franco regime would allow this as a submission.
• The Bedford Incident  –  Bleak Cold War Drama with Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark.  Based on the novel by Mark Rascovich.
• The Skull  –  Amicus Productions pretends they’re making a Hammer film with this Horror film directed by Freddie Francis and starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.  Solid film though and better than most Hammer films, based on a short story by Robert Bloch (better known for writing the original novel Psycho).
• Contempt  –  Known by many as the film that showed Brigitte Bardot’s bare backside.  Known by me as the rare worthwhile Godard films.  Based on the novel Il disprezzo by Alberto Moravia, an Italian novelist best known for the novels made into Two Women and The Conformist.
• Woman in the Dunes  –  Director Hiroshi Teshigahara was Oscar nominated for this film based on the novel by Kōbō Abe.  The film had been nominated for Best Foreign Film the year before.
• Inside Daisy Clover  –  Mulligan and Pakula again but this time with Gavin Lambert as the writer (adapting his own novel).  Solid performances from Natalie Wood in the title role and Ruth Gordon (who earned her first Oscar nom), even if Wood shouldn’t be playing a teenager three years after Gypsy.
• Boeing Boeing  –  A 1960 French play becomes a 1965 Jerry Lewis Comedy that is actually fairly good.
• Von Ryan’s Express  –  A bunch of prisoners escape from a war camp on a train.  Based on a novel by David Westheimer.
• A High Wind in Jamaica  –  The very good novel by Richard Hughes made the Modern Library’s Top 100 list.  The film version from Alexander Mackendrick is also good but a bit more forgettable.
• 36 Hours  –  A Roald Dahl short story (“Beware of the Dog”) is stretched into 115 minutes for a thriller with James Garner.
• Morituri  –  Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner in a World War II Adventure film?  Sure, why not?  Based on a novel by Werner Jörg Lüddecke.
• The Knack… and How to Get It  –  Years before becoming the romantic Phantom, Michael Crawford is a nervous dork of a teacher in this Palme d’Or winner based on the play by Ann Jellicoe.
• Young Cassidy  –  Should have been called Young O’Casey since it’s based on Sean O’Casey’s autobiography.  John Ford started directing it but he fell ill and was replaced by Jack Cardiff.
• The Grasshopper  –  A 1955 Soviet version of the Chekhov story that finally made it to the States in 1965, nominated for Best Picture at the BAFTAs back in 1956.  Decently done but a little dry.
• Station Six-Sahara  –  Carroll Baker would spend much of 1965 proving that she left her acting ability in 1956 including here where she stars in a remake of the 1938 film S.O.S. Sahara which had been based on a play by Jean Martet.  We’re into low ***.
• Samurai Assassin  –  For a samurai film starring Toshiro Mifune, pretty weak.  Based on the book Samurai Japan.
• The Tomb of Ligeia  –  The eighth and final Corman/Poe film in terms of chronology but the seventh in terms of quality.
• The Flight of the Phoenix  –  Mediocre film based on the novel by Elleston Trevor which didn’t stop it from being remade, also as a mediocre film, in 2004.
• She  –  Hammer meet Haggard.  Peter Cushing stars and Christopher Lee has a smaller role in this film adaptation of the classic adventure novel which I rank several points higher than the 1935 version.
• The Loved One  –  Evelyn Waugh’s satirical take on L.A. values doesn’t really fit the screen very well in this Tony Richardson adaptation.
• War Gods of the Deep  –  The final film from Jacques Tourneur and released outside the U.S. as City Under the Sea.  Based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
• The Red Lanterns  –  An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film in 1963 (from Greece), based on a play by Alekos Galanos.
• In Harm’s Way  –  Better by far than the other Otto Preminger film from 1965, this World War II film with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas is based on the novel by James Bassett.
• Life at the Top  –  Proving that unnecessary sequels have been happening for a long time, this one is based on the sequel novel to Room at the Top.
• Dear Brigitte  –  Dear Brigitte is not a good title (even if it is because of Brigitte Bardot) but the novel’s title was Erasmus with Freckles so take what you can get.  Jimmy Stewart re-teams with his Harvey director Henry Koster with weak results.
• The Leather Boys  –  Just because it’s good that they would be willing to make a film about a gay biker doesn’t mean the film is good.  It’s the lowest edge of ***.  Based on the novel by Gillian Freeman.
• Lord Jim  –  Can you take a great writer-director, a great star in his prime and a great novel and still make a relentlessly mediocre film?  With Richard Brooks, Peter O’Toole and Conrad’s classic all teaming up here it seems that you can.
• Pleasures of the Flesh  –  Mediocre Nagisa Oshima film adapted from the novel by Futaro Yamada.
• The Pleasure Seekers  –  Three Coins in the Fountain (based on the novel Coins in the Fountain) gets a pointless remake with Ann-Margaret.
• The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders  –  This might have been a better adaptation of the classic novel if not for a few things, like being directed by Terrence Young, like starring Kim Novak, like not waiting until the rating system was developed and they could have been more risque.
• The Satan Bug  –  Alistar MacLean was more known for War-Adventure novels (The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare) which is maybe why he wrote this under a pseudonym.  It became a pretty weak (low **.5) John Sturges film.
• Planet of the Vampires  –  Mario Bava takes his Horror this time with a dose of Sci-Fi.  Based on the Italian Sci-Fi story “One Night of 21 Hours”.
• A Rage to Live  –  John O’Hara was a mostly good writer but they didn’t make for good films.  Oscar nominated for Costume Design because they needed to do away with the black-and-white / color splits.
• Psyche 59  –  Little known enough that it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page though it did earn a BAFTA nomination (Best British Black-and-White Costume Design, which is more ridiculous than the Oscars).  British Drama based on the novel by Françoise des Ligneris.
• Horror Castle  –  We’ve now hit ** films with this film (also known as The Virgin of Nuremberg), a 1963 Italian Horror film.  Based on the novel by Frank Bogart, though Wikipedia seems to imply that the name is fake.
• The Greatest Story Ever Told  –  Commonly derided as The Longest Story Ever Told (it originally ran 260 minutes).  Ostensibly adapted from the New Testament.  The first film for George Stevens in six years; he had won two Oscars (and earned two other nominations) in the 50’s but this mess was his only output of the decade.
• Pinocchio in Outer Space  –  A Belgian animated film that takes the character and puts it in outer space.  You can skip this.
• The 10th Victim  –  Based on pulp Sci-Fi writer Robert Sheckley’s story (and later novelized by him) this is a mess of a film starring the bizarre combination of Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress.
• Carry On Cleo  –  Oscars.org had listed it as adapted, perhaps because it was a continuation of the Carry On films?  Either way, like many of the Carry On films, it’s terrible.
• The Nanny  –  In spite of Bette Davis, the first of two terrible films based on Evelyn Piper novels.
• Bunny Lake is Missing  –  In spite of Laurence Olivier, the second of two terrible films based on Evelyn Piper novels.
• Harlow  –  One of two 1965 Jean Harlow biopics (I haven’t seen the other).  Nominated for a Golden Globe for Supporting Actor (which is why I’ve seen it).  Based on the biography of Harlow by Irving Shulman but it’s low **.
• The Awful Dr. Orlof  –  Even though it’s *.5, it’s only the fifth worst film I’ve seen for the year (the bottom four are all original).  A terrible film from Jesús Franco.  Neither the IMDb nor Wikipedia list an original source but oscars.org must have listed one, perhaps because it’s basically ripped off from Eyes Without a Face.

MARTHA: And it was an accident . . . a real, goddamn accident!
(GEORGE takes from behind his back a short-barreled shotgun, and calmly aims it at the back of MARTHA’s head.)  (p 57)

My Top 10:

1. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
2. A Man for All Seasons
3. Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment
4. The Professionals
5. The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming
6. Alfie
7. Red Beard
8. You’re a Big Boy Now
9. The Shop on Main Street
10. Georgy Girl

Note:  Back up to 12 films on my list this year.  One is reviewed below as a WGA nominee (Harper) and the final one is on a separate list at the bottom.
Note:  No less than five reviews in this year were lost when my computer died and three of them (Morgan, Alfie, Shop) were of sources that had been a pain to get the first time and so I have tried to write them again as best as possible from memory.

Consensus Nominees:

1. A Man for All Seasons  (304 pts)
2. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  (152 pts)
3. The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming  (152 pts)
4. Alfie  (112 pts)
5. The Professionals  (80 pts)

Note:  Even without being WGA eligible, A Man for All Seasons sets several new records.  It ties the record for most nominations (4), is the first film to reach 4 without multiple WGA noms, sets a new record for wins (4), most points (304) and largest percentage of the total points (30.65%).  Julia will beat its percentage in 1977, Kramer vs Kramer will beat the nominations total in 1979 and while Kramer and Terms of Endearment will tie the wins mark no film will win more than 4 awards until Schindler’s List in 1993.

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• A Man for All Seasons
• Alfie
• The Professionals
• The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
• Harper
• The Professionals
• The Sand Pebbles

Comedy:

• The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming
• How to Steal a Million
• You’re a Big Boy Now

Nominees that are Original:  The Fortune Cookie, Our Man Flint

Musical:

• no Musicals this year (thank god)

Golden Globe:

• A Man for All Seasons
• Alfie
• The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming
• The Sand Pebbles
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

note:  A little oddity here.  Not that they are all Adapted (which they also were in 1965) but that these five films would go on to all earn Best Picture nominations at the Oscars.  This is the first of four times that the Globes Screenplay category would predict 5/5 the eventual Oscar Picture nominees (1982, 1984, 1994).

My Top 10

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The Film:

There are few films that match this one, especially when it comes to the acting.  All four credited actors earned Oscar noms and they all deserved the Oscar themselves (the females won, the males did not).  It is a long dark night of the soul and when you come out the other side you aren’t certain what to think.  I wrote this about it when I reviewed the film seven years ago for my Best Picture project: “Certainly what George does to conclude the night could be considered horrifying were it not for the night that drove him to it and the horrifying truth behind it all in the first place.”  That pretty much sums it up.

The Source:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: A Play by Edward Albee (1962)

This was the sixth play by Edward Albee and yet he was only 34 when it first went on stage in 1962.  Imagine that type of success.  Albee would continue to be a successful playwright throughout his career but nothing again would ever come close to this kind of success.  But, then again, very few plays in the 55 years since have come close to this kind of success.  It brings four powerhouse characters to the stage and when they are coupled with great acting, it is really a sight to see.

The Adaptation:

Ernest Lehman really wouldn’t have to do much with this film.  He could basically take the script and put it on film.  The biggest difference between the film and the original play is that while the play is broken up into three acts, the location never changes.  By moving things into the car and then the diner (with some actual other people in the film even if they aren’t credited), it opens things up a bit (as do the scenes outdoors).  It is so well adapted by Lehman, moving things around and directed by Nichols, that even though this entire movie is basically over two hours of four people talking it never feels staged.   But that’s what great films do.

The Credits:

Directed by Mike Nichols.  Screenplay by Ernest Lehman.
note: The only mention of the source in the opening credits is with the title: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A Man for All Seasons

The Film:

If you are like me you watch this film and you see high art in it.  It is exquisitely dignified, smart and refined.  It has a great script, excellent directing, phenomenal acting and all of those were rewarded with Oscars.  It is exactly the kind of the thing that Oscar voters look at and think, “yes, that’s a Best Picture.”  But there is also a lack of fiery emotion at its core.  It is a movie that I greatly admire but not one that I love.  It is a reminder that in years like 1966, 1980 and 1990 while the Oscar voters went for the clear Oscar film (and made good choices every time), they didn’t make my choice, the choice of raw emotion.  That being said, this is a great film and I don’t want anyone to think I think otherwise.  It is the best evidence that Paul Scofield really was a born actor and that Robert Shaw, when held properly under control, could be a burst of energy and not a hopeless ham.  You can read a full review here.

The Source:

A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt  (1960)

I write the date 1960 up above but that is not the whole story.  This began as a BBC radio production in 1954.  After that, it was a one hour BBC television special in 1957.  Following the success of both versions, Bolt retooled his work yet again to arrange it for the stage, where it landed in 1960.  Perhaps it was that original work that ended up with the version seen on stage.  To allow us access into the historical aspects of the story, Bolt creates the character of The Common Man, a semi-narrator who also takes part in the play.  That character allows us to get into the story and understand all of the historical and theological complications from the period.  When the play moved to Broadway in 1961 it was a massive hit and won the Tony for Best Play (as mentioned in my film review where I noted it is one of the few works to win the Tony and the Oscar).  The play is certainly compelling but something about the staging of it (at least as I read it, since I have never seen it on stage) doesn’t quite work and I think I prefer the film version.

The Adaptation:

The biggest shift from the stage to the screen is the dropping of the Common Man and allowing the film to be told in a more standard film narrative.  Leo McKern, who had played the Common Man in London had moved to Cromwell on Broadway and would actually play Cromwell again on film, joining Paul Scofield who had played Thomas More on stage, both in London and in New York and would win the Oscar for playing him on screen.  Because the Common Man is cut out, there are a few scenes that are added into the film that weren’t in the stage version that actually show us events that were told to us on stage (such as the death scene of Cardinal Wolsey).  Any scenes in which the Common Man actually interacted with characters has the character simply replaced by normal characters.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Fred Zinnemann.  Screenplay by Robert Bolt.  From the play by Robert Bolt.

Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film in full as one of the five best films in what is, admittedly, a very weak year.  There is something about Morgan that speaks to me, something in his character that I like in spite of the fact that he’s really rather unlikeable.  It’s not a film for everyone and it’s definitely not one I would try to convince people on if they have already decided they don’t like it.  But it is a fairly original film with some very good performances from David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave.

The Source:

“A Suitable Case for Treatment” by David Mercer (1962)

Did the film keep the sub-title because it would remind people of where they had seen the story once before?  Perhaps.  The original television production had aired in 1962 and appears to be unavailable on video (not surprising considering BBC’s old policy of wiping) but you can get held of the original teleplay in a collection by David Mercer.  That’s where I read it, getting it from another library and writing my original review that unfortunately was eaten in the death of my computer and I’m trying to do this from memory so I don’t have to get the book again.

The Adaptation:

The original television production only ran one hour and while Morgan is not a particularly long movie (97 minutes), it still had to come up with other scenes to fill the time.  Part of that is done by expanding the scenes of Morgan’s life, by having him interact more with people outside of his wife and the the man his wife is now sleeping with (such as the cop or his mother) but also by inserting a lot of scenes that seem to be coming from Morgan’s psyche.  But, since all of this is also written by David Mercer, who wrote the script, it’s safe to say that it all works with authorial intent.

The Credits:

Directed by Karel Reisz.  Written by David Mercer.  (no mention of source in the opening credits)

The Professionals

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the best films of the year.  I also gave it a small review here as well as my example film for Richard Brooks when I included him in my original Top 100 Directors list (to be fair, I should mention he no longer makes the list).  The Directors branch recognized that this film was better than three of the films actually nominated for Best Picture (all of which are included below).  It is one of the great all-time fun Westerns, funny and action-filled and with some great camaraderie.  If you read some of the behind-the-scenes stuff on the film (mentioned in my review) you can be even more amazed at how well the final version turned out.

The Source:

A Mule for the Marquesa by Frank O’Rourke  (1964)

This is a small little Western (just over 200 pages) about a group of men who are hired to go down to Mexico and rescue the woman of a rich man who has been kidnapped and held to hostage.  They have a deadline because they need to get her out before the required ransom date.  There’s not much to it other than the blueprint for a film.

The Adaptation:

“In doing so with A Mule for the Marquesa, Richard immediately recognized that the ending – the husband’s private army saves the mercenaries in the nick of time – was a cliche and would have to be rewritten.  He also determined that five mercenaries were one too many if each were to have a strong presence and not be lost in a crowded cast.  In keeping with mission-driven movies like The Guns of Navarone (1961), he decided that each would be a man with a specialty: a munitions expert, a dynamiter, a wrangler and a tracker.  Other changes in the O’Rourke story gave Richard’s screenplay more punch and the feel of a caper movie.  A standoff between one of the mercenaries and the revolutionaries comes in the middle of the book.  Richard turned an attack on the Mexican camp into the film’s main action sequence and moved the ensuing pursuit and standoff closer to the end of the movie.” (Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks, Douglass K. Daniel, p 162)

All of that pretty well sums up that the book only ended up being used as a blueprint.  There is the basic plot that comes from the book and a couple of details (the dynamite arrows for one).  But almost everything else was changed for the film, including the personalities of the mercenaries (they have very little in the book), the fact that it’s Raza, the man who kidnapped her, who is in love with her (and her with him) and the ending, which is drastically different.  Really, this is a good example of not needing to read the book because the film is vastly superior in every way.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen and Directed by Richard Brooks.  Based on the novel, “A Mule for the Marquesa” by Frank O’Rourke.

The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!

The Film:

Alan Arkin is Yuri Rozanov, a Political Officer on a Soviet submarine (well-suited as Arkin grew up speaking Russian).  He has been tasked, as the only decent English speaking member of the crew, to go on to the island and get a boat to tug the sub off a sandbar where it has been stranded.  But what he really wants to do is get away from this crazy island, from its crazy people, from it ridiculous name that doesn’t seem to be pronounced correctly.  Arkin became an instant star (and Oscar nominee) with this film, a hilarious bit of Cold War satire that actually manages a considerable amount of sympathy for the Soviets and never lets up on the laughs.  It’s the perfect example of Roger Ebert’s maxim that people trying to act funny aren’t funny but people trying to act serious and failing are very funny.  To read more, my original review can be found here.

The Source:

The Off-Islanders by Nathaniel Benchley  (1961)

A little amusing book about a group of Russians on a submarine who end up stranded on a sandbar off an American island and have to find a way to get their sub off the sandbar and get off the island without starting a war.  It’s decently humorous, but more as a concept (especially in that all the islanders react to the Russians less as Russians and more as people who aren’t from the island, thus the title) than in actual execution, as there isn’t much depth to any of the characters.  Benchley’s son would later write a far more successful novel dealing with a small island and what happens just offshore, with Jaws.

The Adaptation:

“What was lacking in the ending was a moment of enlightenment, a catalyst that makes both groups realize that they have more in common than they realize. When I asked Bill to change the ending, I knew he might have problems with my request. … Bill got to work on the ending and produced a brilliant solution.”  (This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me: An Autobiography by Norman Jewison, p 121)

If all you do is read that quote, you would wonder if most of the film comes from the book and they changed the ending simply so that they would have a better moment for the ending, but really, like the previous film on this list, the novel really only provides a blueprint for the film.  Almost all of the details and the personalities come from the screenwriters and not from the original novel.  In fact, the whole family that starts off the film (the playwright who is stuck and his wife and children) don’t even exist in the novel.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Norman Jewison.  Screenplay by William Rose.  Based on the Novel “The Off Islanders” by Nathaniel Benchley.

Alfie

The Film:

This film and the performance from Michael Caine that is the key to the film reminds me of a couple of lines in a couple of very different films than this one.  “He said that he may be an… ‘a-hole’. But he’s not, and I quote, ‘100% a dick’.”  “I thought you were an asshole.”  “Oh, I’m an asshole alright, but I’m your kind of asshole!”  The first is from Guardians of the Galaxy and the second is from Die Hard 2 and the only notion they share with Alfie is what kind of an asshole Alfie is.  What’s amazing is that he’s the kind of asshole that you can tolerate watching an entire movie about.  He’s charming and he knows how to score sexually but he leaves a trail of destruction in his wake.  Yet, the film is really very good and Caine’s performance was a star in the making.  It says something about how good the performance is and the writing is that when you get to the end of the film you’re not really sure if you want Alfie to find some measure of happiness or not.  It’s not quite a great film (the directing isn’t all that up to snuff and most of the technical work leaves something to be desired) but it’s a very good one and it’s worth watching just for Caine’s performance alone.  There’s more in my original review here.

The Source:

Alfie by Bill Naughton  (1966)

You think of breaking the fourth wall and usually you think of film, but it happens in theater as well.  It specifically happens in Alfie, when he turns away from the characters and starts talking directly to us.  That’s actually part of his charm.  We allow him to win us over even when we are repulsed by his actions because he’s interacting directly with us and that creates a connection that we can’t really ignore.  The play follows Alfie, a ladies man, but one who knows his limitations (he goes for older well-to-do women and in a bit of stupidity actually sleeps with the wife of his roommate from his time in a sanatorium).  He just wants a life where he can have what he wants and not have to worry too much about it.  In the end, you wonder if he’s learned anything at all and perhaps he hasn’t and it’s remarkable how much we can accept it.  On stage, the role was originally played by Terrence Stamp but Stamp refused to play the role on film, instead insisting Caine (his friend and roommate) that he should do it.  This is one of those rare cases where I really wish I could have seen it on stage, not because I care about the staging but because I really would have liked to have seen Stamp in the role.

The Adaptation:

Alfie and Morgan have a lot of similarities and I’m not just talking about the titles being their names.  They are about people who are hard to like and yet somehow make a connection with the audience anyway, they both helped catapult good young British actors to bigger and better things and both of them rely chiefly on their writing because the directing and the technical aspects aren’t all that impressive.  But also, in both cases, their screenplays are adapted by the original authors.  In both, scenes are expanded and added and things that we just heard about in the original version are actually shown to us, though neither is substantially altered and the characters remain basically the same even if we do see more of what they do.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Lewis Gilbert.  Screenplay by Bill Naughton.  Based on the play Alfie by Bill Naughton.

赤ひげ
(Red Beard)

The Film:

Though this is not of Kurosawa’s great films (I have it as a high ***.5 and the strength of the film comes more from Mifune’s powerhouse performance than from the usual things we would attribute to Kurosawa like his magnificent direction and strong writing).  The film is very good but this is Kurosawa that we’re talking about.  Never the less, it has already been reviewed in full because this is also 1966 that we’re talking about and it’s a very weak year for film and this film managed to slide into the Top 5.

The Source:

Akahige sinryotan by Shugoro Yamamoto (1958)

This collection of short stories, sadly, is not available in English.

The Adaptation:

Without being able to get the original, I can’t really know what was changed.  There are parts of the film that don’t come from the original novel:

“The script is quite different from the novel. One of the major characters, the young girl, is not even found in the book. While I was writing I kept remembering Dostoevsky and I tried to show the same thing that he showed in the character of Nelli in The Insulted and Injured.” (Kurosawa, quoted in The Films of Akira Kurosawa, 3rd ed., Donald Richie, p 171)

The Credits:

Directed by Akira Kurosawa.  Original Story by Shugoro Yamamoto.  The credits are from the Criterion Collection as played on TCM and there is no credit for the screenplay (at least in English).

You’re a Big Boy Now

The Film:

I have never been a fan of Godard, though his first film, Breathless, is a very good one.  To me, the problem is that Godard’s films, while different and new, aren’t very good.  But perhaps it’s just that he was working in the wrong genre.  His style of editing and storytelling, to me, undermined any attempt at a narrative and made his films a mess.  Yet here, in a style very similar to Godard (at least his early work) we have a charming, refreshing comedy that would herald the real arrival of a bold new filmmaker, one who would become almost a poster boy for the 70’s, both in its success and its excess.

This is the story of Bernard Chanticleer, a young page at the NYPL who skates around pulling books for patrons.  He’s shy, inexperienced at sex, forced to deal with a nosy landlady when his father forces him to move out of the house and into an apartment in Manhattan and he falls hopelessly for a brusque actress who doesn’t care about him while the girl who’s had a crush on him since grade school is trying to get him to notice her.  All of this is told at times at breakneck speed with constant editing jumps and a glorious Lovin’ Spoonful soundtrack.

This is the announcement of a major talent in Francis Ford Coppola.  He had made two films before, one of them just a re-editing job and the second a small little film for Roger Corman.  But here, with his own script (basically the story he was interested in telling married a bit to a pre-existing novel because of various circumstances listed below) and his own directorial style, he really creates a film that is very much his own.  He brings in such talents as Julie Harris, Rip Torn and Geraldine Page (earning her fourth Oscar nomination, this time for playing Bernard’s uptight mother who mails him bits of her hair after he gets his own place) and discovering future multiple Oscar nominee Karen Black.  If Peter Kastner is a bit bland as Bernard, that’s also because he’s kind of supposed to be and it perfectly suits the character.  He’s just the right actor to play the kind of schlub who would get stuck filling glasses of milk because the machine is stuck or getting knocked down by a mannequin leg in the hands of a former girlfriend that he was never able to sleep with because of a failure to perform.

This film is really almost unlike any other that Coppola would make.  He wouldn’t make a straight Comedy again for 20 years and this is the only one that he would make that he would also write, that would be his own movie through and through.  You might never have expected this director to make The Godfather or Apocalypse Now but you could tell you were looking at something new and fresh.

The Source:

You’re a Big Boy Now by David Benedictus  (1963)

I haven’t been able to get hold of the Benedictus’ novel, which is really hard to find, at least in the States (it’s a British novel).  Over 40 years later, Benedictus would be the author who would continue the Pooh series, writing Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.

The Adaptation:

Even without having read the book, I can give a pretty good idea of the changes that Coppola made from the original novel thanks to two different biographies.

“When [Coppola] had begun writing the script in paris, he was writing an original screenplay largely based on the events of his life, but he immediately realized that, as an employee of Seven Arts, he would be obligated to turn the script over to the company – a prospect he did not relish.  He figured he had found a loophole when he read David Benedictus’s novel and noticed the similarities between his script and Benedictus’s book.  He purchased the film rights to the book and began to adapt portions of the work into his screenplay.  The result a strange sort of hybrid, only vaguely resembling the literary source.”  (Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life, Michael Schumacher, p 47)

“Coppola had optioned Benedictus’s novel for a thousand dollars and set about transplanting the story to New York City because he had always wanted to portray the life of a teenager living in new York, where he had grown up.”  (Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola, Gene D. Phillips, p 37)

“Coppola had always been fascinated by the young people, called pages, who get books for patrons at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue by sailing down the eighty miles of library stacks on roller skates, and so he gave that job to his hero rather than making him a shoe clerk as in the novel.”  (Phillips, p 39)  Note:  The NYPL’s fun facts page lists this film as one that “perpetuates the myth” that the pages wear roller skates.  The quote from Phillips also seems to perpetuate that, as it implies that they really do wear skates.

“Benedictus’s novel concludes with Bernard having lost both Barbara and Amy, but Coppola’s screenplay reunites Bernard with Amy.  Benedictus points out that his book concludes with Bernard living a solitary life, whereas Coppola supplied a happy ending: ‘Instead of being scarred for life by this sadistic Barbara Darling, the young hero will get a nice girl in the end . . . Still I think there have been fewer concessions to public taste than in most American films.’  As a matter of fact, Coppola’s script does have a serious dimension underlying the plot, despite the happy ending.  Like the novel, the script presents a young fellow on the brink of manhood who matures by finally summoning the gumption to defy his overbearing parents and outgrow their influence.”  (Phillips, p 40)

The Credits:

Written for the Screen & Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.  Based on a novel by David Benedictus.

Obchod na korze

The Film:

Where do we have to make our stand against evil?  What is the line that must be drawn?  And when it comes on gradually, incrementally moving forward, how do we even see that line?  None of those questions are explicitly asked in The Shop on Main Street but they hang over the film nonetheless.  Tono is a poor carpenter.  He is browbeaten by his wife and he isn’t able to bring much into the household.  He lives in a small town in the Slovak Republic, a Nazi controlled country during World War II.  His brother-in-law, who is also the commandant of the town, offers Tono the chance to take over a sewing store.  He doesn’t think too much about why he is being offered this chance.  He takes it.

But he will start to realize not only why he has been offered this chance but also what it means to have taken it.  The store belong to an old, almost deaf, Jewish woman.  He keeps her on and she moves through her days under the delusion that she’s still in charge of the store.  But it’s been taken from her because she’s Jewish and it’s losing money, relying mostly on charity.  Tono then has a chance for something different when the local community offers him that same charity to stay in charge of the store so that it is not passed on to someone worse.  By staying in the position is he selling his soul for a few meager dollars or is he actually doing something that benefits not only himself but also his community?  He isn’t asking himself this, but it is the question at the very heart of the film.

But this is, while not explicitly a Holocaust film, it is implicitly one and these films don’t move towards happy endings.  Things in the town start to get worse and while the old woman has been ignorant of what has been going on around her before, things will finally penetrate her fog.  She will react to what she sees and Tono will also react and things will take a quick turn towards tragedy.  In the countries controlled by the Nazis what other course could we find it taking?

This film was an unqualified success.  It won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars (and earns a nomination from me) and 66 year old Ida Kaminska earned a surprise Oscar nomination for her performance as the old woman.  It is not a Czech New Wave film, per se, but director Ján Kadár would actually train many of the directors that would become identified with the New Wave.

The Source:

Obchod na korze by Ladislav Grosman  (1964)

A rather short simply story of a carpenter who is given the chance to run a sewing store after it is taken away from the Jewish woman in charge of it because the pogrom that was taking hold in the Slovak Republic during World War II.  There is a spare poetry to it, perhaps because it was really designed to already be a screenplay, though not published in the format that most screenplays usually are published.

The Adaptation:

Because it was actually written to be a screenplay rather than a novel (even though its published format resembles a novel more than a script), almost nothing was changed from the novel to the film.

The Credits:

natocili resiséri Ján Kadár a Elmar Klos.  ve filmu podle novely Ladislava Grosmana.  scénár napsali L. Grosman, J. Kadár, E. Klos.
note:  I think that is the directorial credit for Kadár and Klos but can not be certain.  I also can’t be certain of the spelling because the on-screen lettering is hard to read.

Georgy Girl

The Film:

The Redgrave sisters didn’t spring out of nowhere.  Vanessa was already well-known on stage and younger sister Lynn had done several film roles before 1966.  But in 1966, they would both leap upon the scene, with Vanessa’s prominent topless scene in Blow-Up and the two of them competing with each other at the Oscars in the Best Actress category (they would both lose to Elizabeth Taylor).  It was the Oscar nominations that were important, because it was clear that both of them, though very different (Vanessa was the bombshell while Lynn was more of the “ugly duckling”) were both extremely talented.  Lynn would never be the film star that her sister was, partially because she stuck to mostly television and the theatre for a stretch of 20 years before returning to film with highly lauded performances in Shine and Gods and Monsters, and partially because she didn’t have her sister’s looks and, sadly, looks are highly valued in the film industry.  But in 1966, it was Lynn who was the more accomplished actress, giving a great performance in Georgy Girl and showing that she belonged on the screen.

Georgy is a bit of a mess.  She’s the kind of girl who decides, on a whim, to get an expensive new hairdo, only to have it rain on her as soon as she comes out and have her hair fall like a mop all over her face.  She’s the kind of girl who attracts a man like her father’s boss who wants her for a mistress now that he’s helped pay for her to go to school.  Or a man like Jos, who is a young man and seems interested in her, except that he’s also getting married to Georgy’s gorgeous, irresponsible flatmate that he has just knocked up.  It would seem that Georgy just can’t sort out the mess of her life.  At the moment that Jos is running after her is the same moment where his wife is going into labor.  But that turns out to be just what Georgy needs.  She doesn’t really care about Jos.  She doesn’t care about her flatmate.  She cares about the baby.

This is the key to happiness for Georgy and it turns out to be exactly what she needs.  As soon as little baby Sarah arrives, her parent just want to get rid of her.  No one cares about her except Georgy and she is the only thing that Georgy cares about.  It gives her new meaning in life.

Given the simplicity of the plot, this film is surprisingly effective.  Part of that is that it is actually well written and intelligent about the way that young people act and the choices they make (or have forced upon them).  Part of it is the smart performance from James Mason as the older man who will eventually marry Georgy and provide her with the security she and little baby Sarah need.  But really, most of the credit for this film moving from *** into the lower ends of ***.5 is from the remarkable performance of Lynn Redgrave, who so brilliantly brings Georgy to life in every way.

The Source:

Georgy Girl: A Novel by Margaret Forster (1965)

This is a decent enough novel about a young woman (Georgy) who is making quite a mess of her life, not knowing what she wants to do, rejecting the advances of her father’s boss (who paid for her schooling) and even having an affair with her flatmate’s husband after he marries the flatmate because he knocked her up and she decides to have the baby (she’s already aborted multiple times).  But once the baby arrives, she finds her purpose in life: to love that baby with every ounce of her being, and she ends up following a course so that she will be able to keep the baby and end up with a life that will make that easier.  A decent and quick little read.

The Adaptation:

The novel really is fairly faithfully adapted into the film.  The only real change is that the premise that social services will come take the baby away isn’t present in the book – she wants a father to provide her with security, but it’s more plot-driven to keep her with the baby in the film.  Other than that, it’s a very faithful rendition of the original novel.

The Credits:

Directed by Silvio Narizzano.  Screenplay by Margaret Forster and Peter Nichols.  Based on the novel “Georgy Girl” by Margaret Forster.

Multiple Nominations

The Sand Pebbles

The Film:

Steve McQueen was the most interesting man in the world.  He was the big star who did nutty things like racing cars.  He was charismatic and enjoyable on screen and at times he really showed that he could act.  Sadly this is the only film that would earn him an Oscar nomination (I rank his performance in Love with the Proper Stranger slightly higher and his great action roles in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and Bullitt are much more important to watch) and it’s dreary as can be.  I broke watching the film up this time into several bike rides (I watch while riding on the stationary bike) and it just seemed like the film wasn’t ever getting anywhere.  McQueen is quite good (as are Mako and Richard Attenborough) but the film itself is just so damn flat and we can blame that on director Robert Wise, screenwriter Robert Anderson and editor William Reynolds.  They just don’t provide any energy to the film and because McQueen’s performance is more subtle and less of a star turn like his action films they needed to compensate it with some more life and they just never do.  You can read a longer review here because this is another year where all five of the Best Picture nominees are also adapted.

The Source:

The Sand Pebbles: A Novel by Richard McKenna  (1962)

Richard McKenna had an idea of what he was writing about.  He had not only served in the Navy, but he had also served in the Far East, including two years on a Yangtze River gunboat.  He hadn’t been around during the Chinese Revolution (he was still a teenager in Idaho at the time) but he heard about it firsthand from the people who were.  So he had an idea but the idea didn’t really have enough development to last the 600 pages that McKenna draws it out into.  It’s ostensibly the story of a gunboat (the Sand Pebbles of the title) but it’s really the story of Jake Holman, an engineer assigned to the boat.  He ends up involved in the revolution, somewhat falling for a missionary’s daughter and ending up in a position where he is forced to kill his own native assistant to spare him a worse death from his own people.  In the end though, the book takes a turn towards what would be called tragedy if not for the fact that it easily could have been prevented earlier in the novel.

The Adaptation:

“I’ve often wondered if maybe I tried to tell too many stories in The Sand Pebbles.  It was a multiple story film – the story of the ship and the Captain, the story of Holman, the story of Frenchy and Maily, the story of the mission and the missionaries.  I’ve wondered if, in terms of interest and length, I should almost have cut out the Frenchy / Maily story.  Maybe I would have saved time, but I liked the story and thought that Dick Attenborough and Marayat Andriane were very touching.  Also, I wanted to try to do the book and that was a very important part of it.” (Robert Wise on His Films, p 190)

The film does follow the book fairly closely.  It does move a few things around (watching the film as I was reading the book, I hit the death of the assistant at the same time in both and was surprised because it happens much earlier in the book than in the film) but the biggest actual change is at the end.  In the book it ends with the death (the last line is “The flailing storm of lead crumpled and threw Jake Holman like a giant hand wadding newspaper.”) so we never actually see if the missionaries make it out safe like they do in the final shot of the film.

The Credits:

Based on the novel by Richard McKenna.  Screenplay by Robert Anderson.  Directed by Robert Wise.

WGA Nominees

Harper

The Film:

In the 1940’s, with the birth of film noir, detectives had been a big thing.  The Maltese Falcon had its definitive adaptation and the Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler started making it to the screen.  But they had to work around the Production Code, because these were cold men, men who will kill if they had to, who would slap people around, who would sleep with the girl.  Now, with the middle 60’s, things were changing and filmmakers could go back to those cold-hearted detectives.  Except, for some reason, they didn’t.  With this exception.  It came about because producer Elliot Kastner said to William Goldman “I’d like to do a movie with balls.” (supposedly in response to the film The Professionals, but Goldman is likely mis-remembering, as The Professionals was just finishing production when Harper was released in February of 1966).  So Goldman suggested making one of the Lew Archer books and when Kastner gave him free reign to pick, he picked the first one.

So, enter Paul Newman as the latest in the long line of hard-boiled detectives.  This film isn’t a noir film, though, as its filled with so much California sunshine, shots of Newman driving on 101 on the California coast and his kind of pathetic attempts to connect back to his ex-wife.  But still, he is a detective and very much in the vein of Marlowe.  In fact, just like Marlowe, he shows up at the rich mansion of someone in a wheelchair and deals with Lauren Bacall.  Except this time, Bacall is the one in the chair and she wants her husband back.  There is again a problematic flirtatious daughter, though not nearly as deadly as in The Big Sleep.  Mostly, what we have is a kidnapping scheme, one that he is eventually able to figure his way through, following the men, following the money, following the motivations.

The film works primarily for two reasons.  The first is the solid script from Goldman, his first real experience in Hollywood and a good summation of the novel, keeping to the plot-line until the end and making the character of Harper (they changed it because they only bought the right to the one book, not the character) interesting.  Some of that came from the opening credits scene, something which Goldman added on after the film was basically done (both that story and the one above come from his description of making the film in Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting).

The other thing, of course, is the performance from Paul Newman in the title role.  In fact, in a film filled with good actors (aside from Bacall, there’s Robert Wagner, Shelley Winters, Janet Leigh and Strother Martin), it’s surprising how much Newman’s performance carries the film.  He’s been hired to do one thing and he’s determined to do that thing: find the missing man and return him to his wife (his single-mindedness about this presages Lee Marvin in Point Blank the next year).  This film didn’t exactly revive the detective film on screen (Goldman says they were out of vogue because television had taken over the genre) but it is a solid addition to the genre.

The Source:

The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald (1949)

If you had simply given me this novel to read without a name attached to it, I would have assumed it was a later Raymond Chandler novel.  We have a detective who is hired by a rich client and goes through a strange mystery trying to figure everything out, which includes shenanigans among the members of the household.  It doesn’t do a lot of characterization but has a pretty solid story that keeps moving at a good pace and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

That said, of course, it’s a not a Chandler novel, but the first novel by Ross MacDonald (actually published as John MacDonald originally).  It shows the Chandler influence and it’s clear that MacDonald is a solid successor to the two early California greats (Hammett being the other one).  I haven’t read any other MacDonald novels, but it does seem that as time went on, he started going for much character development, showing his own style and not just being a later version of Chandler.

The Adaptation:

For the most part, the film follows fairly closely to the novel.  Until we get towards the end of the film, the only major difference between the original novel and the film is the addition of the cult group that is involved with the illegal aliens.  None of that was in the book (but isn’t so strange an addition in the mid-60’s).  However, towards the end, there are several changes, including how Harper knows who the real culprit is (well, not the kidnapping one, but the one responsible for a death) and how the final scenes play out.  They are a lot more complex in the book and we get a fuller conclusion, while here things kind of basically just end.  It’s an interesting way to end it, but definitely far less conclusive than in the original novel.

The Credits:

Directed by Jack Smight. Screenplay by William Goldman. From the novel “The Moving Target” by Ross MacDonald.

How to Steal a Million

The Film:

If you were doing a film like this today, things would get far more intricate.  There would be double-crosses and more double-crosses and you would be hard-pressed to keep track of who is really trying to steal what and why.  You would have to wonder about everyone’s motivations.  But in fact, while there are many people in this film who aren’t what they seem to be at first glance, it never really gets too detailed or tries to trick us too much.  It’s just a good old-fashioned heist movie married to a romantic comedy and it works so well because the actors in it are so perfect for their parts.

First off we have Audrey Hepburn.  Now Hepburn (b. 1929) had, by this time, been playing opposite actors like Gregory Peck (b. 1916), William Holden (b. 1918), Rex Harrison (b. 1908), Cary Grant (b. 1904), Gary Cooper (b. 1901) and even Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire (both b. 1899).  We know she can charm older men.  But here we get reminded that she can charm a younger man as well as she gets to play against Peter O’Toole (b. 1932).  Hepburn discovers O’Toole stealing a painting one night.  The problem is that the painting is a fake and Hepburn knows that because her father (played with nice energy and humor from Hugh Griffith) is a forger.  In fact, his current forgery of Cellini’s Venus is on display at a museum and an American tycoon is in town and wants it.  He’s played by Eli Wallach and he’s so instinctively untrustworthy that Hepburn figures that he knows it’s a fake but really he just wants the fake (he doesn’t know it’s a fake) and he wants Hepburn as well (he’s b. 1915 by the way).  So, she’s got the wrong idea about him, he’s got the wrong idea about the painting and in the middle of this is O’Toole as the most charming thief ever (who actually robs a house while wearing a coat and tie).  After accidentally shooting O’Toole and helping to clean him up, she drives him home and a kiss leads them both in a different direction.  Instead of turning him in, she turns to him when she decides that the way to keep the Venus from being discovered as a fake is to steal it.  So they set out to steal it.

This is where things in a modern day film would get really complicated.  Danny Ocean would have an intricate and expensive plan for how to break in and steal it.  O’Toole’s expenditures come to the price of a toy boomerang.  It’s such an ingenious little plan and one that requires O’Toole and Hepburn to stay hidden in a broom closet in the museum for long stretches at a time that we remember that this isn’t just a heist film but also a romantic comedy and they quickly fall for each other.

After that, there will be one final revelation that in fact one character isn’t what the character appears to be at first sight.  But when we learn that, everything falls into place and it just streamlines towards the happy ending that anyone watching the film will want.  To add on a little cherry at the top, we get a charming little ending that also works for both genres and brings a smile to your face.  This was not a great film from William Wyler, when you consider what he had made before and it’s even quite a drop from The Collector from the year before but it’s a low level ***.5, a very enjoyable film that crosses multiple genres and it’s far better than the last few films Wyler would make.

The Source:

“Venus Rising” by George Bradshaw  (1962)

Actually, I can’t confirm the 1962 date.  That’s when the short story collection Practise to Deceive was published but the copyright page in the copy that I read didn’t distinguish when the stories were originally printed.  Actually reading this story was almost pointless.  It’s a forgettable story about an art forger and his daughter who’s in love with a man who could expose him.  I was only even able to read it because of a bit of strange circumstances involving Veronica that I won’t go into.  I’m glad I didn’t have to write that I couldn’t get hold of it, but I’ve already forgotten it and I just read it yesterday.

The Adaptation:

This doesn’t even hold up to the notion of “similar in general, different in specifics” like so many adaptations do.  Other than the basic facts I mention above, nothing in the story is at all like the film that would be made out of it.  You could easily read the story and have no idea it was made into this film.  Possibly the forger having a daughter would clue you in, but since almost everything else is different, it might not.

The Credits:

directed by William Wyler.  based on a story by George Bradshaw.  screenplay by Harry Kurnitz.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10:
(in descending order of how I rank the script)

• This Property is Condemned  –  The second film directed by Sydney Pollack is the first of seven that he directed starring Robert Redford.  Adapted from a Tennessee Williams one-act play.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum  –  Stephen Sondheim’s musical becomes a film with its star, Zero Mostel, intact as the lead.  Worth watching just for the opening number and for the early Michael Crawford performance.  Comedy tonight!  It has a happy ending, of course.
• The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse  –  The fourth and final Mabuse film from Fritz Lang though others would pick up the character in later years.  Based on the original character by Norbert Jacques.
• The Sleeping Car Murders  –  The first film from Costa-Gavras, a stylish thriller based on the novel by Sébastien Japrisot.
• Gambit  –  The old oscars.org database had listed this as adapted but it seems it’s just based on a screen story by Sidney Carroll, not an actual previously published story.  Fun Michael Caine heist film.
• The Saragossa Manuscript  –  A 1965 Polish film based on the classic Polish novel from 1815 (though published in French).  Solid high *** film.
• La Terra Trema  –  A 1948 Luchino Visconti film finally getting its U.S. release.  Loosely based on the novel I Malavoglia.
• 7 Women  –  A bit of a different film for the last in John Ford’s career, a drama set in 1930s China.  Still a solid ***.
• Funeral in Berlin  –  The second Harry Palmer film with Michael Caine.
• King and Country  –  Bleak World War I Drama from Joseph Losey.  Based on the  novel Return to the Wood and its subsequent stage adaptation.
• Born Free  –  True life drama about a naturalist couple (the Adamsons) raising a lioness and then releasing her to the wild.  Based on the book by Joy Adamson
• The Group  –  Sidney Lumet adapted Mary McCarthy’s massive selling novel about a group of friends at what is pretty much Vassar.
• Fahrenheit 451  –  Given the brilliant source material and that it’s directed by Truffaut, disappointing at mid ***.  His first color film and his only English language film.
• Is Paris Burning?  –  Rene Clement’s film about the liberation of Paris had an all-star cast.  Based on the book by Larry Collins an Dominique Lapierre.
• Dracula: Prince of Darkness  –  The third Hammer Dracula film and the second with Christopher Lee.  Whether you believe Lee (“I said to Hammer, if you think I’m going to say any of these lines, you’re very much mistaken.” or screenwriter Jimmy Sangster (“Vampires don’t chat. So I didn’t write him any dialogue.”), either way, Lee has no lines (and is still effective because he’s Christopher Lee).  The best of the Dracula sequels from Hammer and fully reviewed here.
• Seconds  –  Solid thriller based on the novel by James Ely that could have been better if it hadn’t starred Rock Hudson.
• Walk Don’t Run  –  Cary Grant’s last film is a remake of The More the Merrier except instead of Washington in wartime, it’s Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics.
• A Man Could Get Killed  –  A James Garner Comedy based on the novel Diamonds for Danger.
• The Wrong Box  –  Another Michael Caine film, this one a Comedy based on the first of three novels that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote with his stepson.
• Up to His Ears  –  Jean-Paul Belmondo Comedy about a man who is bored and hires someone to kill him.  Based on a Jules Verne novel, the idea was recycled for Bulworth.
• Le Amiche  –  A 1955 Antonioni Drama coming to the States.  Based on Tra donne sole by Cesare Pavese.
• A Fine Madness  –  Between Bond roles, Sean Connery stars in this Comedy based on the novel by Elliott Baker.
• La Mandragola  –  An Italian Comedy from Alberto Lattuada based on a 16th Century Italian play.
• Hotel Paradiso  –  I’ve seen this one because director Peter Glenville was once nominated for an Oscar.  Based on the play L’Hôtel du Libre échange.
• The Blue Max  –  The BAFTAs reward their own, giving the film Best British Art Direction and nominating it for Best British Cinematography and Costume Design.  A World War I dogfight film based on the novel by Jack D. Hunter.
• A Big Hand for the Little Lady  –  A Western Comedy with Henry Fonda.  Based on a teleplay called Big Deal in Laredo.
• Hawaii  –  Epic-length James Michener novel (937 pages) becomes epic-length George Roy Hill film (189 minutes).  We’re into low-level ***.
• The Face of Fu Manchu  –  The first of five films where Christopher Lee plays Fu Manchu.
• 10:30 P.M. Summer  –  Jules Dassin directs this Drama based on the novel Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night.
• The Shameless Old Lady  –  French Drama based on a Brecht short story.
• Any Wednesday  –  The play ran for two years but the film, in spite of a young Jane Fonda, is less than stellar.
• Stop the World I Want to Get Off  –  Successful West End and Broadway Musical becomes less than successful film.
• Mister Buddwing  –  One of the last films to earn Oscar nominations just because of the black-and-white / color split (it was nominated for Black-and-White Art Direction and Black-and-White Costume Design).  Delbert Mann Drama with James Garner based on the novel Buddwing by Evan Hunter (who wrote Blackboard Jungle and later wrote as Ed McBain).
• Arabesque  –  Stanley Donen tried to pull off Charade again but Gregory Peck isn’t Cary Grant and Sophia Loren is definitely no Audrey Hepburn.  Comedy thriller based on the novel The Cypher.
• The Man Called Flintstone  –  We’re into **.5 range now.  Hanna-Barbera’s second feature film concludes the run of the television show.  The animated team was always more successful on television and wouldn’t make another film until Charlotte’s Web in 1973.
• An American Dream  –  Bland adaptation of a subpar Norman Mailer novel with Janet Leigh.
• The Appaloosa  –  A mediocre Marlon Brando Western based on the book by Robert McLeod.
• Ten Little Indians  –  You can skip this adaptation of the novel by Agatha Christie and just watch the 1945 version instead (or the 2015 television version).
• Modesty Blaise  –  Joseph Losey adapts the British comic strip into a feature film.
• The Liquidator  –  John Gardner’s thriller gets made into a low **.5 film starring Rod Taylor.
• The Silencers  –  The first of the Matt Helm films with Dean Martin based on the series by Donald Hamilton.
• Frankenstein Conquers the World  –  Not, in fact, a Hammer film as you might have expected here but instead a Japanese kaiju film.  Is it really adapted?  Oscars.org thought so, perhaps because the concept of Frankenstein’s Monster was adapted.
• Lord Love a Duck  –  Now we’ve hit ** films.  Dumb Comedy based on the 1961 novel that attempts to be a satire of popular culture but is just bland and stupid.
• The Oscar  –  A lot of former Oscar winners in this terrible film about someone trying to win an Oscar.  Based on the novel by Richard Sale.
• Tarzan and the Valley of Gold  –  Mike Henry takes over as a James Bond-type Tarzan.  The film itself was novelized by Fritz Leiber, the first authorized Tarzan novel not by Burroughs.  Low **.  By far the worst Tarzan film to this point.
• Moment to Moment  –  The last film from Mervyn LeRoy is a disaster, a Suspense film with Jean Seberg based on a short story called “Laughs with a Stranger”.
• Batman: The Movie  –  Campy and terrible.  For a full review you can read this.
• Mudhoney!  –  Russ Meyer adapts a novel (Streets Paved With Gold).  Why?  The third worst film of the year, a .5 film.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• Macbeth  –  A 1960 television version of Shakespeare’s play that must have received a U.S. theatrical release because oscars.org used to list it back when the database was live.
• School of Love  –  Apparently little-seen (no votes on the IMDb) 1965 film version of a lesser known (in other words, I haven’t read it) Yukio Mishima novel.

” ‘Mrs. Robinson,’ he said, turning around, ‘you are trying to seduce me.’ She frowned at him. ‘Aren’t you.’ She seated herself again on the couch. ‘Aren’t you?’ ” (p 22)

My Top 10:

1. The Graduate
2. In the Heat of the Night
3. In Cold Blood
4. Cool Hand Luke
5. Point Blank
6. The Comedians
7. The Deadly Affair
8. Wait Until Dark
9. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
10. A Fistful of Dollars

Note:  I not only have a Top 10 again but several films beyond the Top 10 which are down below.  Barefoot in the Park (#11) is the only film on my list I review down below as a WGA nominee.

Consensus Nominees:

1. The Graduate  (232 pts)
2. In the Heat of the Night  (184 pts)
3. In Cold Blood  (80 pts)
4. Cool Hand Luke  (40 pts)
5. Ulysses  (40 pts)
6. Up the Down Staircase  (40 pts)
7. Barefoot in the Park  (40 pts)
8. The Flim-Flam Man  (40 pts)
9. Camelot  (40 pts)
10. Doctor Dolittle  (40 pts)
11. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying  (40 pts)

Note:  It’s the first time since 1962 that a film with 40 pts makes it as a Consensus nominee and it won’t happen again until 1974.  It’s the first time since 1953 that only three films earn more than 40 Consensus points and it won’t happen again until 1986.  The Graduate has the fourth most points to-date but the second highest percentage to-date (29.90%), less than one percent behind A Man for All Seasons in 1966; no film will have a higher percentage until Julia in 1977.

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• In the Heat of the Night
• Cool Hand Luke
• The Graduate
• In Cold Blood
• Ulysses

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• In Cold Blood
• In the Heat of the Night
• Up the Down Staircase

Nominees that are Original:  Bonnie & Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Comedy:

• The Graduate
• Barefoot in the Park
• The Flim-Flam Man

Nominees that are Original:  Divorce American Style, Guide for the Married Man

Musical:

• Camelot
• Doctor Dolittle
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Nominees that are Original:  Thoroughly Modern Millie

Golden Globe:

• In the Heat of the Night
• The Fox  *
• The Graduate

Nominees that are Original:  Bonnie & Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
note:  The Fox would earn an Oscar eligible release in early 1968 (and would actually be nominated for Best Score) so it will be in the 1968 post.

BAFTA:

• The Graduate

note:  The Graduate would be BAFTA eligible in 1968.  From here on out, we’ll have BAFTA nominees (in 1968, the BAFTAs dropped their “British” categories, including Screenplay, and thus it will start counting regularly towards the Consensus points).  But, because of differences in eligibility years (American films are often eligible a year or even two later while British films are often eligible a year earlier than the Oscars) and because they won’t split into Original and Adapted until 1983, I will only list whatever relevant film from whatever year I am in for receiving BAFTA noms (though I will mention the year).

My Top 10

The Graduate

The Film:

This film has gone up and down a little with me over the years, as evidenced by ending up at #5 when I originally did the Best Picture and Year in Film posts but had bounced back to #2 when I did the Nighthawk Awards a few years later.  But it has never really strayed that far and every time I return to it, I am amused and entertained.  Most of all, of course, as I mentioned in the full review, is the wonderful acting from the three main characters.  It has, over the years, become something more than a film and more like an institution.  While Bonnie and Clyde has the highest reputation and In the Heat of the Night won the Oscar, it’s The Graduate that in some ways seems to be the one that people love the most (which I suppose was also true at the time as it was only the 4th film to ever gross $100 million).

The Source:

The Graduate by Charles Webb (1963)

This was an interesting experience.  There have definitely been novels that I have read where I loved the film but ended up not liking the book.  But there are usually good reasons for that having to do with the prose.  The Ice Storm, for instance, I found to be impenetrable as a novel because of the way Rick Moody writes.  Or there is Sideways, which is really just a book about wine.  And don’t even get me started on Jane Austen and Henry James.  Which brings me to The Graduate.  The Graduate is bizarre because there is so little difference between the film and the novel, yet while I have always loved the film I really hated the novel.  And it’s not because of the prose.  It’s because, as I was reading the book, I hated Benjamin Braddock.  I found him to be a self-involved boring narcissistic little prick who I would gladly punch in the face.  He’s gotten himself believing that he needs time to sort things out but we never really get the sense that he’s doing that.  We first meet him at the party for his graduation and his behavior is just boorish and childish with a complete lack of civility.

Honestly, if I had picked up this book on my own, I would have just put it down quickly.  I found nothing likable about Benjamin and I just would have given it up.  Which brings us to the adaptation.

The Adaptation:

What is so brilliant about the film is perhaps not the screenplay, even though the screenplay is magnificent.  Most of what is in the film, about 75% of the dialogue or more, comes straight from the novel, even the famous “You’re trying to seduce me” scene in its entirety.  The only line that springs to mind that wasn’t in the novel was “Plastics!”  And the main difference between the film and the novel in terms of the script is that in the novel Benjamin sells his car to pay for his room in Berkeley, so when there is all the back and forth at the end of the film, he is flying rather than driving (which wouldn’t film nearly as well).

But that’s when the performance comes into play.  What Dustin Hoffman does with his performance is give us a Benjamin who peeks our interest in spite of his boorish behavior.  He doesn’t seem entitled or obnoxious.  He genuinely seems lost, and what was so irritating when I read it in the novel works so well on the screen.

Mark Harris seems to acknowledge some of this in his excellent book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood: “Henry became the movie’s fourth screenwriter and started from scratch with a new draft that retained much of the book’s dialogue but transformed the character of Benjamin Braddock in some crucial ways.  Charles Webb had been Benjamin’s age when he wrote the novel, and with perhaps too little authorial distance, he had allowed Benjamin to personify the confusion, arrogance, and uncertainty of a pampered twenty-two-year-old who hadn’t yet figured out a direction for his life but knew he wanted to point it away from his parents.  On the page, Benjamin’s ungainly sense of moral severity can become smug.” (Harris, p 119)

The Credits:

Directed by Mike Nichols.  Screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry.  Based on the novel by Charles Webb.

In the Heat of the Night

The Film:

This film has continued to rise in my estimation even as it has had other films shuffle around it.  When I first saw it, back in the early 90’s, it seemed like a great film, but not much more than that and certainly not on the same level as the really big films of the year, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate (both of which I had already seen).  But it was already rising when I placed it at #4 in the Best Picture post where it is reviewed.  Then by the time of the Nighthawk Awards it had moved up to #3.  It is a great film, one of the great all-time Mystery films and it’s just too bad that Poitier wasn’t nominated, which I think is part of why I didn’t rate it as highly when I first saw it.

The Source:

In the Heat of the Night by John Ball (1965)

This is an effective thriller.  It’s the story of a black cop from Pasadena who is travelling through South Carolina after having visited his mother.  He is arrested on suspicion of murder after the promoter of a music festival turns up dead but when it is discovered that he is a homicide detective, the mayor decides to push the police chief to make use of him because if he finds the killer they can take the credit and if he doesn’t, he can take the blame.  In the end, he does find the killer through some very good detective work (not quite Sherlock Holmes but it does require a very keen eye for detail that starts from the minute he is arrested) and even manages to make a couple of friends on the force (the chief who he helps and the officer who is mistakenly arrested and who he gets off).  It works both in its approach to the racial question as well as a mystery / thriller.

The Adaptation:

“In the Heat of the Night, on the page, was a far cry from the story it became on the screen.  Ball’s basic outline was workable and remains recognizable in the finished film . . .  But the way in which Ball had fleshed out the story and characters would have to be completely discarded.  Ball had first conceived the plot of In the Heat of the Night back in 1933 and had written the novel in 1960; it took him four years to find a publisher.  Virgil Tibbs was already, by 1965, a retrograde character whose placid reaction to a racially charged situation was far too outdated for Poitier to play, or for any moviegoer who would choose to see this film in the first place to believe.”  (Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Mark Harris, p 139-140)

“At the same time, Silliphant and Jewison toughened their depiction of Virgil Tibbs, paring away so much of his dialogue that he became, by the final draft, someone who uses silence, withholding, and watchfulness as a weapon . . .  The accommodationist Negro of Ball’s novel was disappearing, in part because Silliphant and Jewison knew it was already outdated and in part because Poitier, who had a good deal of influence in the shaping of Tibbs’s character during the screenwriting process, was no longer interested in playing the role of an appeaser.”  (Harris, p 179)

Those quotes are both extremely accurate.  The basic premise of the story remains the same – the out-of-town black cop who solves the murder mystery in the Southern white town.  Some details remain the same (like the suspicion of Officer Wood) and even some dialogue remains the same (“They call me Mr. Tibbs.”).  But almost everything else is different, including Virgil’s hometown (changed from Pasadena to Philadelphia), the state the film takes place in (changed from South Carolina to Mississippi) and the identity of the victim (changed from music promoter to man building a factory).

The Credits:

directed by norman jewison.  screenplay by stirling silliphant.  based on a novel by john ball.

In Cold Blood

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as one of the Top 5 films of 1967.  I wrote that review in the shadow of a couple of current issues revolving around the death penalty and part of my review hinged on the very use of it in the film (and real life).  The film is smart enough and well enough made that it can actually serve as support for either side of that argument.  It is utterly preposterous that this film was nominated for Director and Screenplay but passed over for Picture in favor of Doctor Dolittle.

The Source:

In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences by Truman Capote  (1965)

I have never been a big reader of True Crime.  What I have read has usually been connected to films.  Of the books I have read, there are two that really stand out and I suspect they do for most people because they are written by genuinely literary stars, major names, not only as writers, but as celebrities: Truman Capote and Norman Mailer.  Both books were massive successes, both involved true senseless thefts and murders (with very little yield) and both involved men who were executed.  Other than that, the books are actually very different.  Mailer might have also been a “non-fiction novelist” like Capote (who coined the phrase for this book) but his, much longer book, focuses as much on the character of Gary Gilmore in why he did what he did whereas Capote’s book is much more a work of pure journalism.

Capote’s book is a riveting, fascinating work that keeps you fascinated at the same time that it leaves you cold.  Part of what makes it brilliant would also be part of what would make the film brilliant: its construction by leading up to the crime and then moving to the aftermath and only doubling back to give us the details of the crime once the perpetrators have been caught and it allows us to hear about it in their own words.

It’s been well documented in books and in the film Capote that writing this book broke Capote; he wouldn’t publish another complete book in his lifetime.  But if you’re going to be broken by a book, at least it’s one that has endured as a classic, not only of its genre, but as a piece of writing.

The Adaptation:

This is a fantastic book to film adaptation, pulling almost everything in the film direct from the book.  It even, wisely, follows the structure of the book by not showing what actually happens during the murders until late in the film, after the men have been captured and allows Perry to tell the story in his own words.  I’m not sure there’s anything in the film that wasn’t in the original book, unless you want to count the character of the reporter who is a stand-in for Capote himself.  There are certain things that are cut (what Dick and Perry do after the crimes is considerably truncated, for instance) because you can’t get the entire book into a film but everything else is pretty much straight from the book.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen and Directed by Richard Books.  Based on the Book by Truman Capote.

Cool Hand Luke

The Film:

Did Stuart Rosenberg and Frank R. Pierson (I am excluding Donn Pearce, whose initial script was mostly dropped) watch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof before they came up with the opening shots of Cool Hand Luke?  That film had a scene at the beginning of the film that helped set the stage for the film but wasn’t in the original source material, simply being referred to instead.  That was the scene where Brick actually breaks his leg and then we get Paul Newman, lying on the ground with those blue eyes in glorious color.  In Cool Hand Luke, we open with a scene referred to in the original novel but not actually shown.  In it, he stumbles drunkenly through the street, taking the tops off parking meters, before he lays down and is arrested and we get that clear shots of those blue eyes.  Both films set the stage for the performance that follows and they bring us into a character with some sympathy when the character has serious flaws that might otherwise push away some of our sympathy.

Cool Hand Luke is an interesting film, the kind of overlooked film in some ways of a seminal year.  People think about the famous line (“What we have here is a failure to communicate”) and they think about the scene where Luke eats the 50 eggs or they might remember the fight between him and George Kennedy.  But in a year that produced Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate and In the Heat of the Night, all films that ended in the Best Picture race over Cool Hand Luke (deservedly), are they thinking much of Cool Hand Luke?  It’s a great film, a **** film with a very solid script, a great, cool performance from Newman (more on that below), easily the best performance by George Kennedy by much more than a mile (although there’s no way he should have won the Oscar over Gene Hackman) and it is quite well made.  But it’s sitting down in the lower ranges of **** and can’t match up to those classic films.

There are a few key scenes (mentioned above) but what really makes this film work is Paul Newman’s performance.  He runs the gamut of our emotions.  He makes us feel that Luke is cool, that Luke is kind of badass, that Luke is a rebel.  We believe that he would stand with us, that he would find a way to win in his fight against rebellion (there are echoes of how Paul Newman came from the shadow of James Dean in that his mother in this film is played by Jo Van Fleet, who also played Dean’s mother in East of Eden).  But look at how Luke suffers.  Look at what he does, and for what?  He doesn’t find freedom.  He doesn’t find redemption.  He finds pain and suffering and eventually death.  The film suckers us in and then doesn’t actually come through for us and maybe that’s the most rebellious thing about it, in spite of the smiling picture we see at the end that’s supposed to remind us of everything Luke has done.

The Source:

Cool Hand Luke: A Novel by Donn Pearce (1965)

“The physical presence of Paul Newman is the reason this movie works: The smile, the innocent blue eyes, the lack of strutting.”  That’s Roger Ebert in his Great Film review of Cool Hand Luke.  And he is right, there is no question about it (see my own review above).  But that also says, not only what is right about the film, but what is wrong about the novel.  In the novel, we hear a lot about Luke, the characters talk about him, rave about him, about he was everything they wanted to live up to, even if Luke in the end died, really, for nothing.  But without that smile, without that strut, without those eyes, Luke never really comes to life.  Yes, we hear about how he keeps escaping and we know about the 50 eggs.  But we never really see Luke as a real person, just as an embodiment of these men and what they hope to live up to.

This book never really is moving like other prison books, like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” perhaps because it is just about some guys on a chain gang.  Yes, life is brutal.  But these men aren’t innocent (and neither was Pearce – he was writing about his own experiences and the bio in the book describes him as both a safecracker and a convict), so it makes it harder to relate to them.  If not for the brutality of the guards, this would be like any book about anecdotes about the cool kid among a group of people trapped in one place, whether it be prison, boarding school or the armed forces.  But Pearce’s characters never really take off and it would be the film and some of its immortal dialogue and the classic performance from Newman that would really bring this story to life.

The Adaptation:

Several of the key scenes from the film come originally from the book, most notably the scene of Luke eating the 50 eggs and the death scene at the end (although the film presents the final shots of the film in a way that is a little bit more uplifting than the sheer bleakness of the book).  But some of the most important ones also don’t come from the book, including what is not only the most famous line of dialogue in the book, but one of the most famous lines of dialogue from all of film: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”  The scene between Luke and his mother is also created for the film and has no original source in the book.  The film really takes the blueprint from the book of a man who is looked up to by the other prisoners but is eventually broken and then killed and expands on it to make it more of a classic.

The Credits:

Directed by Stuart Rosenberg.  Screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson.  Based on the Novel by Donn Pearce.

Point Blank

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as the under-appreciated film of 1967, although, good lord, that was eight years ago now.  It might seem strange to have a film now widely acknowledged to be a classic to be seen as under-appreciated but bear in mind that this film, in the same year as Doctor Dolittle and Camelot winning Oscars, failed to be nominated for any award by any group.

The Source:

The Hunter by Richard Stark (1962)

This is a very stark novel (thus the name of the author – it’s a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake).  Stark had the idea for writing it after walking across the George Washington Bridge, which gave him the opening (dropped, ironically for the film) and developed it from there.  Originally, Parker was going to die in the end, but the editor of Pocket Books said “I like Parker. Is there any way you could rewrite the book so that Parker gets away, and then give us two or three books a year about him?” (intro, p viii).  The novel is extremely effective as we follow Parker through the first part, then switch to Mal for the second part, then back to Parker for the third part until the two intersect and we can continue forward with the story.  Parker is a driven character and he’s fascinating and it all makes for a very quick read (it’s only 155 pages) and for its genre, it’s a solid book.  Unlike the film, it doesn’t really rise above the genre, but it does provide a good example of how fascinating the crime book can be.

The Adaptation:

The film takes the basic ideas of the book (a man is shot by his partners and left for dead, he goes about getting revenge on his wife and the main man responsible while trying to get his money back).  There are a few details that are the same (he does visit a man who works with Mal and threatens him on a drive, but not by destroying his car) but almost all the details are different, including the locations (it takes place in New York in the book, with the scene of Walker walking through the airport filling in for his walk across the GW Bridge while the film goes with California, including Alcatraz), the name of the main characters (Parker becomes Walker, probably because they just bought the rights to the one book rather than the series, just like Harper in 1966 while Mal Resnick becomes Mal Reese) the way some of them die (Resnick is strangled by Parker while Reese is thrown off a building by Walker), the girl (Chris, the Angie Dickinson character, doesn’t exist in the book) and even the ending (in the book, Parker gets the money but then has to leave it behind when two cops catch up to him for a different, incidental connection so he starts robbing Outfit locations to get his revenge).

The Credits:

directed by John Boorman.  screen play by Alexander Jacobs and David Newhouse & Rafe Newhouse.  based on the novel “The Hunter” by Richard Stark.

The Comedians

The Film:

Around the time I first saw this film (sometime between 2005 and 2007 when I was living in Quincy) I learned that it didn’t have a particularly great reputation.  Here we have a film from a Graham Greene novel, complete with a script by Greene himself that stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (which can be a mixed bag, I realize), with a great supporting performance from Alec Guinness and an early film appearance by James Earl Jones.  What, exactly, was the problem?

Well, there were a couple of things at least, one of which is understandable and true, the other of which is understandable but I think it a mistake.  The first is that the director of this film is Peter Glenville.  Glenville had worked with Burton before (directing him to an Oscar nomination in Becket) and with Guinness before (in The Prisoner) and hadn’t gotten a lot out of two of the all-time great film actors.  In fact, the acting in most of Glenville’s films isn’t all that great and given the talent he has been working with (and the quality of the writing), that has to be laid at his feet.  Here, he gets an interesting, kind of morose performance out of Burton (appropriate for the character) and fascinating ones out of Guinness and Paul Ford, though he isn’t able to do much with Taylor.

The second thing is that this film is a political thriller without being particularly thrilling.  I think people look that it’s a Greene adaptation, see that it deals with the politics in Haiti and then expect something that they don’t find in the film.  This film depicts a Haiti that is falling apart (during the rule of Papa Doc Duvalier) and seen, mostly through the eyes of a burned-out man who is trying to sell his hotel in Port-au-Prince and get off the island.  He gets caught up in an attempted revolution, befriending the communist doctor who is leading it (Jones), a British man who may be a spy or may be just a blowhard (Guinness) and a man who once ran against Harry Truman as a Vegetarian (Ford).  In the middle of it all, he is sleeping with Liz Taylor and even that’s not enough to get him excited about anything.  But these characters are fascinating, especially Guinness’ Major Jones, a man who reminds me of one of my all-time favorite Seinfeld lines (“Perhaps there’s more to Newman than meets the eye.” “No. There’s less.”).

The Source:

The Comedians by Graham Greene (1965)

For a long time, in Greene’s list of published works at the front of his books, the novels would be split into “Entertainments” and “Novels”.  The list last appears in this novel, which means we don’t know which this book would have been considered.  I suspect it would have been a novel, because it lacked the humor of his most recent entertainment (Our Man in Havana) and because, in some ways, this book deals with the same kind of thing that The Quiet American does: how the great powers try to sometimes badly intervene in the affairs of smaller, less developed nations, and how those nations are doing enough tearing themselves apart without any help.

This is not even close to one of Greene’s best novels, but when you’re talking about someone like Graham Greene, who is in the top tier of British writers, alongside Dickens, Lawrence and Woolf, that still makes this a very readable book.  It’s the story of a burned-out hotel owner who is trying to get out of Haiti and extricate himself from his hotel, his love affair with the wife of the Venezuelan counsel, from the revolution that seems to be imposing itself upon his life and from the various people he met on his return to the island.

The Adaptation:

Greene himself adapted the novel, so the changes that he made were ones he decided upon.  The biggest one has simply to do with how much we know about what is going on.  The original novel is written in first person by Mr. Brown, the owner of the hotel (played by Richard Burton in the film).  That means a lot of scenes, like the murder of the doctor leading the revolution (depicted much differently than how it was described in the book) or the early imprisonment of Major Jones are things that we only learned about later (and through the prism of Brown’s viewpoint) in the novel, while in the film we see them as they happen.  By expanding that, we actually get a much more negative viewpoint of Haiti and the way that Duvalier and his secret police were running things.  The ending of the film is also much more ambiguous, as Greene could do that with the film while the novel, limited by Brown’s viewpoint, couldn’t have that luxury.

The Credits:

Produced and directed by Peter Glenville. From the novel by Graham Greene. Screenplay by Graham Greene.

The Deadly Affair

The Film:

The Deadly Affair seemed at the time of its release like it could be an important film.  It was directed by Sidney Lumet who, even years before his amazing work in the 70’s was already known as a solid and important film-maker thanks to films like 12 Angry Men, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Pawnbroker.  It would end up being nominated for several BAFTAs including British Film, British Actor and Foreign Actress.  It would also be the first real George Smiley film, his small role in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold not really counting and John le Carré was still in the process of writing more Smiley books.  Yet, it didn’t turn out to be that kind of film at all.  When it was released in the States it went mostly unnoticed, being a British production in 1967, a year overwhelmed by its importance in film history.  The Smiley character had to be renamed because Paramount owned the rights to the character because of Spy and so, while it was a Smiley story (the original one, in fact), it didn’t even use his name and so it seemed divorced from the work of its author.  It was made at a time where Lumet seemed to be wandering a bit in the wilderness; it was one of 11 films that Lumet made in less than a decade between The Pawnbroker and Serpico but none of them really seemed to burnish his reputation and it would take that string of years in the mid-70’s where it seemed he was making a major Oscar contender every year to really revive his reputation as an important director.  Today, it is not celebrated at all as one of Lumet’s very good films (I have it as mid ***.5 and the #18 film of the year) but seems to be almost forgotten and your best chance to watch it is to catch it on a showing on TCM (which is where I did watch it for this review).

Charles Dobbs (our re-named George Smiley) is weary.  He was important back during the war and maybe for a few years after that but now he’s just finishing out his career at MI-5 doing whatever they require of him.  In this case, it’s going over to the Foreign Office to interview someone he knows who has been denounced as a Communist.  After a short talk and an assurance that it won’t harm the man’s career, Dobbs thinks he is done.  Until the man commits suicide.  And when Dobbs goes down to investigate, there is a wake-up call from the local exchange for the dead man.  But what kind of suicide schedules a wake-up call?  As Dobbs stands there in the room, looking at the foreign wife of the dead man, his mind is starting to move and he starts to feel a bit like the younger man in the war who actually did something worthwhile for his country.  All of this will take him through a mystery that involves murder, deception and even adultery when Dobbs will eventually realize that his own wife’s famous infidelities are tied up in all of this (not that she knows that).

Dobbs is played very well by James Mason in a performance that is better than the Oscar nominated performance from Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.  With that magnificent voice of Mason’s we can easily believe that there is something far more going on behind those eyes that his body is capable of following through on.  He will work through this mystery and Lumet takes us through it with precision and quality.  There’s no question that Lumet’s work in this era was not his best (his films, as a whole average 69.4 but his 11 films in this era average a 62.2).  But this is the best of those films, partially because it is well-written and it’s an effective thriller, partially because Lumet really kind of finds his touch again in this film and partially because of the strong performance from Mason (with able support from the rest of a talented cast like Simone Signoret, Harriet Andersson, Maximilian Schell, Harry Andrews and Rory Kinnear – Lumet really got a good, wide international cast for the film).  In the end, if there’s a real problem with the film it’s not that the film’s not worth seeing but that the film suffers so much when compared to what Alec Guinness would do with the character of George Smiley over a decade later.  But don’t let the ruin your enjoyment of Smiley’s first real film outing.

The Source:

Call for the Dead by John le Carré  (1961)

As I mentioned in the previous year’s post, I came to John le Carré late.  I had already seen several films based on his books long before I ever read one of them, including this one (though it took me years to find this film).  After reading Tinker Tailor, I did things right and went back to the beginning of the Smiley books and read them in order, which means I began with Call for the Dead (a quick caveat: like with Fleming, I prefer my John le Carré books to be in older mass markets because I think the format suits the style, so I only have the books up through Smiley’s People though I have read some of the later ones).  Call for the Dead is interesting for a lot of reasons.  While it is short and is more of a mystery than the more subtle spy novels that really begin with The Spy Who Came From the Cold, it still fits into le Carré’s notion of writing anti-Fleming books showing how spies really tended to do their work (with intelligence and hard work rather than brawn and bullets).  Smiley is asked to run a check on a Foreign Office employee who has been denounced as a Communist and he clears him, so he is understandably surprised when the man supposedly commits suicide.  That draws Smiley into a mystery over who must have killed him and why.  It will actually bring about Smiley’s resignation from The Circus (which is ignored) and it introduces the major character of Peter Guillam (a character who would be changed a bit in Tinker and who eventually gets to be the star of his own book in le Carré’s latest book A Legacy of Spies).  In the end, Smiley will need to deal with someone that he worked with when he was a spy working during the war, something that will come up again in the later books.  It is a short and sweet book (running just 148 pages) but is a nice, easy introduction to the character and the author.

The Adaptation:

The basic premise of the story and indeed, a lot of the details do come straight from the original novel (even if the names don’t).  But one major detail later in the story is not only drastically different but would have major implications for the future Smiley novels.  The screenwriters bring in the character of Smiley’s wife Anne (who is mentioned but does not appear in the book) and they have one having an affair with Dieter, the main villain in the film.  There would be strong echoes of that in Tinker Tailor where it will turn out that Anne was having an affair will the man who turns out to be the traitor.  The reasons for this are different, though, as Dieter uses it to keep tabs on his rival while in Tinker, it is done specifically to keep Smiley from being objective about the man and realizing who is the traitor.  Still, the similarities are strong enough and important enough that this film has to be considered a major part of the Smiley canon.

The Credits:

produced and directed by sidney lumet.  screenplay by paul dehn.
note:  the only mention of the source is in the title card: john le carre’s the deadly affair.

Wait Until Dark

The Film:

Audrey Hepburn was never a star the way lots of Hollywood stars were.  She made, in all, only 27 feature films, six of them with only small roles before she broke out with Roman Holiday.  By 1967, she hadn’t really done any serious roles for a while, not since The Children’s Hour in 1961.  But she would do two major roles in the year, returning to the list of Oscar nominees, and if she earned her nomination for the lesser of the two roles (she’s significantly better in Two for the Road, which is also a better film), that’s not her fault.  She is quite good as the blind woman who is, through an accident, in possession of a doll containing heroin that three crooks want to get back from her.

This film is smart in the way that it presents us the situation (we see a mysterious situation at an airport that only becomes clear over time).  The doll has been passed on to Hepburn’s husband, a photographer who is then called away for a business trip.  He’s not that concerned about leaving his blind wife at home because she is very capable and she has some help from the young girl upstairs.  Plus, he doesn’t know that three crooks are about to descend upon his home.

The crooks don’t trust each other and they meet by accident.  Two of them are working together, but it is the third, Roat, played by Alan Arkin in an odd, yet disturbing performance, that is by far the most dangerous.  He is like a snake, ready to strike at any time and you must never turn your back on him.  In the end, it is him that the blind woman must face off against, trying to disguise herself in darkness and work against him as best she can.

The film works for a few reasons.  It is tautly directed with an interesting script that allows us to know what is going on while we watch the poor blind woman going about her life surrounded by liars and no longer certain who or what to believe.  But the primary reason for the success is the performance from Audrey Hepburn.  She hits every right note, brave when she needs to be, frightened when it makes sense, determined when she has to be.  It would earn her fifth and final Oscar nomination, one of two really good performances that made 1967 seem like a big year for her.

Sadly, this was not to be the revival of Hepburn’s film career.  Her two fantastic performances of 1967 were the end, really, of a long, but not that plentiful career.  She would not make another film for nine years, and that, Robin and Marian, though far from great, was the best and most important of the four films she would make post-1967.  Still, she was one of the best that we ever saw on screen, a light comedienne who could really bring drama when necessary and this film, a very good film that makes the climb up into ***.5 territory, is a reminder of her total range.

The Source:

Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott (1966)

This is an effective play about a blind woman whose husband has unwittingly brought him a doll filled with drugs.  Three criminals have united in an attempt to outwit the woman and find the doll.  Aside from the performance (which could change depending on the star, though it was Lee Remick in the original production, so that’s a solid star), the really interesting part comes from the way we can watch the criminals and the way they interact and try to fool the woman while she, of course, cannot see them and doesn’t know what we know.  It’s also an effective thriller for the way it builds to the climax in which she is forced to defend herself in a dark apartment.

The Adaptation:

Most of the film comes straight from the play.  Because so much of the action is confined to the blind woman’s apartment, there is very little “opening up” of the play, but a little bit is done.  First, there is an opening scene in which her husband first is given the doll, complete with the danger involved.  Then, while in the play we only hear about what happens to one of the crooks from another one, in the film we actually see the results.  Other than that, the vast majority of the action and the dialogue come straight from the play, right down to the suspenseful climax.

The Credits:

Directed by Terence Young.  Based on the Play by Frederick Knott.  Screenplay by Robert & Jane-Howard Carrington.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

The Film:

Certain directors have specific stylistic flourishes or choices that mark their films with a distinctive trademark.  Sometimes those are things that are great and other times, while they are something that many critics admire, they are things that keep me from overly admiring the director’s body of work.  Godard is the perfect example of course, with his experimental vision on film bringing many in to his tent and forcing me to want to burn it down.  Lars von Trier’s adherence to the Dogme code brings him many admirers and I am most decidedly not one of them.  Then there is Robert Bresson.  After a couple of early films, Bresson would decide that Hollywood flourishes, the very things that Truffaut would write papers about expressing his admiration, were things that his films could do without.  From then on, his films would make use of amateurs and they would be decidedly minimalist in things such as scoring.  Bresson is such a talented director with such a unique vision that a lot of his films manage to make their way into the high *** range in spite of all of that but professionals are professionals for a reason and I find many of his best known films to be difficult to sit through.  But then there is Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.

This was Bresson’s second film, made back in 1945 (it was supposedly released in the U.S. in 1964 but oscars.org had it listed as Academy eligible in 1967) and starring Maria Casares, the beautiful young actress who was just coming off making Children of Paradise, easily one of the greatest films ever made (and her performance is a part of why).  Bresson hadn’t yet stepped away from professionalism in front of the camera and the result is a strong film.  If Bresson hasn’t yet reached his full potential as a director, he also isn’t burdened by the blank acting coming off the screen.

The story is actually quite simple.  Hélène and Jean love each other, promise themselves to each other without any legal entanglements.  But when Hélène realizes Jean is cooling on her, she pretends to spurn him while dedicating herself instead to revenge.  To that end, she embarks on a complicated plot, getting him to fall for an impoverished young girl who has been forced into work as a prostitute.  Most of the 84 minute film is dedicated to the plot, climaxing with the marriage in which Hélène reveals to Jean what she has done to him.

The film works because it is well-written and it works because of Casares.  While Bresson was still using professionals at this point, the weak performance of Paul Bernard as Jean almost brings the film down in the way that some of his later films are undermined.  But Casares, heartbroken at the start and then dedicated to her revenge keeps the film moving forward.  Indeed, the reason that the film doesn’t quite escape the level of *** in spite of a strong script is that the somewhat happy ending, in which Jean pledges his love to his new bride (keeping her from dying of a broken heart) is forced to push Casares out of the way and since it was her performance that was really holding the film together, it just feels like a wishy-washy ending.  It’s interesting then, with this professional performance being by far the best thing about the film, that Bresson would then turn away from such acting.

The Source:

Jacques le fataliste et son maître by Denis Diderot  (1796)

This is a bizarre novel, a bit of Tristram Shandy (literally, as sometimes the novel actually quotes from Sterne’s book and makes specific allusions to it in other places), a bit of Arabian Nights (with the constant story-telling that is often interrupted and then started again).  It was written over the course of a decade but then not published until after his death (partially in German, then re-translated to French before a worthy French edition was finally published in 1796).  The book is a collection of various stories that Jacques tells to his master over the course of the journey including the story of Mme de La Pommeraye, a woman who is scorned by the man she loves and then plots her revenge.  The strange thing is that there are definitely elements of similarity between this particular story (which is what the film is based on) and de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses, yet the latter book was published in 1782, supposedly long after Diderot had finished writing his own book and yet, since Diderot’s book wasn’t published until after his death in 1784, it’s clear neither writer could have gotten any ideas from the other.

The Adaptation:

Bresson would take the basic story from the Diderot book of a woman who is scorned by the man she loves (and who had loved her) and plots her revenge that will see him humiliated.  But almost everything in the specifics is changed for the film, especially as the film is updated to the present.  The story in the book covers a good stretch of the book, beginning on page 109 (of the Penguin Classics edition) but that’s because the story is constantly interrupted and there are digressions as we try to continue forward with the actual story of Mme de La Pommeraye.

The Credits:

Un film de Robert Bresson.  Scénario et Adaptation de Robert Bresson.  D’après un conte de Diderot.  Dialogue de Jean Cocteau.

A Fistful of Dollars

The Film:

It’s amazing how a film can be so original and yet have no originality all at the same time.  This film is often credited as the beginning of Spaghetti Westerns, yet there had already been over 20 Westerns made in Italy by this time.  This film created the Man with No Name, a character that has inspired many a film and an entire book series (Stephen King’s magnificent Dark Tower) and yet, this film was such a blatant rip-off from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo that Kurosawa didn’t threaten to sue but actually sued and won in court, earning a percentage of the worldwide gross and exclusive distribution rights in several Asian countries, a deal that he would later say, would earn him more money than his original Yojimbo did.  There is nothing truly original in this film, and yet, it sparkles with a directorial vision that would turn a lowly director who had been struggling to find success and turn him into one of the most famous directors in the world.  This lawsuit is what delayed the U.S. release until 1967 and why U.S. versions of the film have no screenplay credits.

Yet, this film is a wonder to behold.  It single-handedly made Leone’s reputation and there is a reason for that.  It may shamelessly rip off Yojimbo, but Leone’s shots are fantastic, the action keeps things moving and we really wonder if we should be rooting for this Man with No Name even as find ourselves rooting for him anyway.  And he is no perfect man, winning at every turn.  He gets severely beaten, manages to just keep himself alive, and yet, in the end, he somehow manages to prevail.  That is in no small part to Eastwood’s performance, the performance that turned him from a television actor into an international film star.  It is Eastwood’s squint, his way with few words, the way he captivates people without barely saying anything that made people look to him in a new way.  And of course, what would all of this be without the magnificent music from Ennio Morricone?  That fantastic director wouldn’t win an Oscar until 2015 and none of his music for Leone would ever be acknowledged by awards groups, but it is some of the most fantastic (and famous) music ever composed for film.

There are genres that are owned by various studios.  Universal Horror would later be followed by Hammer Horror and they ruled that genre in a way no studio ever came close to.  Warners was known for their Gangster films.  But no director ever completely ruled a subgenre in the way that Sergio Leone would with Spaghetti Westerns.  I have seen dozens and dozens of them and only four of them rank above mid-*** and all of them were directed by Sergio Leone.  The genre can be entertaining and fun, but when not directed by Leone, that’s all they manage to rise to.  With Leone, they take that extra step and they become film masterpieces.  He hadn’t quite hit that stride here, but this was the first step, and with just a slight step backwards in the second film, it would then lead to his two absolute masterpieces.

The Source:

Yojimbo, directed by Akira Kurosawa, screenplay by Akira Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima, story by Akira Kurosawa (1961)

This isn’t really the original Man with No Name, because technically, Toshiro Mifune’s samurai actually has a name (Sanjuro Kuwabatake).  And in a sense, this isn’t even all that original, as it seems derived from Dash Hammett’s great novel Red Harvest, about a man who comes upon rival gangsters that are tearing apart a town and then proceeds to get in the middle of it (it also seems to have inspired the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing).

Yojimbo is a great film, the film that rules over the Nighthawk Awards with the most nominations without a Best Picture nomination, because it comes in 6th place in 1961 yet manages 11 nominations, including winning Best Original Screenplay.  It is really required watching for almost anyone interested in film, one of the great Samurai films from Akira Kurosawa, and indeed, I first saw it in high school in a World Literature class.

The Adaptation:

Well, the adaptation was so blatant that Leone and his producers were taken to court and they lost.  You can read in The Emperor and the Wolf on pages 310-312 about how Kurosawa was first made aware of the film and the various information that makes it clear that no matter what Leone might have claimed, he clearly was inspired by the film and then sat down to make the film almost exactly as it was originally, except transplanting it to the American west.  There were a few changes: “Two big scenes were added: a massacre at the Rio Bravo Canyon, and a shoot-out in a cemetery, where two dead soldiers are used as decoys.  Another key scene was removed: the arrival of ‘the county inspector’, who had revealed that there was a political and social world going on beyond the confines of the story.”  (Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death, Christopher Frayling, p 126)

The Credits:

Directed by Sergio Leone.
note:  As I was watching a U.S. print, there are no writing credits, due to the lawsuit from Akira Kurosawa. The IMDb lists writing credits for: Adriano Bolzoni (story), Mark Lowell (dialogue), Víctor Andrés Catena (story, screenplay), Sergio Leone (story, screenplay), Jaime Comas Gil (screenplay), Fernando Di Leo (screenplay), Duccio Tessari (screenplay), Tonino Valerii(screenplay).

Consensus Nominees

Ulysses

The Film:

This is an okay film.  That it earned an Oscar nomination for its script is, as I have written elsewhere in my full review of the film, less an acknowledgement of the quality of the script than an acknowledgement of the difficulty of adapting a novel that everyone said couldn’t be filmed.  Or perhaps it was just that it was done decently when it could have been done badly.  But I also explained in that review why it wasn’t that hard to film this book well.  Joyce could be and has been, filmed a lot worse.

The Source:

Ulysses by James Joyce  (1922)

I have already written far more on this novel than you will probably want to read especially since the odds are that you will never read the book itself.  It is, nonetheless, far less, of course, than has already been written on the book, including entire books.  It is one of the greatest novels ever written and if you are frightened off by either its length or its complexity, it’s your loss.

The Adaptation:

It would take far too long to explain all the parts of the book that are cut to make a nearly 800 page book fit into just a little over two hours.  But the most important thing is that almost everything you see on screen does indeed come from the book.  While they were forced to cut large parts of the book to make it fit (most notably, most of the sex), they did stick to the book for everything that they did keep (and most of what they cut wasn’t plot because the book is about language as much as story).  Because they wanted to keep with the idea of Molly’s long monologue to end the film (which is stream-of-consciousness in the book), we do get a large barrage of imagery in the last 20 minutes of the film which aren’t necessarily from the book but they all work with what she is saying.  Kudos to the filmmakers for not skimping or changing Molly’s speech and rightfully ending the film with her wonderful ending words.

The Credits:

Directed and Produced by Joseph Strick.  Screenplay by Joseph Strick and Fred Haines.
note:  The are no opening credits except the title card: Ulysses by James Joyce.

Up the Down Staircase

The Film:

The story of the noble teacher trying to get through to the down-trodden youth might have already been old hat when Blackboard Jungle made it seem somewhat new again with its use of “Rock Around the Clock”.  So, here we are 12 years later and we’re doing the same thing with the caveat that we’ve got Sandy Dennis as the young teacher, not exactly a stellar example when you can look at Glen Ford and that this isn’t even the best example of this exact story in this year because To Sir With Love was also released this year.

This film was produced by Alan J. Pakula (before he turned to directing) and directed by Robert Mulligan.  This was the same team that had made To Kill a Mockingbird and there, their basic liberal philosophy was able to shine through because it worked so well in conjunction with the story.  Here, they are trying too hard to make a statement about the state of public schools in New York City and it just makes the film seem heavy-handed.  It doesn’t help that they cast Sandy Dennis.  Dennis had talent as an actress, as she had proved the year before in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but that was a role perfectly suited for her.  Her shrill yet mousy demeanor doesn’t engender sympathy and if you don’t feel much sympathy for the teacher in this terrible situation then there’s nothing that allows you to emotionally access the film.

I watched this film in the same week that I watched I, Daniel Blake.  Both films approach similar problems in similar styles.  The problem with both films is that they so determined to get through their points, so determined to show how wasteful and obstructive the bureaucracy is that it becomes basically unbelievable.  Even if it’s true, it seems so ridiculously contrived and over-the-top that you lose the dramatic flow of the film.  What’s more, this film doesn’t have the directing prowess of Ken Loach or the performances.  What it has is a bunch of kids who act out, but then, by the end of the film, are able to come through and find the meaning in classic literature and have a mock trial because of course there will be progress, otherwise why make the movie?

The Source:

Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman (1964)

Bel Kaufman was a New York City school teacher so I must assume that some of the details in this novel stem from her actual experiences but they still seem too unreal.  What’s more, the novel is written in a style that makes it almost impossible to get through.  It’s sort of an epistolary novel, made up of some letters but mostly memos and inter-office communications.  But it’s just a mess and supplies no actual narrative and long before I was even halfway through the book I just wanted to throw it down in anguish.

The Adaptation:

The basic premise for the film comes from the original novel (though definitely not the casting, given that Miss Barrett is described as “not only everybody’s choice ‘Audrey Hepburn’ of Calvin Coolidge but is also a very attractive woman . . . brown hair and blue-gray eyes”) but the original, because of its style, doesn’t really have a plot and to keep the film moving forward, it provides more of one, especially so you can have some sort of dramatic conclusion.

The Credits:

Directed by Robert Mulligan.  Based on the novel by Bel Kaufman.  Screenplay by Tad Mosel.

Barefoot in the Park

The Film:

In my Best Picture post, I had someone comment that Doctor Dolittle definitely deserves all the scorn I heaped upon it, but his link goes to his negative review of Barefoot in the Park where he claims it is the second worst Oscar nominated film of the year.  It’s a good thing he didn’t see my Nighthawk Awards where it earned five Comedy nominations (Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress).  Granted, outside of The Graduate, this is a terrible year for Comedy so even a mid to low ***.5 film like this one can ride high at the nominations.  To be fair to that commenter, I suppose, I should mention that his scorn hurled at Barefoot included the facts that he doesn’t like Jane Fonda or Neil Simon, though that begs the question of what the hell he was doing watching this film in the first place if that’s the case.

This film wasn’t the start of Neil Simon on film; his Come Blow Your Horn had been made in 1963 and he had co-written the script for After the Fox in 1966.  But this was the first time that Simon was adapting his own play, it was a massive success at the box office and earned several award nominations (though, oddly none from the Globes where you would think it would do well).  It had a star in Robert Redford who had already played the part on stage and had another star, Jane Fonda, who was really starting to come into her own.  I have seen every film that Fonda made up to this point and while she had already been nominated three times at the Globes this is where she really starts to act (which, two years later, will take on a new life) and even the BAFTAs would notice, giving her the first of an eventual six nominations for Best Actress.

This film is the kind of story that I have been known to heap scorn upon: that of the free spirit who is trying to get people to relax and live a little (the poster on the right really plays into that and I’m glad I didn’t see it until after writing the review).  So why is it that it manages to break into the ***.5 range when normally I would be decrying its very existence?  Well, a couple of reasons.  First, there is Fonda’s winning performance as a poor young woman who is completely head over heels in love with her new husband and is also completely out of her depth trying to set up everything in their new Greenwich Village apartment.  It doesn’t hurt that Fonda is still kind of in her sex kitten phase and that she’s willing to tease her husband with a couple of hilarious moments that weren’t in the original play (such as exiting the elevator in the Plaza Hotel for their honeymoon and saying loud enough for everyone still in the elevator to hear “Mr. Adams, I think you should know that I’m only fifteen.”).  There is also the fact that she’s in perfect contrast to her stuffed shirt lawyer husband, also perfectly played by Robert Redford (who had already played her husband once before in The Chase).  She’s also trying to deal with, not only her new apartment, but the very eccentric upstairs neighbor who enters through his own apartment by climbing out her window (“Did you lose your key?”  “No.  I have my key.  I lost my money.  I’m four months behind in the rent.”) who she wants to set up with her widowed mother.  Aside from Redford, the film also has Mildred Natwick as Fonda’s poor mother, constantly trudging up five flights of stairs (if you don’t count the stoop) coming in from the original stage production and her performance is so perfectly placed that it earned her an Oscar nomination.

The other thing that really makes the film work is Simon’s script.  It shows us a real couple who have probably gotten married too quickly and don’t really know what living together will entail (certainly they didn’t imagine that it would snow directly into their living room).  While it has good use of the two supporting cast members (Charles Boyer plays the neighbor), it’s really the story of a young couple learning what it’s like to be married.  And thankfully, the answer isn’t simply that one of them is a free spirit and the other one needs to learn to be one.

The Source:

Barefoot in the Park: A New Comedy by Neil Simon  (1963)

While this wasn’t Simon’s first play (or even his first big hit, as Come Blow Your Horn played 678 performances), it was the play that really helped make Simon such a big name.  It played for almost four years, finally closing right after the film was released.  It helped establish Mike Nicholas a Broadway director (winning him the Tony) and was the big stage success for Robert Redford that helped propel him into a real film career (he had done some films before the play but only became a star after the play).  It’s a good play, the story of a young married couple dealing with their first apartment together and the problems it entails, from a bizarre upstairs neighbor to a skylight with a hole to a problematic closet (“Oh, we decided not to use the closet for a while.”  “Really?  Don’t you need the space?”  “Not as much as we need the clothes.  It flooded.”).  In the end, after considering divorce, the young wife learns a bit about settling down and the young husband learns that sometimes you need to relax and just walk barefoot in the park, though doing it when it’s 10 degrees outside is not recommended.

The Adaptation:

Simon himself would adapt the play and he would begin it by adding an opening scene that involves the newlyweds heading to their hotel (during the opening credits) and then spending nearly a week there together (with the young wife saying goodbye to her husband in front of an elevator full of people wearing only his pajama top and declaring “Thank you, Mr. Dooley. Next time you’re in New York, just call me up.”).  Most of the rest of the film follows directly from the play, with some scenes moved outside the apartment and the wife having to go out and look for her husband in the park rather than him just returning home.  But, for the most part, we get the relationships and good lines just as they were on stage.  This would set the stage for a lot of the adaptations that Simon would do of his own plays, loosening things up, allowing himself the freedom that film offers rather than the one location so many plays rely upon.

The Credits:

Directed by Gene Saks.  From the play by Neil Simon.  As produced on the stage by Arnold Saint-Subber.  Screenplay by Neil Simon.

The Flim-Flam Man

The Film:

A soldier, Curley, has returned home.  Well, he’s deserted and he’s trying to get by and so he jumps a train.  But then he says an older man thrown off the same train and he decides to go help instead.  That old man, Mordecai Jones, is a con man. If one scheme starts to fail, that’s fine because he’s got another ready right up his sleeve.  Finding Curley might just be the best thing that could have happened to him.  Curley is going to provide him with a protege, a guy just stupid enough to get sucked into this life and perhaps just smart enough to be able to continue to do something with it.

The film revolves around George C. Scott’s Mordecai Jones.  Scott is a bit of an odd choice for the role since he was only 40 at the time (indeed, in his next film, Petulia, he looks and seems much younger) but, being Scott, a consummate actor, he dives right into the role.  Jones is used to the life on the rough, trying to get by by just conning a couple of dollars out of the idiot down the road. He’s also smart enough to develop plans for how to get more.  He runs all over everyone else in the film, not just as a character, but as an actor (the only other person in the film who doesn’t seem completely bowled over by Scott’s personality and performance is Harry Morgan as the local sheriff who will go up against him).  That’s good for the film but also bad since our straight man, the ostensible point-of-view character for the view is Curley and played by Michael Sarrazin, he’s a complete blank on the screen.

This is one of this quirky quasi-independent films (it’s made by a major studio, Fox, but doesn’t feel like it and was filmed on location, not in Hollywood) that lead to Irvin Kershner’s reputation for character driven pieces that inspired George Lucas to eventually ask him to direct The Empire Strikes Back.  What’s interesting about all those Kershner films though, is that they’re usually not all that great.  That’s the case here, where Scott’s performance is really the only thing worth watching.  I’m reviewing it because it somehow managed to get nominated for Best Written American Comedy at the WGA but it was a terrible year for the award and they really should have just given the award to The Graduate and skipped having nominees.

The Source:

The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man by Guy Owen (1965)

If the movie is not all that interesting outside of Scott’s performance, the book isn’t really interesting at all.  What’s more, this is one of the reviews that was lost when my computer died and the book was an ILL and I didn’t really want to go through the effort of getting it all over again.  I was definitely not impressed though it was at least a very quick read.

The Adaptation:

I seem to remember that this was one of those examples of “the same in concept but different in the details” but that’s about all I’ve got.

The Credits:

Directed by Irvin Kershner. Screenplay by William Rose. Based on a novel by Guy Owen.

Camelot

The Film:

Oh, the problems that later films can bring to an earlier film.  In this case, let’s look at Excalibur.  I remember in high school, when we studied the Arthur Legend, our teacher didn’t show us either Excalibur or Camelot because she said she would have to show both, a light and dark side of the legend.  Instead, she showed us two films that took a lot less time: Ladyhawke (an example of an Arthurian romance) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (she was an awesome teacher).  In Excalibur, we have Nigel Terry as Arthur.  In the early scenes, clean-shaven, with a little mop top, he seems very much like a boy and his performance enhances that.  Later, as the more adult King Arthur, he has the beard and he has a regal bearing.  He seems like an adult king.  Richard Harris gives us none of that.  With the dopey beard through the whole film, he acts like a boy throughout and it’s hard to really imagine him as King Arthur.  Harris’ performance was never particularly good (he won the Globe over Dustin Hoffman, so the voters had clearly lost their minds), but once you see what Nigel Terry did, it becomes that much more worse.

Which is hard to imagine because Camelot didn’t need anything added to make it worse.  Its Cinematography was nominated at the Oscars.  If you watch this film you will think to yourself, ‘wait, that can’t be right’.  And it shouldn’t be, but it is.  Richard Harris, who couldn’t sing (just remember that he’s the one singing “Macarthur Park”, which is probably the worst song ever) was playing Arthur as the lead in a musical.  Franco Nero, who could sing but definitely couldn’t act, is supposed to be playing Lancelot and Vanessa Redgrave is supposed to fall in love with him.

I understand that there are lots of fans of the original Broadway production (I am not one of them – see below) but can they possibly be fans of the film?  Joshua Logan had been an Oscar nominee as a director but he doesn’t seem to know how to stage anything here.  Some songs are cut, yet the film goes on for almost three hours.  A song such as “Lusty Month of May”, which could have been at least shortened, if not cut entirely, since it’s mostly just a chorus and people running around, is not only kept but it seems to go on forever.  There’s no sense of timing in the editing.  We never believe in the story.  We never believe that this man we’re seeing on screen is a legendary king.  We never believe the goofy guy with the French accent is the most incredible knight the world has ever seen (though we do believe that he’s so pompously noble that he annoys the hell out of everyone).

Camelot is in no way, shape or form a good film.  It was nominated for Best Cinematography in a year in which Persona and Point Blank failed to earn any nominations at all.  It won two Oscars, which is the same as Bonnie and Clyde and more than The Graduate.  It is long, boring and pointless and then it just ends without any sort of climax. Don’t bother with it.

The Source:

Camelot: A New Musical, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe, based on The Once and Future King by T.H. White (1960) and The Once and Future King by T.H. White (1958)

I could just say that I don’t much care for the music of Camelot and dismiss it like that.  But I find other problems with it that don’t make it work for me.  One is the conceit, carried over from the original White novel, of referring to Guinevere as Jenny.  That works in the novel but spoken aloud, it just seems too silly, too out of place in Camelot.  But the bigger problem is the lack of real dramatic tension.  They deal too long with the build-up to the Lancelot / Guinevere relationship, so that once it comes, things happen too fast.  Mordred suddenly appears, everything comes to a head and then the play ends.  It doesn’t climax.  They talk about the upcoming big battle and then the whole thing just ends.  You find yourself sitting there for close to three hours and then thinking, ‘wait, that was it?’  I might have been able to carry through if I had Julie Andrews and Richard Burton in that original production (and Robert Goulet, in those long-ago days before he was a punchline) but probably not.

The Once and Future King is also problematic.  That’s because it has the same problem.  It’s four books combined into one, and I always think of it fondly, but when I go back to it, I end up remembering that it’s really kind of a slog to get through and then you get to the end: “The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.”  And you think, wait, that’s the end?  Are you kidding me?

The Adaptation:

As is often the case with classic Musicals, people who care about this production much more than I do have written extensively on Wikipedia about the differences between the original Broadway production and the film.  Some of the changes that are mentioned just make things confusing in the film (the way Merlin leaves in the play makes sense – in the film you are just left confused) and some of the changes they didn’t make (as I mentioned above, they should have cut “The Lusty Month of May”) would have been better than the cuts that they did make, which seem to rush you towards the ending.

Most of the events of the play come from the third and fourth parts of The Once and Future King.  All of the most fun stuff in the novel was adapted into the Disney adaptation of The Sword and the Stone.

The Credits:

Directed by Joshua Logan.  Based on the Play “Camelot”.  Book and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner.  Music by Frederick Loewe.  Directed by Moss Hart.  Produced on the stage by Jenny Productions.  From “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White.  Screenplay and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner.

Doctor Dolittle

The Film:

This film is terrible.  No one seems to dispute that other than the voters at the Academy who allowed themselves to be essentially bribed into voting for it and giving it a Best Picture nomination.  Critics didn’t like it, audiences stayed away, modern day filmgoers don’t like it and it’s widely considered one of the worst films ever nominated for Best Picture, if not the worst (which, in my opinion, it is).  As for the WGA, well, there really was nothing to nominate in a category that should have been excised before this year and would straggle on for one more year (and as it was, they only nominated four films).  But one interesting thing came about as a result of this, which is George Lucas becoming rich behind anyone’s wildest dreams.  People know how the film went way over budget and lost a lot of money.  But the merchandising lost much, much more and a result, no one cared about merchandising rights by 1977 when Lucas demanded the full rights for Star Wars and was granted them without barely a second thought.  A bad move on Fox’s part that stemmed from their bad moves in making this film a decade before.  I discuss more about the film (and the two fantastic books that deal with it) here in my full review.

The Source:

the Doctor Dolittle novels by Hugh Lofting

Ah, the Dolittle books.  I have a long and complicated history with the character.  My first exposure to him was in a Beginner Reader book.  The Random House Beginner Reader Books were started in 1957 with the publication of The Cat in the Hat and they continued to carry a lot of Dr. Seuss books (classics like Green Eggs and Ham or One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and books he wrote under other names like Ten Apples Up on Top) as well as other books in a similar style (like the brilliant Are You My Mother).  There were two books in the series by Al Perkins (who also wrote the fantastic Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb) that were adapted from the Dolittle stories.  We had the second one, Doctor Dolittle and the Pirates (if you Google it, you can see a lot of images from the book), when I was growing up and I read it a lot, perhaps because I was intrigued by the talking animals (namely the fictional two headed pushmi-pullyu).  Next came fourth grade when we were required to read a Newbury book for school and, being me, I read all of them.  Yes, every Newbury winner from 1922 to 1982.  That included The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, which I also used as the basis for a project I had to do, which involved teaming up with the geekiest kid in our class (surprisingly, not me) and singing a song I wrote about Doctor Dolittle which had a refrain I can still hear in my head after 34 years of “Doctor Dolittle was famous!”  That wasn’t even the most embarrassing part of that project because, as it turned out, I had a habit of fidgeting and I was spinning my hands as we sang and everyone in the class got obsessed with my fidgeting and for weeks all I heard about was the way I spun my hands while we sung that song.  In spite of that trauma, I had really enjoyed the book and when Veronica and I were busy buying kids books early in our marriage for our intended kids (singular, as it turned out), it would be one of the books I would buy, in spite of the fact that it’s the second book in the series (which you actually would never know from just reading the book).  Then, of course, I would watch this film some time in the 90’s on my trek through all of the Oscar nominees and I would realize it was pretty bad.  Then I would watch it again for my Best Picture project and realize just how bad it really was.  Thankfully, the presumably terrible Eddie Murphy films and assorted sequels were never nominated for anything, so I didn’t have to endure those.  But here I am, watching the film again which also brings me back to the book yet again, only to realize that technically, I should read the other two books that the film pulls scenes from (the first one, The Story of Doctor Dolittle and the fourth one, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus) but, yeah, I’m not doing that.

The Dolittle stories began as letters by Hugh Lofting home to his children during World War I because he couldn’t bring himself to write about what he was witnessing, so he wrote about this character he created, a doctor in the Victorian Era who could talk to animals and illustrated the letters with pictures of him and his animals.  The first novel was published in 1920 and by the time of the second in 1922, the Newbury Medal had been established (Lofting was British but moved to Connecticut in 1919) and it was the second winner (after the ridiculously long and exceedingly dull The Story of Mankind).  The fourth book, also used for the film, was published in 1924.  Lofting would write 13 Dolittle books in all, 10 of which would be published before his death in 1947.  Today, there is some controversy over actions and images in the books which are considered racist today but were pretty standard for the 1920’s.  Some of the books have been reprinted as they originally appeared and others have had language or even plot elements changed to fit more current views.  That puts them in the same class as the Hardy Boys books and the Tintin books which have also had the same problem.  Voyages is a pretty fun book for kids, with a doctor who talks to animals and by reading the book you don’t have the endure the awful songs that would go with the film.  It doesn’t hold up like some of the Newbury winners do (namely Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, the best of all the Newbury winners) but it’s a hell of a lot better than Johnny Tremain which I hated in fourth grade and will hate forever.

The Adaptation:

“Since Jacobs and Fox owned the rights to all twelve Dolittle books, [Bricusse] could cherry-pick plot points from any volume.” (Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Mark Harris, p 125).  While this is true, most of the plot points come from the first two books, which really help introduce the character of Doctor Dolittle and take him on the voyages which form the basis for much of the film.  The second main character, the romantic lead of Emma Fairfax, is actually a character introduced only for the film to give it a bit of romance (which doesn’t work).  There are a few elements from the fourth book that make their way into the film, but for the most part, it’s bits and pieces from the first two films and then some crap (and crappy songs) that the filmmakers threw onto the screen to bring the film to an interminable length that makes you want to kill yourself rather than finish watching it.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Fleischer.  Music and Lyrics by Leslie Bricusse.  Based upon the Doctor Dolittle Stories by Hugh Lofting.  Screenplay by Leslie Bricusse.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

The Film:

Can something be a commercial success at every level and still not really be all that good?  Well, certainly it can and it has been proven time and again.  This time, it’s all about mediocrity.  A silly little book becomes a massive best seller, gets loosely adapted into a musical that becomes a smash hit in spite of the lack of any really memorable song and would become a successful film as well that would earn a WGA nomination.  Now, I am aware that there are people who will dispute all of my points, who will claim that this is a good, enjoyable film (the other sources will be dealt with below).  But I find this film to be flat and rather boring, though in a year with massive duds like Dolittle and Camelot, it still could have been far worse.

Robert Morse (who had starred in the Broadway production) is Ponty Finch, a young window washer who finds a book that helps lead him to success as he follows its steps (which I assume is supposed to count as satire since it’s the actual book the musical is so loosely based on).  He climbs up the ladder and may indeed, by the end, even be headed for the White House, an idea that definitely seemed like satire in 1967 and seems like the way the world works in 2018.  Unfortunately, while Morse’s performance might have felt fresh on Broadway, six years later, it didn’t really work on screen.  He felt like a lightweight Jerry Lewis without the bitterness, a goofy little kid accidentally bouncing his way up towards the top.  He isn’t helped by the direction of David Swift, a director who began with Disney films starring Hayley Mills, moved to light comedy and ended here, his last feature film and not an improvement over his earlier work.

The film might have worked better for me if there had been something better among the supporting performers, but they’re just as flat as Morse.  Or if I liked the songs (it’s not that I dislike them, it’s just that they disappear from my brain the second I stop listening to them and sometimes while I’m still listening).  But it’s just a bit of light fluff that didn’t earn a nomination for its writing even if it received one.

The Source:

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: The Dastard’s Guide to Fame and Fortune by Shepherd Mead  (1952)  /  How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert  (1961)

The original book by Shepherd Mead is not a novel, in spite of what the credits of the film might say.  It’s a humor book that pretends to be an actual business book.  It has chapters like “The Meeting Is a MUST!” with lines like “The object of a meeting is not, as the very young believe, to solve the problem at hand, but to impress the people there.  And for this purpose, of course, the larger the meeting the better.”  Mead’s book has some amusing moments, but it’s not for me.  I avidly avoid business books and even humor books disguised as business books don’t work for me (perhaps, ironically, because I am the type of person who avoids meetings at all costs because they waste time and then I can’t get things done).  So this was never a book for me.

The creators of the musical decided to take the original book and the character who sort of exists in it (Ponty Finch) and make him the focus of a story in which he finds this book and it leads him to success.  It’s at least an interesting way to approach a book like this and once you fill things out with songs there’s usually not that much room for plot anyway.  It was a big hit on Broadway (which I don’t really understand since I’m not fond of the songs) and was a big deal as a revival in 2011 because it starred Dan Radcliffe.  I admit, Radcliffe’s energy would have made me much more interested in it.

The Adaptation:

The real adaptation had been done when adapting Mead’s original book to the stage.  The film mostly takes the stage production, while expanding the scenes in which it takes place, and puts it on film.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen, Produced and Directed by David Swift.  Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser.  Book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert.  Based upon the novel by Shepherd Mead.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10:
(in descending order of how I rank the script)

• To Sir, with Love  –  Solid Sidney Poitier drama based on the autobiographical novel by E. R. Braithwaite who just died a year and a half ago at the stunning age of 104.  One of three Poitier performances that failed to earn him an Oscar nom in this year.
• Far From the Madding Crowd  –  High *** version of the classic Hardy novel from director John Schlesinger.
• The Jungle Book  –  Classic Disney film (the last overseen by Walt) from the classic Kipling novel.  Ranked at #18 among the first 50 Disney films.
• The Dirty Dozen  –  Surprisingly well-written for an Action-War film.  Great fun.  Based on the novel by E. M. Nathansan who based it on a real U.S. Army regiment.
• For a Few Dollars More  –  The middle film in the Man with No Name Trilogy is the weakest but is still a high ***.  Only adapted in the sense that it’s a sequel.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Hamlet  –  Very good 1964 Soviet version from director Grigori Kozintsev.
• Anna Karenina  –  One of the greatest novels ever written, of course, and until 2012 this was the best film version, even if it only reaches high ***.  Follow the link to a full review.
• Beach Red  –  Solid World War II film based on the novella.
• Gertrud  –  The final from Carl Th. Dreyer, based on the play by Hjalmar Söderberg.
• Band of Outsiders  –  One of Godard’s best films.  Based on the novel Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens.
• El Dorado  –  Howard Hawks Western ostensibly based on the novel The Stars in Their Courses by Harry Brown but really just a remake of Rio Bravo.
• Hombre  –  The third Paul Newman single word “H” film and the final of six films he made with Martin Ritt.  Based on the novel by Elmore Leonard.
• Accident  –  Second Joseph Losey / Harold Pinter collaboration is an adaptation of the novel by Nicholas Mosley.
• The Quiller Memorandum  –  A spy thriller with Alec Guinness based on the novel The Berlin Memorandum.
• The Taming of the Shrew  –  Liz and Dick spare at each other as Kat and Petruchio.  Not a classic Shakespeare film but not bad either.
• The War Wagon  –  John Wayne Western based on the novel by Clair Huffaker originally titled Badman but retitled after the film was released.
• Diary of a Country Priest  –  A 1951 Bresson film finally getting a U.S. release.  Based on the well received 1936 novel by Georges Bernanos.
• Fitzwilly  –  Silly Dick Van Dyke Comedy based on the novel A Garden of Cucumbers.
• The Stranger  –  A decent but flawed version of the great Camus novel.  You can my review here where I ranked the novel #4.
• The Honey Pot  –  The Wikipedia page makes it sound like the filmmakers gathered together three different sources to make this Rex Harrison comedy.  But it’s just based on the play Mr. Fox of Venice which was an adaptation of the novel The Evil of the Day which had been inspired by Ben Jonson’s classics play Volpone.
• Billion Dollar Brain  –  Another Michael Caine as Harry Palmer film though this one, oddly, is directed by Ken Russell.
• The Game is Over  –  Roger Vadim tackles La Curée, the second in Zola’s 20 book Rougon-Macquart cycle.
• The Venetian Affair  –  We’re into low *** at this point.  A spy thriller with Robert Vaughn based on the novel.  I honestly have no idea why I’ve seen this.
• A Study in Terror  –  John Nevill makes a mediocre Sherlock Holmes.  Not based on an actual Doyle story but instead has Holmes after Jack the Ripper.
• The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin  –  Actually based on a novel called By the Great Horn Spoon but it must have been re-released under the film’s title because I read this book in 4th grade and later had a copy of it (which is why I decided to see the film).  Decent Disney Kids film.
• Zatoichi on the Road  –  The 5th of a 26 film series about the blind swordsman.  Released in Japan in 1963.
• Masculin Feminin  –  Godard sort-of adapts a Guy de Maupassant short story but he’s very Godard about it.
• Frankenstein Created Woman  –  The fourth in the Hammer series of Frankenstein films.
• Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors  –  1965 Soviet film based on the classic Ukrainian novel.
• The Way West  –  Weak Western adapted from a weak winner of the Pulitzer (I gave that win a C, I give the film low ***).
• The Happiest Millionaire  –  Disney Musical based on the (non-musical) play which had been based on the book My Philadelphia Father by Cordelia Drexel Biddle.
• Lemonade Joe  –  We have now entered **.5.  Ridiculous Czech Comedy adapted by Jiří Brdečka from his own novel and play.
• In Like Flint  –  The first Flint film had been original but this one, as a sequel, is technically adapted.  It’s also not all that funny or good.
• Hurry Sundown  –  I have this as a high **.5 which is probably much higher than what Mark Harris has of it given some of the things he wrote about it in Pictures at a Revolution.  Adapted from the novel by K. A. Gilden.
• Penelope  –  Wikipedia claims that the source material was a novelization even though it came out before the film even began filming – they are wrong.  It was written by Howard Fast (of Spartacus fame) under a pseudonym.  Mediocre Comedy with Natalie Wood.
• The Gnome-Mobile  –  From a silly Comedy based on a Howard Fast novel to, wait for it, a Disney film based on a book by Upton Sinclair.  The last film of Ed Wynn.
• Welcome to Hard Times  –  Decent debut novel from E. L. Doctorow didn’t really let you know he could write Ragtime made into a mediocre Henry Fonda Western.
• Murderers’ Row  –  The second Matt Helm film with Dean Martin.  Isn’t it enough to have one not so great spy parody in one year?  If given a choice, stick with James Coburn as Flint.
• Tarzan and the Great River  –  Mike Henry is once again the more James Bond type Tarzan and you would have to ask yourself why if it weren’t, sadly, better than the actual James Bond film for the year.
• You Only Live Twice  –  You can find a full review of this film here and I’m quite detailed on why it’s the worst of the Connery Bond films.
• The Brides of Fu Manchu  –  The second of the films with Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu.  Given that it’s Lee, you would expect them to be better but they aren’t.
• The Thief of Paris  –  Based on the book by Georges Darien, this is a really disappointing film from Louis Malle.
• Reflections in a Golden Eye  –  Carson McCullers is a very good novelist and the book is much better than this messed up film.  In fact, this much talent (Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor in a John Huston adaptation) should have produced gold instead of crap but it didn’t.  For some reason my brain always think Richard Burton is in this instead of Brando.  A rare case of a John Huston adaptation of a literary book that isn’t really worth seeing.
• Marat/Sade  –  The official title is actually 25 words long.  It’s as boring as the film.  Based on the play.
• Don’t Make Waves  –  The lowest of the **.5 films.  The final film from Alexander Mackendrick, who did some wonderful Ealing Comedies, is this stupid beach sex farce with Tony Curtis.  Based on the book Muscle Beach.
• The Alphabet Murders  –  Yes, let’s make the first Poirot film in over 30 years and have him played by Tony Randall!  What idiot thought up that idea?  This ** film is based on The ABC Murders.
• The Last Safari  –  Late Henry Hathaway Adventure film.  Based on the novel Gilligan’s Last Elephant.
• Those Fantastic Flying Fools  –  Terrible version of Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon retitled to fit in with Those Magnificent Men from two years before.  Finally recently saw this and wish I hadn’t.
• Valley of the Dolls  –  Well at least it’s not as bad as the follow-up film.  But utter dreck.  Based on utter dreck by Jacqueline Susann.
• The Night of the Generals  –  How can a film re-uniting Peter O’Toole with Omar Sharif be so bad?  Low **.  Based on the novel by Hans Hellmut Kirst.
• Casino Royale  –  Not actually the worst adapted film of the year because Dr. Dolittle was nominated by the WGA and is reviewed above.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• The Mikado  –  Basically a filmed version of Stuart Burge’s stage production of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera.
• Sofi  –  Little-seen (16 votes on IMDb) version of Gogol’s story “Diary of a Madman” directed by a man who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page (Robert Carlisle) who only directed this one film and was mostly a sound editor.  The IMDb lists it as 1968 but the old oscars.org database listed it here in 1967.
• The Steppe  –  Even fewer votes on the IMDb (11) but at least directed by a well known director (Alberto Lattuada).  A 1962 Italian version of the novella by Chekhov.

The Tripods Trilogy:

1. The White Mountains
2. The City of Gold and Lead
3. The Pool of Fire

• Author:  John Christopher  (1922-2012)
• Published:  1967 / 1968 / 1969
• Publisher:  Hamish Hamilton
• Pages:  650
• First Line:  “Apart from the one in the church tower, there were five clocks in the village that kept reasonable time, and my father owned one of them.”
• Last Lines:  “The air was cold but exhilarating.  A gust of wind scattered powdery snow from the face of the Jungfrau.  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll leave my seas and islands.'”
• Film:  television version  (1984)
• First Read:  1987  (as a book)

Like Jim Kirk, I was never a Boy Scout.  I was, however, a Cub Scout and a Webelo and I grew up in a scouting household (before too long my nephew Luke will become a fourth generation Eagle Scout).  That meant I grew up in a household where there were copies of Boys’ Life around.  In May of 1981, that magazine began serializing a comic strip version of a young adult Science-Fiction novel called The White Mountains.  I didn’t read it at the time but later, I would root around the piles of back issues we had and devour the story.  Over the course of five years, the magazine would serialize all three books of the trilogy of which The White Mountains was the first.  It was a great story and I liked the illustration style.  Our collection however, was incomplete.  For some reason we were missing the last couple of installments of The White Mountains and the first couple of The City of Gold and Lead, the second in the trilogy.  Sometime in 1986 or early 1987, I would track down the missing issues at the Orange Public Library and finally see why one of the main three characters had been switched over for another one (who was drawn in a similar style, which was confusing).  More importantly, sometime during that same year I would find the original novel The White Mountains at my junior high school library (the Collier edition, which has, in my opinion, terrible cover art).  I would finally read the actual book itself, followed not long after by the other two.  Before long, I would own copies of all three, copies that have travelled with me for years now.  (These editions, also published by Collier, have really nice covers designed by Tim Hildebrant, whose Tolkien artwork I can’t stand but I really like these.)

This trilogy has always fascinated me.  I came to it, as I explained, through the comic strip version, which you can see a complete collection of here, though I suggest reading the books first so as to allow you to have your own vision of the world first (which is why I haven’t included any of the art here).  But, partially because I was really young, and partially because I was missing certain parts, I didn’t realize the first time that I was reading it that this was definitely the world we know, a century in the future, after an alien invasion has taken over.  That is what is so good about Christopher’s story.  The realization that this is the remains of our world is slow to come.  We realize almost right away that this is a pre-industrial society, with watches and clocks being rare.  On the second page, the narrator, Will Parker, mentions Capping, but we don’t yet know what this means.  But, soon we see a sign about “DANGER 6,600 VOLTS” and when Will talks to his cousin Jack we begin to realize that this actually a post-apocalypse society that has lost the world of industrialization.  Then discussion begins about Capping and Vagrants and we slowly begin to realize that this is a world in which humanity is no longer in charge of itself.  Then, for anyone who is familiar with War of the Worlds, comes an ominous sign: the talk of Tripods and their description: “The booming came nearer and then, suddenly, we could see it over the roofs of the houses to the south: the great hemisphere of great metal rocking through the air above the three articulate legs, several times as high as the church.”  Then Jack is taken into the Tripod and Capped and we realize that in this world, that war was lost and mankind was conquered.

In the next chapter, we meet the Vagrant Ozymandius and we realize that not all signs of civilization have been lost to time.  With his conversation with Will we also learn that not all men have been conquered and we launch into the adventure: Will will run away and attempt to find the last bastion of free men, hiding in the White Mountains.  He is forced to take his cousin Henry, who he doesn’t get along with, on the journey and they flee to the sea.  Across the sea they find another land where the language is different and they are befriended by another boy.  In all three cases, the boys don’t want to be Capped and so they have a common cause in their journey.  It is here also, in the newest boy, named Beanpole because of his lankiness, that we can slowly start to go backwards through the book and realize that this is definitely our world.  Beanpole is also a mis-understanding of his name, which is printed as “Zhan-pole”.  Looking back on things, you slowly to start to realize (perhaps by this point, but perhaps not, depending on the age of the reader) that his name is actually Jean-Paul.  They have just crossed the Channel and they are in France.  They are headed for those mythical mountains near a great lake, so outside Zurich up in the Alps is our destination.

But part of the fascination in the first book is to go back through after you have discovered what is going on and figure out what you are seeing.  Look at Chapter 5, “The City of the Ancients”.  They cross a river and discover “a building which, even in ruins, had a magnificence that compelled the eye.”  But then Will’s narration goes on and we learn more:

There had been twin towers in front, but one of these had been sliced down the side.  On them, and on the whole facade, were carvings in stone, and from roofs and angles stone figures of monstrous animals probed the quiet air.  It was a cathedral, I guessed, and it looked bigger even than the great cathedral in Winchester, which I had always believed was the biggest building in the world.  The huge wooden door stood open, tilted on its hinges and rotting.  Part of the roof of the nave had fallen in, and one could see up past the pillars and buttresses to the sky.  We did not go inside; I think none of us wanted to disturb its crumbling silence.

This is a Science-Fiction book, but it is also a voyage of discovery of our own planet, our own history of civilization, lost to us.  I won’t explain what Will is looking at, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure it out.  And I recommend reading the books and following your own journey.

The journey to the mountains is fraught with hardships, not the least of which is that three of them are still teenage boys.  They end up at a castle which seems to have sprung straight from Medieval times and Will falls for the “princess” of the castle.  What happens will hasten Will’s ascent into adulthood (not in the way you’re thinking), but it will haunt him even more during the events of the second book.  In the end, of course, the boys do make it to the mountains, because if they didn’t, then how would we get to the next two books in the trilogy?

The second book takes a very different tone.  The journey of discovery is over and now the three boys have been integrated into a society that is fighting for its very freedom.  Without giving away too much of the books, over the course of the next two books we discover what has happened to human civilization, what the power is behind the Tripods and we learn the desperate situation that humanity is in.  The second book takes Henry out of the main attraction but replaces him with Fritz, a taciturn young German.  One of the major differences between the comic adaptation and the original books is how distant Fritz is to Will and how long it takes the two of them to learn to trust each other.  It’s a smart move for the adaptation because it would have slowed things down.  Much of the second half of the second book, The City of Gold and Lead, is inside the city of the Masters, the beings who control the Tripods.  What Will and Fritz learn there leads to the great sense of desperation that fuels the third book.  The ending of the second book is reminiscent of the end of The Empire Strikes Back: there’s hope and a fighting chance but things are desperate and one of the main characters is missing.

The final book, The Pool of Fire doesn’t work quite as well as the first two books, mainly because there is less to discover.  The first novel took us, in a sense, back through the past.  The second novel, in a sense, takes us into the future.  The third one really focuses more around the character of Will.  He’s been acknowledged throughout the series as a flawed character, one who acts too quickly and doesn’t take the time to make certain he’s making the right decision.  He’s forced to grow and accept his own limitations, but he’s around for the rest of the story to let us know what happens.

This series might work better for young adults, as it was intended.  But that doesn’t mean that adults can’t read it with a sense of wonder.  Twenty years later, Christopher would write a prequel, When the Tripods Came (unsurprisingly, about when the tripods landed) but you can easily skip it because it’s not nearly as good and if you read it first it takes away the awe and wonder of reading the trilogy.

The Television Series:

When I was in college, I desperately wanted to be a screenwriter.  There were several source materials that I wanted to adapt as well as writing my own material.  Several of those have now been made into films, ranging all the way from brilliant (Shawshank Redemption) to dreck (Daredevil).  There are a still few left that haven’t ever been made and since I clearly won’t ever be a screenwriter, I hope someone does make them while I still have a chance to see them, so if someone could get cracking on Nova, that would be great.  This is the only one left besides Catcher in the Rye that I actually started writing a script for that hasn’t been made so it was nice, when going to write this post, to discover that at least someone had made a television show out of it even if it’s not all that great.

The show was only ever broadcast in Britain (it was a BBC production) and has been released there on DVD but you can find episodes of it on YouTube and watch your way through the entire show.  It’s not a bad show by any means, but it is hampered by budget issues and has the same kind of cheaper special effects that at times hampered both Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  It changes the story considerably (adding more female characters because Christopher believed that boys wouldn’t really read stories with female characters which is why there are so few in the book) and really reduces the use of the tripods themselves (so as to not to overexpose them and because, mainly, for budget reasons) and add in a whole new group of villains to help compensate.  The acting is okay but far from great (as evidenced by none of them going on to significant careers though the main female had to be replaced between the two seasons because the actress was killed in a car crash).  The first season covers the first book and the second season the second book, although it greatly truncates the action in the second book.

RICHARD: You’re getting old. One day you’ll have me once too often.
HENRY: When? I’m fifty now. My God, boy, I’m the oldest man I know. I’ve got a decade on the Pope. (p 48-49)

My Top 10:

1. The Lion in Winter
2. Rosemary’s Baby
3. Belle de Jour
4. Closely Watched Trains
5. The Odd Couple
6. Hunger
7. Rachel Rachel
8. Pretty Poison
9. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
10. War and Peace

Note:  My list is 14 long this year.  My #13 (The Fixer) and #14 (Oliver) are reviewed below because of award nominations.  The other two are listed down at the bottom.  You could make the case that 2001: A Space Odyssey should be listed but the Oscars treated it as original and I do the same.  You can find plenty of places on-line that explained the complicated history of its script.

Consensus Nominees:

1. The Lion in Winter  (232 pts)
2. The Odd Couple  (120 pts)
3. Rosemary’s Baby  (112 pts)
4. Funny Girl  (80 pts)
5. Pretty Poison  (80 pts)
6. Rachel Rachel  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• The Lion in Winter
• The Odd Couple
• Oliver!
• Rachel Rachel
• Rosemary’s Baby

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• The Lion in Winter
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• Petulia
• Rachel Rachel
• Rosemary’s Baby

Comedy:

• The Odd Couple
• Yours, Mine and Ours

Nominees that are Original:  Hot Millions, I Love You Alice B. Toklas, The Producers

Musical:

• Funny Girl
• Finian’s Rainbow

Nominees that are Original:  Star

Golden Globe:

• Charly
• The Fixer
• The Lion in Winter
• Rosemary’s Baby

Nominees that are Original:  The Producers
note:  The Fox was Globe nominated in 1967 but will appear below because it was Oscar eligible in 1968.

BAFTA:

• The Lion in Winter

My Top 10

The Lion in Winter

The Film:

I don’t remember precisely when I first saw this film but I know it was some time after February of 1991 because I know I had already seen Silence of the Lambs.  I remember watching Anthony Hopkins and not even realizing it was the same man who had played Hannibal Lector and just being floored.  Then I realized just how amazing the film was as a whole, with fantastic performances and some of the best writing I had ever seen.  It’s still a great film, still holds up far better than the mediocre Oliver! and it still stuns me that Hopkins wasn’t even nominated and that O’Toole lost to Cliff Robertson.  A more full review of the film can be found here.

The Source:

The Lion in Winter by James Goldman (1966)

“Most everyone who talks to me about The Lion in Winter is totally convinced the play has always been a great success.  Even people who actually saw it during its run on Broadway are apt to mention what a hit it was or that they caught it in its second year.  In point of fact, Lion opened on March 3, 1966 to highly contradictory notices, including a thunderous dismissal in the New York Times.  Eight-three performances later, it closed and sank from sight for what I was convinced would be forever.  Then came the film.” (Introduction to The Lion in Winter, James Goldman).

Very high on the list of plays that, given a time machine, I would go to see on the stage is that original run of The Lion in Winter with Robert Preston in the role of Henry II and a Tony winning performance from Rosemary Harris as Eleanor (with Christopher Walken as Philip, years before his film debut).  Given that cast and given that the play is almost the same as the film (see below), I can not, for the life of me, understand how it was not a success.  Yet, after the success of the film, the play actually ended up being produced several times, something that has not traditionally happened after a film adaptation of an unsuccessful play.  Perhaps it’s because the core of the film is in the brilliant, witty script by James Goldman (older brother of future Oscar winner William Goldman)

The Adaptation:

With the exception of the opening scenes (where the members of the family are gathered), you can pretty much read along with the play as you watch the film (it’s a primary reason I own the play – because the original dialogue is all right there on the page).  Yes, the film opens things up by chopping scenes up, moving them in placement (physically, not temporally) and allowing a greater freedom of movement.  A key example of that is the ending dialogue which, on stage, is just spoken between Henry and Eleanor as they are the last two moving off-stage, as opposed to Eleanor departing on the boat.  It’s among the most faithful play to screen adaptations ever made, which makes sense, since James Goldman wrote both (winning the Oscar for the latter, rightfully so).

The Credits:

directed by Anthony Harvey.  screenplay by James Goldman.  based on the play “The Lion in Winter” by James Goldman, produced on Broadway by Euegene V. Wolsk, Walter A. Hyman & Alan King in association with Emanuel Azenberg.

Rosemary’s Baby

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once, as one of my Top 5 films of the year.  If you have never seen it because of the genre, I will remind you that this film transcends the genre in multiple ways.  The first is that it is excellent, one of the very best Horror movies ever made and any film that reaches the pinnacle of its genre should be seen.  The second is that it is a film that terrifies and horrifies you in the things that it suggests.  It is not a film trying to make you jump.  It is a film trying to make you feel.  Its success at that level of horror is what makes it so brilliant.

The Source:

Rosemary’s Baby: a novel by Ira Levin (1967)

Ira Levin was not a particularly great writer but he was a very successful writer.  Indeed, if you count the television production of Rosemary’s Baby, Levin has three different novels that were successful enough that they were actually adapted into films multiple times (A Kiss Before Dying and The Stepford Wives are the other two) and Rosemary and Stepford seem to transcend their popularity as books and move to another stage.  He is very good at coming up with concepts that really strike a nerve in people (robots replacing women, Satan’s child, Hitler clones).  The book gives you a palpable sense of horror as Rosemary slowly starts to realize what is going on around her but it is the film that really allows that to sink in.

The Adaptation:

“I realized that I could make the film only if I remained faithful to the novel.”  (Roman Polanski quoted in Roman Polanski Interviews, p 18)  A famously faithful adaptation of a novel, Rosemary’s Baby really kept things close.  In fact, there is a story about Polanski trying to track down the actual New Yorker issue that advertises a shirt to use in the film only to discover that Levin didn’t even read the New Yorker and just assumed you would see a shirt advertised in it.  Almost all of the dialogue comes straight from the book.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen and Directed by Roman Polanski.  From the novel by Ira Levin.

Belle de Jour

The Film:

In the fall of 1995, I went to Cinema 21 in Portland.  It was not only my first time going there, it was also the first time seeing a Luis Buñuel film.  It would not be long before I had devoured a lot of his films.  This particular one, Belle de Jour, had been unavailable for a long time and was circulating in a new print in theaters.  It was a revelation.  Could a film really do this kind of thing?  Could it take a Salvador Dali sense of surrealism and make it come to life on screen?  Could it actually take this strong sense of sexuality and sensuality and place it on the screen without really showing any nudity?

The “belle de jour”, the lady of the day of the title is Severin, played by Catherine Deneuve.  She’s young, she’s very beautiful (in response to this film, when writing a poem called “Arguments for an Against the Existence of God”, a college friend of mine listed Deneuve as the final argument “for”) and she’s very much in love with her wealthy young husband.  But just because she’s in love with him doesn’t mean that she’s able to free herself up to actually be warm to him in a sexual way.  She’s frigid.  But not in her head, not in her dreams, where she plays out scenes of sadomasochism and is freed from any propriety.  To explore more of this, to try to understand what is going on in her head and her heart, she visits a brothel.  It is there that she starts to find freedom within herself.  She becomes that lady of the day, the whore that can only be bought during working hours while her husband is away and she can be back each night where she is still unable to overcome her frigidity.

None of this would work on screen if not for the collaboration of Buñuel and Deneuve.  Buñuel is the only director who could take the more serious scenes of Deneuve and her husband, of her in her place in society and contrast them, not only against the scenes in the brothel where she is able to more come to life and the scenes that play out inside her head (including flashbacks to the events in her life that made her so frigid in the first place) and not have them devolve into farce.  The film is a serious one, designed to entrance us but not make us giggle.  It is sexual and thoughtful all at once.  But in the hands of a different lead actress, it might not have worked.  Deneuve had already shown that she could handle a role of confused sexuality in her star performance in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

Belle de Jour remains as much a revelation today as it was then, for me in 1995, and I am sure, as it was in 1967 when audiences first saw it.  Like Rosemary’s Baby, it is a film that understands that you can be much more effective by being suggestive than by being explicit.  You could remake both films today and my guess is that today it would be made explicit because you can show a lot more on film and would be considerably less effective.

The Source:

Belle de Jour by Joseph Kessel (1928)

Kessel’s original novel presages what Buñuel would so brilliantly do with his film: “There is not an obscene word of a graphic sex scene in Kessel’s novel, but its subject almost guaranteed that there would be no American edition for decades and the first English translation of Belle de Jour wasn’t published until 1962.” (introduction to the 2007 edition of the novel).  It’s a short (181 pages) but effective novel.  It doesn’t have the surrealism that makes the film such a triumph though.

The Adaptation:

“The novel is very melodramatic, but well constructed, and it offered me the chance to translate Séverine’s (accented first e) fantasies into pictorial images as well as to draw a serious portrait of a young female bourgeois masochist. I was able to indulge myself in the faithful description of some interesting sexual perversions.”  (My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Bunuel, p 242)

That is, of course, the biggest difference between the novel and the film.  If you went to the novel expecting the kind of fantasy delusions that run through her mind in the film you won’t find them at all.  But perhaps the even more significant change is the ending.  Buñuel provides a surreal but perhaps happy ending, with Séverine’s husband standing up after her has been paralyzed.  There is nothing even remotely comparable to that in the original novel as not only is the husband still paralyzed but their relationship seems hopelessly broken (the last lines are “Three years have now gone by.  Séverine and Pierre live over a quiet little beach. But since the day Séverine spoke, she has not heard her husband’s voice.”) but Marcel, the gangster is in not only not dead, but is in jail and Séverine can’t seem to let him go (“‘Please tell him,’ she said, ‘that after my husband there’s no one in the world I love more.'”).

The Credits:

un film de Luis Bunuel.  d’après le roman de Joseph Kessel de l’Académie Française.  Adaptation et dialogue Luis Bunuel et Jean-Clause Carriere.

Ostře sledované vlaky

The Film:

It was the turn of the Czechs.  Czechoslovakia existed for just under 75 years but in that time, we had Kafka and Kundera in literature, not to mention The Great Soldier Svejk.  For film, it blossomed in the 60’s with the Czech New Wave films, lead by directors like Milos Forman and Jiri Menzel.  Forman may have been the best director to emerge but it was a Menzel film, Closely Watched Trains, that is the best I’ve seen from the country (and is considerably better than anything that the Czech Republic or Slovakia have made since the split).

This film epitomizes much of what could be seen in the Czech New Wave.  It is made in black and white, with some quick editing between scenes.  There is not nearly as much dialogue as you would find in an American film (or in many European films).  It relies on what the characters do and how they interact rather than their actual words.  It is also finds humor in situations that usually aren’t funny.  In those days before the Soviet crackdown, it showed what could be amusing when things were a bit awry, much like you could find in the great novels from the country.  In this case, we have a young train station guard who is in the midst of a country at war (occupied Czechoslovakia during the war) and eventually becomes seduced into taking a stand against the Nazis.

Is young Milos really ready to die for his country?  Or is he going to die if he can’t get sex right with the sexy young conductor Masa, especially since he botches things quite badly on his first attempt.  Should he trust the advice of the dispatcher, a man who gets in his own trouble when he applies rubber stamps to the amble behind of the telegrapher?  Will madness this way lie?  Or just some humor?

This is a Comedy with, essentially, a tragic ending.  Or is it a tragedy with a truly comic ending?  That’s part of the glory of the New Wave, of these fresh films that came across from Europe, bringing fame and fortune (to a director like Forman who would emigrate and become a major name) or even Oscars (long before Forman would win two Oscars for Best Director this film won Best Foreign Film, rather rightfully.  And even today, 50 years later, it still seems fresh and fun, even if you know, or even perhaps because you might know what is coming.

The Source:

Ostře sledované vlaky by Bohumil Hrabal  (1965)

The success of this novel in the U.S. is almost certainly tied to the film’s release as it was first published in an English translation in 1968.  But the short novel (85 pages and with more realistic margins could have been considerably shorter) was a big success in its home country where its tale of a young train guard and the slow, bizarre path to revolution helped stir up the kind of feeling that would lead to the Prague Spring and then the brutal crackdown that followed.

It is written in the first person and if you have seen the film (especially multiple times like I have), then that might seem a bit odd given what is going to happen.  But somehow it makes things work and you still kind of find yourself laughing, though not nearly as much as when you are watching the film.

The Adaptation:

Most of what we get in the film is straight from the book, though the first person narration is mostly eliminated and most of the dialogue is cut considerably.  The biggest difference is in the end where, yes, in the book, young Milos is able to succeed in his mission, but in a way where he is still able to describe it before the end while there is absolutely no way that Milos in the film would be able to describe what was happening – it’s a much bigger bang of an ending in the film and that’s part of what brings the comedy.

The Credits:

Režie: Jiří Menzel.  Podle Novely: Bohumila Hrabala.  Scénár: Bohumil Hrabal, Jiří Menzel.

The Odd Couple

The Film:

Is Felix Unger the most annoying man who ever lived?  It’s hard to tell but he certainly tries to make a case for it.  Yet, there is also a certain charm inherent in him, especially when played by Jack Lemmon.  He might complain about anything and everything, demanding you move in a diner, describing his every ache and pain.  But he will also leave you with an apartment that is clean down to the molecular level and make you a meal that will make you grateful for life itself.  Things like this balance.  He will call you to explain that he’s making dinner and at the same time make you miss the thrill of a triple play.

They balance the same way with Oscar Madison.  He has a memorable rant about what a pain he is: “Blanche used to say to me, ‘What time do you want dinner’ I’d say ‘I dunno, I’m not hungry’. Then 3 o’clock in the morning, I’d wake her up and say ‘now’. I’ve been one of the highest paid sports writers in the east for the past fourteen years, we saved eight and a half dollars in pennies. I’m never home, I gamble, burn cigar holes in the furniture, drink like a fish, lie to her every chance I get. Then on our tenth wedding anniversary, I took her to the New York Rangers-Detroit Red Wings hockey game where she got hit by a puck! I still can’t figure out why she left me, that’s how impossible I am.”  But he’s the guy who hosts the poker game because he’s relaxed and you can be yourself in his apartment.

In a lot of ways these two men belong together.  And in a sense, they ended up together.  The actions of the film (and the original play) only take about a week but on television, the show lasted for 114 episodes.  Felix needs a bit of a slob to remind him of living, of grasping for something more than just a clean apartment while Oscar needs someone who can bring him enough in line with reality to put away a few dollars for alimony and not having an apartment in danger of being condemned as a health hazard.

Two years before this film, Billy Wilder had the brilliant idea of teaming Walter Matthau with Jack Lemmon in The Fortune Cookie, giving Matthau the best lines and making Lemmon more of the straight man.  The formula worked again here, with Matthau in perfect line with the play (having originated the role on stage) and Lemmon perfectly sliding into the role of a man so uptight that he when he intends to kill himself he sends his wife a telegram (which she then has to tip the delivery boy).  It’s not a perfect film because Gene Saks was a better director for the stage than on film.  But it’s one of Neil Simon’s most successful play-to-film adaptations and would help to cement the idea of Matthau and Lemmon as the eternally feuding comedic team.

The Source:

The Odd Couple by Neil Simon  (1965)

It’s surprising to think of, but Simon still wasn’t a household name when this play came out.  It was only his third play and only one film had been made of his plays by that point.  But it helped cement his status as the premier comedic writer on Broadway at the time.  It was nominated for the Tony (though Walter Matthau won) and ran for two years before being adapted for film.  It has continued to be revived through the years and of course not only was made into a successful television show that ran for five seasons but also an animated show, two more less successful television shows a television movie sequel to the original show and a sequel to the film.  It has resonated through the years because Felix Unger and Oscar Madison are such perfect archetypes of their characters and pretty much everyone knows somebody who is one or the other.

The Adaptation:

Pretty much every line in the original play makes it to the film.  There are also some expanded scenes in the film that weren’t in the original play (including Oscar’s wonderful rant about what a slob he is and not knowing why Blanche left him).  While there are a few lines that are moved outside the apartment, the general rule for this adaptation is that if a scene is set outside of the apartment, then it wasn’t in the original play, including, of course, the memorable triple play scene.  They actually wanted Roberto Clemente to do that scene (it was filmed at an actual Pirates-Mets game, set up for the scene before the game itself) and Clemente, one of the greatest rightfielders in history, refused.  Good for him.  Have the weak hitting Mazeroski do it.

The Credits:

Directed by Gene Saks.  From the play by Neil Simon.  As produced on the stage by Saint-Subber.  Screenplay by Neil Simon.

Svält

The Film:

Hunger is a film from a remarkable year of Foreign Films submitted to the Oscars and of course the Academy didn’t do them justice.  Hunger wasn’t nominated, nor was Come Drink with Me nor Persona in spite of being one of the most lauded films of the year.  They even nominated The Battle of Algiers but then gave the Oscar to A Man and a Woman.  There are a lot of years that would have a better group of nominees but no year until 1987 would have a better group of submitted films.

I first saw Hunger long before I was worried about trying to track down the submitted Foreign films.  I saw it because when it made it to the States in 1968 (two years after it was originally released and submitted to the Oscars for Best Foreign Film), it managed to win Best Actor at the National Society of Film Critics (the critics groups most welcoming of foreign films, but still rare to win an acting award at this point).  Per Oscarssen’s powerhouse performance as the writer who wanders around late 19th Century Oslo in a daze of hunger and poverty and sometimes even defeat (in those rare days when he doesn’t fervently believe the newspaper will realize his article is a work of genius and publish him and give him some money) doesn’t actually make my Top 5 because he’s just nudged down into 6th place but it is definitely a reason to see the film.

But I should stress that Oscarssen’s performance is not the only reason to see this film.  This was fascinating film just from a historical performance.  Knut Hamsun, the author of the original novel, was a widely revered Norwegian writer, the second of just three Norwegians to win the Nobel Prize, but one whose reputation suffered badly when he spoke positively of Hitler during and even after the war.  This film was the first Danish film to ever merit serious study outside of Denmark that wasn’t made by Carl Theodor Dreyer and yet in some senses, it really wasn’t a Danish film at all.  After all, though it had a Danish director, it had a Swedish star and it was filmed in Norway (and was Norwegian in origin) and it was the first film that was a co-production of the three countries, a moment for Scandinavian unity.  Aside from Oscarssen, there is Gunnel Lindbloom, a rather higher class woman that he meets on the street and whom, in his own brain, he has made a connection to.  Lindbloom was a veteran of Bergman’s films and added yet another Swedish touch to the film.  The remarkable black-and-white cinematography was from Henning Kristiansen, a Danish cinematographer who would, over 20 years later, earn a BAFTA for Babette’s Feast (the first Danish film to win Best Foreign Film at the Oscars).

I will end with this final note about the country of origin.  Denmark has been a consistent submitter to the Oscars and those films are hard to find, at least in the States.  I have seen just less than half of the 55 Danish submissions while no other country with that many submissions is below 63% (only two other countries below 50% on my list have submitted more than 21 films).  But of the 42 Danish films I have seen over the years, I rank this one as the 5th best (behind, in order, Day of Wrath, Ordet, Babette’s Feast, The Hunt) and it’s actually not that far removed from the top of the list (three points).

The Source:

Sult by Knut Hamsun  (1890)

I have no evidence that John Kennedy Toole ever read Knut Hamsun, though, given his range of literary knowledge, it’s definitely not out of the question.  Indeed, the only reason that the thought even occurs to me is that I recently re-read Confederacy of Dunces and it strikes me that Dunces and Hunger are in a sense, related.  They are not as closely related, certainly as the Hamsun book is to Dostoevsky, both to Notes from Underground (which seems to be the predecessor to this novel) or Crime and Punishment (the unnamed narrator resembles Raskolnikov in some ways), but there are connections.  Our unnamed narrator here is possibly a genius.  Or possibly just a madman.  He wanders through a major city (Kristiania, what is now Oslo) bereft of food and money but in some ways certain that salvation is right around the corner with the publication of his work.  An essay here, an article there, and everything will be fine.  If only the idiots will listen.  It reminds me of Garp’s notion for a writer to leave a suicide note of “I have been misunderstood by you idiots for the last time.”  It’s every writer’s thought, no matter how successful, that they are being misunderstood.  So our unnamed narrator wanders the streets, hoping for food, giving away any money he receives and in the end, taking a chance and signing on for a tour at sea because at least it will give him a meal and hey, if it doesn’t work out, they can always part company in England.

I first read this novel when I was reading my way through the Nobel Prize list back in 2007 or 2008.  Yes, Hamsun’s Prize was specifically given for Growth of the Soil (one of the rare examples when a specific work was cited by the Academy) and I also read that, but I had either just seen the film or was just about to see the film and I thought I should read this as well and I was struck by its power, its darkness of the soul.  This is a darker twist on the same story as Dunces, of the misunderstood genius.  It is, to me, the best proof that Hamsun was worth of the prize.

The Adaptation:

This is a remarkably straight forward adaptation of the novel.  We have the genius or madman writer (you pick) begging food, talking to people who come his way, trying to get assured that his article will be published, then (falsely) assuring his landlady that money will be forthcoming to cover his rent and for some food.  In the end, with nothing left to lose, he signs on for a tour at sea without any idea of what the future might bring him.

The Credits:

en film av Henning Carlsen.  efter Knut Hamsun’s roman.  manuskript: Peter Seeberg.  filmmanuskript: Henning Carlsen.

Rachel, Rachel

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film, since it was one of the Best Picture nominees of 1968.  It was not only a nominee, but it was the second best of the five nominees (by a considerable margin).  It showcased a fantastic performance from Joanne Woodward and a deft directing hand from Paul Newman.  Newman wouldn’t often sit in the director’s chair, but his clear chemistry in working with his wife did shine through.

The Source:

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence (1966)

This is an interesting little novel about a woman who is lonely, living in the town that she grew up in, dealing with an elderly mother and a close friend who has emotions that she can’t deal with.  Someone comes back to the town and over the course of the novel, we learn that this man had a brother who died and that when Rachel (the woman) was a child, she went with her undertaker father to deal with it when the brother died.  It’s only slowly that we start to get a better idea of the relationship and the past as the story unfolds.  In the end, the novel isn’t nearly as interesting as the film, for reasons explained below.

The Adaptation:

Part of the reason that the novel doesn’t really match up to the film is the very fine performance from Joanne Woodward as Rachel.  But just as important is the way that the film gives us information.  The book is mostly straight forward and it is only much later in the book that we start to find out what happened when the main characters were still young.  The film moves back and forth between adulthood and childhood that adds subtext to what we are already seeing about Rachel’s adult life and her inability to relate much to other adults.  It was a smart move from the filmmakers to make those transitions begin right from the start and continue through rather than the much later revelations we get in the book.

The Credits:

produced and directed by paul newman. screenplay by stewart stern. based on the novel “a jest of god” by margaret laurence.
note: these are from the end credits, as the opening credits only have the film’s title.

Pretty Poison

The Film:

Does the existence of Psycho add something to this film or take away from it?  Do we read something more into the character of Dennis Pitt, the disturbed young man who was put away for arson and has only recently been released because he’s played by Anthony Perkins?  In fact, while this film was made eight years after the great Hitchcock film, this was actually Perkins’ first role in Hollywood since that one.  He had spent the eight years in between doing plays and acting in films in Europe and when he finally returned, it was hardly a return.  This was a small film, directed by a first time director (he had done short films and television), filmed in Massachusetts, far from the glittery lights of tinseltown.  It had trouble getting released and received mixed reviews, with Vincent Canby trashing it but Pauline Kael loving it.  And the film is indeed, mixed.  It has a good script and a strong performance from Perkins but the direction and technical aspects are less than stellar and co-star Tuesday Weld is really pretty bad (though, she hated the director and making the film and that probably played into her performance).

Dennis Pitt is a man who has just been released from prison.  He comes to a small Massachusetts town and when he sees local blonde Sue Ann Stepenek, he falls for her hard and fast.  How to win her over?  Well, apparently in Pitt’s mind the best way to to do it is pretend to be a CIA agent on a mission and enlist her aid.  This will cascade upon both of them until they are in her mother’s house, preparing to kill her and we have to see which one of them is really capable of doing anything.

In the year after Bonnie & Clyde, the reminder in this film is no matter what you might have in the young man looking for a girl, you also have to be careful which girl you suddenly make a play for because she might be much crazier than you.  We are well into the film before we begin to realize that it’s not Pitt who is the dangerous one in this relationship and things have gotten out of his control.

And again, we have to come back to Psycho and Perkins.  Do we think of Pitt as more disturbed and dangerous than he really is because some part of our mind is thinking of Norman Bates?  Or was that perhaps part of the filmmakers intention, to kind of bluff us into thinking that while bringing along Sue Ann as the much more psychotic one of the couple?

Pretty Poison didn’t do a whole lot in spite of critical acclaim in certain quarters (Gene Siskel named it to his Top 10 of the year but Roger Ebert didn’t even seem to have reviewed it) and though it won Best Screenplay at the New York Film Critics, it received no other awards attention from any other group (no other winner has ever done that).  I have it as a high *** but not able to break into ***.5 and join my list of Best Picture contenders.  But it has a cult favorite reputation and is a film you should see at least once.

The Source:

She Let Him Continue by Stephen Geller (1966)

The first novel by a young writer (he was 26, which you bizarrely can’t find out from either Wikipedia or the IMDb, but his papers are at Dartmouth and they list his birth date), it’s not widely available and thus I wasn’t able to get hold of it.

The Adaptation:

The quote from Noel Black about the book (“a Walter Mitty type who comes up against a teenybopper Lady Macbeth”) certainly seems to indicate that at least the basic premise of the film was there in the original novel.

The Credits:

directed by Noel Black.  based on a novel by Stephen Geller.  screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

The Film:

What did audiences in the late 60’s make of Alan Arkin?  In his film debut, he earned a Best Actor nomination for playing a poor Russian sailor whose submarine gets stuck on a sand bar on a Massachusetts island.  Here he earned a second Oscar nomination for playing a deaf-mute.  In between he played a nasty bit of action, sometimes with sunglasses in the dark, sometimes with makeup in Wait Until Dark.  Unfortunately, after these two nominations, he would have to wait another 38 years before earning a surprise Oscar win.

It’s interesting that it took almost 30 years for McCullers’ most famous novel to make it to film.  All the elements were there: the problems of race in the south, a man with a disability, the story of a young girl coming into womanhood and McCullers had a lesser novel (Reflections in a Golden Eye) filmed the year before.  Perhaps it was the right thing to wait so long because in the 40’s, the role of the deaf-mute Singer might have been pushed too much until it was almost like pantomime.  Arkin was the right actor for the role, a gentle man whose best friend is put away and so he moves to a new town so he can be closer to the institution.  Watching it this time, over 20 years after I originally watched it, I was reminded a little of The Station Agent, in which another person who doesn’t meet society’s norm faces a life changing situation and moves to a new town, but that was a warm comedy and this is straight drama.

It’s a warm, caring film.  It gives us three main characters that have their own issues: Singer, the deaf-mute who wants to live his simple life and be close to his friend, Mick, the budding young woman of the house where Singer boards and forms a bond with him and Dr. Copeland, a black doctor in a Southern town (even though the film is updated from the 30’s to the 60’s, the racism inherent in the novel is presented the same way in the book and I don’t think anybody blinked an eye).  Arkin had already established himself as a talented actor and this did nothing to diminish that and he’s definitely the right man for the role.  What’s more surprising is remembering that Sondra Locke (at age 24, very much looking like she’s 15 or so) once could act before she started getting dragged through the mud in Eastwood films and then thrown to the side.

The Source:

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)

The novel is quite good, even if it doesn’t remotely belong at #17 on the Modern Library list.  What’s most remarkable about it, and what I think people really remember about it, is that McCullers was only 23 when the novel was published.  It has a quiet grace and determination that belies the young age of the author.  The scene, towards the end of the book, when Singer learns what has happened to his friend and decides on his own destiny is moving and extraordinary.  And yet, there is also something to be said that she doesn’t end the book there, but gives one final look at the other lives in the book.

The Adaptation:

Perhaps the reason the book was never made before the time that it was is because of the ending.  How would that have stood up in the era of the Production Code?  Yet, it is necessary for the tragedy of the book to come full circle and for Mick to move beyond and take her own steps towards adulthood.  Though that final conversation between Mick and Copeland might not be from the book, we can still see her moving forward (there is more on that on the book).  But the film does a good job of sticking to the novel and making the characters come alive.

The Credits:

Directed by Robert Ellis Miller.  From the Novel by Carson McCullers.  Screenplay by Thomas C. Ryan.

Война и мир

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film here.  But is it fair to call it a film?  It is really four films, filmed together and released separately.  It was, however, released around the world as one film and that was how it won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars (among other places) so I have always considered it a single film.  At over seven hours in length that would certainly make it one of the longest films on record.  The length begins to strain and by the end of the film you wonder if it could have been shorter.  Of course it could have been, but Bondarchuk wanted to make an epic length film that wouldn’t have to cut massive parts of the story.  It is a very good film but I don’t quite put it into the **** category.  It is currently available on DVD though the prints are far from great.  Still, you get the epic scope of the film.  Unlike Vidor’s version of the film, it doesn’t skimp on the peace just so that it can make the war more epic.

The Source:

Война́ и миръ by Leo Tolstoy  (1869)

I have reviewed this novel once already.  You could look at my review in one of two ways.  On the one hand, I disagree with those who try to argue that it is the greatest novel ever written or anyway near that very top.  Indeed, I don’t even think it’s close to the greatest novel written by Tolstoy, as I rank Anna Karenina considerably higher.  Or you could look at it this way: I rank this novel at #61 all-time among the hundreds and hundreds (probably thousands) of novels I have read in my life.  It is a great novel, not just for its epic scope, but in the way that it does so many things, bringing in history and philosophy and morality without every skimping on the story and the characters.  If you have never read it, if you have perhaps been daunted by its length, you really need to cross this one off your list before you die.  Your best bet is the Pevear / Volokhonsky translation.

The Adaptation:

Because Bondarchuk (and his co-writer Solovyev) didn’t skimp on the length of the film, they are able to get a considerable amount of the film’s story and characters onscreen.  Not everything makes it to the screen, of course, because even in a film this length that just isn’t happening.  There are a few subplots and minor characters that are pretty much excised.  Excised, as well, of course, are the bits of philosophy and history that make reading the book such a wonderful experience.  You can’t really find a way to put this onscreen.

One thing the filmmakers did to keep things faithful to Tolstoy’s novel is diving the film up into four parts.  The parts aren’t arbitrary but are in fact the four sections of the novel which is why the films are of such uneven length (the first film is almost an hour longer than any of the others and close to twice the length of the third film).

The Credits:

Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk.  Scenario by Sergei Bondarchuk and Vasili Solovyev.
note:  The source is only listed in the title: Leo Tolstoy War and Peace.  I also am unable to type in cyrillic, so I can’t capture the exact credit phrasing.  I worked backwards from the subtitled credits and what I got below on a reverse translation app online was close but not exact to what was on the screen.

Режиссер Сергей Бондарчук. Лев Толстой. Сценарий Сергея Бондарчука и Василия Соловьева

Consensus Nominees

Funny Girl

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once, as a Best Picture nominee.  I was not very kind to the film and that’s because it doesn’t deserve kindness.  It is way too long, it is not particularly well made and if it weren’t for the debut film performance of Barbra Streisand it wouldn’t even be worth remembering.  She is funny and she can sing (if you like the songs, which I don’t) and she is charming and adorable (though not gorgeous); she is pretty much everything that the rest of the film isn’t.

The Source:

Funny Girl: A New Musical, book by Isobel Lennart, from an original story by Miss Lennart, music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill (1964)

Funny Girl was an extremely successful Broadway show, one that made such a star out of Streisand that she was already well known before she ever made it to film.  Indeed, she became such an instant success with it that one of the songs that was considered for being cut (“People”) had already been recorded by her as a single so they kept it in the show just because of that.  The show gave Streisand a chance to show off her gifts for comedy and singing.  What it doesn’t do is give us a very interesting show.  On some levels, this is a re-hash of Gypsy, which Styne had written a few years before: a show about a famous performer working her way up, complete with “Don’t Rain on My Parade” filling the same role that “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” had.  What’s more, unlike Gypsy, which had a more natural arc (and had Sondheim doing the lyrics), Funny Girl only really gives us half the story of Fanny Brice, which is why when it was made into a film (which was always the plan, as the musical had begun as a screenplay – thus the “from an original story by Miss Lennart” credit) they ended up having to make yet another two and a half hour movie to give us the rest of the story and that one’s even more boring than this one.

The Adaptation:

The film actually does a pretty good job of sticking the original book, perhaps because the book and the script were written by the same writer.  What was changed considerably were the songs.  Eight of the original songs from the Broadway show were dropped (including any that didn’t involve Fanny herself) and a few new ones were written (including the title song, which received an undeserved Oscar nomination and might be the only case in Broadway film adaptation when a title song wasn’t written for the original show but then was written for the film adaptation).

The Credits:

Directed by William Wyler.  Based upon the play with Music by Jule Styne, Lyrics by Bob Merrill, Book by Isobel Lennart, from the original story by Miss Lennart and produced by Rastar Productions.  Screenplay by Isobel Lennart.

Golden Globe Winner

Charly

The Film:

I have mentioned in previous posts my tendency, when younger, to give films more credit for what they were trying to say than I do now, with a prime example being Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.  Interesting then, that I never gave much credit to Charly.  Oh, I knew what it was trying to say, talking about the way we treat those with less intelligence, both in life and as subjects for us to study, but since it always seemed to be about as subtle as slamming my head with a sledgehammer, its intentions never made the slightest bit of difference.  Did it matter that I had already seen The Lion in Winter long before I ever saw Charly and I just sat there in stunned disbelief that this was the performance than won the Oscar over Peter O’Toole?

Poor Charly Gordon is not blessed with much in the way of brains.  He goes through life working as a janitor at a bakery and goes to classes to try and improve himself.  He is then given the chance to take part in an experiment, one that has already been successful with a mouse, an experiment designed to greatly increase Charly’s intelligence.  It works, of course, because if it didn’t work would we even bother to have a movie?  And of course it won’t hold because, again, then would we even have a movie?

The problem isn’t that Robertson is only okay and he won the Oscar (although for me, personally, that’s a problem).  It’s that the film is not well made at all.  It is badly edited and filmed and at times you wonder who was in charge of this project.  Director Ralph Nelson had directed a Best Picture nominee (the much better but also unsubtle Lilies of the Field) but Robertson was the one who had moved the project along.  There are far too many montages of Charly’s life once he gains the intelligence and then we have to watch Robertson trying to emote too much when it all starts to slip away.  Really, this is just a glorified Afterschool Special about what it is like to be developmentally delayed and how we should treat such people better than we do but with the science-fiction motif that he is able to gain intelligence and realize for himself what his life has been like.

I would say that I can not, for the life of me, believe that this film won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay over The Lion in Winter given how brilliant that script is and how trite this one is but I do believe it because this is the same group that two years later will give Love Story the Best Screenplay award over M*A*S*H.

The Source:

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes  (1966)

Flowers for Algernon began life as a short story and I think I would have liked it much better if it had stayed that way.  It’s the first person narrative of Charlie Gordon, a mentally deficient janitor who is trying to improve himself (though, if he his I.Q. is as low as the book claims, I wonder at his ability to read and write at all) and then gets the chance to undergo an experiment that will greatly increase his intelligence.  Of course, being science-fiction, it all goes wrong and eventually his new intelligence starts to fade.

The book has been much beloved and I was given it as a gift years and years ago and put off reading it for a really long time.  The first person narration, complete with spelling and grammar that improves when Charlie gets smarter and devolves again later in the book really doesn’t work for me.  If I could have had the shorter burst of a short story that would have been better, I am certain, than 300 pages of this.  It has been adapted a number of times since this film and was satirized rather deftly in a 2001 Simpsons episode.

The Adaptation:

This was still just a short story when it was originally produced on television with Robertson in the lead role as “The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon”.  Robertson had already lost the film role in The Hustler and The Days of Wine and Roses after playing the leads on television (that the latter wouldn’t be released until a year and a half later I presume doesn’t mean that Robertson hadn’t already lost the role to Jack Lemmon) so he bought the property to this one himself and pushed it for seven years before it made it to the screen.  In that time, Keyes had expanded his original story to a full-length novel and that’s what we get.  Thankfully, some of the things that presumably weren’t in the original story (the constant tiresome repetitious bad dreams that Charlie endures) got cut from the film.  Also, there is much less focus on Algernon and more focus on the romance, which is also, presumably, why they decided to change the title.

The Credits:

directed and produced by ralph nelson.  from the novel ‘flowers for algernon’ by daniel keyes.  screenplay by stirling silliphant.

Oscar Nominee

Oliver!

The Film:

This film has already been written about as the winner of Best Picture, something which always irritates me out of proportion to the quality of the film.  It comes down to this: Oliver is not a bad film by any means.  It’s a fairly good film, a high *** with strong performances from Ron Moody, Jack Wild and Oliver Reed.  But, unfortunately, it had absolutely no business winning Best Picture when The Lion in Winter was sitting right there and 2001 wasn’t even nominated.  It doesn’t help that the songs have never really worked for me.

The Source:

Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress by Boz  [Charles Dickens]  (serialized Feb 1837-March 1839, book form 1838) / Oliver! by Lionel Bart (1960)

I have already written a small review of the original novel when I ranked it at at #5 among all the Dickens novels (#4 if you don’t want to count A Christmas Carol).  I wrote a longer piece on it when I reviewed it for the David Lean film version.

As for the Musical, well, I’m not a fan.  It’s not just that I don’t particularly care for the songs (which I don’t).  I am also somewhat bothered by the dark tone of Oliver Twist, which has a penultimate chapter which is one of the best and darkest things Dickens ever wrote, being turned into such a light-hearted affair.  It’s one thing to have Fagin survive rather than the darkness of that final paragraph (“Day was dawning when they again emerged.  A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking.  Everything told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects in the centre of all – the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and all the hideous apparatus of death.”) but to have him literally walking off into the sunset?  It just belies the story and places all the darkness in the hands of Bill Sykes.

The Adaptation:

So, do I compare this to the original novel, talking about the way that Fagin survives the film when he doesn’t survive in the book?  Or about the other aspects of the film that are cut (how do you not have time for the character Monks? – well, because you spend so much damn time with all your elaborate staging of musical numbers that go on forever)?  Well, as you can see from the credits below, they fully admit this is “freely adapted” from the original novel so I can’t begrudge them too much for changing things that had already been changed by the musical itself.

Or do I compare this film to the musical as it played on stage?  That would certainly be much more faithful.  There are the typical changes that come with moving a stage musical to the screen.  To that effect, “I Shall Scream” and “My Name” are both eliminated (though the music from “My Name” is used when Bill Sykes first appears) and some of the reprises later in the show of various songs are cut.  Unlike a lot of big musicals, there were no original songs added for the film although even if there had been it still would have probably lost to “The Windmills of Your Mind”.

The Credits:

Directed by Carol Reed.  Book, Music and Lyrics by Lionel Bart.  Screenplay by Vernon Harris.  Freely Adapted from Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”.

WGA Nominees

Petulia

The Film:

A beautiful young woman comes over to a handsome older doctor at a party and explains that she’s been married for six months and hasn’t yet had an affair.  Or maybe this already happened.  Or maybe it hasn’t happened yet.  At some point in their lives, these two will intersect.  He’s a bit lonely, as he’s dealing with a divorce and the way his two sons are already finding a substitute for him in their mother’s new boyfriend.  She’s put off by the abusive manner of her stand-offish husband.  So they find something in each other.  I think.

See, that’s part of the problem.  It’s not that I can’t tell what the film is trying to do.  I’m not sure the film can tell what it is trying to do.  In directing a film like A Hard Day’s Night, Richard Lester’s style of jumping all around seemed like the Beatles manic energy let loose into the editing room.  But Petulia is something else.  We jump back and forth in time, never quite knowing where in the story we are.  That bleeds over into the film’s concept.  It’s the story of a free spirit (an annoying free spirit and if she wasn’t played by Julie Christie, I might feel the urge to reach into the film and strangle her) and the more stolid doctor (George C. Scott) that she sets off to have the affair with.  But because of all the jump cuts, because of her personality, because of something in the film, I always viewed it as a Comedy while most people (including the Globes) saw it as a Drama.

But it doesn’t really matter what the film is.  Or maybe it matters a lot.  The film can’t see its way clear to being something.  The movements back and forth in time don’t help the film at all (if you want to see the opposite effect in a Julie Christie film watch Don’t Look Now which is brilliant with the technique).  It’s just an annoying film that somehow managed a WGA nomination as one of the Best Written American Dramas and I would suggest they had lost their minds but they also gave the WGA award to Funny Girl in this year so I don’t think I have to make that point.

The Source:

Me and the Arch Kook Petulia by John Haase (1966)

I read a book like this and I wonder.  The first thing I wonder is that this book managed to be published in the first place.  It’s not very long (191 pages) and there isn’t much to it.  It’s the story of a doctor and the woman that he ends up having an affair with because she’s been married six months and wants to have an affair.  All of the characters are annoying and you read the book and think, good lord, why did I read this.  But then I wonder about who read this book and thought, I know, I’ll make a movie out of this book.  Because who wouldn’t want to see that?

The Adaptation:

I wouldn’t necessarily say that the characters are less annoying on the screen then they are in the film.  Well, the doctor is at least, though that may come more from Scott’s performance than from the writing.  The performance from Julie Christie helps overcome the feeling of her as an “Auntie Mame” type character just flitting from thing to thing for whatever whim comes into her mind.

The most aggravating thing about the film, the random editing that doesn’t really work, is in no way present in the original book.  The book is written in a straightforward manner and I can’t imagine what happened that the filmmakers thought that the jump editing from time to time would actually improve this story.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Lester.  Screenplay by Lawrence B. Marcus.  Based on a novel by John Haase.  Adaptation by Barbara Turner.

Yours, Mine and Ours

The Film:

If I were to start this review by saying “It’s the story of a man named Fonda,” that might give you an idea, not only of the content of this film, but of its seriousness as well.  This is a silly little film that just happens to be inspired by a true story (see below for how inspired).  A widower with ten children manages to meet, by accident, a widow with eight children.  They fall in love with each other and marry and have to figure out how to make everything work with all of those children (and then manage to have yet more children after they are married – this is why Griswold v Connecticut is such an important case).

All of this just makes for a silly romantic comedy.  I imagine that the makers of The Brady Bunch must have gotten the idea from this story and decided that it was too ridiculous to try and make that work with so many people to keep track of and it would be enough to just have six and parcel them out appropriately.  We get some shenanigans of how to deal with boys and dating and groceries and what happens when your wife is in labor and you’re in the Navy and aboard ship.  I would like to say that it’s saved somewhat by the presence of Henry Fonda as the father and Lucille Ball, but it’s not.  Fonda is just ridiculous miscast while Ball kind of tries to fall into her role as Lucy and it doesn’t really work.  They try to make the film too much about little things that come up to cause problems.  Yet, the worst thing about it is the really awful title song that plays over both the opening and end credits.

The Source:

Who Gets the Drumstick?: The Story of the Beardsley Family by Helen Beardsley (1965)

Helen Beardsley was Helen North, a happily married woman with seven kids (and one on the way) when her Navy husband died in an accident.  She managed to meet, through correspondence, another Navy man, whose wife had died, leaving him with ten children.  They began to correspond more and then fell in love and married.  It’s an abnormal story but it doesn’t make it extraordinary and it’s incredibly boring reading.  You have a lot of kids, he has a lot, you make it work, the end.  Definitely not my thing.  If this happened today it would almost certainly be a reality show rather than a book.

The Adaptation:

According to the statements on Wikipedia (which are unsourced and had at least one error that I corrected), Ball was interested in this story very early on, well before Beardsley actually wrote her book.  Whether that’s true or not, there are only a few things from the book that make it to the film accurately: that there are these two sets of kids belonging to the two parents and that they marry and that he eventually adopts her kids as well.  Almost everything else about how they met is fictionalized and all of the little details in the film to make it a comedy are created for the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Melville Shavelson.  Screenplay by Melville Shavelson and Mort Lachman.  Story by Madelyn Davis and Bob Carroll, Jr.
note:  There is no mention of the source book in the opening credits.

Finian’s Rainbow

The Film:

The year before had been the first sounding of the death knell for the big roadshow Musical.  That was the year of Doctor Dolittle and Star!, two films that nearly combined to sink an entire studio, not to mention Camelot.  So then came 1968 and bizarrely, it brought people back, with over-rated films like Oliver! and Funny Girl.  This was also the year that brought Finian’s Rainbow to the screen after almost two decades.  The original Broadway show had been a big hit, running for two years and people had been trying to bring it to the screen ever since.  But the issue of racism that is dealt with satirically in the show had helped to elude people.  So Warner Bros decided to take a chance on a young director who had brought forth the bizarrely engaging You’re a Big Boy Now, an egotistical but talented young man named Francis Ford Coppola.

This was an odd choice and it wasn’t really the right one.  By a lot of measures of success, Finian’s Rainbow worked: it got some very good reviews (including from a young Roger Ebert), it got awards attention (four Globe nominations) and it did solidly at the box office.  But is it good?  Well, when I originally watched it, I gave it a 74, which is a high *** and that also means I ranked it above the Oscar winning Oliver.  Looking back on it now, I think it’s more in the high 60’s and I don’t think there’s any way that it’s better than Oliver.  No, I don’t like the music in Oliver (see above), but I don’t much like the music in Finian’s Rainbow either.  No, Carol Reed is not as good a director as Coppola, but this was Coppola working for hire, and in fact the process was kind of what made Coppola turn personal and crank out The Rain People and take his own ride towards making Zoetrope and becoming one of the most important people in the film industry for the next decade.  I think I overrated this film precisely because it is directed by Coppola.  Looking at it now, with its desperate attempts for humor (like when the young botanist ends up working as a servant for the racist senator), with its long stretches that helped kill the roadshow Musical, the long overture, the intermission, the dance numbers that go on and on and on and might still be going on.

This film does have Fred Astaire going for it, in his last singing and dancing role as the man who stole gold from a leprechaun and wants to plant it near Fort Knox so that it will breed more gold.  He is charming and it reminds me of the roles he would play in the 30’s, when there always seemed to be something sneaky behind his smile.  But no one else in the film is particularly good (Petula Clark could definitely sing, but I don’t think much of her acting and she’s singing songs I don’t much care for).

There were a lot of musicals in the 50’s that I didn’t much care for but had to watch again for this project because the WGA for almost 20 years had a Best Written Musical category.  This is the last year of that category and this is the last film that I had to re-watch because of that category.  A lot of those films would have been fine to watch if I had liked the music (which I usually didn’t) but with this film, with Coppola wanting to make more of a new Hollywood film while the studio (and the star) just wanted an old fashioned show made on soundstages, combined with out-of-date humor is something different than me just not caring for the songs.

The Source:

Finian’s Rainbow: A Musical Satire by E. Y. Harburg & Fred Saidy (1947)

This must have been a risky thing in 1947, a Musical in which a racist senator from Missitucky (yes, two combined states) ends up becoming black because of a wish near a leprechaun’s pot of gold.  And, though I might not think much of the songs, it was choreographed by Michael Kidd, so I imagine that the dancing was a sight to see in that original production.

Of course, none of that changes the songs or the silliness of the two romantic plots (the young man and the daughter of Finian, the Irish dreamer who stole the gold in the first place, as well as the leprechaun himself and the deaf sister of the young man).  So, the strengths of this come from the satire and even that includes some lame attempts at humor – it’s the basic idea that really does something there.

The Adaptation:

There are a few things that were updated, since the original Broadway show came out in 1947 and the film was released in 1968.  Those include the changing of a couple of occupations and changing a couple of cultural references in the songs.  Other than that, the play comes fairly untouched to the screen as it was on the stage.

The Credits:

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.  From the Broadway Play. Book by E. Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy.  Lyrics by E. Y. Harburg.  Music by Burton Lane.  Screenplay by E. Y. Harburg & Fred Saidy.

Golden Globe Nominees

The Fixer

The Film:

Yakov Bok doesn’t want your friendship.  He doesn’t want your love.  He doesn’t even want your pity.  He just wants a chance to do his job in peace (he is a carpenter and can do odd jobs, or a fixer, have you will).  He has driven his wife away from him and left the town where he felt unwelcome to come to Kiev.  Unfortunately, it is 1911 and Bok is a Jew and Kiev in 1911 is not a safe place and time for him.  It becomes even more unsafe when two young boys, boys who Yakov had yelled at once, turn up dead and severely drained of blood.  In a country where pogroms have happened before, it is the widespread belief that this must be the work of some Jew to collect blood for passover matzohs (especially since it is now Passover).  Never mind that this belief is absurd and never had any resemblance to the truth.  Never mind that Yakov barely can even be considered a Jew, does not worship as one, does not live as one.  Never mind that Yakov did not kill the boy.  He is the one who is arrested, he is the one who is persecuted and pushed to the edge of madness.

The Fixer is a fascinating, though fairly relentlessly bleak, film.  It had been a Pulitzer and National Book winning novel from Bernard Malamud.  It was directed by John Frankenheimer, a prominent director of such Oscar nominated films as The Manchurian Candidate, The Birdman of Alcatraz and The Train.  It starred Alan Bates, who had been a rising British star, earning a BAFTA nom for A Kind of Loving, Globe noms for Georgy Girl and Far from the Madding Crowd and would clearly be an Oscar nominee soon (in fact, he earned a nomination for this film).  But now, it’s almost forgotten.  It has just 1000 votes on the IMDb (a third of any of the other Oscar nominees for Best Actor from that year and 1/25th of Oliver or The Lion in Winter).  It is not available on DVD and is hard to find on video (I actually, for the this viewing, watched the film on YouTube with Greek subtitles) and the book itself seems to be not in demand.

So what are we to make of the film?  Well, there is a very good performance from Alan Bates, though, hidden under the beard like he is and with such intensity at times, I kept thinking I was watching Oliver Reed instead.  It has a solid early nasty performance from Ian Holm as the prosecuting magistrate determined to see Bok hanged just for being a Jew.  It is a literate, well-written film, even if it wears on you because you know that nothing good can come of this (although, in real life you would have been wrong, as I note below).  You should find it and watch it at least once, for Bates’ performance if for no other reason.  But I can certainly understand why there would be no call for a DVD release in that who would want to own it and watch it again and again?

The Source:

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud  (1966)

This was the Pulitzer winner for 1967, an award I gave a grade of B+.  It was a very good choice (I think it’s Malamud’s best novel and one of the best of the year though my own choice would have been The Crying of Lot 49) and was the rare winner of both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.  It’s the (depressing) story of a Jewish carpenter who is arrested for the murder of two young boys under the absurd (but at the time widely believed in Tsarist Russia) theory that Jews killed young boys to use their blood to make matzoh.  It’s based on a real trial that took place in 1913 although Malamud’s version is actually far bleaker than what actually happened (the evidence was so flimsy that the man was actually acquitted) and a stark reminder a generation after the Holocaust and some 50 years after Tsarist Russia was gone of the power and ridiculous beliefs of anti-Semitism.  Aside from a bleaker version of what happened, Malamud’s version is different than real life in that his character, Yakov Bok, is a loner, a man who has alienated his family (his wife has committed adultery and left him) and has no friends, a far different cry from the actual man and one that makes the book more complicated in that he is less sympathetic as a character even while his conditions are even worse.  A very good read from a solid American author who has been neglected more of late and is no longer thought of as highly as he once was.

The Adaptation:

“To have reduced the overt action of the Malamud novel would have been to make a movie that was unendurably grim and brutal: an audience tends to back off, to withhold empathy, when things get too rough.  Trumbo knew all this and carefully constructed his screenplay so that the psychological and physical brutality to the defenseless Yakov is relieved by episodes – little victories – in which the fixer fashions a device for keeping time, or fantasizes an assassination of the czar.  He added a couple of others, too, not involving Yakov directly, in which a scene is shifted from his cell, and the audience is given at least temporary liberation from the claustrophobic restriction of the jail setting.  These sequences are all important to the dramatic pacing of the script, and that is why they are there – ultimately to keep a hold on the audience.  They were in the final draft of the script, and they were shot by director John Frankenheimer.  But these were precisely the bits that were edited when the film was trimmed down to final cut.”  (Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Cook, p 290)

I should note that Cook has a much lower opinion of this film than I do, which is quite clear in his further discussions of the film.  He is correct though, that the film is quite dark and there isn’t much in there to keep things lighter.  But I don’t know that he’s right about those sequences because they might have felt too much like flights of fantasy.

The book is actually quite faithfully adapted.  As happens quite a lot, the scenes at the beginning of the film aren’t actually at the beginning of the book (they are flashbacks in the back) but do occur over the course of the book.

The Credits:

Directed by John Frankenheimer.  Based on the Novel by Bernard Malamud.  Screen Play by Dalton Trumbo.

The Fox

The Film:

This is still a surprisingly difficult film to get hold of.  I looked for it for years because it was an Oscar nominee (Score), and a Golden Globe winner (Best English Language Foreign Film) as well as earning three major Globe noms (Director, Screenplay, Actress – Drama).  Those awards actually lead to some confusion (it was released in Canada, where it was made, in December of 1967, possibly why it earned the Globe noms in 1967 but wasn’t released in the US until February of 1968 and earned its Oscar noms in 1968) and, for me, some consternation.  This film doesn’t remotely deserve its nominations, and yet, I think I am more bothered by the Oscar nom than the Globe noms.

This is the story of two women who live way out in rural Canada on a farm that is haunted by a fox that keeps killing their hens.  The fox will eventually be shot by a young man who comes and stays at their farm, a man who claims his grandfather used to live there and will replace the physical fox with his own metaphorical fox, set loose among these two hens to bring mischief and even death.  Some of the scenes are well-done but they are not written particularly well and at times it feels like the film was directed with a sledgehammer.  It has a lesbian love scene that was remarkable at the time (remember that the Production Code was just disappearing) and is actually filmed with some tenderness, but the relationships aren’t handled well and it stuns me that the Globes could think the Screenplay worthy of a nomination.  The Actress nomination isn’t so bad, because it was for Ann Heywood and not Sandy Dennis (who goes beyond her histrionics in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because she’s not reigned in by a capable director).

But as I said, it’s really the Best Score nomination that is the most annoying.  If the script bludgeons you over the head at times, that’s nothing compared to what the score does.  I’ve always been a big believer that the score must be good in and of itself (listening to it out of context always helps to determine that) but it also must work within the film and this time it really doesn’t.

The Source:

The Fox by D.H. Lawrence (1923)

This is a very minor work by Lawrence, a novella published in 1923, by which time almost all of his best work was behind him.  It can be misleading for those who see the film first (at this point, probably not many, given the difficulties of getting the film), because the film has, at the least, a lesbian love scene, and at the most, a portrayal of a lesbian couple (see below) while there is no sexuality in the book at all, something you would actually look for in a Lawrence work.

The central conceit of the story is the title – the physical fox that has been killing the hens on the farm where two women who have passed beyond marriageable age are living together and the metaphorical fox, the man who comes to the farm because his grandfather once lived there, and sticks around, doing some work and basically winning over one of the women, causing a rift that ends in death (physical, not metaphorical).  It’s not bad, because this is Lawrence, one of the great writers of all-time and he has such a gift for language (“But at the end of the rainbow is a bottomless gulf down which you can fall forever without arriving, and the blue distance is a void pit which can swallow you and all your efforts into its emptiness, and still be no emptier.”).

The Adaptation:

For the most part, the film follows the novella: the two women have been trying to kill the fox, the man comes to the farm, starts enticing one woman, kills the fox, goes away, comes back, gets her to agree to marry him, is cutting down a tree, kills the other woman.  The superficial difference is that the book takes place in England during and just after the Great War while the film moves the action to modern day Canada (although, way out in the rural landscape, it’s hardly modern).  The main difference is the lesbian love scene – the novella doesn’t ever give any idea of sexuality between the two.  Depending on your interpretation, you can say the love scene was a one-time thing because of the shock they have been through (Roger Ebert’s original review says as much) or you can believe that we have just seen one scene in their love life.  Either way, it is a change from the source.

That change is discussed in one of the most vital and useful film books ever written, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (in fact, it was the film version of the book where I first saw clips from The Fox): “By making the relationship between Jill (Sandy Dennis) and Ellen (Anne Heywood) explicit in their adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox (1968), director Mark Rydell and screenwriter Lewis John Carlino exaggerated the results of that lesbian passion. A subtle, almost unconsciously lesbian affair between Jill and Ellen became on film a hotly explicit obsession that is broken up by the arrival of Paul (Keir Dullea), the ‘fox’ for whom Ellen has an inexplicable attraction. The overstated sexuality in the film makes it a ‘will she or won’t she choose normalcy?’ tug-of-war between lesbianism and heterosexuality.” (p 164)

The Credits

Directed by Mark Rydell.  Screenplay by Lewis John Carlino and Howard Koch.  From the Novella “The Fox” by D. H. Lawrence.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10 (in descending order of how I rank the script):

• The Music Room  –  Very good 1958 Satyajit Ray film finally earning a U.S. release.  Based on the short story by Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay.
• The Charge of the Light Brigade  –  Mostly original but it also used research from the book The Reason Why by British historian Cecil Woodham-Smith.  Very good British film about the famous charge.

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Bullitt  –  Low-level ***.5 is great for its action, not necessarily its script, which was based on the novel Mute Witness by Robert L. Fish (writing as Robert L. Pike, so not much of a pseudonym).
• Capricious Summer  –  A Czech New Wave Comedy based on the novel by Vladislav Vancura.
• The Bride Wore Black  –  High level *** from Francois Truffaut, based on the novel by Cornel Woolrich.  Truffaut will make the Top 10 in 1970 for another Woolrich adaptation, Mississippi Mermaid.
• Planet of the Apes  –  I came to this film late (late 90’s) and already knew all the surprises before I had ever seen it.  Solid but not great.  The ending is brilliant, of course, even if it’s the much derided ending of the 2001 Burton version that is almost word for word the ending from the original Pierre Boule novel (the same writer who wrote Bridge on the River Kwai).
• The Boston Strangler  –  Highly fictionalized version of Gerrold Frank’s book on the famous serial killer but it has one of Tony Curtis’ best performances (the title role, but really supporting to Henry Fonda’s detective).
• The Killing of Sister George  –  Featured even more prominently than The Fox in The Celluloid Closet (and the two films together merit a chapter in The Lavender Screen), an early, important film with a lesbian lead even if the supposed black comedy on stage became a serious drama on film.
• Weekend  –  One of the few Godard adaptations and, to me, one of his better films.  A comedy based on the short story “La autopista del Sur” by Julio Cortázar.
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang  –  Unfortunately, just seeing the title puts the title song in my head, making me want to bang it against the desk.  The second of two very different films that were written originally by Ian Fleming (seriously) and adapted to the screen by Roald Dahl.
• Reconstruction  –  Romanian satire based on a novel by Horia Pătraşcu.  Made one appearance in TPSDT’s expanded Top 2000 just two years ago way down at #1701.
• Pierrot Le Fou  –  Another adapted Godard film, this one originally from 1965.  Based on the novel Obsession by Lionel White (whose novel Clean Break was made into The Killing).
• Madigan  –  Don Siegel cop film.  Based on the novel The Commissioner.
• Countdown  –  Early Robert Altman film, a Sci-Fi film no less.  Based on The Pilgrim Project by Hank Searls.  We’re into mid-*** range at this point.
• The Night They Raided Minsky’s  –  Another early film from a seminal 70’s director, this time William Friedkin.  Based on the novel by Rowland Barber.
• How I Won the War  –  Satirical anti-war film that stars, if you can believe it, both Michael Crawford and John Lennon.  This is the film being filmed in Spain in Living is Easy with Eyes Closed.
• The Subject Was Roses  –  This was a Pulitzer Prize winning play by Frank D. Gilroy (who has three sons in the industry, two of whom have earned Oscar noms) before it became an Oscar winning film.  I definitely don’t agree with the Oscar (Best Supporting Actor for Jack Albertson).
• The Birthday Party  –  Friedkin again, but this time he’s directing a Harold Pinter adaptation of his own play.
• Half a Sixpence  –  Before this was a BAFTA nominated film (Best Colour Costume Design) it was a stage musical and before that it was actually an H.G. Wells novel called Kipps: The Story of a Lost Soul.
• Asterix and Cleopatra  –  The second animated Asterix film, which was later remade in live action in 2002.
• Poor Cow  –  Now we enter low ***.  Ken Loach’s feature debut.  I don’t much like his films but the BAFTAs love them.  This is before his BAFTA love but it was nominated at the Globes for Best English Language Foreign Film.  Adapted from the novel by Neil Dunn.
• The Shoes of the Fisherman  –  Bizarre quasi-alternate history film from Michael Anderson (who directed Around the World in 80 Days).  Oscar nominated for Score and Art Direction.  Based on the novel by Morris West.
• Romeo and Juliet  –  Once again, five adapted nominees for Best Picture, which means I already reviewed this here although obviously, given how far down this list it is, I am not a fan.  The only one of the five to receive no plaudits for its writing partially because its Shakespeare and partially because it really isn’t all that good.
• The Sailor from Gibraltar  –  From director Tony Richardson, this film is actually really hard to find in the States and I had to borrow it from a friend.  Based on a novel by Marguerite Duras.
• Inadmissible Evidence  –  John Osborne adapts his own play.  BAFTA nominated for Best Actor (Nicol Williamson).
• The Swimmer  –  Fascinating John Cheever story about ennui in modern suburbia becomes a listless film from director Frank Perry (the worst director ever nominated for an Oscar).
• Yellow Submarine  –  Fun Beatles song becomes mediocre animated film.
• Asterix the Gaul  –  My brothers grew up with Asterix because they lived in France with my parents in 1969.  The first Asterix animated film based fairly closely on the first book.
• The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band  –  In trying to get in as many Oscar eligible songs as possible I saw this film which had 9 eligible songs (one of which was long-listed).  Don’t bother.  Sub-par Disney film based on the book about the Bower family by Laura Bower Van Nuys.
• Shalako  –  Sean Connery wasn’t exactly made for Westerns.  Based on a novel by Louis L’Amour.
• The Sea Gull  –  It’s directed by Sidney Lumet, it’s a Chekhov adaptation and it has a strong cast but it just never gels.  We’re now into **.5 films.
• The Ugly Ones  –  A 1966 Spaghetti Western getting a U.S. release.  Based on the novel The Bounty Killer by Marvin H. Albert.
• Blackbeard’s Ghost  –  A silly Disney film from Robert Stevenson (Mary Poppins) based on the novel by Ben Stahl.
• Quatermass and the Pit  –  Released in the U.S. as Five Million Years to Earth, this is the third Quatermass film from Hammer.
• The Stalking Moon  –  Director Robert Mulligan and star Gregory Peck did better with To Kill a Mockingbird.  They really shouldn’t have tried their luck with a Western.  Based on a novel by T.V. Olsen.
• Isadora  –  Low **.5 film that’s only worth watching for Vanessa Redgrave’s Oscar nominated performance.  Based on Isadora Duncan’s autobiography and a biography about her.
• Wild in the Streets  –  Oscar nominated for Best Editing but not very good.  Based on a story from Esquire.
• Dark of the Sun  –  Former Oscar nominated director Jack Cardiff (Sons and Lovers) directs a mediocre action film based on the novel by Wilbur Smith.
• Live a Little, Love a Little  –  One of several weak Elvis films directed by Norman Taurog.  This one gave us “A Little Less Conversation”.  Based on the novel Kiss My Firm But Pliant Lips.
• Les Carabiniers  –  This was apparently the year for Godard’s adaptations getting U.S. releases.  Originally released in 1963 this one is based on the play I Caribinieri.
• Ice Station Zebra  –  Another Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone) novel becomes a film though with considerably less success this time.  That’s what happens when your star is Rock Hudson instead of Gregory Peck.
• Inspector Clouseau  –  No Peter Sellers, no Blake Edwards, no Henry Mancini.  Just a crappy sequel with Alan Arkin taking on the role.
• Doctor Faustus  –  Richard Burton directs himself and Liz makes an appearance as Helen (“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships”) written originally by Kit Marlowe of course.  They were better off being directed by Mike Nichols.
• The Vengeance of She  –  Hammer films makes a loose sequel to their 1965 version of She based loosely on Haggard’s actual sequel Ayesha: The Return of She.
• What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?  –  Weak George Seaton Comedy with Mary Tyler Moore and George Peppard based on I Am Thinking of My Darling by Vincent McHugh.
• The Double Man  –  Now we’ve reached the ** films.  Crappy spy film with Yul Brynner based on the novel Legacy of a Spy.  This was actually a 1967 film from Franklin J. Schaffner who would follow this film up with his next three films being a blockbuster (Planet of the Apes) a Best Picture / Director winner (Patton) and one of the worst Best Picture nominees in Oscar history (Nicholas and Alexandra).
• The Shuttered Room  –  H.P. Lovecraft was a fantastic writer and you should definitely get the Annotated Lovecraft.  But films based on his works, like this one should mostly be skipped.
• The Wacky World of Mother Goose  –  Terrible Rankin/Bass film based on several nursery rhymes.  I only saw it to try and see as many animated films as possible and you should skip it.
• Secret Ceremony  –  Joseph Losey is another British director that I think is over-rated.  Based on the novel by Marco Denevi.
• Anzio  –  We’re even into low ** now and they get really bad.  Crappy film about the famous World War battle from former Oscar nominee Edward Dmytryk based on the book by Wynford Vaughan-Thomas who was the BBC correspondent during the battle.
• Bye Bye Braverman  –  Sidney Lumet’s worst film until 1999.  Based on the novel To an Early Grave by Wallace Markfield.
• No Way to Treat a Lady  –  William Goldman adapts his own novel which shows even he’s not always great.  BAFTA nominated for Supporting Actor (George Segal).
• Barbarella  –  I am the first to admit that this film, adapted from the French comic is terrible, the bottom end of **.  But Jane Fonda in it is just about the sexiest thing ever put on film so it’s got that.  And it gave us the name for Duran Duran and the title of one of their best songs.  So it has that going for it.
• The Legend of Lylah Clare  –  Kim Novak in multiple roles?  Spare me.  Directed by Robert Aldrich, it had been a 1962 television production originally.  It should have stayed that way.  This film earns a 22, which is high *.
• The Girl on a Motorcycle  –  This film, however, earns an 18, which is mid *.  Another film from Jack Cardiff, which is why I’ve seen it.  Based on the novel by André Pieyre de Mandiargues.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• none

FALSTAFF: We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Robert Shallow. (Henry IV Part 2, III. ii. 220)

My Top 10:

1. Chimes at Midnight
2. Z
3. Stolen Kisses
4. Oh! What a Lovely War
5. Midnight Cowboy
6. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
7. Boudu Saved from Drowning
8. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
9. Goodbye Columbus
10. Cactus Flower

Note:  This year’s post is a bit ugly with a number of source materials I was unable to get.  There is also even a film that I am unable to really review because while I have seen it, it was years ago (well over a decade ago) and it is extremely difficult to get hold of and I wasn’t able to do so.

Consensus Nominees:

1. Midnight Cowboy  (272 pts)
2. Goodbye Columbus  (160 pts)
3. Anne of the Thousand Days  (144 pts)
4. They Shoot Horses Don’t They  (120 pts)
5. Z  (80 pts)

note:  Midnight Cowboy becomes the first Adapted script to win the Oscar, WGA and the BAFTA (this same year Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid does the same in Original).

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• Midnight Cowboy
• Anne of the Thousand Days
• Goodbye Columbus
• They Shoot Horses Don’t They
• Z

WGA Awards:

note:  The WGA finally drops their straight Genre categories and creates four categories, dividing things up by Adapted and Original (finally!) and by Drama and Comedy.

Adapted Drama:

• Midnight Cowboy
• Anne of the Thousand Days
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• They Shoot Horses Don’t They
• True Grit

Adapted Comedy:

• Goodbye Columbus
• Cactus Flower
• Gaily Gaily
• John and Mary
• The Reivers

Original Drama:

• Alice’s Restaurant

note:  Yes, the category is Original Drama but Alice’s Restaurant is based on the song.  At this point, the WGA seemed to have the Oscars’ loose definition that fact-based scripts were considered Original.  We’ll go through this again the next year with Patton.  I originally had Downhill Racer listed here as well which is supposedly based on the novel but the film only takes the title and doesn’t credit the book so I decided I didn’t need to count it (a decision that was easier to make since I couldn’t get hold of the novel anyway).

Golden Globe:

• Anne of the Thousand Days
• John and Mary
• Midnight Cowboy

Nominees that are Original:  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium

BAFTA:

• Midnight Cowboy
• Goodbye Columbus
• They Shoot Horses Don’t They
• Z

note:  They Shoot Horses Don’t They would actually be nominated in 1970.  The last nominee, Women in Love, will be on this list in 1970 when it is Oscar eligible.

My Top 10

Chimes at Midnight

The Film:

It’s now been a decade since I originally wrote this review of Chimes at Midnight.  Thankfully, in the time since then, it has become much more readily available, namely because Criterion put it on DVD.  But that doesn’t change a lot of what I wrote in the review.  I knew about the film for years before I was able to see it.  In fact, I bought the screenplay in London in 1996 (it has £ on the price tag still on the back) and didn’t actually see the film until I discovered Movie Madness in the fall of 1998.  It is wonderful though, that it is available from Criterion now, because it looks, not only better than ever, but as good as it possibly could.  They have done a good job of trying to synch the sound up with the picture and cleared up a lot of the negative.  Because of the way that Welles shot the film, it will never look as polished as a major studio production, but that’s also part of the charm of the film and why it endures when so many Shakespeare adaptations with much higher production values have faded into obscurity.

The Source:

Five Kings by Orson Welles, a night of William Shakespeare’s plays adapted into one performance  (1939)

“Five Kings was going to be in two evenings. We did only one, using Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V. The second night would have included Henry VI, Parts I, II and III, and Richard III. The whole sweep of the English history plays . . . [I didn’t take] scenes [from Merry Wives of Windsor]. Just some dialogue of Falstaff’s. And [I] used Holinshed’s writings for narration in Five Kings, as [I] did in Chimes at Midnight.” (This is Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, p 259)

So, Welles didn’t write anything of his own.  But he brilliantly adapted a lot of different things into one idea.  More on that below.

The idea of doing this as all one continuous narrative would later be used brilliantly by the BBC for The Hollow Crown.

The Adaptation:

“With the focus firmly on Falstaff, Welles was obliged to lose his original opening to the film, the murder of Richard II by Henry IV’s lackeys.” (Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios by Clinton Heylin, p 346)  Welles himself in an interview that is reproduced in the published screenplay says “We shot one day on the assassination, and it didn’t seem to me that the scene was sufficiently clear; instead of explaining the political background, it would tend to obscure it and confuse the audience.”  (p 264)

The actual opening comes from Act III, Scene II of Henry IV Part 2.  I don’t have to compare the film to the original Shakespeare because the screenplay has already done that.  If you have a serious interest in this film, you should absolutely buy it.  The editor, Bridget Gellert Lyons, did a brilliant job annotating every line in the script.  It also perfectly matches the film because it’s a continuity script taken from the soundtrack of the film.  For a long time, as I said above, it was the only thing I had and how I experienced the film.  That does make it a little hard to read at times because it uses every camera shot in the script and that breaks up the dialogue a lot.  But the book is so worth it as it also has an essay by Lyons as well as several reviews and commentaries on the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Orson Welles.  Adapted from plays by William Shakespeare.  Narration based on Holinshed’s Chronicles Spoken by Ralph Richardson.
note:  The direction credit is only at the end of the film.  There is no writing credit.

Z

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as a Best Picture nominee.  It’s a great film; there is no question of that.  It was the first Foreign film since 1938 to be nominated for Best Picture and the first to win Best Foreign Film and earn a Best Picture nomination.  This is the best praise I can find for it: my mother consistently praises this film in spite of always claiming that she only likes film with happy endings.

The Source:

Z by Vassilis Vassilikos (1966)

To be honest, I was drowning in this book.  I have seen the film several times but this was my first try with the book and it will remain my only try.  Yes, there is a story of a murder and an investigation buried there, but I really couldn’t find it.  Could some of the problem be because of the translation from Greek to English?  I really couldn’t say.  All I know is that I struggled to comprehend what was going on in the book and if it wasn’t for the film, I’m not sure I ever would have really worked it out.

The Adaptation:

The script finds a way to cut through the narrative noise and find the film within.  Part of the brilliance in that is the way the film keeps travelling back, finding the moment of assassination and revisiting it from all these different angles, finding all the connections between all the people involved and cutting to the truth the same way that the prosecutor did.

The Credits:

Film de Costa-Gavras.  d’après le roman de Vassili Vassilikos.  Z.  éditions Gallimard.  Dialogue de Jorge Semprun.
The IMDb lists uncredited writing from Costa-Gavras and Ben Barzman.

Baisers Volés

The Film:

Just last night, Veronica and I were discussing the difference between genre works and literary works.  Genre works focus more on plot while literary works focus on character.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t a story going on in more literary works but the focus is different.  I think about that when I write because there are some things I write more for plot and some things more for character.  It’s the plot driven ones in art that often tend to get sequels because you just find something new for them to do.  But that doesn’t mean that character driven stories can’t be continued as well.  When I have thought about writing further stories that take my characters forward, it is often the Antoine Doinel films that I think of.  Truffaut didn’t need to make a sequel to The 400 Blows; it is one of the great films in history with one of the great endings.  But he was interested in what happened to that character further down the line, especially since so much of Antoine had come from himself.  I am the same.  I like to know where these characters go.

This isn’t the first continuation of Antoine’s story.  There was the short film “Antoine and Colette” but that was only a half hour and not a full story in and of itself.  Now we have the reached the adult Antoine, being bounced out of the army (and rightfully so, because, having met Antoine, how can we ever imagine him in the army?) and headed back to Paris to meet his girlfriend.  What we have from there is the story of Antoine as he tries to find his place in the world and as he tries to find his place in love as well.

Perhaps Antoine can work as a bellboy?  Working in a small hotel it seems like something he can do that won’t require too much difficulty, but in the end, he has not the attention to detail.  He, much to his girlfriend’s surprise, lands a job working at a detective agency but when he starts to be attracted to the wife of the shoe store where he is working undercover that job sinks as well.  So finally he ends up working as a television repairman.  It’s a far cry away from the lone youth running across the beach at the end of The 400 Blows but what can he do?

But all of this is balanced out because at the same time, there is Christine.  She is pretty, she is charming, she is willing to put up with Antoine and his flights of fancy.  In fact, as she develops over the course of the films in the series, she is a metaphor for the way that young men and women relate to each other even in a relationship that fails.

I was critical of the film Boyhood because I felt that it was an experiment that was interesting but didn’t really hold up as a story.  The adventures of Antoine Doinel are much more interesting to me because he is more fascinating as a character.  We get to watch the character grow as the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud grows.  But the series starts to work really well here (and really becomes a series) because of the addition of Claude Jade as Christine.  Her development and their relationship through the last three films in the series provide an extra balance of maturity that helps make Antoine a realistic character that someone can relate to.  At the end, it seems like there won’t be enough time for them to find each other, but Christine comes up with a great solution and it’s not much of a surprise when we see Antoine’s work, lying on the floor, unfinished, and him lying in bed with her, having finally found something he can do right.

The Source:

characters created by François Truffaut  (1959)

François Truffaut simply set out to make a film in 1959.  He didn’t have any idea that he was creating a story that would extend nearly all the way until his early death.  His character of Antoine Doinel was just a thinly veiled version of himself.  But he had returned to Antoine for his short film “Antoine and Colette” which was part of an anthology film by several prominent European directors.  And so we come to this film which finds Antoine several years older, just coming out of the army and trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to do with the rest of his life.

The Adaptation:

There isn’t really an adaptation, but rather a continuation of a character that had already been created for an earlier film and thus, by Academy definition, this screenplay is adapted.

The Credits:

Mise en scène: François Truffaut.  Scénario et Dialogue: François Truffaut, Calude de Givray, Bernard Revon.

Oh! What a Lovely War

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once as the under-appreciated film of 1969.  It is true that it was widely acclaimed at the BAFTAs (where it won five awards).  But it was completely blanked at the Oscars and was, until 2006, almost completely unavailable on video or DVD.  It is a remarkable directorial debut from a director who would later be much more lauded for films that aren’t nearly as good as this one is.  It seems like it might have been the model for Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, a way of limiting the action to a small space and letting movement and dialogue take the place of greater action.  If you have never seen the film, then you definitely need to rectify that.  It just misses out on Picture and Director nominations in this very good year but does earn 8 nominations and wins the Nighthawk for both Art Direction and Makeup.

The Source:

Oh, What a Lovely War! by Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop  (1963)

Littlewood refused the original idea of doing a play based on World War I because she didn’t want to put people in uniforms and hated war.  She eventually relented, producing this musical that made use of old 1910’s music hall songs to satirize the war and the way the British population was mobilized into fighting it though she still refused to put the characters in uniform.  I was unable to get hold of the original play.

The Adaptation:

This is the first of the adaptations where I can’t write much here because I was unable to get hold of the original source.  I do know that the film decided to use actual military uniforms (and depict actual events in the war, even if they were then altered to fit into the the stage hill motifs), something which Littlewood had adamantly refused to do on stage.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Attenborough.  Based on Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop Production by Charles Chilton and the members of the original cast.  After a stage treatment by Ted Allan.
The IMDb lists the Screenplay as being uncredited by Len Deighton.

Midnight Cowboy

The Film:

Midnight Cowboy was a historical film when it was first released, the first film released with an X rating to win Best Picture.  Of course, when it was re-released later it was downgraded to an R and it’s likely that the only reason that it received the X was not because of its depiction of sex but because it dared to be honest about homosexuality (and what I mean by that is that it honest in being clear that it is depicting homosexuality, at least in the cruising scenes, even if there is still more subtext in the relationship between Joe and Rizzo).  What’s more, it has managed to endure, landing in the Top 50 on both of the AFI Top 100 lists.  It is a great film with two magnificent performances but I have never thought it deserved to win best Picture in a year when it was nominated against Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Z.  Nonetheless, it only ranks down at #7 for the year for me (and #5 in Adapted Screenplay) because 1969 is a good year.  In 1970 it would have been in 3rd place in both categories.  A full review of the film can be found here.  Soon after this posts, Criterion will release the film on both dvd and Blu-Ray.

The Source:

Midnight Cowboy: a novel by James Leo Herlihy  (1965)

In 1965, when Herlihy published this novel, could he have imagined it would have been made into a film?  His previous novel, All Fall Down, had already been made into a film before this novel was even published.  But this is the story of Joe Buck, a down-on-his-luck guy who never knows his father, is abandoned by his mother, loves his grandmother but is helpless when she dies while he’s in the army (his overwhelming grief over her death prevents his re-enlistment) and after working as a hustler in a small Texas town eventually heads to New York, intending to make a life of it.  Instead, he’s terrible at it and ends up with the only friend he manages to make, poor crippled Ratso Rizzo and they struggle to get by until they head off to Florida, the dream that Rizzo has hoped for his entire short life.

Given its frank depiction of drug use, sexuality, prostitution, homosexuality and the seedy life of the New York homeless, there was little chance that in 1965 a film could have been made.  But then things opened up with the dropping of the Production Code and the arrival of the ratings system and suddenly the novel found new life as a film.  It’s a solid novel, an interesting one in that it never tries to make more of its protagonist than he deserves.

It would appear at this time that the book may currently be out-of-print.

The Adaptation:

The opening moments of the film, that magical moment when Joe Buck starts strutting through the street with the hat on, with Harry Nilsson singing “Everybody’s Talkin’ come straight from the book.  Then, you pretty much lose the entire first half of the book after that.  As he takes the bus out of town, Joe Buck ruminates on what lead him to his dead-end job in Texas.  You get a little of that in flashbacks, the blondes, the abandonment, the grandmother, the girlfriend, but none of it comes in a straight narrative.  Instead, the film takes the second half of the book and films it quite faithfully (of course the “I’m walkin’ here” isn’t there since it was improvised) and many of the scenes come almost directly from the book.  Just look at how the brilliant scene where Joe sees Rizzo and smiles before remembering that Rizzo ripped him off is depicted in the book: “But Joe, having wandered homeless and a stranger for three weeks, a long time by the clocks of limbo, was thrilled to see a face that was known to him.  His whole being stopped short, accustoming itself to this keen, unexpected pleasure, and it took more than a moment to remember that Ratso Rizzo was an enemy.”

The Credits:

Director: John Schlesinger.  Screenplay: Waldo Salt.  Based on the novel by James Leo Herlihy.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

The Film:

Jane Fonda debuted on film with a silly film called The Tall Story in 1960.  She was quite cute and adorable on screen but there wasn’t much to her performance.  Through the rest of the decade she continued to get cuter and cuter on screen without a lot of depth to her, even if she was acting in a Tennessee Williams adaptation.  By the middle of the decade she started getting Golden Globe nominations but for light-weight Comedies that she wasn’t really all the good in.  But she was also becoming the sexiest thing on film, with tight outfits in Cat Ballou, dangling her leg while taunting and teasing Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park and finally, combining everything about her sexuality in Barbarella.  But she still wasn’t doing a whole lot of acting.

Then came They Shoot Horses Don’t They.  She turned down the role initially but then her husband, Roger Vadim, talked her into it.  And when Sydney Pollack asked her opinion on the script “It was a germinal moment [for me] … This was the first time in my life as an actor that I was working on a film about larger societal issues, and instead of my professional work feeling peripheral to life, it felt relevant.”  (My Life So Far, Jane Fonda, p 204-205)  She dug deep down inside and she found a woman who would stop at nothing to succeed, who would carry a dying man across the finish line.  She would put aside the sex kitten and find the actress within.  And it would be noticed.  While no one but the Comedy section of the Globes had noticed her before, this time she was rewarded with the NYFC Award for Best Actress as well as an Oscar, BAFTA and Globe – Drama nom.  And while the 60’s had been all about her kitten phase, by the end of the next decade she would be 7th all-time in Oscar points and would have won two.

But this film is not all about Fonda.  It’s a virtuoso of acting performances and the first real evidence that Sydney Pollack, while he would never be great with the camera, was an actor’s director.  This film would deliver the first three of 12 Oscar nominated acting performances in films directed by Pollack.  First, there is Fonda, there tour-de-force who is trying to escape the horrors outside of the Depression dance marathon where she is competing, hoping desperately to win those 1500 silver dollars.  There is Susannah York, miles away from being the object of desire in Tom Jones, a desperate actress whose breakdown after witnessing the death is the best few moments of her entire career.  There is Gig Young who won the Oscar as the bombastic mc of this entire charade but who can quiet down and do what he needs to when he has to get a woman out of the shower.  There is even Red Buttons who somehow failed to earn a nomination for the poor sailor, just trying to keep up with all the kids around him.

If there’s a weakness in the film it’s Michael Sarrazin, of course, who always seems to fall into that role.  But he’s supposed to be kind of a blank role in the film, being whatever he needs to be so that he can be believable as the kind of boy who will do what he does in the final moments of the film.

This is one of the bleakest films I have ever seen.  There is almost no humor at all in the entire film, nothing amusing about watching a pregnant woman singing to the crowd because she is so exhausted she can barely stand, nothing particularly entertaining about people pushed so far past the edge of desperation that a gun is the best option you can find.  But it is a work of art, certainly the best drama that Pollack was ever able to put together (he would later equal it on the comedic side with Tootsie) and the start of a run of Fonda performances that would be as good as anyone else in film history.

I will also point out that this film is sitting in sixth place here and in ninth place for both Picture and Director.  Part of that is just luck of the draw.  If this film had been released in 1970 instead of 1969 it would have easily earned Nighthawk nominations in all three categories.

The Source:

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy  (1935)

For such a short (in the Library of America edition it runs 110 pages) novel that wouldn’t be made into a film for over three decades, this one really seemed to pack a wallop.  It’s the story of two people, a man and a woman, who are the end of the line, competing in a dance contest to push everything else about the Depression away.  But it is also run through with tragedy because, in increasing font size, we also get the sentence being handed down upon the young man for murder (we get the crime before chapter five and his name before chapter seven which gives us six more chapters to read about what lead to it) who will be executed.  So in the end, it really is the end of the line for both characters making this just about the most depressing book you could ever read, even if you include Hardy, Zola, Norris and McEwan.  Apparently it was a battle for McCoy to get that font size specifically set (it mentions it in the LoA edition) set to increase with each every little bit before every chapter.  It makes the ending a bit anti-climactic but it makes for a very powerful short reading experience.

The Adaptation:

The Hollywood Screenwriters contains an interview of over 20 pages where James Poe details all the things he had done in his original script for the film, sticking closely to the book, and precisely the points where Sydney Pollack and his new screenwriter Robert E. Thompson diverge and where Poe thinks it is to the detriment of the film.  I disagree with Poe on anything being to the detriment of the film but there are certainly any number of changes (the main character, for instance, doesn’t just come in to the contest by chance and get matched up with the woman) and all of the scenes with the sailor aren’t in the book but a lot of the key scenes are straight from the book and they kept to the original very depressing ending, so credit the screenwriters for that even if Poe wouldn’t.

The Credits:

directed by Sydney Pollack.  from the novel “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” by Horace McCoy.  screenplay by James Poe and Robert E. Thompson.

Boudo sauvé des eaux

The Film:

Do people have to be saved?  What if people don’t want to be saved?  Some people aren’t dying because of despair but disgust and boredom.  When they are saved, they are still faced with that same world of disgust and boredom.  That may sound like a horrifying or disturbing opening to a film review, yet if you know the film, and if you are a true lover of film you do know it, you know that the film I am reviewing here is a comedy.  So how does that work?  Well, you have to go back to something my friend John and I used to say, a little routine on commenting on anyone’s height, because by being factual about a reality that is a joke, any description of someone’s height is by definition a height joke.  So laugh while you can, because it’s funny somewhere.

Edouard might not understand that but I think that Boudu does.  Edouard is a bookseller and a bourgeois and when he sees the tramp Boudu suicidally plunging into the Seine, he saves him.  Then he does more, bringing Boudu back to his house, to his life.  That’s when the joke pours in.  Boudu didn’t really want to be saved and now he’s going to unleash hell.  Not as deliberate revenge.  But that’s just the way Boudu’s life kind of works.  So we’ll watch Edouard’s life kind of unravel around him.

All of this actually makes for quite lively comedy that also manages to completely satirize the life of the bourgeois in France in the years between the wars.  In England, there would have been country manners and servants downstairs.  Here we have a tramp who seduces the housemaid, then the lady of the house, then wins the lottery and settles down to marry the housemaid before kind of remembering that he thinks this is all a joke so he heads the hell out of there.

All of this works because of Renoir’s deft touch with his characters, because of the essential humanism at the core of all of Renoir’s work, because the humor of the situation and the humor of the satire never overwhelm you but never quite leave you either.  In short, it’s exactly what we would expect from Renoir.

The Source:

Boudu sauvé des eaux by René Fauchois

I haven’t been able to read the original play and it doesn’t seem like it’s been translated into English.  It makes me wonder if, when the makers of Down and Out in Beverly Hills decided to make their film, they actually went back to the original play or just used Renoir’s film.

The Adaptation:

“Then one day [Michel Simon} said to me, ‘We should do Boudu.’  At first I didn’t understand.  I read the play, which I admired a great deal, it’s a beautiful play.  But I couldn’t see how we could make it into a film.  One day it came to me, it hit me.  I saw Michel Simon dressed as a hobo.” (Renoir on Renoir, p 223-224)

“As usual, I had made great changes in the original story.  Fauchois, the author, took this in very bad part and threatened to have his name removed from the credits.  Thirty years later, upon seeing the film again, he was astonished by its enthusiastic reception.  He was brought on to the stage, and the ovation he received caused him to forget my unfaithfulness to his story.” (My Life and My Films, Jean Renoir, p 116-117)

The biggest change, the one that Fauchois was supposedly so upset about, is the ending, because in the original play, apparently Boudu actually does settle down and get married as opposed to fleeing back to his life of freedom and poverty like in the film.

The Credits:

Réalisation de Jean Renoir.  D’après la pièce de René Fauchois.
note:  The screenwriters (uncredited) are Renoir and Albert Valentin.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Film:

I had my own Jean Brodie, though not reflected in the negative ways that Brodie is.  In fact, she showed us this film, which was daring, given Pamela Franklin’s nude scene.  She became our teacher in my Freshman year and our group of friends stuck with her every year because of Academic Decathlon and then AP English.  We stuck with her because she inspired us.  She inspired us to love what we do, to do what we love, to believe in learning and she believed in us so we believed in her.  It’s not quite the same for the Brodie set, the four young girls who grow as Jean Brodie is in her prime and enjoy her attention and devotion but her weaknesses also reflect on the girls and it eventually leads to a chasm that cannot be crossed.  “Assassin”, Jean Brodie will yell at the girl she feels has betrayed her without any notion of what she might have done wrong or even differently.

People go into teaching for a variety of reasons.  Indeed, we see that just within the scope of this film.  Mr. Lawther, for instance, loves to sing and loves to bring that joy of singing to his students.  Mr. Lloyd is a painter, but not a good enough painter to really make a living, certainly not the kind of genius that Brodie will show off to her set when she treats them to a day at the museum.  He also has is a passionate man and while he ends up sleeping with one girl after being set up to sleep with another, it’s not a surprise either way and you suspect it’s the not the first girl he’s taken as a lover.  Jean Brodie teaches because she enjoys the influence.  She is, in some ways, the template for Horace Slughorn in the Harry Potter series, enjoying the young minds that she molds and what might come of them.

The problem is that Jean has some very bad ideas and because she believes that all of her ideas are brilliant, she does nothing to inhibit them.  They come even more to life in Maggie Smith’s brilliant Oscar-winning portrayal, a woman so full of what she is doing in her life that she is utterly unaware of what she is doing to the people around her in her life.  The most damaged is poor dim Mary McGregor who will run off and die in Spain looking to fight for the wrong side but the one who realizes the damage is Sandy, also played brilliantly by Pamela Franklin.  Sandy comes to slowly understand what Brodie is doing to these minds and how some ideas can no longer be permitted to attach themselves to the unfettered minds of young girls.  If Dead Poets Society is a film about how a teacher can inspire and bring someone closer to art this film is about the dangers that a teacher can also bring to their level of inspiration.

The Source:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark  (1961)  /  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: A Drama in Three Acts by Jay Presson Allen  (1966)

This is a good novel, a fascinating book about what can happen when a teacher with some very bad ideas also is the inspiration for very impressionable young girls.  But I was surprised when it was acclaimed as one of the best novels of our time by both TIME (where it was on their unranked list) and the Modern Library (where it ranked at #76).  I certainly had not thought of it on that level and still don’t.

I think the novel works very well with what it does, giving us this portrait of a teacher and while it is not written in first person, we tend to get the viewpoints of the various characters (usually Sandy).  It doesn’t necessarily move around in time but we do see what the characters are like far in the future while it continually moves forward in the actual narrative.

The play keeps part of the flash-forward with a number of scenes with the older Sandy as a nun parcelling out the story in bits.  While I think the play is effective as a whole and provides certainly a plum role for anyone playing Jean Brodie, I would have done away with the flash-forward scenes.

The Adaptation:

For a film that follows decently closely to the original novel, the two are also remarkably different.  The first change, of course, is that the novel, as mentioned, moves around in time.  From the very first pages we get a sense of what the girls will grow up to be and to do while we are also watching them grow.  There are also six girls in the book who are reduced to four in the film by combining Rose’s sexuality with Jenny and Eunice’s ridiculous death with Mary.  The ending of the book is very different of course, not only because we know very early on which girl “betrayed” Miss Brodie but Miss Brodie herself never actually discovers who it was and indeed talks about with Sandy years after the fact, unaware of what has been done.  Yet, much of the rest of the book and certainly the way the story proceeds follows rather closely to how the story unfolds in the book.

What is most interesting perhaps is that both the film and the book succeed in the different ways they approach the story and it wouldn’t work as well for either to do it the way the other did.  In the book, it works to leap forward and use it to help us understand the characters as they go along but that wouldn’t work very well in the film if it had tried it.  Yet, the book wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if it had just been a straight-forward narrative like the film.  Each succeeds in its own medium.

The play is really the stepping stone between them.  Both the play and the script were written by Jay Presson Allen and most of the work was done the first time around in the play.  With the exception of the flash-forward scenes with Sandy as a nun which were all dropped for the film, the vast majority of the film and its dialogue comes straight from the play.  In the final scene, it is very easy to read completely along with the play while watching the film without a single change in word.

The Credits:

Directed by Ronald Neame.  Adapted from the Novel by Muriel Spark.  Based on the Play by Jay Presson Allen.  Screenplay by Jay Presson Allen.

Goodbye, Columbus

The Film:

Would this be what people were thinking of when a Philip Roth adaptation was released in 1969?  Goodbye, Columbus had made Roth as a writer when he won the National Book Award for it, his first book, in 1959.  But it was the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 that made Roth a household name.  So, since this wasn’t the outlandish kind of sex comedy that was making Roth famous, were audiences ready for this?

Well, either way what they got was a nice charming romantic comedy about a young Jewish man in Newark who meets an upper class girl and falls in love with her and the romance they have over the summer.  It was well adapted from the original novella that had been the main part of Roth’s first book.  It helped further the career of Richard Benjamin as a young, fretful man looking for romance, something he would be very good at over the next decade.  It would help establish Ali MacGraw as a star for her looks more than any acting ability, something she would definitely embrace over the next decade (in spite of the Oscar nomination the next year she was most assuredly not a very good actress).  It established the Jewish family dynamic that was already becoming a hallmark of Roth’s writing, but not yet in the kind of satirical overload that so many readers would not be able to ever adapt to.

In short, this is a nice romantic comedy.  It’s well written, with a strong measure of bitterness, because that’s evident in the original novella.  It’s got two rising stars that very much embody their characters.  It doesn’t have great direction and it was never destined to be a classic, but it’s a solid film that, not undeservedly, earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Source:

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (1959)

I think this was the second Philip Roth book I ever bought.  I began with Portnoy’s Complaint and laughed so hard that I quickly moved on to other Roth books.  I know I read this the same school year because I had already read it before the spring when we each had to chose a short story to present in my writing class to discuss and dissect and I chose “The Conversion of the Jews”, in my mind the best of the stories in this collection.

But Goodbye, Columbus is the centerpiece of the book, the novella length story that also gives the book its title.  It is funny in its look at Jewish life in Newark and the difference between the lower middle class Jew working in a library and who went to Rutgers and the rich bitch from Short Hills who goes to Radcliffe (when asked if she goes to Bennington, she replies “No. I go to school in Boston.”) and is handed everything on a silver plate.  But it also has a lot of what would become the hallmark Roth bitterness.  Neil, the narrator of the story, is often rather nasty in his relationship with Brenda and it brings a measure of realism to the summer romance between two people in very different social classes.

If this book had been the first Roth book I read, would I have so avidly read them all?  Well, this novella is quite strong, but it doesn’t have the same sort of humor that Roth would later develop.  But the other short stories in the collection probably would have meant I would have at least checked out other Roth.  Either way, he is one of my favorite all-time authors and this is where he began.

The Adaptation:

It’s actually a rather remarkable faithful adaptation of the original novella.  There are some changes that are made to tone down the rating (the young black kid in Newark who keeps looking at the Gaugin book, for instance, doesn’t have the profane tongue that he had in the original book).  But the film does a very good job of sticking to the original text, from the first lines all the way until the final fight that provides the closure for both the story and the film.

The Credits:

directed by larry peerce.  based on the novella by philip roth.  screenplay by arnold schulman.

Cactus Flower

The Film:

I can’t stand Goldie Hawn.  I never could.  So how would I react to her Oscar winning performance?  I wondered that before seeing Cactus Flower the first time, some time around 2004 (I remember where I saw it and it must have been in 04 or 05).  But as it turned out I was able to tolerate her and recognize that with the possible exception of Private Benjamin, this was miles above any other performance she had ever or would ever give.  But part of her performance simply comes from the film itself, a charming, fun comedy that slots two actors perfectly into their precise ranges and takes another one and gives her a character almost unlike anything she had played in her over three decades on film.

Goldie Hawn plays Toni and if she’s only a supporting role, she is still the first person we see, a ditzy young blonde who has been dating Julian, a married dentist and decides to kill herself over him.  However, first, her suicide attempt is undone by the handsome young aspiring playwright next door (Rick Lenz, who is charming and funny, such as when he starts to leave the apartment so two people can talk in private only to object “Hey, I live here!”).  Second, it turns out the dentist isn’t married after all.  He just didn’t want to be pushed into marriage so he made up a marriage.  Now, knowing he has pushed her towards suicide, he decides to marry her after all.  But first he must undo his non-existent marriage.  The dentist is played by Walter Matthau in that gruff, yet somehow lovable way that Matthau has of bringing characters to life.  But he can’t tell her the truth because she hates liars.  So now comes the next problem.  How to divorce the wife who doesn’t exist, especially when Toni demands a chance to meet the wife.

Enter Miss Dickinson, the very prim and formal secretary to Julian.  This is the role that offers some fun because Miss Dickinson is played by Ingrid Bergman and once she starts to play the part of the wife several things happen.  First, it becomes obvious that she harbors feelings for Julian herself and this will only complicate them.  Second, she will start to loosen up and not only will Julian notice this but so will the young playwright and Toni won’t know who she is supposed to feel jealous over.  All of this works so well because Bergman allows herself to slowly come out of her cocoon.

The film isn’t perfect.  It’s directed by Gene Saks, who is too much the stage director to really bring the film to life properly (the same problem The Odd Couple, also directed by Saks, had the year before).  There is also far too much time spent in a nightclub scene where everyone starts getting jealous of everyone else and it kind of kills the momentum of the film before we get to the final act and things start to be resolved.  But for a film with such a key role played by Hawn, I really enjoyed it, both the first time and this time.  It still only ends up as a high *** but it’s definitely worth seeing even if you don’t like Hawn.

The Source:

Cactus Flower: A Comedy in Two Acts by Abe Burrows  (1965)

A fun comedy about a dentist whose young lover tries to kill herself over him, thus causing him to divorce the wife he has told her he has but really doesn’t.  I imagine that part of the charm of the original stage run (which lasted over two years) was Lauren Bacall in the part of Miss Dickinson.  In the role of Julian, you had the relentlessly bland Barry Nelson.  But it is a charming play.  It is based on the play Fleur de cactus by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy (which both the book of the play and the film credits acknowledge).  I have not been able to get hold of the original and it almost certainly isn’t available in English.  In the play and the film, the title hits you over the head a bit with Miss Dickinson being directly compared to the cactus she keeps on her desk.  I imagine it was the same in the original.

The Adaptation:

Almost everything from the actual play makes it to the screen intact.  There are a few short scenes and some added lines that weren’t in the original play (including the line “I live here!”).  Like so many plays, it does open things up, with a few extra scenes not in the original stage locations but the original play actually had four different locations, so not as much as in a lot of plays.

The Credits:

Directed by Gene Saks.  Stage Play by Abe Burrows.  Based upon a French Play by Barillet and Gredy.  Screenplay by I.A.L. Diamond.

Consensus Nominees

Anne of the Thousand Days

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as a Best Picture nominee.  It wasn’t a particularly good choice – a slow and stolid film that should be interesting given the subject matter but isn’t able to overcome weak direction and a not particularly strong script.  It has two very good performances in the main two roles and some solid supporting performances but at almost two and a half hours, you expect something more than you get.  Honestly, if you want this story, watch Wolf Hall, though that one is much more sympathetic to Cromwell while this one is much more sympathetic to Anne.

The Source:

Anne of the Thousand Days by Maxwell Anderson (1948)

Some writers fall out of fashion.  I quite like Sinclair Lewis, but he has definitely fallen out of fashion (as evidenced by me not having to read him as either an undergraduate or graduate student), though It Can’t Happen Here has definitely seen a revival.  Maxwell Anderson is a writer like that.  Watch Bullets Over Broadway and see how the characters talk about him, how important a playwright he was, and yet today, while O’Neill, Williams and Miller live on, Anderson is all but forgotten.  There’s a reason why people don’t make films out of his plays anymore.  The biggest problem is the four historical plays that he wrote, three of them dealing with British History in the 16th Century (of which this is one), all written in blank verse.  The play doesn’t read very well because of the style of blank verse and it undercuts the natural way that people talk.  Writing in verse worked for Shakespeare but in Modern English it just sounds stilted.  What’s more, many of the scenes aren’t complete scenes – there are constant little scenes within the scenes and it just seems like it would be strange to see on-stage.  It’s like Anderson decided on the subject matter but wasn’t able to really write the play in a style that worked for the subject.

The Adaptation:

Maybe that’s why the filmmakers ditched most of the original play.  Oh, there are definitely scenes that come direct from the play and sometimes even whole stretches of lines that come from the play.  But, for the most part, the filmmakers took the basic idea and some of the structure and dumped the rest.  Nowhere is that more obvious than in the opening and closing of the film.  The play opens with Anne speaking by herself on stage, in 1530, before she is married and ends with Henry alone on stage just after Anne has been executed (the previous scene had Anne still alive an on-stage talking with Henry).  In the film, we open with Henry deciding whether or not to have Anne executed and it ends with a shot of Elizabeth and a reprise of Anne’s dialogue about how Elizabeth will be queen.  Pauline Kael, in her typical style of trying to seem like she knew about everything, wrote “at the end we’re left with Maxwell Anderson’s glowing, fatuous hindsight: a final shot of Anne’s posthumous triumph-the baby Elizabeth wandering about, deserted, as her foolish father, who doesn’t know what we know, goes off to beget a male heir” which just goes to show that she didn’t read the play like I did.

The Credits:

Directed by Charles Jarrott.  Screenplay by Bridget Boland and John Hale.  Adaptation by Richard Sokolove.  Based on the Play by Maxwell Anderson.

Multiple Nominations

John and Mary

The Film:

Boy meets girl.  It’s not exactly a meet cute, more like a meet annoying.  She’s talking about a film with some friends in a bar (the film is Godard’s Weekend but it is not named) and she claims that her friend is missing the point of the movie and he chimes in that he saw the film at a festival and it’s about “the materialistic basis of our society” and we are off to the pretentious races.

So boy meets girl.  His name is John and her name is Mary because hey, why put thought into the names.  Or actually, that’s probably the point, at least of the film (I haven’t read the novel) because much of the film avoids use of names and descriptions (you can read Roger Ebert’s review of the film here and it really annoyed the hell out of him).  But back to the names.  His name is John and her name is Mary.  We know that because that’s the rather unoriginal title of the film (and the novel) but the characters themselves don’t know that in spite of getting drinks, sleeping together, spending most of the next day together and considering living together.  In fact, it’s the point of the film that the last lines of the film are them actually introducing themselves to each other.

All of this could make for a terrible film and in some ways it makes for an obnoxious film and one that I actually kind of made fun of both without knowing it and without ever having seen it.  Back in 1997, I wrote a script in which two college friends sleep together and consider making a go out of it (they are graduating the next morning) but realize all the reasons they couldn’t really survive as a couple and manage, over the course of just a few minutes, to talk themselves out of it because they are more mature characters than John and Mary in this film and, I suppose, because my film was a Comedy.

So why doesn’t this film just suck?  It easily could have and Ebert certainly was no fan but I ranked this film as a mid-range ***.  It’s because of the performances of Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow as the couple.  They are both young, both coming off hit films and they really bring the characters to life.  You might not to meet these characters and you might not need them brought to life but there is enough in their performances that it keeps the film from sinking under the morass of its script.

The Source:

John and Mary by Mervyn Jones  (1966)

I haven’t been able to track down a copy of the original novel.  It was originally published in 1966 and was republished in 1969 with a movie cover copy.  But it doesn’t appear to still be in print.

The Adaptation:

Obviously, I can’t make the comparison.  But god, I hope the novel is less annoying, but somehow I doubt it.

The Credits:

Directed by Peter Yates.  Screenplay by John Mortimer.  Based on the novel by Mervyn Jones.

WGA Nominees

True Grit

The Film:

In all fairness to this film, I first saw it well over 20 years ago, long before the Coen Brothers decided to take another try at filming the novel.  That means when I first saw it I decided that it sucked based on watching the film I was watching, not in comparison to a future film version that would show how good this could have been.

I’ve never been much for John Wayne.  Oh, when he’s on, he can be the perfect person for a role, whether it requires just a presence rather than acting (Stagecoach), some serious acting (Red River, The Searchers) or relying on a lifetime of playing a role (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).  But in this film, he was rewarded for his acting, in the same year that Orson Welles (Chimes at Midnight) and William Holden (The Wild Bunch) went un-nominated for the two best performances of the year, the next two were nominated but probably split the vote (Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy) and the other two nominees were the two eternal groomsmen at the Oscars and never the grooms (Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days and Peter O’Toole in Goodbye Mr Chips).  The Oscar went to the one-eyed fat man even though he’s not all that good in the film and that he pushes himself forward mostly on bluster than on an actual performance.  You don’t have to compare him to the masterful performance from Jeff Bridges in the remake to see that.  Yet, he is far and away the best thing about this film.

This film is a mediocre mess all across the board.  It’s rather ineptly directed by Henry Hathaway, who was years past his days of directing solid films.  The score, from Elmer Bernstein, is totally inappropriate at almost every moment, going for light-hearted jangling music and is constantly distracting.  The script knows to use some of the great lines from the original book, but then departs at some bizarre moments (see below).  But I don’t know if the worst mistakes were done in the performances of Kim Darby and Glen Campbell or by the casting director who thought to put them both in the film in the first place.

If you don’t know the story because you haven’t seen either this or the remake (then, seriously, see the remake), a 14 year old girl (which Darby isn’t close to being) enlists the help of an aging marshall to track down the man who murdered her father.  A Texas Ranger also comes along, after the man for a separate reward (and who thought Glen Campbell was a good choice as a Texas Ranger?).  They will eventually track down the man, with the bad guys dying.  What was a story of a very brave, resourceful, remarkable girl instead just becomes another standard John Wayne Western.  Darby just doesn’t cut it as the girl and Campbell is such a disaster that it’s almost as much of a distraction as the awful music.  What’s more, this film was released in 1969, the same year that Westerns were being re-vitalized with directorial vision (and extreme violence) and this is just a reminder of the old, lackluster films that were being passed by.

The Source:

True Grit: a novel by Charles Portis (1968)

When I first saw the film, back in the 90’s, I don’t think I even paid attention to the fact that it was adapted from a novel and certainly nothing about the film made me go seek out that novel.  But, once the Coen Brothers got their hands on it, I got a copy of it and read it and was astounded to discover how good it was.  How good was it?  Good enough that I included it among my Top 200 Novels of All-Time.  It’s a first person narrative from the girl herself, told when she is an old woman, alone, one-armed, with the rest of the world having kind of passed her by.  Yet, Portis finds a remarkable style of narration for her (“He was in tears and I am not ashamed to own that I was too.  The man Maledon covered his head with the hood and went to his lever.  Yarnell put a hand over my face but I pushed it aside.  I would see it all.” she writes, about witnessing a hanging).  It is through her eyes that we meet Rooster Cogburn, Ranger LaBoeuf (“He called it LaBeef but spelled it something like LaBoeuf.”) and the members of Ned Pepper’s gang.  It’s a short novel (just over 200 pages) but memorable and quite probably the best Western I have ever read.

One last note.  I didn’t want to use a movie cover copy of the book for the image on the right.  Often I use either a popular mass market cover (which didn’t really happen since the film followed just a year after the original novel) or the original 1st Edition cover.  But the illustration on the cover of the 1st Edition is, and I can not stress this word enough, horrible.  So instead I went with a relatively recent edition.  My own copy of the novel is a movie cover from the 2010 version but it doesn’t feature any characters from the film on the cover so I’m okay with it.

The Adaptation:

It’s remarkable, given how weak the script is, how closely it follows the novel in a lot of points, including the exact dialogue.  But then, inexplicably, it cuts away from the novel and changes things for reasons that I can’t fathom.  I’m not talking about things like the setting (supposedly in Arkansas and Oklahoma, yet so clearly filmed in California and Colorado, which has mountains the likes of which Arkansas and Oklahoma have never seen) or things that make sense because of the time period (it’s a lot easier to show Mattie as having a wounded arm rather than an amputated one at the end because of technology at the time).  I’m talking about things like the inexplicable decision to change the hopeful ambush of Ned Pepper to daylight when it wouldn’t have made any sense for Cogburn to accuse LaBoeuf of being asleep or the bizarre choice to have LaBoeuf die at the end when it’s completely unnecessary.  The remake of the film is partially better because it sticks so closely to the original novel throughout.

The Credits:

Directed by Henry Hathaway.  From the novel by Charles Portis.  Screenplay by Margeuerite Roberts.

Gaily, Gaily

The Film:

What can I say about this film?  I can say that I saw it years ago and remember almost nothing.  As a film by a prominent director from 1969 that was hard to find at the time, my brain thinks of it as starring Shirley MacLaine and being an adaptation of Nights of Cabiria and then I remind my brain that it’s thinking of Sweet Charity.  I can tell you that it’s actually about Ben Hecht moving to Chicago in 1910 (it’s based on his autobiographical novel) and that it’s directed by Norman Jewison.  I can also say that I gave it a 52, which is a low **.5 and that it sits at #107 out of 145 films for the year.  But, unfortunately, it has proven extremely difficult to find and I was unable to re-watch it again for this project.  Perhaps someday I’ll be able to correct that and write a full review, although at a 52 and directed by Jewison, I’m not about to knock myself out trying.

The Source:

Gaily, Gaily by Ben Hecht  (1963)

I might have gone ahead and gotten the book even though I wasn’t able to get the film but even the book turned out to be difficult to get hold of, so I wasn’t able to do that either.

The Adaptation:

There’s not much that I can do here.

The Credits:

Directed by Norman Jewison.  Screenplay by Abram S. Ginnes.  Based on the novel by Ben Hecht.
note:  Not the on-screen credits, as I wasn’t able to watch the film.

The Reivers

The Film:

If you were to watch this film in a bubble what would you think would be the source?  This is the story of a young boy who goes along with two older men, both of whom work for his family and one of whom, who happens to be black, is also distantly related to him.  Being black is not insignificant because this story is set in rural Mississippi and Memphis in the early part of the 20th Century when a car was a new-fangled device that some people couldn’t keep away from and it could get them in a lot of trouble.  In this case, that trouble involves stealing the car and driving to Memphis and getting into all kinds of shenanigans.  So, other than the rural Mississippi setting, is there anything that would make you think this originated from the pen of William Faulkner?

Faulkner first began thinking about this book in the early 40’s though it wouldn’t actually be written and released until 1962.  Though Faulkner was getting on in years by this point (he was 64), he had no reason to believe that this nostalgic look back at a time when he would have been a child would be his last book, but less than two weeks after it was published, he fell from a horse, the complications of which lead to his fatal heart attack just two weeks after that.  So, instead of the depths of Yoknapatawpha County, these three take off for Memphis, a city where there are much more lively things going on.

Just as this film doesn’t seem like it came from the pen of the most modernist of American writers, the starring role ended up going to person that you wouldn’t expect to see starring in a Faulkner adaptation.  Yet, here we have Steve McQueen as Boon, the rambunctious man with the decision making of an impatient child.  As soon as Boss, the grandfather of the eleven year old that Boon is supposed to be watching, heads out of town with his son and daughter-in-law for a funeral, Boon is off, taking his charge with him.  What he doesn’t know is that stowed away is Ned, who Boon already took some shots at for taking off in the car once already.  But that’s nothing compared to what happens when they get to Memphis which involves no less than putting an eleven year old up in a whorehouse where he will get into a fistfight over one woman’s honor and Ned trading the car for a horse which means they will have to use this bizarre horse with a passion for sardines to win back the car before they go back to Mississippi or they shouldn’t even bother going back in the first place.

Faulkner was often thought of as a difficult author (true) and rather humorless (untrue).  Because of the style of his books, they have often resisted adaptation and even the better attempts haven’t always worked.  But here, with something so different than most of he wrote, we get a charming film with a fun role for McQueen and simply a good time.  At the time when films were turning towards sex and violence because they finally could this was a look back, not just to another time for the characters but to another time at the movies.

The Source:

The Reivers: A Reminiscence by William Faulkner  (1962)

As noted above, this is a comic novel, which is something that is rare for Faulkner.  As also said above, this was Faulkner’s last novel and he died just over a month after it was published.  Did this influence the judges the following spring when the novel won the Pulitzer, making Faulkner just the second novelist to win two prizes?  (Booth Tarkington had already done it and John Updike would also later do it).  I could point out that it’s actually one of his weaker novels and that the judges were making up for all this brilliant books in the 20’s and 30’s that they had continually ignored.  But the Pulitzers also smiled on A Fable, a bizarre book that is also unlike Faulkner’s other work and is also, in my opinion, one of his weaker novels.  On my Pulitzer post I graded this award a B because they could have gone with Mother Night, Wise Blood or One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, all of them better choices.

So, the better question is not how good a book this is, because Faulkner didn’t write bad books, but how readable a book is this?  Because what Faulkner didn’t write was novels that were easy to read.  Well, if you just want to be able to say you’ve read one Faulkner book, this would be a good choice because it’s easier to get into, it has some comic value and you don’t need to understand all the underlying stories around it to enjoy it.

The Adaptation:

The adaptation follows the book fairly well.  There is a bit more going on between Boon and Ned before they leave for Memphis (and he is discovered in a different way) and the very end of the book doesn’t happen in the film because there is no time jump (though the narration of the story by a grown Lucius is carried through in the film with Burgess Meredith narrating the film).  But most of the book carries through faithfully.  The filmmakers wisely cut the extraneous parts of the book that mention other Faulkner characters that don’t actually appear in the book.

Interestingly, though this film is not directed by Martin Ritt, who had directed both The Long Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury in 1958 and 1959, it is written by the same screenwriters, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank jr who wrote those films (Frank and Ravetch were a married couple).

The Credits:

Directed by Mark Rydell.  Based on the novel by William Faulkner.  Screenplay by Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank, jr..

Alice’s Restaurant

The Film:

I suppose I can’t complain that Clint Eastwood is taking real-life “heroes” and having them play themselves on screen even though they can’t act when Arthur Penn was doing the same damn thing back in 1969.  Arlo Guthrie had an interesting and funny song but he wasn’t an actor.  So, what had been an entertaining story about a bizarre Thanksgiving weekend becomes a film that feels like it will never end, not only because of Guthrie’s meandering style but also because Guthrie really can’t act and it’s painful to watch him on the screen.

This story was already famous before it was made into a film, of course, because Arlo Guthrie’s song had been a big hit (or as big as you can be when you’re an 18 minute song that doesn’t actually get played on the radio).  It’s about the Thanksgiving weekend where Arlo and his friends rehabilitated an old church and made it into a restaurant and then threw all their trash off a cliff because the dump was closed which ended up with Arlo’s arrest and how that arrest would eventually keep him out of the army during Vietnam.

So what is this film really about, though?  Is it an embrace of the hippie lifestyle, of not having a job and drifting around with your friends and having a good time?  Is it a moral stand against an immoral war where someone who pleads guilty to littering is considered too immoral to go to a foreign country and kill other people?  Is it a laconic comedy about what it’s like to life in such an age?  What it mostly is, is a pointless meander that never really goes anywhere, doesn’t have much acting to it and just keeps rambling on and on until it finally ends.  It tries to give us more depth with the relationship between Alice and Ray (with the added irony that they divorced the day the film was released) but there just isn’t really anything there.

The Source:

“The Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie  (1967)

I remember the first time I heard this song, sometime in the summer of 1993.  At the time, I was listening mostly to a classic rock station and they used to do this game where you had to guess the connection between three songs.  This one was pretty easy (the other two songs were Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and “All the Young Girls Love Alice” by Elton John) but I remember the dj commenting that this was the first time, as far as he was aware, that they had ever played the song in its entirety other than on Thanksgiving.  That’s because the song runs a whopping 18 minutes if “song” is even the right word to label it.  It’s more of a story with some guitar and a small refrain (“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant”) that tells two loosely connected stories, the first about Arlo Guthrie and his friend dumping some garbage (they dumped it because the town dump was closed for Thanksgiving) and eventually getting arrested for littering which then morphs into the bit about Guthrie’s draft status and eventually getting rejected by the army because of his arrest.  It is an amusing song but not one you want to play often (which is why radio stations rarely play it except on Thanksgiving).  It’s all a true story, of course and all of this really did happen to Guthrie over Thanksgiving in 1965.

I used to own the lp but, like my most of my vinyl, I gave it to my college roommate before I left Oregon back in 2005.

The Adaptation:

What the film does is take a song that is already at the straining point for most people’s attention span and turn into an almost two hour long film.  The film itself, like the song before it, is pretty true to life and all the film does it continually expand on things that he already told us of in the song.

The Credits:

Directed by Arthur Penn.  Screenplay by Venable Herndon and Arthur Penn.  Based on the “The Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10
(in descending order of how I rank the script):

• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service  –  One of the most under-rated of the Bond films because Lazenby was such a lackluster Bond.  But the film is well worth watching.  A full review here from Bond series.
• The Bofors Gun  –  One of those BAFTA winners (Supporting Actor for Ian Holm) that seemed to be ignored in the States.  Solid film based on the play Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun.  Also stars Nicol Williamson (see below).

Other Adaptations:
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Hamlet  –  Nicol Williamson as the gloomy Dane, Anthony Hopkins as his uncle but the rest of the cast is weak and the direction from Tony Richardson is also weak.  As high as it is just because of Richardson and Hopkins.
• The Boys of Paul Street  –  Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film from Hungary is based on the 1906 kids book The Paul Street Boys.
• Sweet Charity  –  Now this is the big name director (Bob Fosse) directing the musical remake of Nights of Cabiria (after it had been a Broadway hit) with Shirley MacLaine.  Much better than Gaily Gaily.
• The Sterile Cuckoo  –  A young Liza goes serious and earns her first Oscar nom in this adaptation of the novel by John Nichols.
• The Fire Within  –  A 1963 Louis Malle film getting a U.S. release.  Based on the novel Will O’ the Wisp by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.
• Topaz  –  Flawed and overlong Hitchcock thriller but with a worthwhile lead performance from John Forsythe.  Based on the novel by Leon Uris.
• The Secret of Santa Vittoria  –  It was a best-selling novel and it won the Globe for Comedy / Musical but it’s still just a silly film about hiding wine from the Germans after the fall of Mussolini.
• Under the Banner of Samurai  –  Based on the novel of the same name, although it apparently literally translates to Fudan Volcano.  Decent samurai film made better by the presence of Toshiro Mifune.
• Baby Love  –  Disturbing British Drama based on the book by Tina Chad Christian.
• Dr Who and the Daleks  –  The first theatrical Dr Who film with Peter Cushing as the Doctor.  Not great, but Cushing makes it worthwhile.  Basically an adaptation of “The Daleks”, the serial that introduced the classic Who villains.
• Mayerling  –  A British romance / tragedy based on two different novels about the actual Mayerling incident of murder-suicide involving the Crown Prince of Austria and his lover.
• Doulos – The Finger Man  –  Generally known as Le Doulus or The Finger Man this is the title that the old oscars.org database used.  Whatever title you prefer, it’s a 1963 French Crime film by Melville based on the novel by Pierre V. Lesou.
• Black Lizard  –  A Japanese Crime film directed by Kinji Fukasaku based on a play by acclaimed Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.
• The Learning Tree  –  The rare kind of film, directed and written by Gordon Parks based on his own autobiographical novel.  Talk about being the auteur of the project.
• Marooned  –  We’re down to low level ***.  A G rated Sci-Fi film usually means it’s boring and that’s the case here.  It deserves its Oscar for Special Effects but it’s not very interesting.  Based on the novel by Martin Caidin.
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips  –  Peter O’Toole’s Oscar nominated performance keeps this musical version of the Hilton novel from sinking too deeply into schmaltz.
• Castle Keep  –  Sydney Pollack directs Burt Lancaster in a World War II film based on the novel by Donald Eastlake.
• One Thousand and One Nights  –  Before Fritz the Cat there was this adult Japanese animated version of the classic tales.
• The Quare Fellow  –  This film version of Brendan Behan’s play was actually made in 1962 but took until 1969 to reach LA.
• Black Rose  –  The second Fukasaku film based on a Mishima play released in this year.
• Last Summer  –  Would you believe this coming of age story was based on a novel by Evan Hunter who also wrote The Blackboard Jungle and was also Ed McBain?
• Puss in Boots  –  Animated Japanese version of the classic Perrault tale which has early work from Hayao Miyazaki (animating, not directing).
• Spirits of the Dead  –  We’re into the **.5 films now.  An anthology film of Poe stories that has both Jane and Peter Fonda but who cares about Peter.
• Hello, Dolly!  –  I’ve already lambasted this film here in a full review because it was nominated for Best Picture.
• The Arrangement  –  A second example this year of a director writing and directing his own source novel, in this case, Elia Kazan.  One of his weakest films with Kirk Douglas an ad executive.
• Ring of Bright Water  –  Somebody brought an otter from Iraq to Scotland, wrote a book about it and they made a movie about it.
• Decline and Fall… of a Birdwatcher  –  Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Decline and Fall has the title stupidly altered in this mediocre film version.
• Tintin and the Temple of the Sun  –  A mediocre version of two of the Tintin books.  There is a full review here way down the page.
• Dracula Has Risen from the Grave  –  The beginning of the dip in quality of the Hammer Dracula films.  This is the fourth Dracula film in the series and we’re already way beyond any actual Dracula source material for the films.
• Battle of Britain  –  Guy Hamilton gives us an all-star packed film but there’s not much there.  Based on the book The Narrow Margin.
• The Oblong Box  –  Another Poe adaptation.  It’s got Christopher Lee and Vincent Price but still isn’t all that good.
• 100 Rifles  –  Early Burt Reynolds starring role in a Western based on the novel by Robert McLeod.
• The Gypsy Moths  –  Perhaps best known for having Deborah Kerr’s one nude scene.  A movie about skydivers starring Burt Lancaster.  Based on the novel by James Drought.
• Mackenna’s Gold  –  A Will Henry novel becomes a Gregory Peck Western.
• Don’t Drink the Water  –  Maybe if Woody Allen had been more involved (he wrote the play the film was based on) it wouldn’t be so bad.  Low **.5.
• The Magus  –  Low **.5 is probably generous. Woody Allen once said “If I had to live my life again, I’d do everything the same, except that I wouldn’t see The Magus.”  A full review is here because the book is brilliant and made my Top 100.
• The Night of the Following Day  –  Not sure why I’ve even seen this one.  Suspense film based on the novel by Lionel White.
• The Southern Star  –  Just finally saw this one but not worth it.  It’s got Orson Welles and it’s based on a Jules Verne novel (The Vanished Diamond) but it’s not good.
• Danger: Diabolik  –  We’re into the ** films now.  A Mario Bava film based on an Italian comic book series.
• Laughter in the Dark  –  Finally saw this one as well.  Terrible Tony Richardson adaptation of the Nabokov novel.
• That Cold Day in the Park  –  Robert Altman pre-M*A*S*H directs this film based on a novel by Peter Miles.
• Bloody Pit of Horror  –  Apparently when it was released in America (this was a 1965 Italian Horror film), they claimed it was based on writing be de Sade and the old oscars.org database also said that which is why I saw it and why it’s here.
• The Chairman  –  Terrible (low **) spy film from J. Lee Thompson.  Based on a novel by Jay Richard Kennedy.
• Justine  –  It’s the Durrell novel not the de Sade.  But it’s proof (along with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) that film critics shouldn’t write films because Andrew Sarris worked on the screenplay.
• Camille 2000  –  The Dumas novel (and play) becomes a crappy film.
• The Illustrated Man  –  “Kiss me you illustrated man.”  I’ve never read the Bradbury book but I’ve heard the Rachel Bloom song (a lot).  You should skip the film.
• Paint Your Wagon  –  “Here comes Lee Marvin, thank god.  He’s always drunk and violent.”  Oh, Homer, you are so wrong as you are about to discover, prompting you to eject this movie straight into the trash.  The Lerner and Loewe musical was a hit on Broadway but a complete dud as a film.
• Staircase  –  An appallingly bad film with Rex Harrison and Richard Burton playing a campy gay couple.  Based on the play by Charles Dyer.
• Blood of Dracula’s Castle  –  Only nominally an adaptation in that it uses Dracula.  The worst film of the year and reviewed way down here.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• Marlowe  –  James Garner plays the famous detective in this adaptation of The Little Sister.  I can’t bring myself to pay the money to watch this from Warners On Demand on YouTube.  Ebert gave it **.5.
• Once You Kiss a Stranger  –  Hard to find for a long time, with fewer than 150 votes on the IMDb but clearly people can find it now if they are willing to pay $2.99 to see it from WOD on YouTube.  An uncredited loose version of Strangers on a Train.

A nice ensemble pic from M*A*S*H that doesn’t really have a corresponding scene in the book.

My Top 10:

1. M*A*S*H
2. The Twelve Chairs
3. Women in Love
4. Lovers and Other Strangers
5. Patton
6. Floating Weeds
7. The Joke
8. Mississippi Mermaid
9. Where’s Poppa?
10. Catch-22

Note:  Not a strong Top 10, although at least it has 10.  The 2-5 are the weakest as a whole since 1965 and there won’t be a weaker group until 1976.  They look even weaker because they are between two very strong years.  Patton would have been #9 in 1969.

Consensus Nominees:

1. M*A*S*H  (192 pts)
2. Patton  (160 pts)
3. I Never Sang for My Father  (120 pts)
4. Airport  (80 pts)
5. Lovers and Other Strangers  (80 pts)
6. Women in Love  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium):

• M*A*S*H
• Airport
• I Never Sang for My Father
• Lovers and Other Strangers
• Women in Love

Oscar Nominees  (Best Story and Screenplay – Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published):

• Patton

note:  So this is the Original Screenplay category but Patton, based on “factual material”, was based on two books and thus, today, would be considered Adapted.

WGA Awards:

note:  The WGA finally drops their straight Genre categories and creates four categories, dividing things up by Adapted and Original (finally!) and by Drama and Comedy.

Adapted Drama:

• I Never Sang for My Father
• Airport
• Catch-22
• The Great White Hope
• Little Big Man

Adapted Comedy:

• M*A*S*H
• Lovers and Other Strangers
• The Owl and the Pussycat
• The Twelve Chairs
• Where’s Poppa?

Original Drama:

• Patton

Original Comedy:

• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

note:  Both would be considered by the Academy today as Adapted though the WGA, which has looser definitions, might still consider them Original.

Golden Globe:

• M*A*S*H
• Scrooge

Nominees that are Original:  Love Story, Five Easy Pieces, Husbands
note:  You read that correctly.  The Globes awarded Best Screenplay to Love Story over M*A*S*H.

BAFTA:

• Women in Love

note:  Women in Love is the only Adapted script eligible in 1970 to be nominated at the BAFTAs and it was actually nominated in 1969.

My Top 10

M*A*S*H

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film.  In fact, I have reviewed it twice, the first time as my example film for Robert Altman in my Top 100 post and then again as a Best Picture nominee though it absolutely should have won.  It is one of the great War films of all-time without ever really showing the war.  It is one of the great Comedies of all-time in spite of mercilessly ridiculing everything about the military and war and authority and anything else that Altman could think of to ridicule.  It is one of the few great films to also inspire a great television show and the two, while the same in concept (comedy set during Korea) with the same characters are also completely different and still both are great.

The Source:

MASH by Richard Hooker  (1968)

This might seem surprising but this was the first book in this post that I ever read.  Yes, years before I ever read Catch-22 or any D.H. Lawrence, I had read this novel.  That’s because, in addition loving the television show (I am just old enough that I have very clear memories of the original airing of the record-obliterating finale) I had loved the film from when I first saw it (probably Freshman or Sophomore year of high school) and what’s more, my mother had a copy of the novel, so it was very easy to get.  I only had to walk in her room and pick it up and read it, so I did.  It was okay, I felt at the time and nothing in the intervening almost 25 years have changed that (I can say 25 without a problem because I distinctly remember where I read it and that definitely would have been 25 years ago).  It’s always surprising to look at the book and see some of the more outlandish plot points from the film (Hawkeye and Trapper going to Tokyo and saving the baby who’s in the combination pediatric hospital / whorehouse, the football game) were actually there in the original novel.  But there’s something lacking in the film that really doesn’t have the sheer level of satire that was present in the film.  It’s a good enough book but I really can’t say that if you have seen the film there’s any need to go read the novel.

note:  A little note about the titles for the sources.  I use what is on the title page.  The front cover of the book lists this as MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors but the title page (at least of the edition I read this time, which was the 2001 Harper Perennial edition) only says MASH, without the stars between the letters like in the film.

The Adaptation:

“ELLIOT GOULD: Ring Lardner, Jr. came out and walked up to me and said, ‘How could you do this to me?  There’s not a word that I wrote on screen.'”  (Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, Mitchell Zuckoff, p 185)  The Zuckoff book also includes a quote from Lardner from unused footage for an Altman documentary: “I think Bob should have gotten some kind of cowriting credit since he did add so much, but he didn’t ask for it.”  (p 187)

As I said, the most outlandish plot points in the film were right there in the book.  In fact, almost anything having to do with story was from the original novel but the vast majority of the actual dialogue isn’t.  Just look at the scene where Hawkeye pushes Frank to the point where he gets sent away.  In the book, Hawkeye says “Hey, Frank, is that stuff you’re tappin’ really any good?” then Frank threatens to kill him and Hawkeye says “So kill me.”  In the film we get this:

Hawkeye Pierce: Would you say that she was a moaner, Frank? Seriously Frank. I mean, does she go “ooooh” or does she lie there quiet and not do anything at all?

Frank Burns: Keep your filthy mouth to yourself.

Hawkeye Pierce: Or does she go “uh-uh-uh”?

That’s just an example, of course, but you can go through most of the novel or the film and see where the scenes are so similar but also so very different because the dialogue is so much better in the film.  One of the few actual changes from the book (aside from dialogue) is that in the book, Frank Burns is a captain and some of his actions at the start of the film are from a character named Major Hobson who was simply combined with Frank in the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Robert Altman.  From the novel by Richard Hooker.  Screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr..

the Twelve Chairs

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film.  There is an error in the review (it turns out Ebert did review it) but that doesn’t take away from the brilliant hilarity of the film.  It gets lost in the shuffle because it was the film that Brooks made between The Producers and Blazing Saddles.  That’s like being the Springsteen album between the 5x Platinum The River and the 15x Platinum Born in the U.S.A., which is the even more brilliant but often over-looked Nebraska.  This film is hilarious and yet, often gets over-looked.

The Source:

Двенадцать стульев by Ilf and Petrov  (1928)

I know I read this book years ago after I first saw the film and was charmed by it.  But I had remembered it being a much shorter book than it is (the edition I read this time ran 395 pages and definitely isn’t the version used by Brooks for the film since he specifically mentions the Hill / Mudie translation and I read an edition translated by John H.C. Richardson).  It’s actually the first of two novels starring Ostap Bender, the smooth operating con-man who is one of several people after a set of twelve chairs that contain hidden jewels from before the revolution that may be worth a small fortune.  It’s amusing that Bender is in the sequel (which was packaged together as one book with this one in the edition I read: Ilf & Petrov’s The Complete Adventures of Ostap Bender) since it doesn’t appear that he even survives this book (see below) but the authors seemed to realize that they had a winning character on their hands.

In brief, a man who has wasted his wife’s money discovers from his dying mother-in-law that she hid her family jewels in a set of chairs.  This information also passes to the family priest and to Bender himself and the race is on to see who can first, find the chairs, then figure out which one has the jewels, since the set has now been split up across the Soviet Union.  Numerous film versions have been made over the years from filmmakers as diverse as Soviet era filmmakers, Nazi filmmakers and 30’s British filmmakers, not to mention, of course, the Brooks version which is, even though it’s one of his least appreciated films, probably the best known film version.

This is a good book and well worth a read if for no other reason than because it’s actually a considerably funny novel and the Soviets (and the Russians before them) aren’t exactly known for their humor, so it’s nice to get a satirical take on the world from them.

The Adaptation:

While a lot of small details are either changed or omitted to get all of the action of the book into a film, most of the film does follow decently closely to the book.  That is, until the ending, when in the book, Bender is actually killed by Vorobyaninov (“He approached the back of the chair and, drawing back his hand with the razor, plunged the blade slantways into Ostap’s throat, pulled it out, and jumped backward toward the wall.”), something which doesn’t actually slow down Ostap when he appears in the sequel sporting a scar on his neck.  That is one hell of a change from the book to the film where Ostap and Vorobyaninov simply go forward into a life of conning together.

The Credits:

Directed by Mel Brooks.  Based on the novel “The Twelve chairs” by Ilf and Petrov as translated by Elizabeth Hill and Doris Mudie and published by Methun & Co. Ltd. under the title “Diamonds to Sit On”.  Screenplay by Mel Brooks.

Women in Love

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film.  I would have reviewed it for my Nighthawk Awards because it was one of the five best films of (this admittedly weak) year but I had already reviewed it from when I reviewed the novel (see the link below).  I don’t consider it a great film (I have it as a high ***.5) but it is a very good one.  It has a magnificent lead performance from Glenda Jackson which wins the Nighthawk by a mile (it is one of four years where there is at least a three point difference between the #1 and #2 for Actress, along with 1955, 1966 and 1992 – I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of them also won the Oscar and the Consensus) though, and I can’t believe I have to write these words, she lost the Globe to Ali MacGraw for Love Story.  It is the only really good example of adapting Lawrence to the screen as I discuss in the review.  It’s also the best film from Ken Russell, a very uneven but talented director.  This film was nominated for Director, Adapted Screenplay and Cinematography and even won Actress but was passed over for Best Picture by Airport and Love Story.  One of the most inexplicable years in Oscar history.

The Source:

Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence

It it Lawrence’s greatest novel?  Apparently Lawrence thought so, according to the back of my Penguin paperback.  My own preference, as is obvious from the fact that I ranked this at #92 and I ranked Sons and Lovers at #81 is that I prefer the latter.  But that shouldn’t take away from this novel, which, as noted, I did rank as one of the Top 100 Novels of All-Time.  As such, I have already written a full appreciation of this novel which can be read here.  That piece also has my review of the film.  Lawrence is one of the great novelists in the English language.  He was one of only 21 authors with multiple novels on the list and four of them didn’t write in English.  More importantly, he also scored four novels on my Top 200, one of just ten authors to do that and one just four British writers to do that (even if you include Rushdie as British).  If you have never read Lawrence this is actually a great place to start, because even though this novel continues the story of the Brangwen sisters from The Rainbow you can read this without having read that (although I highly recommend that as well).

The Adaptation:

As mentioned in the review, this is the most fully realized film adaptation of a Lawrence novel.  That’s because unlike Sons and Lovers, it was filmed after the dropping of the Production Code, which means the film was able to embrace the sensuality of the novel, both in the language and in the characters.  There are minor scenes that are cut, of course, but this is a surprisingly fully realized adaptation of a 541 page novel into just 131 minutes on film.

The Credits:

directed by ken russell.  from the novel by d.h. lawrence.  written for the screen and produced by larry kramer.

Lovers and Other Strangers

The Film:

Weddings are ripe to exploit for comedy.  Indeed, the very essence of a Shakespearian Comedy is that it ends with a wedding.  But the wedding itself isn’t the scene for the comedy in Shakespeare while it is here.  In fact, the wedding is planned and arriving before the film even begins and we hit the wedding about halfway through the film.  That’s because weddings bring together all sorts of things that are the essence of romantic comedies.  Indeed, Four Weddings and a Funeral, one of the funniest films ever made, has, as one of its funniest scenes, a scene that is so unoriginal in its basic concept, that of someone ending up at a table with all of his exes that I wrote essentially the same scene a few years before that as a teenager.

Think of what you can find at a wedding and you will find it in Lovers and Other Strangers.  The happy couple, who, it turns out, may not be so happy.  They are both lying to their parents about non-existent roommates while living together (“I promise you that you will meet my roommate at the wedding” the young man tells his mother, not untruthfully), they are both getting nervous (the film opens with him explaining why they aren’t getting married, wandering around the room dressing, then changing his mind as he undresses and gets back in bed and the final lines of the film echo the opening scene rather wittily).  There are the parents of the couple, in this case, a WASP couple in which the father is actually having an affair with his wife’s sister and a very Italian couple played to great hilarity by Richard Castellano and Bea Arthur who claim that they’re not happy but they’re content.  That comes up because their older son, at the same time that their younger son is getting married, is announcing that he’s getting divorced and they can’t understand this younger generation’s ridiculous need to find happiness in their marriages.

This film works so well because it finds balance among all of this.  If one couple, a groomsman and a bridesmaid, are hopping into bed with discussing The Prophet a bit ridiculously, well, we also get some very heartfelt speeches from the Castellano with his son and Arthur with her daughter-in-law.  In fact, while the play has some funny moments, the film actually greatly improves on it for reasons that I will mention below.  I first saw this film about 15 years ago because it was nominated for Supporting Actor and Adapted Screenplay and I had liked it quite a bit.  Having not seen it since, I wondered if it would hold up but in the accurate way it shows how couples interact with each other, how family members deal with other family members, how weddings can be both poignant and funny, it feels very true to life and holds up as one of the best films in a very weak year.

The Source:

Lovers and Other Strangers: Five Comedies by Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna  (1968)

This is a rather short comedy, a small production of five different couples.  Well, sort of.  One of the couples isn’t technically a couple, with the man being married to the woman’s sister but they are having an affair and apparently they weren’t even in the original production because there is a footnote for them that says “Not in original production, but featured in the film version, and added as a ‘fifth’ comedy by popular demand,” which would seem to indicate that the copyright in the book should include the 1970 film but it doesn’t.  Anyway, this play follows the couples (there are actually six because in the final one, it has a pair of parents and their son and his wife) through their loose connections (they are all connected to each other, though that is left vague and might not have really been that intended in the original play).  It’s an okay little play but it works much better as a film for reasons I will mention down below.

The Adaptation:

Like Neil Simon would later do with a couple of his “suite” plays, this film takes five different scenes in the play and intermixes them.  But, much more importantly, it has a lot of added extra scenes which bring the characters together.  The couple getting married has the younger brother of the man getting divorced and the daughter of the man having an affair with his sister-in-law while the last two couples are both connected to the wedding (the sister of the bride and a bridesmaid and a groomsman).  But by bringing the characters together in extra scenes, it really makes this feel like one continuous story and not just a series of scenes.  The best example is the end of the film where the two conversations, the one between the father and his son and the mother and the daughter-in-law are actually juxtaposed against each other instead of one having to follow the other one.  The entire film benefits from being a film and how the screenplay and the editing allows the scenes to work off each other and I can’t imagine that anyone would feel the need to return to it as a play once it has become a continuous whole like in the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Cy Howard.  Based on the play by Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor.  Screenplay by Renee Taylor, Joseph Bologna and David Zelag Goodman.

Patton

The Film:

I have already reviewed the film.  Like I wrote in my review, this film has been trending downwards whenever I re-watch it.  It is lead by such a magnificent performance by George C. Scott that it makes you realize how little is left of the film aside from that performance.  It is still sitting at the very edge of **** but it seems in danger of tumbling lower.  The ironic thing is that I wish I could see a shorter version, one without the Germans endlessly wondering what Patton will do and focusing even more on Patton.  And yes, by the way, in the U.K. the film really was released as Patton: Lust for Glory like the poster says.

The Source:

Patton: Ordeal and Triumph by Ladislas Farago (1963)  /  A Soldier’s Story by Omar N. Bradley (1951)

This book is a long, heavy slog.  It can only be of use to those who are already firmly interested in Patton.  I thought, at well over 800 pages, it would have much of his early life but that is actually dispensed with in just a couple of chapters.  The bulk of the book is not only his actions in the War but mostly his actions post D-Day.  Even the actions in North Africa and Sicily are done with before the halfway point of the book.  When there were still several hundred pages left and we were already up to late 1944 I wondered if the book would take longer than the rest of the war.

There is no question that Farago was a big, big fan of Patton.  He likes to whitewash over his flaws and basically spends the book reminding us of his feeling that if Patton had simply been allowed to do his thing then the war would have been over by Christmas of 1944.  He gives little credit to Eisenhower, Bradley or Montgomery and mostly describes them in the ways he feels they hold Patton back.

The Bradley book is one of the definitive books on World War II from one of the top generals involved.  Bradley didn’t come into the war until 1943 but the book does a solid job of describing what he went through from the time he entered the war all the way until V-E Day.  It’s easy to find in print because it was re-released in the late 90’s as one of the first batch of books in the Modern Library War series.  Because this was written (or ghost-written) by Bradley and he was a fairly modest man in spite of all of his success it doesn’t have the bombast of the Patton book and is a much easier, more enjoyable read.

I also suspect that the Bradley book was used as research for the Farago book because there are a few scenes of dialogue that are word for word in both books.

The Adaptation:

The script for Patton was written in 1966 before Coppola really became known as a director.  Michael Schumacher’s book says that “Coppola’s major contribution to the movie was his stunning opening scene” (p 42) while Gene D. Phillips’ book Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola notes “After devoting six months to the screenplay, which is dated December 27, 1965, Coppola moved on to other projects.  In typical Hollywood fashion, his screenplay was passed on to other writers who altered it substantially.  When the title role was offered to George C. Scott, he remembered having read Coppola’s screenplay earlier.  He stated flatly that he would accept the part only if they used Coppola’s script.  ‘Scott is the one who resurrected my version,’ says Coppola.  Screenwriter Edmund North then made some modifications in the Coppola version, but the shooting script is essentially Coppola’s work.” (p 32)

The odd thing about that bit above is that supposedly Scott was concerned about the opening speech, worrying that if it was the opening of the film (which he was supposedly promised it would not be) then the rest of the film would pale in comparison.  Yet, also supposedly, the opening speech is the whole key to Coppola’s script.  So which is it?  Scott wanted Coppola’s script for what he did in the opening but he also didn’t want it to be the opening?

Now, as for the source material, well, here is another quote: “In knowing nothing about his subject, [Coppola] was not bound to honor the mythology that surrounded the legendary but eccentric war hero. Coppola immersed himself into a study of Patton, and the more he learned, the more convinced he became that Patton needed to be treated as a quixotic figure, complete with heroic and villainous traits.”  (Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life by Michael Schumacher, p 42)

That quote seems to confirm what I was thinking about when actually reading the source material.  I suspect that the filmmakers had bought the rights to the Farago book and thus used it as the credit because they had paid for it.  But I think that Coppola’s script was one he built himself based on a lot of things he had read.  I don’t think it’s really an adaptation of the book which means it could be considered an Original Screenplay (the award it actually won because of how the categories were divided at the time).  I also suspect that the Bradley book is credited only because Bradley himself was an advisor on the film and so they decided to use his book for some background and give him credit.  I doubt that it was involved at all in the actual writing of the script.  There certainly didn’t seem to be anything in the book involving Patton that wasn’t covered in the Farago book.

One key difference between the book (or life) and the film is that there was a second slapping incident.  Actually, that was the first incident and the two aren’t so much combined as the first one, whose repercussions were minimal, is excised.  It works better that way anyway.

The Credits:

Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner.  Screen Story and Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North.  Based on Factual Material from Patton: Ordeal and Triumph by Ladislas Farago and A Soldier’s Story by Omar N. Bradley.

Floating Weeds

The Film:

Much like the film that it was based on, Floating Weeds came at a time of change for director Yasujiro Ozu.  Perhaps that is why he returned to his 1934 silent film and revisited it.  Now, not only would he be making a sound version (which would necessitate a more complete screenplay since there would be spoken dialogue) but he also would be making it in color.  That took the acting troupe that is a major part of the film and allowed its sets, its costumes and its makeup to appear in color and make for a more vibrantly alive film than he was capable of making the first time.  The best way to watch this film is actually to watch it in conjunction with some of the other Ozu films, some of the early Comedies, then the original version, then some of his work in between, then this film.  That really gives you a sense of how far he has come and what the two films mean in his oeuvre.

It’s summer in a seaside town on Japan’s Inland Sea.  It is the late 50’s but some things never change and a troupe of kabuki actors arrive in town on a ship and immediately set about setting things up and promoting their play.  Well, that is, everyone except Komajuro, the leader of the troupe.  He’s got other things on his mind, like visiting his old mistress and the son that doesn’t know who his father is.  But that will bring about a chain of events that will lead to unintended results.  Komajuro has another mistress now, who works with him in the troupe and her jealousy will lead to her asking a young actress in the troupe to seduce Komajuro’s son.  From there, different events in their lives will overlap with the modern day setting.  Traveling kabuki troupes are not in the same position as they were back in the 30’s before the war (when the original film was shot and set) and the troupe has been badly managed.

Without being preachy, the film focuses on a lot of questions that people ask themselves.  What kind of life do I want for myself?  What kind of life do I want for my child?  Is what I do something I want to pass down or am I determined to try and find a better life for them?  That is often the question that passes between generations.  Do you say to your child what was good enough for me is good enough for you or are you determined to give them a better life than you got?  But Ozu frames all of this within changing times in an industry and a land and it is even reflected in the changing aspects of the film.

The troupe arrives by boat rather than by train.  The era of traveling troupes of kabuki actors are ending.  The film is now no longer silent but has both sound and color.  Those even overlap, because with these kinds of films, much more accessible to these kind of isolated towns in 1959 Japan than they had been in 1934 why go see the actors when you get the magic of film?

Ozu was never a massive success but his reputation has continued to grow through the years.  It seems that with each poll, his films climb higher and higher.  A Story of Floating Weeds was his first really good film, the first film of his mature era and this is one of the best films that he would ever make.  They are a fitting pair.

The Source:

A Story of Floating Weeds, Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, Story by James Maki, Screenplay by Tadao Ikeda  (1934)

Yasujiro Ozu, in the mid 30’s had made several Comedies and many of them started with cartoon like credits sequences.  But with this story, the very first shot is of the credits set against a burlap sack, a sign of its pastoral setting (in a small town on Japan’s Inland Sea) and also a sign of the minimalist aspect of directing that Ozu would begin to use with this film.  Of all the great directors in film history, Ozu would perhaps make the least use of camera movement and quick editing and he would allow his film to flow from the characters and the story and even the seasons.  This was the first really mature Ozu film and it was his first one that I rank above *** (and indeed, I rate it as the best film he would make until he would make his greatest film, Tokyo Story, in 1953).

A troupe of kabuki actors have arrived by train.  They are headed by Kihachi, a popular actor and Otaka, his mistress.  But Kihachi has a hidden reason to be in this town that Otaka doesn’t know about: his former mistress and his son (who is unaware of who his father is).  Kihachi is actually thinking of leaving the life on the road and settling down, perhaps here with his former mistress and being a father to a son.  He has been sending them money and he has kept an interest in his son but because his work has him on the road, he has never revealed to his son who he is.  But, driven by jealousy, Otaka hatches a plot that ends up with one of the other actresses in the troupe getting into a relationship with the son.  At the same time that Kihachi is trying to disband the troupe and find a new life, it is completely upended and what we end up with is Kihachi, back on the road, headed into a new version of his old life with his mistress still at his side.  We get a beautiful image of the two of them at the station, her lighting his cigarette before they head back out of town.

It is an interesting transitional film, not just for Ozu, as he moved away from Comedy but also for the country as seven years after The Jazz Singer, it still working in the Silent Era.  It is interesting then, that Ozu would choose this film to remake some 25 years later when more changes had happened in both the country and the industry.  It makes for the rare example of a director not only remaking their own very good film but actually doing a better job with it the second time around.

The Adaptation:

In a sense, the biggest changes are the ones that are only superficial in terms of an adaptation (color film, sound).  There is also the more explicit notion that the son and the young actress sleep together in the second film while it is more implied in the first film but that’s because things were looser in what was allowed to be depicted on film in 1959.  The breakup of the troupe is more complicated in the remake than in the original.  But, for the most part, the two films follow almost exactly the same story.  Don’t be fooled by the writing credits on the first film either, James Maki is a pseudonym for Ozu and he was the main creative force behind both films.  Both films are inspired by the 1928 film The Barker but neither is explicitly based on it.

The Credits:

Directed by Yasujiro Ozu.  Screenplay by Yasujiro Ozu, Kogo Noda.
note:  Credits courtesy of Criterion.  There is no credit for the original film.

Žert

The Film:

The Prague Spring was alive.  Jaromil Jires, a director of the Czech New Wave would team up with Milan Kundera, a hip new author (almost 40, but had just published his first novel the year before) to adapt his novel, The Joke.  The joke of the title is played by Ludvik.  Although there are two jokes.  Or maybe just one joke and it’s a big one and it’s life’s joke on Ludvik.  Either way, things are funny until they are bleak and could not possibly be less funny until they come around and are funny again or maybe it’s all only funny if you look at it from a certain point of view.

Ludvik is in love with Markéta, but unfortunately she’s not exactly one for humor.  So, trying to lighten her mood, when out of town, he sends her a postcard: “Optimism is the opium of the people!  A ‘healthy spirit’ stinks of stupidity. Long live Trotsky!”  That’s the joke and the novel got away with it because it was 1967 and the filmmakers got away with it because it was 1968 but Ludvik himself doesn’t get away with it, ending up expelled from the Party and sent to a re-education camp that will upend his life.  The film itself also doesn’t get away from it because while it was filmed during the Spring, by the time it was ready for release, the Soviet tanks had arrived in Prague and they weren’t about to let this film reach screens, at least not in its native country.

So there’s a joke, or irony, or what have you.  In the film itself, Ludvik has actually come back to Prague after almost two decades away, being educated, learning a different life and now he’s well-known enough to be interviewed by a reporter that he decides he wants to seduce because she’s married to the supposed friend who pushed for Ludvik’s expulsion all those years ago.  But the film itself is banned and the author would, in 1975, leave for France and not only stay there but would eventually start publishing his books in French instead.

But I haven’t even mentioned the other jokes, what else happens in the film that Ludvik does and the way it comes back at him.  But that’s for you to discover in a film that is worth seeing and that may open your eyes to a different world of film.  It’s not a great film, but it feels like the last hurrah of the Czech New Wave, a startling, fresh group of directors and films that was inspired until it was beaten down.  But this film, hard to see for a long time, can be seen in a box set that Criterion released in its Eclipse Series: Pearls of the Czech New Wave.

The Source:

Žert by Milan Kundera  (1967)

Milan Kundera wasn’t actually that young.  He was almost 40 when he turned to writing novels and The Joke was his first.  Its satirical look at the Communist era in his country, beginning in the early years after the war and dealing with students who were about Kundera’s age and running through to the slightly more open era of the late 60’s (just before the Prague Spring) offers a fascinating view into a country that was semi-closed off to American audiences.  As a result of books like this, Kundera would eventually leave Czechoslovakia and settle in France where he continues to be one of the best novelists that Europe has to offer.  This is a first novel and it has some of the trademarks of a first novel, rambling a bit, lacking a bit of focus, but it has some serious bite to it and you can see the direction that Kundera would move on to for his later novels.

The Adaptation:

For a novel that is not very long (304 pages) there is a surprising amount of details that are cut for the film and easily so.  There is much in the novel in the way of first-person narrative (the novel is told from multiple points-of-view) but the film really focuses on Ludvik’s story and tells it the same way the novel does, by starting in the present with his interview, going back to what happened to him 20 years before and then coming back to what he wants to do to try and get back at the man that he views as responsible.

The Credits:

Rezie Jaromil Jires.  Na motivy románu Milana Kundery.  Scénár Napsali: Milana Kundera, Jaromil Jires.

Mississippi Mermaid

The Film:

A wealthy tobacco plantation owner, Louis, lives on an island in the Indian Ocean.  He searches for a wife long distance and finds one, Julia.  He provides her with the means to come to him but when she arrives, it’s not the woman in the photograph that he saw.  Your first thought might be the catfishing was around long before the internet (indeed, since the film is based on a 1947 novel that was actually set in the late 19th Century) but you wouldn’t be on the right track.  He asks her why she looks different from the picture but she says she was afraid that he would want just for her looks and since she’s played by Catherine Deneuve and everyone wants her for her looks it rings true.  He marries her (he also feels okay since he didn’t tell her how rich he was also because he was worried she would just want his money) and gives her access to his bank accounts and then one day he comes home and discovers that she isn’t there any more and neither is his money.

Again, you’re going to go with catfishing and again, you wouldn’t quite be right.  Because then Julia’s sister arrive and when she and Louis talk it will turn out that the Julia that got on the boat to marry him isn’t the Julia who got off the boat and did.  So what happened to the real Julia, the one in the photo?  Both fear that she is dead and so begins a fascinating mystery where you will wander back and forth between your loyalties, trying to decide who to root for and what you are rooting for them to do.

This film is based on a smart, fascinating thriller by Cornel Woolrich and was later remade as Original Sin, a film I haven’t bothered to see because why would I want to watch Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie mess up what has already been done so brilliantly by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve.  Why go for the film with a 33 on Metacritic which I can watch, over and over again, one made by Truffaut?

I’m not going to say any more about the plot because it’s best to immerse yourself in the film and discover what happens.  Are you rooting for Belmondo, the man who had his money ripped off by the woman who showed up and claimed to be his intended?  Or is it is his own fault for being taken in by the beautiful blonde in front of him and are you actually rooting for that femme fatale like you might find yourself doing in so many noir films?  This isn’t a noir film, not in color, filled with so much sunlight like it is.  But it takes some of the best elements and blends them together in an entertaining and very good film that rises towards the top in a very weak year.

The Source:

Waltz into Darkness by William Irisih  (1947)

Cornel Woolrich was a solid writer of mystery and suspense fiction (he wrote the original short story “Rear Window” for instance).  This novel, published under one of his pseudonyms (even Woolrich is an abbreviated version of his actual name) is about a man in late 19th Century New Orleans who has managed to find himself a bride in St. Louis (he is unmarried because his love as a young man died suddenly).  When the woman who arrives is not the one in the daguerreotype that he was sent he accepts her explanation for that and marries her.  But when a letter arrives from her sister claiming that there is an imposter writing to her and his wife disappears with most of his fortune we are plunged into a mystery that continues to grow upon itself.  Obviously I won’t give away the plot here if I didn’t up above but it’s well worth reading, a fascinating mystery that really keeps you guessing as to where it will go and a solid example of noir fiction even if it takes place in the 19th Century.

The Adaptation:

Most of the film and even a lot of the small details come straight from the original novel (the ending of the film is more optimistic than the novel, though that depends on how you feel about the characters).  The main differences are simply any changes you would have to make when taking a novel set in 1880 New Orleans and St Louis and moving it to 20th Century Indian Ocean islands and France.

The Credits:

Directed by François Truffaut.  Based on a novel by William Irish.  Screenplay and Dialogue by François Truffaut.
note:  Yes, even though the film is in French, the credits were in English, or at least they were on the DVD I watched.

Where’s Poppa?

The Film:

A film adaptation of one of my most favorite novels sits at #10 and a Comedy with George Segal sits at #9?  So how to explain that?  Perhaps Roger Ebert sums it up best: “There is a certain kind of humor that rises below vulgarity. It isn’t merely in the worst possible taste; it aspires to be in the worst possible taste. “Where’s Poppa?” is the best example of the genre since “The Producers.””  It’s not like this was going to be a surprise.  The original cover of the book describes it as “a tasteless novel”.

This is a movie that spares no one.  Perhaps the scene that best sums that up is early on when Segal is defending a young beatnik protester against the Vietnam War.  The protestor (played by director Carl Reiner’s son, Rob in an early acting role) is obnoxious and rude and as it turns out, cut off the toe of the army colonel he is accused of assaulting.  So you start to think that the film’s sympathies lie with the colonel.  But as he talks about the war, then starts talking about killing men in Vietnam with his bare hands, killing men who had surrendered, getting the brains of one of the dead men and bringing it home to his little boy, you start to realize that there is nothing that this film won’t tear down.

But the entire film is like that.  It doesn’t worry who it offends.  It will attack everyone.  Blacks?  They’re all just muggers.  The Jewish boy?  The one who still lives with his mother threatens to kill her and the one who doesn’t threatens to strangle his own child so he can run to his mother’s defense.  The law or the police?  Just look at the trial or what happens after one brother is arrested.  There is no way in which this film fails to offend and yet, it never fails to be funny.  It takes things to such an outlandish end that you can’t help but laugh.  You can’t root against the poor guy who just wants to shtup the hot nurse he has hired (mainly because everyone she takes care of dies) because he just hopes to be free and you can’t root for him because this is his mother we’re talking about.

In the end, the film even took a completely outlandish step that was so far out there that when the film was re-released a few years later, they actually cut it out because it was just too much for them to take.  But you can read about that online and then you’ll really know how far they were willing to push things.

The Source:

Where’s Poppa? by Robert Klane  (1970)

Want some irony?  I can’t get hold of this book probably because it was originally a mass market original and thus many libraries don’t have it.  But Joseph Heller, the author of the next source, read it, or at least provided a blurb for it, which I know because it’s on the movie version of the book: “A funny, bawdy, nasty book . . . I laughed out loud all the way through.”  The Independent gave a nice bit on the book in a piece on “Forgotten authors” which reads “Klane’s prose is as blunt as a chucked brick. He has no time for niceties, and recognises that the best dark comedy, like life, is painful, mean and short. Where’s Poppa? (1970) may be the ultimate Jewish mother novel. Trapped at home with a senile parent, a dominated and sleep-deprived lawyer continually loses his cases and his girlfriends. His attempts to frighten his ancient mother to death must be nightly defeated by his guilt-laden brother, who runs a gauntlet of Central Park muggers in order to prevent matricide, and to halt the receipt of said mother into his own home. The film version, made with George Segal and Ruth Gordon, suffered a failure of nerve in the final furlong and avoided the novel’s brilliantly ghastly Oedipal outcome.”

The Adaptation:

So I can’t speak much to the book to novel comparison although certainly the book as described in the review is what was on screen.  The big difference, of course, is the ending, and The Independent is correct, at least in terms of the version I saw but isn’t true for the original release.  Originally, the film ended with Segal back at home with his mother, Luise leaving him and him crawling into bed with his mother saying “Here’s poppa.”  But, when the film was re-released in 1975 (as Going Ape) that original ending was dropped and that’s the version that is available on DVD (or at least the version I watched) and is almost certainly the version that the Independent writer saw.

The Credits:

Directed by Carl Reiner.  Screenplay by Robert Klane.  Based on his novel “Where’s Poppa?”

Catch-22

The Film:

I have already reviewed the film once.  That’s because it’s based on one of the greatest novels ever written (see below).  Every time I watch it (which is several times partially because I used to have a taped copy on VHS) I want it to be better than it is.  It suffers a bit because it’s in the same year as M*A*S*H and while the novel M*A*S*H can never hope to be more than a decent entertainment, the film is brilliant and for all-time.  But here, it’s the novel that stands supreme and the film can’t hope to be more than a grasp at that.  It’s a solid grasp, given the casting, but it still can’t rise above a very high *** and thus doesn’t make it to my Best Picture discussion, even in a weak year like 1970.  But it does win both Actor and Supporting Actor in my Comedy awards, even beating out performances in M*A*S*H.

The Source:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller  (1961)

Easily one of the greatest novels ever written and I discussed in my piece on the book (where I ranked it at #10) about how since it was written, it has not been surpassed (at least in English).  It is definitely the best example of a brilliant book matched with hilarity, even beating out The World According to Garp and Confederacy of Dunces.  There is no book ever written that is both this good and this funny.

Since I did read it again for this project (and will probably read it again next year as I do in a lot of years), I will note a paragraph that wasn’t highlighted or even pencilled in (which I did with some extra lines when I read it for my Top 100 Novels project) but which shows the hilarity of the book:

The soldier who saw everything twice nodded weakly and sank back on his bed.  Yossarian nodded weakly too, eying his talented roommate with great humility and admiration.  He knew he was in the presence of a master.  His talented roommate was obviously a person to be studied and emulated.  During the night, his talented roommate died, and Yossarian decided that he had followed him far enough.  (p 179)

The Adaptation:

In my original review of the book and the film I mentioned my anecdote about this film.  In that anecdote I didn’t mention that I also described the film I had seen the night before was faithful (which does describe both this film and For Whom the Bell Tolls).  But I also said that the film wasn’t coherent and this film is not.  That’s because it is faithful.  Yet, the novel is coherent.  Or is it?  Well, the novel moves around a lot, which is why I have said you can read the first 35 chapters in any order (something my professor actually said first) and sometimes things happen in the book in an order that is not possible.  So almost everything in this film comes straight from the book and if, at times, you are confused, well, that’s the burden of being faithful to such a brilliant book.

The Credits:

Directed by Mike Nichols.  Based on the novel by Joseph Heller.  Screenplay by Buck Henry.

Consensus Nominees

I Never Sang for My Father

The Film:

The first time I saw this film, when I was a lot younger, I was captivated by the acting.  Specifically, I was captivated by the great performance from Gene Hackman and struggled to understand how he could have been listed as a supporting actor when he is clearly the lead. This was still the early days of category fraud.  The idea seemed to be that Melvyn Douglas was established and that Gene Hackman was still a rising character actor, so, of course Douglas was the lead and Hackman was supporting, even though it should be clear to anyone with a brain that Hackman is the lead (he’s even the damn narrator).

But, the great performance from Hackman and the very good one from Douglas (Hackman was nominated for an Oscar and wins the Nighthawk while Douglas is nominated for both) helped me to buy into the schmaltz story (a son who doesn’t get along with his father deals, first with his mother’s death, then with what to do about his father since the son wants to move to California).  I didn’t really think about how badly the film was directed, how badly it was paced, or how agonizingly bad the score was.  I was just so focused on the acting and the lines, which seemed deep and meaningful when I was a teenager, (“Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship.”) now just seem trite to me.

The reason that the film just doesn’t fall apart is because the relationship between Hackman and Douglas plays out both realistically (two men just talking past each other while trying to overcome the years that have made their relationship difficult) and because the performances are so good.  But watching it again, oh boy, was it difficult to get through it without rolling my eyes.  But then again, Hackman has always been one of the greatest of film actors and he’s enough to get you through any film.

The Source:

I Never Sang for My Father by Robert Anderson (1968)

All the triteness and pain in the writing (both the good pain, in the realistic depiction of the relationships and the bad pain of some of the obvious over-writing) comes straight from the play.  The play must have been awkward to watch as the main character keeps stepping away from the action to give us long monologues.  What was strangest for me was that Hal Holbrook was once young enough to play the son in this; I was surprised, when watching / reading this at the end of 2016 that he had managed to survive the year that seemed to take everyone else.

The Adaptation:

Most of the dialogue in the film comes straight from the original play.  Even the voiceovers came from the play, though in the play the character would simply step away from the action and deliver a monologue direct to the audience, which must have been really jarring.  It works much better as a film voiceover.  The big difference between the two is that the character of Peggy, the woman that the son is going to marry and go off to California with never actually makes an appearance in the play.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Gilbert Cates. Written by Robert Anderson.

Airport

The Film:

In my original review, I took this film to task on any number of accounts (actually, it was ten, but who’s counting, aside from me, obviously).  It is a ridiculous, badly acted and even more badly written film that somehow managed to not only become one of the biggest films ever released (#6 at the time and adjusted for inflation it is still in the Top 50 and isn’t that far behind The Last Jedi, to give a current example) but also a Best Picture nominee with an astounding 10 total Oscar nominations.  I can’t necessarily say that the screenplay’s Oscar nomination was the most inexplicable of the 10 nominations given that its costumes were nominated over Women in Love and Patton but it is pretty high up there.  Of all the films ever nominated in this category at the Oscars, only two of them are worse than this one (I Want to Live, Fatal Attraction).

The Source:

Airport by Arthur Hailey  (1968)

Well, here’s the good news.  The filmmakers didn’t take a good, readable novel and make a terrible film out of it.  In spite of its popularity, this book, just like the popular film made out of it, is really pretty bad.  Much of the dialogue and almost all of the story came straight from the book and it’s just as ridiculous as you would imagine when watching the film.

The Adaptation:

Other than trying to convince us that Dean Martin is a pilot, the film doesn’t depart too much from the original novel.  Most of the stupid things about the film that I have mentioned before were there and just as stupid in the original novel, though they seemed less obviously stupid on the page.  The big difference is that in the book there is actually a brother to Burt Lancaster’s character, an air traffic controller who is planning to commit suicide (he decides not to at the end of the film) who adds yet another subplot of melodrama to the book which thankfully the filmmakers cut because there’s only so much melodrama you can fit in one film, even this one.

The Credits:

Written for the Screen and Directed by George Seaton.  From the novel by Arthur Hailey.

WGA Nominees

The Great White Hope

The Film:

We hear about him first.  A bunch of men argue about the powerful black boxer who went to Australia to fight for the crown because in America he wasn’t being allowed to.  Now the newspapermen and powers that be have to talk the reigning champ into going in the ring against him, Jack Jefferson, who demolishes anyone who comes close.  Then we see the man himself and we get that booming voice and yes, this is a young James Earl Jones, vital, powerful, alive.  We remember that he didn’t just become famous for his voice, which must have been a hell of a thing on stage when he first played the role of Jefferson and for which he won his first Tony.

But the problem for many of the whites is not just that Jefferson is powerful and brash and outspoken and has an intensity that they just can’t match.  But he also likes his women and this one particular woman that he is with now happens to be white.  That’s one step too far for many of them and they want to knock him down any way they can.  It turns out it won’t be for years that any great white hope will be found that can knock him down in the ring so they are forced to knock him down through the law, through business, through money, through anything they can think of to knock back his pride and none of them ever work.

This film, with a decent script, a very good performance from Jane Alexander as the woman that Jefferson loves (she had also played the role on stage) and a powerhouse performance from Jones that, remarkably, brought him his only Oscar nomination is a solid film but is never able to do more than that.  Parts of the script are just too hackneyed, too glaringly obvious in what they want to say and how they want to say it.  The direction from Martin Ritt, who was never really a director with a deft hand or a great eye is rather stolid and the fight scenes are nothing like you would see in later boxing films.  You could say that the boxing in this film is beside the point and it mostly is which is why there is so little of it but like with everything else, it just isn’t done well enough to carry the film.  But that’s okay because the film has Jones to rely upon and he more than carries his own and everyone else’s as well.  This film while not as unsubtle as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is also not as deft as In the Heat of the Night but any time you can watch Jones and that intense gleam in his eyes and that bounce to his voice you know it’s worth watching.

The Source:

The Great White Hope by Howard Sackler  (1967)

This play won both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer.  The first I can understand given that the original version on stage had both James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander but the latter is a bit of a surprise because this is a blank verse play that starts to drag after a while with scene after scene of men trying to keep Jack Jefferson (a stand-in for Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion who was recently pardoned) down and him defying them at every turn from sleeping with a white woman to fleeing from the law.

The Adaptation:

Sackler, who adapted the play for the screen himself, definitely felt that he had done the job right the first time (and since he won both the Tony and the Pulitzer) because he changes very little of his play.  Perhaps that is part of what lead to the static directing in that the film is broken up into all of the scenes as they took place on stage and there isn’t much that opens things up.

The Credits:

Directed by Martin Ritt.  Screenplay by Howard Sackler.  Based on his play.

Little Big Man

The Film:

Is this a great film?  Roger Ebert certainly thought so when it was released, giving it four stars, and Vincent Canby called it Penn’s “most extravagant and ambitious film” which is saying something given that Penn had already directed Bonnie and Clyde.  But the Oscars and Globes only nominated it for Chief Dan George’s performance as the chief, Old Lodge Skins, with the Academy even passing over its costumes in favor of Airport.  And I myself have seen it twice now, once years ago, and again for this project and both times I have found myself wanting to think it better than I do but in the end, settling down and rating it at a mid ***.

Is the problem one of tone?  I classified it as a Drama but is it really?  The WGA also classified it as a Drama but then again, it was nominated opposite Catch-22 and if the WGA didn’t get that Catch-22 is a Comedy then what is going on with them?  This is a bit of a picaresque tale, the story of one man who doesn’t seem to know who he is.  There’s good reason for that, because while we’re getting the tale from him as a 121 year old, we see him age, in the course of the film, from ten to 27 and in that time he goes from being a white kid, to being raised by Cheyenne to escaping back to the white world (“God bless George Washington!” he yells to a soldier to keep from being bayonetted) to embracing the Cheyenne again when he is about to be knifed to going back to the white men yet again and working for Custer to managing to survive the Battle of Little Big Horn (where Custer is slaughtered because he believes that everything this man, Jack Crabb, tells him is a lie and moving in when he is told that if he will he will be slaughtered).  Yet, the tale is not told all that seriously at times.  He is tarred and feathered only to have his long lost sister discover him at that moment.  He is sent to bring money to a woman that Wild Bill Hickok wanted taken care of after his death and it’s a woman who once tried to seduce him.  He comes back to the Cheyenne to discover that his Swedish wife has not only survived an attack he thought had killed her but has come into the Cheyenne world, learned their language and is dominating their camp.

So much happens and in some ways so little happens, that I wonder if the film just tries to do too much.  Or maybe I expect the weight of such history to be told a bit more seriously but every time the film seems to get too serious it pulls back and almost looks at us with a wink.  Or maybe the problem is just Hoffman.  Maybe I never really found him convincing in the role, a bit too jokey of a performance and that just never sat right with me?  It’s hard to know.  The performance from Chief Dan George is quite good (he is just outside my Top 5), the costumes are good and the film isn’t boring.  It’s just something that never quite clicks for me.  If only it had made the impression on me that it made with Ebert it could have easily made the Top 5 in such a weak year.

The Source:

Little Big Man: A Novel by Thomas Berger  (1964)

A rather humorous, picaresque novel, almost Don Quixote like, which perhaps explains why I don’t take to it all that much.  It’s kind of a satire of American history, or at least that period of American history, the conquering of the West and the wiping out of the Native Americans but it just doesn’t work for me.  I can see the humor but I just don’t respond to it.

The Adaptation:

The first change was altering the age and timing of the character so he is now 121 and telling the story in 1970 so that he was born in 1849 instead of being 10 in 1849.  Aside from that, the film bounces back and forth between being true to the book, with a lot of the Native characters and Jack’s back and forth in his life between the Natives and the whites and totally doing its own thing.  So, the Battle of Little Big Horn plays out like in the book but in the film, Jack’s there when Wild Bill is killed and it brings him back to an earlier character while in the book, he isn’t even there when Wild Bill is killed.  There’s a lot of that, with back and forth in its fidelity to the book.  In the end, I would say it really veers away, especially in the ending where Old Lodge Skins actually dies in the book but in the film, the fact that he doesn’t die is perhaps the funniest scene in the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Arthur Penn.  Based on the novel by Thomas Berger.  Screenplay by Calder Willingham.

The Owl and the Pussycat

The Film:

If I had to take a guess as to who has the largest role in this film, I would go with Barbra Streisand over George Segal for while she is not in as many scenes, she more than makes up for it with never-ending dialogue.  Her Doris, an actress, or maybe a model, but perhaps definitely a whore, can’t ever seem to stop talking and often gets in several lines to Segal’s Felix, a poor struggling writer who is lucky to string two sentences together on screen or on the page.  But if I had to say who has the most screen time in the film, well that award definitely goes to Streisand’s cleavage.

I have mentioned, in regards to Funny Girl, that the “hello gorgeous” line is a bit ironic because gorgeous is definitely not a word I would apply to Streisand.  This is probably the film in which she looks the best, which is appropriate because she spends the vast majority of the film in a state of considerable undress, including wearing a bra with handprints on each breast (which you can clearly see on the poster to the right).  She even filmed her only nude scene for this film but she ended up getting them to cut it (it was later published in an issue of High Society and she sued).  She looks really good and you can understand it when Felix finally gives in and hops into bed with her.  But of course what you can’t understand is how no one has killed either of these two people long before this point.

Doris complains about Felix’s typing (his apartment is close to hers).  So he complains about the men in her apartment and she gets evicted.  Pissed off, she comes to his apartment, demanding to stay since he got her kicked out.  You would think he might respond to her given her state of undress, but he’s such a prig and a dimwit that he can barely get a sentence out, though eventually they fight so loudly that he gets evicted as well.  So they go crash at the apartment of a friend of his and they are so loud the friend leaves.  All of this and they still haven’t slept together and he still hasn’t told her he has a fiancee (which won’t come up until much later).

This is a romantic comedy, so you know that in the end these two people will end up together.  That they will end up together kind of homeless in Central Park because no one else will have them around won’t be surprising.  What will be surprising is if you can stand these two long enough to even get to the end of the film to find that out.

The Source:

The Owl and the Pussycat: A Comedy in Three Acts by Bill Manhoff  (1964)

A writer, annoyed at having his typing being complained about, complains about the complainer (she is a whore) and gets her evicted so she shows up in his apartment and basically moves herself in with him (which only lasts a few hours until he gets evicted as well).  It’s the story of two people who are so annoying to everyone else that eventually they will realize they should just annoy each other.  One of the reasons it was such a bold success on stage is that, even though the play doesn’t call for it, the male was white and the female was black (it was Alan Alda and Diana Sands in the original production).

The Adaptation:

While the premise is exactly the same and there are some lines that are the same (especially in the first scene), once the film really gets going, it departs considerably from the source material.  Part of that is because the original play is only a two person production while a major part of the film is how these two annoy everyone else so much, which means a lot of interaction with other people at the start and especially end of scenes.  The original play had a charming ending with the two of them kind of starting over while the film has them wandering homeless in Central Park.  That the film dropped the inter-racial romance is not directly a change from the play since it wasn’t written in for the female role to be black in the play, it was just a casting choice.

The Credits:

Directed by Herbert Ross.  Based on the play “The Owl and the Pussycat” by Bill Manhoff.  Presented on the New York Stage by Philip Rose, Pat Fowler and Seven-Arts Production.  Screenplay by Buck Henry.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

The Film:

I was disappointed when I originally saw this film.  I have always been a Sherlock Holmes fan, had read all the original stories long before seeing this film.  And this was Billy Wilder, one of the greatest of writer-directors, one of my all-time favorites.  And yet, this film was, curiously, a bit flat.  The blame for this lies in two places.  The first must go squarely at the feat of Wilder himself.  He just doesn’t do anything to really distinguish this film from any other use of Holmes.  If you’re going to try and stick Holmes into something involving politics of the day, I find it more interesting to have him going up against Jack the Ripper (and by extension, people involved with the throne) like in Murder by Decree rather than having Mycroft developing a submarine in the 19th Century and having it be frowned upon by Queen Victoria as unfair.  By having a bit of a femme fatale the film tries to bring someone into Holmes’ life on the level of Irene Adler but it would have been better off actually making use of the Adler story itself (“A Scandal in Bohemia”) and going from there rather just making up a brand new story.

This was Billy Wilder’s first film in four years, the longest lay-off of his career.  It showed that the upward tick of The Fortune Cookie wasn’t where he was headed and that his career was clearly in a decline.  Though the rest of the films that he would direct are all decent enough films, the magic that had sustained the first two decades of his directing career was now gone.  There’s no bite to this film, no snap to the direction or the script.  For a writer who made his mark on exceptionally witty lines that are remembered for years and years it’s surprising to have a Sherlock Holmes film without hardly any lines worth remembering more than five minutes.

But if much of the blame must be laid at Wilder’s feet (and I’m not suggesting that this is a bad film, just a mid range *** film and for a Sherlock Holmes film, or any film directed by Wilder, that is disappointing even if it’s better than most films), definitely part of the blame goes on the casting.  Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely were far from bad actors but they were not right for the role of Holmes and Watson.  To see a giddy Watson dancing along with a bunch of Russian ballerinas is bad enough, but then to have it cut short because Holmes has implied they have a relationship just so he can get out of fathering a child for the main ballerina is just too much and too silly, especially since that half hour sequence is completely unnecessary and simply makes the film drag.  I know the idea is to show various tidbits of Holmes’ private life (thus the title) and that there were actually more sequences filmed that were cut for running time, but if that was the plan, then they should have shortened things up on the main plot and not had it drag on for an hour and half.

Then there is Christopher Lee.  There’s nothing wrong with Lee or his performance of course because there never is.  But Lee’s Mycroft, with his masterly voice and command of the situation presents other problems.  For instance, this Mycroft seems so on top of things you can’t believe that this Sherlock would ever be considered great when compared to his brother.  For another thing, it reminds you that Lee had already been in a Sherlock Holmes film, the Hammer production of The Hound of the Baskervilles and that is one of the best Sherlock Holmes films ever made and it just makes this one suffer even more for the comparison.

The Source:

characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle

I have long been a fan of the original Doyle stories as I made clear here.  The source material here is simply the characters themselves, specifically the characters of Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft Holmes.  This film doesn’t use any previous existing Sherlock Holmes story but just makes one up and uses the characters.

The Adaptation:

Other than Mycroft being much thinner than he should be according to the source material (which was always going to happen once you cast Christopher Lee – can you imagine an overweight Christopher Lee?) almost nothing in this film contradicts any actual Doyle story so in that sense, the film is certainly true to the characters.  But, given the characters involved and given the writers involved, it’s certainly a disappointing story.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Billy Wilder.  Based upon the Characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond.

Golden Globe Nominee

Scrooge

The Film:

There have been a lot of Scrooges through the years.  There have rarely ever been bad ones, because the role is so ripe to be attacked and because so many good actors have been handed it.  But that doesn’t mean that all versions of the story are equal.  This one, for example, is not all that good.  Oh, it has Albert Finney, and Finney is one of those great actors who seems born to play Scrooge, but the film itself doesn’t quite know what to do with him.  It has him mugging horribly and it has him getting too over-excited at the end and even dressing up as Santa Claus (did that version of Santa even exist at that point?).  Most importantly, in discussing the flaws of the film, it is a musical.

Just being a musical doesn’t count as a flaw.  I am extremely fond of musicals; good ones, that is.  But this isn’t a good one.  The songs are boring, the songs are forgettable, and the songs just make the film last far too long.  One of the good things about this story is that isn’t very long, which means you can do the whole story and do it nicely in 90 minutes or so.  Hell, the Muppets would later do it as a musical and they would still get it done in less than 90 minutes.  The IMDb informs me that this film only lasts 113 minutes but good lord does it feel like a hell of a lot more than that.  It is a low **.5 and it manages to do that mainly through Finney’s performance in the moments where it is able to overcome the direction by Ronald Neame.  Yet, somehow the Globes thought that Finney was worthy of an award and that the film’s script deserved a nomination as one of the best scripts of the year, but then again, it lost to Love Story, so clearly the Globe voters had lost their minds that year.

There are a lot of choices for adaptations of this story.  Your best bet is to find a different one.  This is one has nice art direction and costumes, as this story usually does, and it does have Alec Guinness in a small role as Jacob Marley, but still, your best bet is to skip this and go watch the Alistair Sim version again (or the George C. Scott television version).

Two final notes on this film.  The first is that on the poster to the right the tagline is “If he can sing and dance there’s hope for all of us.”  Of course, the implication is that if Scrooge, the eternal miser, can be inspired to sing and dance, then anyone can find joy and happiness.  But the other way to look at the tagline is that Finney himself doesn’t do a very good job of singing or dancing and that therefore there’s no hope for all of us.  The second note is that at least one of my consistent commenters is a supporter of this film (“a classic populist entertainment that has endured for generations” he called it in the 1960 comments).  I recommend you skip this film but he may (and is welcome to) disagree in the comments and you can decide if he’s convinced you that you should see it.

The Source:

A Christmas Carol in prose being A Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens  (1843)

I have already written about this, in 1952, for the adaptation with Alistair Sim.  It is one of the best works of Dickens, either in spite of the sentimentality or because of it.  A reminder, as well, that there is a brief piece on it here where I ranked it at #4 among the novels of Charles Dickens.

The Adaptation:

This version does a very good job of sticking to the original, because your really don’t need to do anything except that.  But it does add in all the annoying songs, of course, and because of that, it really makes the end of the film just go on forever.

The Credits:

Directed by Ronald Neame.  Based on A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens.  Music and Lyrics by Leslie Bricusse.  Screenplay by Leslie Bricusse.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10
(in descending order of how I rank the script)

• Tristana  –  This film exists in a weird spot for me because I have it as a low ***.5 which is still a very good film but it’s in the midst of Luis Buñuel’s last career resurgence and this is actually the second weakest of his six final films.  Still, definitely worth watching.  Based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, it was Oscar nominated for Foreign Film.

Other Adaptations
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• The Confession  –  Another true political story (following Z) by Costa-Gavras, this one based on the book L’aveu by Artur London.
• Tell Them Willie Boy is Here  –  Abraham Polonsky’s first film in over 20 years is based on the book Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt by Harry Lawton.  A true story that won Actor (Robert Redford) and Actress (Katharine Ross) at the BAFTAs but both were co-winners with their performances in Butch Cassidy.
• The Molly Maguires  –  Though the film is based on a novel by Arthur H. Lewis, the Maguires were a real organization of 19th Century coal miners and I first saw this film in U.S. History as a junior in high school (Mr. Brunt’s class).
• The Boys in the Band  –  A good early Friedkin film based on the popular off-Broadway play which is now playing on Broadway for its 50th anniversary.  As an avid book collector who is straight, the moment I most remember is the scene at the beginning where someone walks into a bookstore and you can see a full display of Modern Library books.  What’s more, that was almost a decade ago (when I saw this film) and when I re-watched The Owl and the Pussycat for this project a couple of weeks ago, I immediately identified it as the same bookstore (the Doubleday on 5th Avenue – I checked and I’m correct on that).  Yes, I’m that guy who, when watching films and television, is looking at the books in the background on the shelves.  My apologies to those people for whom this film is a cultural milestone.
• Black Girl  –  First feature film from important Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène (1966 film released in L.A. in 1970) based on his own novella.  Wikipedia claims “It is often considered the first Sub-Saharan African film by an African filmmaker to receive international attention” but the IMDb says it’s “believed to be the first feature film made by a black African in sub-Saharan Africa”.  It’s possible they’re both true.
• A Boy Named Charlie Brown  –  The first Peanuts feature film was released in December of 1969 but didn’t play L.A. until at least early 1970.  Lost Best Song Score at the Oscars to Let it Be.
• The Crucified Lovers  –  A 1954 Kenji Mizoguchi film that was adapted from a 1715 play.
• A Walk with Love and Death  –  One of the harder to find John Huston films is based on the novel by Hans Konigsberger.  The film debut of Anjelica Huston which seemed like cheap nepotism but then Huston became one of film’s best actresses, so it all worked out.
• Tora! Tora! Tora!  –  Based on the title book as well as The Broken Seal (by Ladislas Farago who wrote the Patton book above), this film is a solid *** film but I want it to be lower because it just crushed Akira Kurosawa and he was fired from the film.
• Wuthering Heights  –  So why watch an AIP version of the classic Bronte novel (my #93 novel of all-time) when there are so many other options?  It’s the only one with Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff.  It also has a young Julian Glover as Hindley.  Not great but certainly watchable.
• The Landlord  –  Kristin Hunter’s 1966 novel becomes Hal Ashby’s directorial debut.  Okay film but gives you no sense of how important Ashby will be the rest of the decade.
• Mouchette  –  A 1967 Robert Bresson film based on the novel by Georges Bernanos.
• Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo  –  The 20th Zatoichi film which is made better by the presence of Toshiro Mifune.
• Zatoichi Challenged  –  The 17th Zatoichi film and automatically inferior to the one listed above because it doesn’t have Toshiro Mifune.
• Soldier Blue  –  Western based on the novel Arrow in the Sun loosely based on the Sand Creek Massacre.  We’re getting into low *** now.
• Loving  –  George Segal Comedy based on the novel Ralph Wilson Ltd.
• Taste the Blood of Dracula  –  Christopher Lee’s fourth go around as Dracula for Hammer.  The last good (***) Hammer Dracula film.
• The Virgin and the Gypsy  –  Mediocre film version of the novella by D.H. Lawrence.
• Borsalino  –  French Gangster film with Jean-Paul Belmondo based on the book Bandits à Marseille by Eugène Saccomano.
• Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed  –  The fifth Hammer Frankenstein film.
• Cotton Comes to Harlem  –  The Chester Himes novel becomes a Blaxploitation film that’s also the directorial debut of Ossie Davis.
• The Kremlin Letter  –  One of John Huston’s weaker films (**.5).  Based on the novel by Noel Behn.
• Beneath the Planet of the Apes  –  People complain about franchises today but this is the third franchise in the last 10 films.  The second of the Planet of the Apes films makes only small use of Charlton Heston.
• The Last Adventure  –  Another 1967 French film, this one based on the novel by José Giovanni.
• Promise at Dawn  –  Jules Dassin directs an adaptation of Romain Gary’s autobiographical novel.
• There’s a Girl in My Soup  –  Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn in a film version of the play that had been running in London for years.
• The Vampire Lovers  –  The same source material as Vampyr (Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu) but Vampyr is a classic and this is a high **.5 film.  It is a Hammer film with Peter Cushing though, so there is that.
• Colossus: The Forbin Project  –  Film version of the Science-Fiction novel by D.F. Jones.
• The Phantom Tollbooth  –  Chuck Jones’ mostly animated version of the classic kids book is a bit uneven.  Famously hated by author Norton Juster.
• Godzilla vs Monster Zero  –  Also known as Invasion of Astro-Monster, released in Japan in 1965 and released in the U.S. on a double bill with The War of the Gargantuas.
• Oedipus the King  –  Christopher Plummer as Oedipus but the film is very theatrical and not all that good.  Down to mid-**.5.
• Diary of a Mad Housewife  –  Very good performances from Carrie Snodgrass and Frank Langella but the film itself just isn’t very good.  Adapted from the novel by Sue Kaufman.
• Something for Everyone  –  Acclaimed theater director Hal Prince makes a rare film.  Based on the novel The Cook by Harry Kressing, it has a Golden Globe nominated performance from Angela Lansbury.
• The Assassination Bureau  –  A black Comedy from Basil Dearden adapted from, of all things, an unfinished novel by Jack London based on a story he apparently got from Sinclair Lewis.
• The Revolutionary  –  Another Konigsberger novel, this one adapted by the author himself and starring Jon Voight.  The film debut of Jeffrey Jones.
• The Blood Demon  –  Whatever title you know it as (it has at least five), it’s a West German version of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”.
• Getting Straight  –  Weak (low **.5) Richard Rush film based on the novel by Ken Kolb.
• Double Suicide  –  Japanese tragedy based on a play from 1721.
• A Man Called Horse  –  Based on a short story by Dorothy M. Johnson (who wrote the story “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”), this is a similar story to Little Big Man but not as good.
• The Devil’s Bride  –  Also known as The Devil Rides Out.  Yet another Hammer film.  I didn’t actually mention it in my Hammer piece which prompted a question about it in the comments.
• On a Clear Day You Can See Forever  –  First you had a Henry James novel (The Sense of the Past), then a play (Berkeley Square) that was also an Oscar nominated movie then turned into a stage musical in 1966 (with lyrics by Lerner and Burton Lane) and now a crappy movie with Barbra Streisand.
• The Liberation of L.B. Jones  –  The final film of directorial great (#25 all-time) William Wyler is a complete dud.  Based on the novel by Jesse Hill Ford.
• The Looking Glass War  –  Even a young Anthony Hopkins can’t save this dud of a John le Carré adaptation.  Based on one of the tangential Smiley novels (the name wasn’t used because Paramount had the rights).  Now we’ve reached ** films.
• Leo the Last  –  Early John Boorman film that’s pretty bad.  Based on a Hungarian play The Prince.
• Dirty Dingus Magee  –  Often lambasted as one of the worst Westerns ever made (I don’t think it’s quite that bad), it’s based on the novel by David Markson.
• Captain Nemo and the Underwater City  –  Inspired by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea but without much inspiration in the film itself.  It does have Robert Ryan as Nemo.
• Julius Caesar  –  Stuart Burge’s Othello in 1965 had been a very good film because it had Olivier and Maggie Smith.  Having Charlton Heston as Mark Antony just isn’t the same and Burge just isn’t a good film director.
• Rabbit, Run  –  This terrible adaptation of the great Updike book (though the other three books are better) was such a disaster that perhaps it scared off anyone from adapting any other Updike books.  Almost 50 years later and the only other novel made into a film was The Witches of Eastwick.
• Last of the Mobile Hot Shots  –  Not quite Sidney Lumet’s worst film, but close.  Gore Vidal wrote this adaptation of a lesser known Tennessee Williams play, The Seven Descents of Myrtle.
• Dougal and the Blue Cat  –  If I use the English title should it be in this year?  The French version (Pollux et le Chat Bleu) was released in 1970 but the U.K. version is from 1972.  Either way, not a good film.  The film comes from the show (The Magic Roundabout) in Britain which had been based on the French show (Le Manège enchanté) and the confusion won’t stop there as in the 2006 Nighthawk Awards, the U.S. version of the second film (Doogal) was my Worst Film of the Year, though there is a British version (again, The Magic Roundabout) which must be better.  Anyway, the U.K. version of the show and the film was created by Eric Thompson who is better known now as the (now-deceased) husband of Phyllida Law and father of Emma and Sophie.
• The Dunwich Horror  –  A Roger Corman produced AIP version of the Lovecraft story.
• Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon  –  Not the worst Otto Preminger film because of Bunny Lake is Missing but very close and low **.  Based on the novel by Marjorie Kellogg.
• Tropic of Cancer  –  Joseph Strick had already written and directed Ulysses and would later do the same for Portrait of the Artist.  With film censorship evaporating he tackles Henry Miller.  This is closer in quality to the latter.  I hated this film but, to be fair, I hated this book.
• The Hawaiians  –  In 1966, George Roy Hill directed Hawaii which, at 189 minutes long, only covered the third chapter of James Michener’s Hawaii.  Now we have this film at 134 minutes covering chapters four and five except instead of Julie Andrews, Max von Sydow and Gene Hackman in a Hill film we have Tom Gries directing Charlton Heston and Geraldine Chaplin.  I remember reading North and South in ninth grade and one of my teachers commenting “Ah, John Jakes, my second favorite bad historical fiction writer.”  His favorite was Michener.  You decide if it’s a compliment.
• The Cross and the Switchblade  –  Erik Estrada finds Christianity thanks to Pat Boone.  Do I need to explain why it’s this low?  Based on the non-fiction book.
• Pieces of Dreams  –  A hard-to-find Oscar nominee (Best Song) about a priest (Robert Forster) wondering if he wants to leave the church for love.  Based on The Wine and the Music by William Edmund Barrett (more famous for writing Lilies in the Field).
• First Love  –  Turgid film from the Turgenev novella directed by Maximilian Schell and nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars.  At best, the ninth worst film ever nominated in that category and I only say that because there are still eight nominees I haven’t seen.
• Venus in Furs  –  Skip the film, listen to the Velvet Underground song.  Oh, you want to point out that the VU song isn’t used in this erotic horror film from Jesus Franco that’s inexplicably in English and only tangentially connected to the 1870 classic of sadomasochism to capitalize on the title?  Who cares?  Listen to the VU song anyway because it’s brilliant.  The film is *.5.
• Pufnstuf  –  First it was a live-action / life-sized puppet show that lasted a whopping 17 episodes.  Then it somehow became a terrible kids film.
• They Came from Beyond Space  –  A 1967 British Sci-Fi film that re-used the sets from the second Doctor Who film and is directed by acclaimed cinematographer Freddie Francis.  Based on the novel The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard.  A * film.
• Flap  –  Just two years after winning the Oscar, Carol Reed hits bottom with this terrible attempt at a comedic Western based on the novel Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian by Clair Huffaker.
• Fellini Satyricon  –  When people try to claim that Fellini’s not self-indulgent, I slap them and then show them Satyricon though I run away first because I’m sure not going to sit through it again.  Loosely based on the classic work by Petronius but without any plot, meaning or sense.  Even though there are still three Best Director nominated films I haven’t seen, I’ll go ahead and say this is the worst film ever nominated.  A good 12 points lower than Fatal Attraction.
• The War of the Gargantuas  –  Not listed as adapted on the old oscars.org database but is a sequel to Frankenstein Conquers the World.  Low *.
• Myra Breckenridge  –  The worst film of the year and therefore it has a full review in my Nighthawk Awards.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• none

Adult Versions of Notable Literary Works:

note:  In this year, the Academy started listing “adult films” in their old oscars.org database.  In this year, for instance, there is a German version of the Kama Sutra.  Going forward, I will list such films down here without any comment as to whether or not I have seen them.

• Kama Sutra

I have been diving deep down into the well of Marvel Comics lately because fnord has ended his magnificent work on his site of putting all his Marvel Comics in order online and before too long he’ll stop paying for the site and it will all be gone from the web.

I also recently finally got a copy of Son of Origins, which I have known about for decades (I remember reading my Uncle Dave’s copy at his and my Aunt Melinda’s apartment the morning of their wedding which was in 1981) which reprints The X-Men #1 (also sometimes known as Uncanny X-Men #1 because the title was changed with issue #142 to Uncanny X-Men and because a new X-Men title was launched in 1991 and it distinguishes it from that one).  While reading it, I was amazed at how many things presented in that first issue have been changed or altered or ret-conned away or into something different.  It was cover-dated September 1963, so for it’s 55th anniversary, I thought I would look at some of those things.  (Note:  For those unfamiliar with the term, ret-con is short for “retroactive continuity change”, changing something that is established and saying it was always the case.  There will be several examples below.)

The X-Men have always been one of my favorite comics with many of my favorite characters.  And obviously, while their films don’t compare to the Marvel Cinematic Universe anymore, it’s important to remember that Marvel made many failed attempts at getting their characters onto the big screen before the first X-Men film was a massive financial success, leading to a franchise that has eleven films with two more coming out next year and that X-Men #1 from 1991 is still the biggest selling comic book in history with over five million copies sold.

So let’s look at the issue, starting with the beginning.

After two small panels introducing Professor X, the rest of the first page covers the introduction to the team.  First of all, before we get into any retcons, let’s look at this picture and wonder where the hell Iceman is sliding from.  Was he traveling inside Angel’s wing?  For that matter, why is he called Iceman when he seems to be covered in snow?  It would be several more issues before he actually started icing over (although a later origin issue would move his first time icing over to before this issue takes place).

By the bottom of page two however, we’ve already gotten into things that will eventually be changed in at least some formats.  First of all, Professor X says (or, more accurately, telepathically communicates) “You are receiving my thoughts perfectly!” and on page 7 he will say “You have mastered reading my thoughts perfectly!”  The suggestion there is that people have to learn how to hear Professor X in his head when he communicates telepathically, something that will be dropped very quickly and will never be used again for any of the (numerous) telepaths that will develop throughout the Marvel Universe.  The second part of the panel is that we haven’t actually moved locations from the first page.  So, while we have a nice Danger Room set-up that is there from the very beginning (hell, it’s introduced before we even complete the original team), as drawn by Kirby, it’s located in some large room on the ground floor next to a window, a room that must be absolutely enormous given what we see Angel doing in his routine on page 4.  In fact, this has already been changed the very next issue, when it gains its actual name as the Danger Room and is a large enclosed room that seems to be underground.  Years later, it will embrued with advanced technology and will even become sentient but those are developments and not retcons.

Let’s look at the Danger Room scenes for a minute because while it’s not a retcon it’s one of the odd things I commented on on fnord’s site.  Angel says “First time I ever flew the spanner with a slip!”  But look at that device and how fast it’s spinning.  If this is the first time that he ever flew it without a slip how he has not just been a big splat upon the wall?

Now we’ll get to a scene that I could have commented on before because it’s something that runs through the first few pages that will also be one of the first things changed.  Look at the panel to the left of the way Beast is talking.  Does that sound like the Beast that you know and love?  Well, of course not.  The first two issues of X-Men have Beast talking like a big lug.  But then Stan Lee decided that he already had that kind of hero with The Thing over in Fantastic Four so he changed gears completely.  In issue #3, he’s reading an Advanced Calculus book and when told it’s time to go, he replies “Angel, although your colloquialisms are extremely colorful, they are completely unnecessary!  I will be fully garbed at the ready before you shut the door!”  That’s the intellectual with a sense of humor that will become a mainstay of not only the X-Men but also the Avengers.

Page 8 is where things really start to get complicated for what will be going on in the future.  First of all, the four existing X-Men get their first glimpse at Jean Grey when she gets out of a car.  Actually, it’s only three because Iceman walks away, noting “A girl . . . Big deal!  I’m glad I’m not a wolf like you guys!”  I’ll write more about that below.

But it’s when Jean actually comes inside and we meet her that the retcons really start to hit in full force.  “What kind of school is this, Sir?  I have a right to know!” she insists.  That’s because in this issue, she’s just arriving at the school and has never met Xavier before.  However, a story published in Bizarre Adventures #27 in 1981 will completely wipe that idea away.  Revealed in that story is that Jean first exhibited her power (more on that below) when she was young and her best friend was killed by a car and her parents eventually sought out Xavier to help her.  This revelation also changes the notion of Xavier as developed in the early X-Men issues.  He was mostly a recluse who was little known while many later retcons have settled on the notion that he was already well known as an expert of mutation and genetics.  This panel, more than any other in the book, has been so thoroughly changed as to make it laughable.  But we’re not done with the changes to Jean yet.

But before we get to that, we get our actual introduction to the boys outside of their costumes.  That just brings the next change.  When we are introduced to Cyclops, he is introduced as “Slim Summers”.  It won’t be long before we learn that his name is actually Scott and it won’t be too long before they drop the “Slim” nickname entirely, but there’s no indication in the first issue that his name actually isn’t Slim.

While we’re on this panel, fnord commented “Scott “Slim” Summers should not be allowed to dress himself.”  I argued in the comments “To be fair to Scott, in theory he should be color-blind. Everything should just look red to him, since the optic beams are always firing. So he SHOULD have terrible taste in clothes.”  One commenter then said that “I’ve always wondered at what Cyclops sees through his visor. If it blocks the red portion of the light spectrum, shouldn’t what he sees through it be actually bleached of red? Because the beams coming from his eyes are red? And they’re being cancelled out?”  That’s an interesting thought that surely someone who writes one of those “Science and . . .” books has probably addressed.  There will actually be more about him and his visor down below.  But, for now, we’re gonna start to get our first demonstration of Jean’s powers and that will bring forth some big changes.

On the panel to the right is the first demonstration of Jean’s powers.  First of all, note that she discusses her “able to practice teleportation”.  Yes, the power of telekinesis was originally described by Stan Lee as teleportation.  Now, in the comments on fnord’s site, I commented “When Phoenix powers up the stargate in #109 (or so), Scott thinks to himself ‘She used to be the weakest X-Man.’ How in the hell can telekinesis be considered a weaker power than having wings? I’ve never understood that.”  One other commenter mentioned “as for Jean being the weakest member, she really was portrayed that way at the beginning. She could not lift a lot of weight, and she had to see where she was moving objects.”  But that just brings up more retcons.  First of all, that commenter is correct and by the mid teen’s of the series, Jean couldn’t lift very much, often described that she couldn’t lift with her mind more than she normally could with her arms.  But that was contradicted in this very first issue because when Hank kisses her (again, his personality wasn’t really developed yet), Jean lifts him up (even though he’s supposed to weigh quite a lot) and spins him around, without looking at him.  So, she originally wasn’t the weakest X-Man, yet her powers were weakened (one of the weaknesses of Stan Lee’s writing was that the female super-heroes, what few there were (Jean, Invisible Girl, Wasp, Scarlet Witch) all had quite weak powers and were often used as hostages) so that she could later be described as the weakest, but she was only the weakest because her powers were later weakened.

Confused yet?  Well, it’s gonna get worse.  Because as I mentioned, Jean originally met Xavier when her friend died and her telepathic powers came into being and she was traumatized by the experience.  But telepathic?  It says nothing about that here.  Well, in fact, she was developed just a telekinetic and then later was supposedly given some of Xavier’s telepathic powers before he died (that was later retconned, of course).  Then, when she became Phoenix, her powers were magnified (that was later retconned so she was never Phoenix).  But, in that issue of Bizarre Adventures, it was suddenly declared that Jean had always been telepathic and that Xavier had put mental blocks on her to keep her from being overwhelmed by her power, so that issue of Bizarre Adventures retconned both the original X-Men issues (where she had no telepathic powers) and the later issues (when she supposedly got some of Xavier’s powers).  So, basically, everything said between Jean and Xavier in this issue is contradicted (read: retconned) by a later issue.

In the next panel, as Professor Xavier explains to Jean about how came to be a mutant, he mentions “I was born of parents who had worked on the first A-bomb project!”  Um, what?  First of all, this is 1963.  How old are we supposed to believe Xavier is?  The Manhattan Project didn’t even begin until 1939.  Hell, nuclear fission wasn’t even achieved until 1938 and that was in Germany.  So is Xavier supposed to be 24 or younger?  That makes no sense.  Plus, by issue #12, which introduced the Juggernaut and his history as Xavier’s step-brother, it was explained that they fought in Korea.  So, Xavier was born, at the very latest, in 1935.  He claims that he was possibly the first such mutant.  Except for, given his meeting with Magneto that will be retconned in in issue #161, he knows Magneto had powers and was using them at an early age, so there’s no reason for him to believe that and there is also his meeting with Amahl Farouk, the Shadow King, who he had battled, shown in a flashback in #117 and was clearly older than Xavier.  Xavier explains as well that he is in a chair due to a childhood accident.  By issue #9 that will already be rewritten that he was fighting against an alien named Lucifer when a block was dropped on him, crushing his legs.

Now, nowhere in these pages does Xavier flat out say that this is his first class of mutants, so it can’t be considered a direct contradiction that we will later learn that there were earlier mutants that he taught, but certainly it is implied that these are his first students.  Indeed, throughout the years we are constantly introduced to characters who it will turn out Xavier knew, worked with or taught long before the actions of this issue, including the most important, who is about to debut.  But before we get to that, let’s talk about sexuality.

First of all, there is Xavier’s sexuality.  By #3, he will be thinking to himself that he is in love with Jean but “I can never tell her!  I have no right!  Not while I’m the leader of the X-Men and confined to this wheelchair!”  Right.  That’s why you can’t tell her.  Not because you’re her professor or twice her age.  Why bring up those objections?  That love, by the way, will be basically dropped for the next 30 years until it becomes part of what turns Xavier into Onslaught and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry, the less you know, the less confused you will be.

Second, there is Bobby’s sexuality.  This is important because, for many years, there was an “Iceman is gay” theory that eventually Marvel decided to embrace and make the character gay, but did a poor job of it, because when the young X-Men travel forward in time (don’t ask), Jean will say that Bobby is gay as if she read his mind.  Never mind the various women he dates over the next 50 years.  While some people point to this issue as evidence that he was gay “A girl . . . big deal!  I’m glad I’m not a wolf like you guys!”, he is also one of the team ogling Jean in her new uniform later (“Wowee!  She looks like she was poured into that uniform!”).  So, if you want to use one piece of evidence, you have to balance it against this one.  Bobby, in his early appearances, was written as a young heterosexual who wasn’t yet that interested in girls (though, in his origin story, written over the course of issues #44-46 he did have a girlfriend).  If they want to change him to gay, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t pretend that he’s like Northstar and was always written to be as such because it’s clearly a retcon.

So, now that we have that out of the way, let’s turn to the villain of the piece.  Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had already created a lot of excellent villains by this point (Doctor Doom, Marvel version of Loki, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Vulture, Radioactive Man) but they didn’t necessarily introduce them along with the villains.  Yes, the Fantastic Four got The Mole Man in their first issue but Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Wasp and The Hulk would all debut with really forgettable foes (unless you want to count Spider-Man’s burglar).  But Stan and Jack really hit one out of the park with Magneto, a foaming at the mouth villain who takes over a missile base in his first appearance, will have a group of evil mutants at his beck and command by #4 and will bedevil not only the X-Men but the Avengers, Thor, Captain America and even Doctor Doom before too long.  He also will eventually become the most morally gray of the original Silver Age Marvel villains and that makes him all the more interesting.  But that will all come later, including all the evidence that he was more complex than he seemed in his first appearance or that he had known Xavier years before.

After five pages where Magneto basically comes in and takes over an army base single-handedly, it’s time for the X-Men not just to work in the Danger Room but to show what they can do in actual combat.  So, Xavier sends them in with the comment “A crisis has occurred at Cape Citadel which leads me to believe the first of the evil mutants has made his appearance!”  Right.  The first of the evil mutants has made his appearance.  And you are lead to believe.  As if he hasn’t announced his presence and name to the world.  And as if you don’t know he’s your old friend.  Of course, the writers hadn’t decided that yet.  Like I said above, that wouldn’t be decided until #161 which wouldn’t be published for another 29 years.  So, for years, Xavier and Magneto act like they had never met to the point where in #4 they will meet on the astral plane (in the early issues Magneto had some telepathic powers that would be mostly dropped but would occasionally resurface over the years) and talk as if neither knows who the other is.

That’s the thing with retcons.  Some of them have to work against the evidence you see before you (not just the Bobby is gay theory or that Magneto and Xavier knew each other, but, to give a non-comic example, that Obi-Wan was unfamiliar with R2-D2 and C-3PO) but some of them are still really good.  I personally think the way that Chris Claremont would develop the existing relationship between Xavier and Magneto was a good choice and it helped to establish the moral ambiguity of Magneto that would, over the course of five years, change Magneto from the group’s arch-foe into a trusted alley and the replacement for Xavier as the head of the school and is a big part of why Claremont’s 15 year run on the title was so damned magnificent.  But that doesn’t change that it was not the intention of what was written here and does not fit the evidence we have before us.

On the way to fight Magneto the team is on a plane that is being guided by Xavier’s thought impulses.  Because we only get an exterior shot of the plane, it’s unclear if there is a pilot and he is just being guided or if Xavier is somehow making the plane move.  It’s just an odd panel that is never again, as far as I know, referenced again.

Most of the last few pages of the issue deal with the team attacking Magneto, which is mostly straight forward panels that show off the team’s abilities, though there is still one odd panel among those.  That’s the one where Cyclops switches to maximum power.  Now, earlier in the comic, we saw that Cyclops’ visor rises for him to utilize his optic blasts (using a switch at the side, though later comics will establish there’s a button in his gloves that also work but later comics will often show him using them in situations where that clearly wouldn’t work).  Here, Jack Kirby shows the beam as if it covers his whole face.  But, since the beam comes from his eyes, they shouldn’t ever be any larger than his eyes.  I don’t recall ever seeing an effect quite like this again, but it was memorable.

In fact, that’s part of what made the whole issue memorable.  Something about Cyclops and his power struck a nerve in me and later, when I would see what he went through in The Dark Phoenix Saga, he would become one of my favorite comic book characters, something that would last long past the point where Marvel decided that since Wolverine was a more popular character that they would completely destroy Cyclops’ character in a variety of ways (leaving his wife, psychically cheating on his wife, killing his mentor) and build up Wolverine as the one true character who is true to the dream.

Nothing that Marvel would do later takes away my enjoyment of this original book or the magnificent characters that were all created in one fell swoop.  This is seven magnificent characters, all created in one issue, all of whom have been characters in multiple films and television shows.  That’s one hell of a legacy.  And even if the next few years of the comic didn’t match up to this first issue (in spite of some memorable villains in the first year – Blob, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Mastermind, Toad), the writing on this comic would be some of the worst at Marvel and the art wouldn’t be much better, at least until Neal Adams would take over (to get an idea of the difference between the other artists and Adams look here, which starts with other artists and then ends with Adams).  It wouldn’t be until the New X-Men were created in 1975 that the comic would really start to move towards the kind of popularity that I discussed in the opening.  But this is still an issue that stands strong, one of the most important and seminal and yes, strange, and completely altered in most of its intentions and a lot of its details.

As a bonus, here’s a picture of the original X-Men as illustrated by one of my favorite comic artists, John Byrne.

“Kay could see how Michael stood to receive their homage.  He reminded her of statues in Rome, statues of those Roman emperors of antiquity, who, by divine right, held the power of life and death over their fellow men.  One hand was on his hip, the profile of his face showed a cold proud power, his body was carelessly, arrogantly at ease, weight resting on one foot slightly behind the other.  The caporegimes stood before him.  In that moment Kay knew that everything Connie had accused Michael of was true.” (p 419)

My Top 10

1. The Godfather
2. Sleuth
3. Play It Again Sam
4. Cabaret
5. Deliverance
6. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
7. The Heartbreak Kid
8. Fat City
9. Travels with My Aunt
10. Avanti

Note:  My full list is fourteen films long but three of the of the other four are reviewed below because of award nominations (The Emigrants, Sounder, Frenzy) leaving just one for the list down at the bottom.

Consensus Nominees:

1. The Godfather  (224 pts)
2. Cabaret  (192 pts)
3. Pete n Tillie  (80 pts)
4. Sounder  (80 pts)
5. Avanti  /  Deliverance  /  The Heartbreak Kid  (72 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium):

• The Godfather
• Cabaret
• The Emigrants
• Pete n Tillie
• Sounder

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Produced or Published)

• Lady Sings the Blues
• Young Winston

note:  Yes, this is essentially the Original Screenplay category.  But their bizarre notion of not having “factual material” in the Adapted category means we have two films based on non-fiction books in this category that are really adapted.  Thankfully this is the last of such nonsense; in 1973 all five are really original and in 1974 the category will just revert to “Original”.

WGA Awards:

Adapted Drama:

• The Godfather
• Deliverance
• Pete n Tillie
• Slaughterhouse Five
• Sounder

Adapted Comedy:

• Cabaret
• Avanti
• Butterflies are Free
• The Heartbreak Kid
• Travels with My Aunt

Original Comedy

• The War Between Men and Women

note:  Not certain what constitutes “Original” here but this is clearly and explicitly based on the writings of James Thurber.  Perhaps because it wasn’t based on a particular source they considered it original?

Golden Globe:

• The Godfather
• Avanti
• Cabaret
• Deliverance
• Frenzy
• The Heartbreak Kid

Nominees that are Original:  none

BAFTA:

• Cabaret
• Sleuth  (1973)

My Top 10

The Godfather

The Film:

What more can be said about this film that I haven’t already said?  Well, the argument could easily be made that there’s a lot more to be said about it since I have only written two reviews (the first here, when writing about Coppola for my Top 100 Directors project and the second here as a Best Picture winner) and there have been entire books written about this film.  But suffice it to say that this is one of the greatest films ever made and probably the best choice of Best Picture that the Academy ever made.  It is a triumph on every level of artistic merit, from the technical aspects to the writing and directing and especially, of course, the acting.

The Source:

The Godfather by Mario Puzo (1969)

Puzo is the first to admit that he wrote this novel to be a success and to make him money because his first two, more literary novels, had not made him much money and because he owed a lot of money.  In that, he did his job perfectly, because the novel made him very rich and was a massive success.  It’s a fairly enjoyable novel, not great, but compulsively readable with fascinating characters.

That being said, it’s worth wondering how much value you get out of reading the book.  Are there people who read the book who haven’t already seen the film?  That means they’re already coming to it with their notions fully formed and while a lot of the scenes in the book are fascinating, there are a number that drag and they’re ironically the ones that you’re not familiar with already (see below).  While the main characters are all really well drawn, the females suffer in the extreme from the madonna-whore complex (especially in the parts that aren’t in the film, like the Hollywood scenes).  There’s not a single female character in the book with any depth.  And aside from that, Puzo feels the need to explain a bit too much which the film can do with images and is why the film is considered so great.

In the end, the book was a fun read but I don’t think I’ll need to ever go back to it again (I used to own it years ago, so this is probably the third time I’ve read it).  There’s just too much in the films and too little of what’s not in the film is worth it.

The Adaptation:

Certain films, after their release, begin to transcend culture.  Such films get so many things written and published about them that it basically makes this section unnecessary.  There is a lot that can be written about what Coppola did to adapt the novel to the screen.  But Coppola has already published that on his own.  First, there is the Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay which publishes the complete screenplay with various annotations and commentary throughout.  The second book, published in 2016, really covers the adaptation itself.  It’s called The Godfather Notebook.  It is literally what Coppola used to write the script, with his own hand written pages of the novel, torn out of the book and pasted on the wall so that he could break the book down into filmable scenes and turn it into a screenplay.  It is, literally, a 786 page book that covers this entire section here.

On page 671 of Conversations at the American Film Institute with The Great Moviemakers: The Next Generation, ed. George Stevens, Jr, Robert Towne details how he was brought in to write the final scene between Michael and his father.

The last thing I will say is that the biggest difference between the novel and the film is that one section of the book would be skipped entirely (Book III, covering 30 pages, which would provide the basis for the De Niro sections of the sequel), that there is a lot more about Johnny Fontane and his later fortunes in the book (which are some of the least interesting parts of the book and were rightly skipped for the film) and that there is a lot, lot more sex in the book than there is in the film.

The Credits:

directed by Francis Ford Coppola.  screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola.
note:  The only mention of the source is in the opening titles: Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.

Sleuth

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film.  That’s because it’s one of the Top 5 films of 1972.  I find it utterly inexplicable that it was passed over for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay while it was nominated for Director and twice for Actor.  Sounder is a charming film, a nice film that works for families even while dealing with serious issues, but it is not anywhere near on the same level as Sleuth.  Then there is, of course, the secret of the film.  If you still don’t know what it is and didn’t listen to me when I told you to go watch it after posting my Nighthawk Awards for 1972 a couple of years ago, then it’s your own fault at this point.

The Source:

Sleuth by Anthony Shaffer  (1970)

I am reminded of James Goldman.  James was a playwright and won an Oscar for adapting his own play The Lion in Winter in 1968.  But, the next year his younger brother won his first Oscar (for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and would later become possibly the most famous screenwriter in Hollywood and today many people that know who William is might be surprised that his brother won an Oscar first.  Now we have Anthony Shaffer who, by early 1973, had won two Edgar Awards, the first for his play Sleuth, which was a big hit, then again for his screenplay for the hit film and then he wrote the script for the original The Wicker Man.  But, 1973 was also the year when his twin brother Peter’s play Equus went on stage, winning the first of two Tonys for Best Play and he would later win an Oscar for adapting his own play, Amadeus and you might find people today who know who Peter is and have no idea he has a brother who was a writer as well.

Sleuth is a very smart play, not so much a “who done it” but more of a “did he did actually do it?”  For it to work, of course, you had to have the perfect placement between the two acts and you had to provide a lie for the audience to believe (which, according to the cast list, they did in both London and New York and even did it slightly differently each time).  You have to have two good actors in order to pull it off plausibly (and they did – Anthony Quayle and Keith Baxter).  Shaffer wanted his originals on film, especially Quayle, but when your director wants Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, there’s no way you’re getting your original cast.  And it doesn’t matter.  Too bad for Quayle, but he’s not on the same level as these two legendary actors.

I don’t know how well the play would work today.  It’s still a really good play and some great acting even if you do know what’s going to happen.  That’s proven by the number of times I have watched the film and never failed to be satisfied.  But Shaffer thought so as well and was hesitant to sell the film rights and damage the potential of the play.

The Adaptation:

“In the original play, Milo Tindle wasn’t a Cockney, but instead directed a travel agency and was half-Jewish and half-Italian.  I preferred to make him a hairstylist, someone who had climbed the social ladder by fornicating, and the hairstylist is good at this.  One of the most brilliant aspects of Michael Caine’s portrayal is his accent. I tried to get him to use his accent like a violinist uses his violin.  He puts on the accent of a proper gentleman and then drops it.” (Joseph L. Mankiewicz Interviews, Brian Dauth, ed. p 129)

Mankiewicz has mentioned the key thing.  Almost all of the dialogue makes it to the film intact.  There is some opening up, especially the amusing opening scene in the maze and of course we see a lot more rooms of Wyce’s house than we did in the original one room play.  But it is a very faithful adaptation, so Shaffer clearly felt he had done it right the first time (and he’s correct).

The Credits:

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  Based on the play by Anthony Shaffer.  Screenplay by Anthony Shaffer.

Play It Again, Sam

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as my Under-appreciated Film of 1972 when I did my Year in Film back in 2010.  It’s an interesting film because it’s written by Woody Allen, both the film itself and the original play and it stars Allen but he didn’t direct it (it’s also set in San Francisco which sets it apart from most Woody Allen films).  But it is actually funnier than many of Allen’s early films.  It doesn’t quite have the same sense of comic timing that an actual Allen film would have but it is a very good film in a year that doesn’t actually have a lot of very good films.

The Source:

Play It Again, Sam by Woody Allen  (1969)

This was Woody Allen’s second foray into play-writing (his Don’t Drink the Water had been staged in 1966) but his first time acting on Broadway, though, of course, he had long been famous as a comedian, so he was widely known for his performances.  Woody stuck in the starring role for a year and when he left, it was likely to really begin his movie career and the role was taken by Bob Denver (yes, Gilligan).  I’ll let Clive Barnes, the editor of Best American Plays, Seventh Series: 1967-1973, where this play was the final play in the book take it from here: “This proved two things.  First it demonstrated that the play was not, as had been suggested, merely a vehicle for the very special comedy talents of Mr. Allen himself.  Second, and rather sadly, it also demonstrated that it was those special talents – rather than the play – that the public was paying to see, for, although Mr. Denver succeeded, the play itself failed and closed soon after Mr. Allen’s departure.” (p 564)

This play is actually vitally important in the history of the film because it was here where Woody Allen met both Tony Roberts and, more importantly, Diane Keaton.  Can you imagine the Allen films of the 1970’s had Allen not met these two, the best friend and the love interest?  Plus, it is a very funny play that makes great use of the Bogart legend and the idea of the film schlub who just wants to sit in the dark and dream of a better life that he can’t ever seem to find.

The Adaptation:

While the film opens the play up (which, according to Woody Allen in Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax was all Herbert Ross’ idea and Woody said “a lot of the adaptation, he should have credit for,” (p 344), giving us a lot of scenes outside on the streets of San Francisco (there was a strike going on in New York so the film was made and set in San Francisco even though the play was set in New York but it works just as well there), almost all of the actual dialogue in the film still comes from the original play.  The changes that are really made are the sight gags which might have been on stage but would have been hard to do every night and certainly aren’t included in the text of the play, the scenes like Allan fighting a losing battle against his hair dryer or his inability to remove a record from its sleeve without destroying it.  A very faithful rendition of the original play but since this had the same writer and star, it’s not a surprise.

The Credits:

directed by Herbert Ross.  based on the play by Woody Allen.  screenplay by Woody Allen.

Cabaret

The Film:

I seem to keep moving up and down on this film.  You can see some of that in my original review of the film.  But when I did the Nighthawk Awards, I think I under-appreciated the visionary look of the film when it comes to its cinematography and editing.  Certainly as I watched it this time, with Veronica watching it for the first time (how is it I had seen this film at least four times without her seeing it?), I was once again blown away by the technical display on-screen.

The Source:

Cabaret, book by Joe Masteroff, Music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, based on the play by John Van Druten (1966)

that play is I Am a Camera: A Play in Three Acts by John Van Druten (1951), Adapted from the Berlin Stories of Christopher Isherwood

The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood was first published as one book in 1945, but it was comprised of Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the latter of which was comprised of various short pieces published over the previous few years, most notably “Sally Bowles”, which was published in 1939

Oh, what a treasure trove of sources to read, and I read them all.  In fact, I also took a look at Cabaret: The Illustrated Book and Lyrics, which is illustrated with stills from the 1998 Broadway revival by Rob Marshall (future director of Best Picture winner Chicago), based on the production that Sam Mendes (future director of Best Picture winner American Beauty) put on in London.  The question is what order to look at the sources?  Perhaps we’ll go with reverse chronological order.

The original Broadway version of Cabaret is not necessarily less dark than the Bob Fosse film but it feels like it’s less dark.  Perhaps part of that is the look of the soundtrack (to the right), which I bought after watching friends perform in it in college.  Or perhaps because some of the songs that are in it are more light-hearted (or sound more light-hearted whether they are or not) and those are the songs that were cut from the film, charming songs like “So What” (sung by the landlady), “A Perfectly Marvelous Boy” (sung by Sally in the apartment) and “Meeskite” (sung by a Jewish tenant at a party who is planning to marry the landlady).  The original musical takes most of what had been brought on stage (and film) in I Am a Camera and brings them to musical life.  Most importantly, it anchored both parts of the show with really great songs that grab at you, from the welcoming Emcee intoning “Wilkommen” to the great climactic number “Life is a Cabaret”.  It’s quite a good musical and it’s worth seeing if you ever get a chance on stage partially because it is so different from the film.  This musical makes me glad that I got a chance to see Hamilton on stage, because I would have loved to have seen, on stage, what Sam Mendes (and Rob Marshall) did with this.

I Am a Camera is also a good play, because it does so much with the character of Sally Bowles.  She isn’t as much the center of the play because we don’t see her performing, but she does liven things up a bit.  There is a lot more character development and more subplots in this play because it doesn’t have to use time with the songs the way that Cabaret does (more on that below).  It was also made into a film, with a good performance from Julie Harris, who also played Sally in the original London version of the play.

The Berlin Stories are well-written and show why Christopher Isherwood was the most famous openly gay writer of his time.  The first part of the book, Mr Norris Changes Trains, is well-written and interesting, but other than the arrival in Berlin, it has almost nothing to do with the later adaptations of the work.  Also, while the title of the play and film would come from the first page of “A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)”, the first part of Goodbye to Berlin: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,” it is really the later story, “Sally Bowles” that would provide most of the plot and ideas that would comprise the adaptations (although parts of them would also come from “The Landauers”).  “Sally Bowles” is the best of the stories, because Sally springs to life in Isherwood’s prose and brings the story to life.  It would be too easy to say that Sally is the one really lively character, but that would be to demote Isherwood’s role really to that of a passive recorder, something that the well-written and deeply thought out introduction to the book by Armistead Maupin correctly warns against.

The Adaptation:

The big thing, which you can read about just about anywhere, is that when Bob Fosse made the film, he decided to cut all but one of the songs that are sung outside the setting of the Kit Kat Club itself, although according to All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse by Martin Gottfried, that was already decided by producer Cy Feuer and Fosse “enthusiastically supported Feuer’s notion of dropping all musical numbers that were not ‘justified.’.” (p 206)  That one song, “Tomorrow Belong to Me”, is also switched in setting and makes for a really disturbing scene.  Most of the light-hearted aspect of the play gets dropped because those songs in the boarding house are much lighter in tone than the others and what was emphasized instead was the growing darkening in the rise of the Nazis.

One of the other things is that Fosse, by dropping those songs, drops the subplot involving the Jewish tenant who agrees to marry the landlady.  Instead, to keep along those same lines (a romance that will become increasingly dangerous in the upcoming dark days), they put back in a subplot from the original novel that had been used in the play I Am a Camera about the man who is pretending not to be Jewish falling in love with the upper class Jewish woman.  I think this subplot is actually distracting from the strengths of the film, but it is true to the original sources.

There are a couple of things that continually change through all the adaptations.  In the original stories, “Christopher Isherwood”, the narrator, is gay and he is British.  Sally is also British.  The identity of who made Sally pregnant is no mystery – it’s Klaus.  But those are the things that change.  In I Am a Camera, Christopher and Sally are both still British, but Christopher is straight and the child is his.  In Cabaret, Clifford Bradshaw becomes American (played by Bert Convy) while Sally is still British and the baby is Cliff’s.  In the film version, Clifford Bradshaw is now Brian Roberts and he’s back to being British while it is Sally who is American.  This time, Brian is bi-sexual and there is debate over whether the child is his or Fritz’s.

The Credits:

directed by Bob Fosse.  based on the musical play “Cabaret”. book by Joe Masteroff.  lyrics by Fred Ebb.  based on the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood. screenplay by Jay Allen.

note: This is the same Jay Allen as Jay Presson Allen who is listed down below as the screenwriter on Travels with My Aunt.
note:  Though the IMDb does not mention it, the Gottfried book mentions script rewrites by Hugh Wheeler.

Deliverance

The Film:

This film is an example of why I distinguish between the best films and my favorite films.  This film is a **** film, it’s extremely well-made, the directing is excellent, the acting and writing are solid.  But it’s a not a movie to enjoy.  I feel uncomfortable every time I have seen it.  There are brilliant moments in it, like when Voight is on the ground and he sees Reynolds and the connection between the two.  But I think I’ll pass on ever watching it again after this unless I start some other project that forces me to watch it yet again.  As a Best Picture nominee, I already reviewed it here.

The Source:

Deliverance by James Dickey (1970)

This novel was on the Modern Library List at #42.  It was also on the Time Magazine list.  It is a well-written novel and extremely riveting (at least if you haven’t seen the film and don’t know what will happen – if you’ve seen the film it becomes a little less riveting) but I think those two lists are over-rating it a bit.  I wouldn’t classify it as a great novel and I am surprised that both groups included it.

It’s the story of four men from Atlanta who go into the back woods on a canoe trip before the river is dammed.  Things quickly take a violent and horrifying turn when they run into a couple of locals who rape one of the men and are about to do the same to the narrator before they are rescued.  From there on out, what begins as a trip against nature becomes a trip against a nightmare and the narrator is forced to climb for his life, kill a man and hope that he can outwit the local law enforcement just to arrive home alive.  As I said, it’s riveting, and with Dickey (who was the U.S. Poet Laureate for a stretch), we have a masterful use of language.

The Adaptation:

The film follows very closely to the book, which is to be expected since Dickey himself wrote the screenplay.  There is a slight difference in the end when it is the sheriff himself who suspects what has happened while in the book it was a deputy who was so insistent.  But in the most famous scene, two things are different.  The line “squeal like a pig” is only in the film (and indeed, there are disagreements over who thought it up, though it doesn’t seem to be Dickey) and in the book, Ed never actually sees Lewis and makes a sign for him (“I knelt down. As my knees hit, I heard a sound, a snap-slap off in the woods, a sound like a rubber band popping or a sickle-blade cutting quick. The older man was standing with the gun barrel in his hand and no change in the stupid, advantage-taking expression of his face, and a foot and a half of bright red arrow was shoved forward from the middle of his chest. It was there so suddenly it seemed to have come from within him.”).  It’s definitely the right move in the film, as it provides that great visual image and the connection between the two men.

Boorman, in his autobiography Adventures of a Suburban Boy writes about adapting the novel: “The first difficulty lay with the opening.  The first third of the novel explores the lives of the four men in Atlanta.  Dickey cleverly evokes the indeterminate dissatisfactions of their comfortable lives.  I decided to start the movie with the construction of the dam that will tame and kill this beautiful river, interposed with the four men arriving in the mountains with their canoes.” (p 183-184)  That was after Dickey had already attempted his own script: “It transpired that Dickey had written a screenplay himself.  He had simply put the entire novel into script form.  I wrote my own version and submitted it to the studio.” (p 182)

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by John Boorman.  Screenplay by James Dickey based on his novel.

“everything you always wanted to know about sex”*
* but were afraid to ask

The Film:

When people say to Woody Allen that they like his early, funny films this is the kind of film they’re talking about.  There are others, of course, but this is a prime example because it reflects the kind of things that Allen was doing before he concentrated on being a filmmaker.  This hearkens back to his stand-up routines, to his first film (What’s Up Tiger Lily) and to the short writings that he would do in The New Yorker.  But it’s also not very reflective of the kind of filmmaking that Allen would do later.  It’s really the last of his films like this because when he would make Sleeper the next year, while there would be lots of gags, it would also start to focus a bit more on character and story.

What we have here is a series of short vignettes.  As mentioned below, Allen got the idea for this film when he saw David Reuben, the author of the famous book, use one of his jokes on The Tonight Show and decided to make the film as revenge.  So this film takes several different questions that are addressed (seriously) in the book and develops short little skits around them.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t get off to a great start because the opening bit, “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?”, with a court jester (Allen) trying to romance the Queen (Lynn Redgrave) just isn’t very funny.  But it definitely kicks up a notch with the next one “What is Sodomy?” which goes a different direction than you would expect when a doctor (Gene Wilder) ends up having an affair with a sheep.

The first four sketches are a little uneven but are more funny than not.  Then we get to the final three sketches and they highlight the unevenness of the film.  The fifth sketch, “What are Sex Perverts?” gives us a game show where people have to guess what the person’s perversion is.  As breaking into a game show would later become a humorous trope in comedic films, this is a nice early use of it and the straight faces we get from these people (including Regis) asking the questions works as a great contrast against the subject matter in question.  The sixth vignette, “Are the Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate?” starts off strong with John Carradine playing a lunatic scientist with all sorts of bizarre ideas but once it moves on to a parody of The Blob with a giant breast on the lose, it loses focus, which is a bit emblematic of the whole film.  If the film had ended there, it definitely would be sitting down in the *** range.  But then the film really comes to life with “What Happens During Ejaculation?”.  With a body being run by the likes of Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds we finish with one of Allen’s funniest little sequences, with Randall getting off the best line in the film: (Randall:  I don’t know if we’re gonna make it or not, doesn’t look too good.  The Girl:  I’m a graduate of New York University.  Randall (confidently):  We’re gonna make it.).

You don’t have to like Woody Allen to like the film.  It’s one of the films that could help someone get into him.  Yes, he does play several parts and his performances in the first and sixth sequences wear a little thin.  But he’s perfectly placed in the final sequence, and just like everything else in that final one, it helps things go out with a climax.

The Source:

Everything you always wanted to know about sex* *but were afraid to ask by David Reuben, M.D.  (1969)

One of the most famous books about sex ever published and a massive seller.  It has useful information that still resonates today in that it can counter a lot of ridiculous things you would learn about sex on the internet.

The Adaptation:

Allen didn’t really adapt the book.  He looked at the chapter headings of the book and created his own vignettes based around them.  According to the IMDb “Woody Allen saw Dr. David Reuben promoting his book, on which this film is based, on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962).  When asked by Johnny Carson “Is sex dirty?”, Reuben replied, “It is if you’re doing it right” which is a line from Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969).  Allen was offended by Dr. Reuben using his joke, so he made this film as a form of revenge against him. Dr. Reuben did not like the film.”  It’s really the only correct way to adapt such a book anyway.  I should note that in Woody Allen on Woody Allen, he doesn’t give that anecdote at all, simply saying that he saw Reuben on television and thought the idea of funny sketches to the questions would make a funny movie.  As he says, “I would use his questions but add my answers.” (p 58)

The Credits:

written for the screen and directed by woody allen.  from the book Everything you always wanted to know about sex* *but were afraid to ask by dr. david reuben.

The Heartbreak Kid

The Film:

In 1993, Sleepless in Seattle was sweeping people over but it left me cold when I left the theater.  It was easy for me to pinpoint my issue with it – the Bill Pullman character.  He was a nice guy, a bit of a drip, but a nice, devoted guy.  Yet, the writers needed to figure out some way to bring Meg Ryan together with Tom Hanks, so you’re supposed to just accept that Pullman is a boring, drip and that Ryan is better off with Hanks.  I just felt bad for Pullman.

Here we have The Heartbreak Kid, and I’m still not really sure how I feel about it.  Charles Grodin and Jeannie Berlin play a newly married couple on their honeymoon.  Berlin is a bit annoying – she constantly wants to be told in bed how much he wants her (he finally just gets tired of it and snaps at her), she needs his attention, and at the beach she refuses to use any sunscreen and gets a horrible burn, essentially curtailing her participation in their honeymoon.  I suspect all of this is in there to make it less objectionable when her husband wants to dump her.  See, the real problem isn’t her.  (Hell, on one level the problem isn’t her at all – Jeannie Berlin gives the best performance in the film and even if she didn’t win the Oscar, she does win the Nighthawk.)  The problem is her husband.  A few minutes before she came out on to the beach (he got tired of waiting for her) he noticed Cybill Shepherd in a bathing suit with the sun shining behind her blonde hair and he no longer had any interest in his marriage.  He just wants the Midwestern blonde with the bombshell body.

This film is written by Neil Simon and directed by Elaine May, both of whom were born with knacks for comedy, so this awkward take on the An American Tragedy story (based on a short story) finds ways to make us laugh (awkwardly) while Grodin is trying to balance his wife, stuck back in the hotel room, with the beautiful blonde and the blonde’s father, well played by Eddie Albert in a role that is so obstructionist to Grodin’s desires that he could give Ted Cruz a lesson in how not to get things done.  Grodin is desperate and pathetic and almost everything in the film makes me wince.  No wonder Ben Stiller decided to star in the remake – his whole awkward comedy schtick seems to come straight from this film.

In the end, the film runs along a very thin line and ends up as a 75.  Films that I give a 75 are rare, because they are quite good, but they fall just that tiny bit short of making it to ***.5 and thus don’t make it into consideration for my Best Picture awards, which is more notable for Comedies because of the fewer contenders for my Comedy awards.  It makes me laugh and it makes me wince (not necessarily a fault), but there’s something a little bit off that keeps me from bumping it up that tiny little bit.

The Source:

“A Change of Plan” by Bruce Jay Friedman (1966)

This is really an unpleasant little story.  A guy is with a girl for a few years and then they get married: “And so finally, after four years of drift, they had found all exits barricaded and gotten married in a sudden spurt, bombing their parents with the news.”  But, on their honeymoon, he meets a Minnesota blonde (“She had a nice fleshiness, a good hundred thirty pounds to his bride’s hundred four. He caught her scent, too, just like honey.”  So, he lies to his wife, goes after the blonde, then dumps his wife, gets a quick divorce and moves to Minnesota just to get the blonde.

The Adaptation:

The film makes a major change that is absent in the story and actually makes Grodin’s character much more acceptable: the annoyance of the wife.  There’s nothing in the original story about her whining in bed, needing to be wanted.  The whole thing with the sunburn that allows him to get out of the room and pursue the blonde isn’t in the story.  Much as I find myself uncomfortable in watching the film, well, that character is far less objectionable than the one in the original story.

Other than that, the film pretty much follows the story, just expanding what is only a six page story into a full-length feature film.

The Credits:

Directed by Elaine May.  Based on “A Change of Plan” by Bruce Jay Friedman.  Screenplay by Neil Simon.

Fat City

The Film:

By 1972, John Huston had been in the wilderness for a bit.  Yes, since 1964 he had made several films and the sources included Carson McCullers and the freaking Bible.  But he hadn’t really made a good film in eight years.  Then he returned to some solidly literary sources, first with Leonard Gardner in Fat City before upping the ante later in the decade with Kipling and Flannery O’Connor before tackling really difficult works in the 80’s (Under the Volcano, The Dead).  Fat City, a story that could take him back to basic storytelling seemed to be something that lit a fire in him and the rest of his career, while he would still have some duds (I’m looking at you, Annie), he would also have some of the biggest triumphs of his career as well.

Tully is a boxer.  Or at least he was a boxer.  Maybe he still is, though he’s nearing thirty and he’s been spending most of his time drinking and picking crops as a dayworker.  But he decides to spend a little time down at the Y punching at a bag and he meets Ernie.  Ernie is young, fresh-faced, just a kid who wants to get in the ring but he seems to have a good punch and might have some talent.  Tully’s not looking to become a manager, so he steers Ernie towards his old manager and kind of continues on his way through life.  But the meeting seems to have awakened something in Tully.  Or maybe it’s the approach of thirty.  Either way, he starts looking at maybe getting in the ring himself and reminding himself of who he is.

Fat City isn’t a movie of redemption, of a boxer looking for the comeback who makes it good.  Nor is it about taking someone young under your wing and trying to live through them.  It’s just a story of a couple of guys and the ways their lives briefly intercept, the way the older one sees something in the younger one.  But it is a well-written and well-directed film.  Most importantly, it is a well-acted film that seems almost naturalistic, not because of the style of acting but because it is not populated with well-known actors.  In the role of Tully is Stacey Keach in what might be his finest film role.  Ernie is played by Jeff Bridges, still young and just a year after The Last Picture Show.  There is also Susan Tyrell playing the barfly that Tully shacks up with for a while when her man is in prison and Tyrell earned an Oscar nomination for her performance.

There is no other sport in which my enjoyment of the sport is so contrasted against the quality of the movies made about (though it doesn’t hurt that there are more films about boxing than any other sport).  But that might be because so many boxing films end up being about so much more than the sport itself.  What we have here is a character study about someone aging out and someone growing up and how they briefly intersect.  Boxing just happens to be what they do.

The Source:

Fat City by Leonard Gardner (1969)

A very good little book about two men who meet on different paths in the boxing world in Stockton.  Denis Johnson hits it right in the introduction: “Though the two men hardly meet, the tale blends the perspective on them until they seem to chart a single life of missteps and baffled love, Ernie its youth and Tully its future.”  That’s a great way of describing this novel.  A slice of life from Stockton, a city that can’t ever seem to become more than it is, right on the edge of the agricultural world (because of its location in Central Valley) and not quite able to become a major city.  When Ernie, the young boxer, is headed back home after a fight in Utah and says he’s going to Stockton he is told “What would anybody want to go to Stockton for?”  A really good book currently in print from New York Review Books Classics that I highly recommend.  Definitely one of the best books that I have read for the first time because of this project.

The Adaptation:

The film, while a faithful adaptation of the book, makes a couple of important changes.  The first is in lessening Ernie’s place in the story.  Yes, we see his domestic situation, but he’s half the book and it really feels like he’s a secondary character in the film while Tully is the lead while in the book it almost perfectly is divided between them.  The second is the ending.  In the book, it ends with Ernie returning home, in a beautifully written line (“He came lightly down the metal steps into balmy air and diesel fumes, and feeling in himself the potent allegiance of fate, he pushed open the door to the lobby, where unkempt sleepers slumped upright on the benches.”).  The poignant scene that ends the film with the two men sitting together in a diner, not speaking is entirely from the filmmakers (though, since Gardner wrote the script, hard to say if it was his idea or Huston’s).

The Credits:

Directed by John Huston.  Screenplay by Leonard Gardner.  Based on the novel “Fat City” by Leonard Gardner.

Travels with My Aunt

The Film:

This was kind of a last hurrah for George Cukor.  He had been a great director in the Hollywood Studio System but in the 60’s, he started to lose his way.  He did manage to finally win Best Director at the Oscars in 1964 for My Fair Lady, but he would only make a handful of films after that and this was the only high spot.  It proved, once again, that there was probably no greater Hollywood director of females than Cukor, as his only real competition are Bergman (Swedish) and Woody Allen (decidedly not Hollywood).  It was also a bit of a strange piece, because it is a Graham Greene Comedy (more on that below).

It’s the story of a retired bank director who, at his mother’s funeral, meets again his Aunt Augusta, who he has not seen in many years.  As can be guessed, from other such films, meeting her will end up in a whirlwind of adventures for him and while he tries to stay the kind of mild mannered Englishman you would expect from a retired bank director (he is played by Alec McCowen, who died not long before I re-watched the film and was always quite good in such roles (he was also Q in Never Say Never Again, the unofficial Connery Bond film and he was quite enjoyable and droll)).  But McCowen is really just a side role in his own adventures.  It’s his aunt, played with a zest for life that you can’t imagine from anyone than Maggie Smith, that is really the star of the show and doesn’t she know it.  She uses the funeral as a chance to reunite herself with him and you can see some revelations coming later but I won’t mention them in case you’ve never had a chance to see the film (which is worth seeing) or read the book (which is also worth reading).

It’s easy to see how this film wouldn’t work for a lot of people.  It has a lot of whimsy and a lot of disjointed stories that seem like they are a connection of anecdotes strung together (which is kind of how the book is), but it keeps moving so steadily because of Smith’s wonderful performance, one that can capture a woman approaching old age (long before Smith was actually doing so) and when she was a still a schoolgirl and allowing herself to be seduced by a complete stranger.  It’s quite simply a fun film and in a year with The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret and The Emigrants, it’s nice to just have a fun film.

The Source:

Travels with My Aunt: A Novel by Graham Greene (1969)

“Greeneland has been described often as a land bleak and severe. A whisky priest dies in one village, a self-hunted man lives with lepers in another. But Greeneland has its summer regions, and in the sunlight everything looks a bit different.”  That’s the jacket flap on my hardcover copy of Travels with My Aunt.  It is a fairly accurate assessment, both of Greene’s more serious works (which you should read if you haven’t, since he was one of the great writers of the 20th Century) and of this book as well.  It’s not like Greene had never done a comedy before (his Our Man in Havana is very sly and droll), but he hadn’t done anything like this book.  It is a novel, but it reads almost more like a series of short little amusing vignettes.

Henry Pulling, a recently retired bank manager, meets his Aunt Augusta at his mother’s funeral, having not seen her for many years.  Augusta than pulls him along on her travels (I think this was the first book that made me realize that Britain used to have very strict rules about how much currency you were allowed to take out of the country and it stuns me that the Brits managed to survive like that for so long) all across Europe, in search of lovers past, in search of lovers future, in search of adventure and excitement and fun.  Pulling’s an Englishman who was a bank manager; fun isn’t something he’s used to.  Nor is he used to having his mother’s ashes used to smuggle cannabis by his aunt’s man servant.  Or discovering that the past he thought he had wasn’t quite what he imagined.

This really is a fun little novel, partially because it is so different from anything else that Greene every published.  I have read all of Greene’s novels, and while this doesn’t belong anywhere near the top of the list, it is certainly one I return to for the sheer enjoyment.

The Adaptation:

“During the script conferences, Cukor continues, ‘Jay Allen and I often compared a scene in the screenplay with the way Greene had written it in the book, and used as much of the dialogue from the novel as possible. We clung very much to the spirit of the novel, and made changes reluctantly and only in the interest of dramatizing the story more vividly.’

One such alteration occurs at the finale, and for Greene this change contributed to what he terms the movie’s ‘misinterpretation’ of his original story.  In correspondence Greene has said, ‘When I read the script that was smuggled to me from Spain’ where Cukor’s unit was doing location work, ‘I was horrified.’

‘Greene’s ending to the story is more hardbitten than the one in the film,’ Cukor concedes. ‘In the novel the aging Visconti is going to marry a twelve-year-old girl in South America and desert Aunt Augusta once more, even though she still loves him.  In the movie, on the other hand, we show her at long last becoming disenchanted with Visconti, and thereby being released from the thrall of her lifelong infatuation with him – something which Greene, perhaps with greater truth and realism, does not allow to happen in the novel.'”  (George Cukor by Gene D. Phillips, p 144)

It is true that the ending of the film is quite different than the original novel and that the rest of the film does follow quite well along with the original.

The Credits:

Directed by George Cukor. Screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler. Based Upon the Novel by Graham Greene.

note: If you read the Wikipedia page on the film, you might think that Katharine Hepburn contributed to the script and practically wrote the first draft.  There is nothing to support that and even though Wikipedia points towards TCM, it’s clear from the TCM notes page on the film that this is completely untrue.

Avanti!

The Film:

I came to this film late in my journey through the Billy Wilder oeuvre.  In spite of its big success at the Golden Globes (six nominations and it won Actor – Comedy) it hadn’t seemed a big deal to see it since it hadn’t received any Oscar nominations.  In fact, no film has ever received as many Globe nominations or come anywhere close to as many as Globe points while failing to earn any Oscar nominations which might say something about it.  And when I did finally see it, I wasn’t overwhelmed.  Oh, it was a good film, a fairly funny film with solid comedic performances from Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills (Hayley’s older sister).  It even had a good comedic premise for the film: Lemmon’s father has died in Italy and he goes to retrieve the body only to discover that his father was having an affair with Mills’ mother who also died in the crash and of course Lemmon and Mills fall into a measure of love and have a short fling before heading back to their own lives.  Yet, in some ways, it seemed almost a letdown for Wilder, not quite the frenzied plots of his earlier films and something which could make a more mellow 70’s comedy (and would, a few years later, in Same Time Next Year).

If all of this feels like a bit of letdown it’s interesting to note what Wilder originally wanted to do.  As he explained to Cameron Crowe in Conversations with Wilder, his original plan was to have Wendell Armbruster Senior, the dead man, having been involved in an affair with a bellhop instead of a British woman and for the bellhop, of course, to be male.  Wilder thought that was a daring choice and could have made for a more interesting comedy (and he’s right) but the studio insisted strongly that it wouldn’t play well.  I do have to wonder if the makers of Death at a Funeral had ever read about this before they decided to bring in their own similar idea into that film which is one of the most brilliant ideas in the whole film.

The film runs well over two hours and it really didn’t need to.  Yes, there are some subplots (the actual bellhop is hoping to get back to America and blackmails Lemmon in two different ways which also brings in a nude swimming scene) and things go off the deep end a bit when the bodies are actually taken hostage by the people whose vineyard was damaged in the crash.  Wilder could have dialed back some of the subplots, focused more just on Lemmon and Mills and cut the film down closer to an hour and a half and it would run much more smoothly.  But in the end, it’s able to overcome the length and still provide us with a good time because this is still Billy Wilder and while the lines might not be at the top of his game, they are still pretty good:

Carlo Carlucci: You see, I have been offered a job with an American chain of hotels… the Sheraton. And there are a couple of openings and one of them is in Damascus.

J.J. Blodgett: Damascus, hmm… Now don’t quote me on this, but with the Russian presence escalating in the Mediterranean, and the military posture of the Arabs stiffening and the first strike capabilities of the Israelis at its peak, the whole place is a powder keg that could blow up in your face any second. My advice is, forget Damascus.

Carlo Carlucci: Thank you. In that case I’d better take the other job.

J.J. Blodgett: What’s that?

Carlo Carlucci: The Sheraton in New York.

J.J. Blodgett: [Slight pause] Hmm… Take the one in Damascus!

The Source:

Avanti! or A Very Uncomplicated Girl by Samuel Taylor  (1968)

Samuel Taylor had a previous play adapted by Wilder, Sabrina Fair.  But Wilder had taken the premise from the play and stripped it of pretty much all the dialogue and created his own film that was much more Wilder than anything Taylor had come up with.  This time, Taylor’s play is a one room Comedy about a man who discovers that his father wasn’t just vacationing in Rome but was having a long time affair once a year and then he falls for the daughter of the woman that his father was having the affair with.  In the end, everything works out (even the problem of what to do with the bodies) and they have a short affair of their own before getting back to their own lives.

If you think I might have put up the wrong play on the right, you are mistaken.  After the success of the film, the play was able to return to the stage in London and Taylor, and, surprisingly, changed the name of the play, apparently deciding not to capitalize on the film.

The Adaptation:

“Taylor’s single-set play takes place in a hotel room in Rome.  Wilder opened it out for the screen by relocating the action at a health resort on the Italian island of Ischia.  What’s more, in reimagining the story for the screen, Wilder kept only Taylor’s premise (the deaths of the couple’s parents, which bring them to Italy) and the resolution (their adopting their parents’ annual romantic ritual).” (Some Like it Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder, Gene D. Phillips, p 247-248)

Wilder really did retool the entire play.  He kept a few lines but most of the memorable lines come from him (such as “The coroner, he eats very well. He knows all the widows.”) as does the nude swimming scene.  The original play had the man’s wife with him in Italy for both the beginning and the conclusion of the play which makes it harder to sympathize with his situation.  He also deliberately had the female lead be overweight so that the viewer wouldn’t feel that Armbruster (a name that Wilder created which is much better than the Alexander Ben Claiborne but going by “Sandy” of the play) was giving up something better by returning to his wife.  This film is a lot closer to the original play than Sabrina was but it’s still much more Wilder than it is Taylor.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Billy Wilder.  Based on the Stage Play “Avanti!” by Samuel Taylor.  Screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond.

Consensus Nominees

Pete ‘n’ Tillie

The Film:

Pete and Tillie are being set up at a party by their mutual friend Gertrude.  They are completely wrong for each other in just about every way, from her shyness to his brashness, from his womanizing to her virginity.  So of course you know this going to be a romantic film.  Pete is played by Walter Matthau and Tillie is played by Carol Burnett (her first major film role though she had been a star on her show for years already) so we know this going to be a comedy.  So we have a romantic comedy but there is an awful lot of emotional pathos to it.

Tillie doesn’t really want to go out with Pete but he talks his way back to her apartment and then manages to score additional dates and then eventually sleeps with her.  That will eventually lead to marriage (“The honeymoon’s over,” she tells him, “it’s time to get married” in a line that comes straight from the book and was the tagline for the film) and to a child.  But the child will only bring happiness for a while because there is Pete’s constant infidelity and more importantly, the generic movie illness (although it was a book illness first) that will kill the child when he is still young.

The writing, based on a long story by constant New Yorker writer Peter de Vries, is okay while the direction doesn’t have a whole lot of subtlety to it (but then again, that was never Martin Ritt’s style).  What it has going for it are four performances.  There are the lead performances from Burnett and Matthau (both of which earned Globe noms) and the supporting performance from Geraldine Page, which of course earned her an Oscar nomination.  Page is quite enjoyable as the woman who refuses to let anyone know her age to the point where we get one of film’s more enjoyable catfights, with Page and Burnett slapping it out in the mud and the leaves.  There is also Rene Auberjonois as Burnett’s gay friend who also wants to know Page’s age and is willing to step up and be married to Tillie when Pete has just about disappeared.

The film is, ostensibly a Comedy, but there is an awful lot of drama going on as well and it’s hard to know if you’re supposed to laugh or cry and I just don’t know if that’s a compliment to the film or not.

The Source:

Witch’s Milk by Peter De Vries (1968)

A novella that was published with another thematically linked novella (The Cat’s Pajamas) that I didn’t bother to read, it’s a decent story about a woman, Tillie, who gets almost tricked into a relationship which then develops into marriage and a child but both are cut short.  There’s not a whole lot to it and I suspect it might have slipped away (and still really has) if not for the film adaptation.

The Adaptation:

A lot of what is in the film, including a lot of specific lines, comes directly from the book.  But there isn’t enough in the book to sustain the film so characters like Burt (the faithless husband of Gertrude, the Geraldine Page character) are invented and characters like Jimmy (Auberjonois) have their roles greatly increased (he only actually appears at the end of the book).  Even the scenes that come straight from the book tend to have additional dialogue to pad their lengths.

The Credits:

Directed by Martin Ritt.  Based on the novella “Witch’s Milk” by Peter de Vries.  Written for the Screen and Produced by Julius J. Epstein.

Sounder

The Film:

Because this film was nominated for Best Picture, I have already reviewed it here.  One thing that I definitely thought about this time is that it’s kind of ridiculous that Paul Winfield was nominated for Best Actor.  He’s quite good, but he’s missing from well over half the film while off on the work gang and he is definitely a supporting performer.  I must say, this is one of those films that actually suffers from being nominated for Best Picture because I am incapable of watching it and not thinking “Really?  This was nominated over Sleuth?”

The Source:

Sounder by William H. Armstrong (1969)

When I was in the fourth grade we were assigned to read a Newbery winner.  I read them all.  Because I’m like that.  That means I read Sounder sometime in the fourth grade, but I have no memory of it.  Given its subject, the love between a boy and his dog while his father is out of the picture (he’s in prison), it’s no wonder that it won the Newbery.  I’m not cynical enough to say that this was written with the award in mind (actually, I’m totally cynical enough to say that but I see no evidence that this is the case so I won’t make that slanderous claim), but it totally fits the kind of thing that the Newbery often rewards.

It’s a good book for kids.  It tells the story of a kid, which is always a good subject choice.  It gives him hardships to deal with but in the end, he is able to grow and have a better future than he has had of the past (he is working towards an education).  It brings up social issues (the family is poor and black in the south) but it doesn’t bludgeon you over the head with them.

It doesn’t work as well for an adult, though, because it is aimed a bit too much towards children and gets a bit too simplistic.  But it’s easy to see how the producers saw there was a movie to be made from it.

The Adaptation:

The first major change becomes apparent when you read what I wrote above and what I wrote in my original review.  I talked in the original review about how this film, unlike Old Yeller or The Yearling, was a drama and not a Kids film.  But the book is clearly a kids book (as is evidenced by the Newbery Award).  It was Lonne Elder III, the screenwriter who made that change of focus, as can be seen when looking at the notes on the AFI page for the film: “While the book centers on the family’s concern for the dog, screenwriter Lonne Elder III stated in a Nov 1972 interview in the New Watts Awakening that he preferred to focus on the family’s daily survival.”

Aside from that, there are a considerable number of changes, some of which are also to be found mentioned on that AFI page.  It talks about how the book ends with the death of the dog and the father while the boy (all the characters are unnamed in the book) lives for a year with the teacher while his father is gone.  But the key character of Mrs. Boatwright, who helps the boy find out where his father is in the film, is not a character at all in the book.

But they key thing comes down to Elder’s decision.  The book was about a relationship between a boy and his dog.  The film is so much more than that, a drama about growing up poor and black in the south and what you can try to do to escape that poverty.

The Credits:

director: Martin Ritt.  screenplay by Lonne Elder III.  based on the Newbery Award winning novel by William H. Armstrong.

Oscar Nominees

The Emigrants

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film once because it was nominated for Best Picture (that makes this the fifth of the year and one of those rare years where all five films nominated were adapted).  In fact, it was nominated for Best Foreign Film in 1971 and then nominated for Best Picture the next year (there are rules that don’t allow that anymore).  I talked about how, though it was a Swedish film with two of Bergman’s biggest stars, it wasn’t an insult to Bergman that it was nominated for Best Picture when he hadn’t yet been nominated because this film was much more suited for the Academy than his were.  It’s lush and colorful and moving, though a bit slow and not even close to the level of Bergman’s best work (or even his next level down).

The Source:

Utvandrarna (1949) and Invandrarna (1952) by Vilhelm Moberg

When I first saw The Emigrants and learned that there was a sequel to the film (The New Land, nominated for Best Foreign Film in 1972), I figured that there was one long novel that had been split into two for the films.  As it turned out, it was the opposite.  There are, in fact, four novels in the series by Vilhelm Moberg, published over the years 1949 to 1959.  The first two (The Emigrant, Unto a Good Land) were adapted into this film while the second two (The Settlers, The Last Letter Home) were adapted into the second film (which I won’t be reviewing because it wasn’t nominated for its script and didn’t make my Top 10 in 1973).  In all, it covers the journey of a family (and a few others) as they leave Sweden in the middle of the 19th Century and come to America to find a new life.  They are solid novels (at least the first two are) and have long been held up as among the heights of Swedish literature.

The Adaptation:

The film covers the family’s time in Sweden including the events that make them decide to leave Sweden, the journey across the Atlantic and then their trek deeper into America, eventually settling in Minnesota, as well as some time there.  The first novel ends with their arrival in New York and they way they are awestruck at the city and how different it is from where they left.  It is the second novel that covers the journey to America and their first year there (including the birth of their first American child).  Almost everything we see on the screen was in the original novels, though a few things are compressed so that we can get to it all in the space of one film (though, a long film, clocking in at 191 minutes).

The Credits:

Directed, Photographed and Edited by Jan Troell.  From a novel by Vilhelm Moburg.  Screenplay by Jan Troell and Bengt Forslund.

Lady Sings the Blues

The Film:

The music is jarring and a bit harsh as we watch the woman, in still photographs, being brought into a jail and fingerprinted.  It makes you think that this will be a thriller or a crime film or that this is a woman about to go on Death Row, something like I Want to Live.  Indeed, it ends on a still photograph where the woman looks completely deranged.  And it turns out, she’s thrown in a literally padded cell.  But this is a biopic, a Musical, the life of one of the most important and talented singers in American musical history, a woman whose deeply troubled life ended when she was barely older than I am now.  With a bit of irony, I write these words on the same day where Aretha Franklin, one of the very few black female singers, possibly the only one who could be legitimately said to be a greater figure in American musical history than Billie Holiday, has died.  But other than their race, gender, talent and that they were both signed by John Hammond, the similarities pretty much end there.  Franklin had a loving family, rose to great respect among the entire world, was beloved by almost everyone and died after a long, amazing life.  Holliday lived and worked in brothels, begged money from her father, was raped, beaten and had to fight for everything and was just five months older than I am now when she died.

As a biopic this isn’t much.  It does what all biopics do, especially ones about singers, focusing on their singing and on the more lurid aspects of their lives.  Holiday was born very poor, got by on guile, luck, hard work and learning to survive.  But she also had an amazing voice and she is finally given a chance to show that off.  That manages to impress not only her future nightclub manager but also, before too long, a rich man (with Mob connections) who wants her voice as much as he wants her body.  But Holiday, sadly, ends up in the thrall of heroin and she spends the rest of her life trying to balance her career with her need for the drugs.

It’s a little surprising to watch the film and realize that it was nominated for its writing.  But, it was during the short stretch where films based on “factual material” were considered as part of the Original Screenplay category and it was a weak year for original scripts.  The Art Direction and Costume Design were also nominated and though they are on my list, I probably should have had them higher up.  But none of that really matters, nor do Richard Pryor or Billy Dee Williams in key early film roles.  This is the film where Diana Ross became an actress, seemingly out of nowhere.  You can see a fictionalized version of this in Dreamgirls, but basically Ross told Berry Gordy he needed to give her this role and since he was producing the film, he did.  She didn’t disappoint, giving a bravura performance, though she had the bad luck to run up against Liza Minnelli at the Oscars.  It’s a decent film, a low-level *** film, so it isn’t a bad film.  But really, it’s all about Ross reaching down, finding her inner Billie Holiday, whether working at a brothel, wowing the crowds or trying to get off the junk.

The Source:

Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday with William Dufty  (1956)

I am a bit mixed when it comes to musical autobiographies (or biographies).  Even when it’s someone I really like, someone like Bruce Springsteen or Carrie Brownstein, I’m hard to pressed to really get into the book.  If it’s someone whose music isn’t really to my taste, someone like Billie Holiday, it’s really hard for me to sink into the book.  It doesn’t help that Holiday lived such a messed up life, born when her parents were fifteen and thirteen, raised at times in a brothel, begging her father at his club for money to take home to her mother and, of course, all the years on heroin.  I mean, what does it even say about a person when she publishes such a book at the age of 41?  Is it any surprise then that she died at 44?  It is well-written enough (Dufty did the actual writing) and it is certainly lurid (although supposedly not nearly as lurid as it could have been, at least in regards to her famous lovers).

The Adaptation:

Only the bare bones of the book are up on screen.  Indeed, you could make the argument that this film is more of an original screenplay than an adapted screenplay just from seeing what made it on screen.  It’s telling that Holiday didn’t marry Louis McKay until after the book was published and that he’s barely mentioned at all.  He’s the second leading character in the film (the fifty dollars really happened but not from McKay – she met McKay one night in Harlem when she kept a whore from picking his pocket).  The audition where Billie gets hired and then chooses her name?  Nothing like that happened in real life.  The film doesn’t bother with John Hammond, who, of course, not only signed Holiday to Columbia but also Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

One thing of note from the book that might resonate even more today than when it was published in 1956 and that really seems to come from Holiday’s heart:

People on drugs are sick people.  So now we end up with the government chasing sick people like they were criminals, telling doctors they can’t help them, prosecuting them because they had some stuff without paying the tax, and sending them to jail.  Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail.  If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy.  Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.  The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day.  (p 152-153)

The Credits:

Directed by Sidney J. Furie.  Screenplay by Terence McCloy and Chris Clark & Suzanne de Passe.  Based on the book by Billie Holiday and William Dufty.

Young Winston

The Film:

Richard Attenborough, as his career as a director progressed, would become known for true stories.  He would have a good eye for the camera and his work with actors was strong but his films would often lack a strong narrative cohesion.  That is all on display here, in his second film as a director.  We get the story of the young Winston Churchill, from his birth, through to his famous capture and escape from a prisoner-of-war camp during the Boer War and on to his election to Parliament and the beginning of his real career.  Given that Churchill lived a fascinating life (the daughter of an American beauty with a lot of money and the Chancellor of the Exchequer) and was known throughout his country before the age of 30, you would expect more than what you get here.  And more perplexing, this film is being reviewed here because it was nominated for its script (in the ostensible Original Screenplay category but placed there in spite of being adapted because it was during the short stretch the category was titled Best Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Produced or Published).

There is little about the screenplay that makes it stand out.  It is like so many other biopics (although only covering half a life and the half that doesn’t include failures like Gallipoli or triumphs like Dunkirk).  We get a standard voice-over, although one that is often off-putting since sometimes we get the older Winston looking back and sometimes it’s narrated by the actual actor playing Winston at a young age.  The film needed a clearer narrative frame.  We get two and a half hours of young Winston but much of the first half isn’t really about him, instead being tied up with his father’s work at getting elected (and a really long scene with Winston’s mother debating with a shop owner) and his failures as a politician and the long descent into death.  It’s like the filmmakers didn’t think there was enough of Winston’s life to fill a film.  But we could have lopped off the first hour of the film, still had more than enough to fill the rest of the time (the film runs 157 minutes) and kept the focus on Winston and his adventures in India and South Africa.

In later years, Attenborough would delight in giving small roles to all sorts of distinguished British actors and that’s on full display here (as it was in his first film, the fantastic Oh What a Lovely War) with big names like Jack Hawkins and John Mills and then rising stars like Ian Holm and Anthony Hopkins.  But unfortunately Simon Ward, in the key role of Winston himself, isn’t really up to the task.

The Source:

My Early Life: 1874-1904 by Winston Churchill (1930)

Winston Churchill was 56 when he published this book (though parts of it had been written and were even in circulation for much of the decade leading up to that).  He might have imagined that the best part, the part of his life that he would be best known for (hoping that people would eventually forget about Gallipoli or at least realize that the catastrophic part of it shouldn’t have been laid at his feet) was already long past.  Could he have imagined that he would be far more famous a decade after writing this than he was at the time?

Churchill is a talented writer.  It is worth remembering that he actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I have read his entire six volume works on the Second World War and they are a fascinating and detailed study.  Yet, I never found any of that here.  I struggled to get myself into this story.  Perhaps he wasn’t really meant to write memoirs, but rather history where, even though he was involved in it, he could take a step back and describe it as a historian and writer rather than the subject.  This book has been lauded by many but I can’t honestly recommend it.  Perhaps it just smacks too much of British imperialism.

The Adaptation:

There are a few scenes in the film that are lifted straight from the book (most notably, the moment after he has escaped from the prisoner-of-war camp and found the one Englishman within 20 miles), complete with dialogue intact.  But much of the film comes from either more general descriptions in the book or aren’t in the book at all.  Perhaps what best sums up the difference between the book and the film is that the film is separated into two roughly equal length parts which are divided upon the death of Winston’s father while the 372 page book features the death of his father on page 62.  Basically, any scene in the first half of the film which features either of his parents in which Winston is not present does not come from the actual book since the book is very much an autobiography and does not discuss his parents’ lives outside of him.

The Credits:

Directed by Richard Attenborough.  Based upon “My Early Life: A Roving Commission” by The Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill K.G. O.M. C.H. M.P.  Written for the screen and Produced by Carl Foreman.

WGA Nominees

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Film:

I first read Slaughterhouse-Five when I was in college but I didn’t see the film then.  I didn’t even know there was a film then.  Eventually I did learn of the film’s existence and I kept putting it off because it seemed that Vonnegut wasn’t right for film (I did see and like the film adaptation of Mother Night when it was released in 1996 but that’s a very different kind of Vonnegut book) and I didn’t want to be disappointed.  I started to bend a bit when John Irving wrote, in his book My Movie Business about talking to Vonnegut about George Roy Hill who had directed not only this film but also the film adaptation of Irving’s The World According to Garp and how they were both pleased with the adaptations Hill had made of their books.  And, of course, eventually my OCD about movie awards would win out and since this film earned various nominations, I would eventually end up seeing it, no matter my reservations.  So, of course, I did.  And I wasn’t impressed but neither was I massively disappointed.

Consider the original novel.  It’s the story of Billie Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time.  By that, Vonnegut means that Billy keeps bouncing back and forth between times in his life.  He’s not reliving his memories.  He’s just not living his life in a linear fashion anymore.  So, one minute, he is a poor, pathetic chaplain’s assistant in World War II, captured by the Nazis and being held in Dresden during the period of time that it was being destroyed from the air by Allied bombs.  The next minute, he is an adult in a plane crash that will cause his wife to get careless in her grief and concern and end up in a car accident that will end with her death (from carbon monoxide poisoning).  Then he is a captive on the planet Tralfamadore, essentially an exhibit in a zoo along with an adult film star that eventually becomes his lover.  So you can see the trickiness of trying to make a coherent film about all of this.  Not only do you have constant, massive shifts in time that can come with no warning (which is as they happen to Billy, who might be talking romantically to his porn-star lover only to find himself confronted with his fellow soldiers who can’t believe what is happening) but shifts in tone as well.  The scenes during the war are War scenes, complete with the capture of Billy and the prisoner of war situation.  The scenes on Tralfamadore, while not laden with special effects, are nonetheless Science-Fiction scenes.  Then there is the rest of the film which ventures somewhere between Drama and Black Comedy.  When his wife is dealing with her grief, for instance, you think it’s Drama, but then she keeps getting into accidents and driving like a madwoman and you start to laugh because there’s nothing else you can do one when one man is describing this crazy woman and then suddenly yells to duck because she’s coming back around.

So, what we have, is a solidly, well-filmed (which makes sense since Hill was an Oscar nominee before this for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and would win the Oscar the next year for The Sting) story that really doesn’t have a solid handle on what it really is.  It wants to be so many things and so it never really succeeds at any of them but it doesn’t actually fail at any of them either.  It certainly isn’t helped though by Michael Sacks.  Sacks was in his first starring role in a major film playing Billy and if he is effective during the war scenes because he’s supposed to be overwhelmed by it all, he doesn’t really work in the scenes where he is supposed to be an older Billy.  Likewise, other than Valerie Perrine (who was also in her first major film role but is much more convincing in spite of her lack of experience as an actress and would be good enough that two years later she would earn an Oscar nomination for Lenny), the film really doesn’t have much in the way of actors.

The Source:

Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut  (1969)

I have already reviewed this book.  It is one of the great novels of the 20th Century.  That viewpoint is not only held by me (I ranked it #31 All-Time and many of the novels above it aren’t from the 20th Century) but by many others as well.  Time placed it on their own list and the Modern Library ranked it #18 for 20th Century English Language Novels.  If you haven’t read it, well then I hope you haven’t been through college, because if so, I feel bad for you, because you should have, and also, you need to read it.  Vonnegut is one of the most original, fascinating, funny and unique writers in the history of literature and this is widely regarded as his best book (including by me).  And so it goes.

The Adaptation:

“I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen.  I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book. … I had nothing to do with the script of Slaughterhouse-Five, incidentally.  That was the work of Steven [sic] Geller – and a good job it was.”  (Between Time and Timbuktu or Prometheus-5: A Space Fantasy Based on Materials, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, p xv-xvi)

I’m a little torn on Vonnegut’s quote.  I don’t see the film as flawless by any means but that’s not necessarily what he is saying.  He is saying that it is a flawless translation.  In that sense, I suppose, Vonnegut is correct.  Almost everything that we see on screen comes directly from the book and most of the book does end up on the screen (the scenes on Tralfamadore are pushed a little later in the film).  While the film is okay, it is a solid adaptation of the book, as good a film that I think you could make out of it unless you wanted to be really unfaithful.

The Credits:

Directed by George Roy Hill.  Based on the Novel “Slaughterhouse-Five Or The Children’s Crusade” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  Screenplay by Stephen Geller.

Butterflies are Free

The Film:

When I watched this film the first time, years ago, 30 Rock didn’t exist yet.  And when I initially re-watched it and wrote this review back in July of 2017 (it became toast when my computer died), I hadn’t yet watched the show.  But having watched the show now, the first word that comes to mind in thinking about this film is “blerg”.  For Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon, it mostly means “damn it”, but to me it’s not only that (damn it for having to write this again or even have to think about it again), but also a kind of all “blech” description of the film itself.

This film takes two different kind of tropes and marries them together.  Since each trope taken separately is kind of nauseating, the combination of the two is really more than I can take.  The first is the notion that someone who is disabled in some way isn’t really that disabled as long as they can think and feel.  In this case, it’s a blind man who has finally moved out of his overbearing mother’s house.  The other trope is that of the free-spirit (or hippie, if you prefer) who is able to help someone who is more uptight to learn to relax and enjoy life.  That the poster for the film shows the free-spirit cutting the blind man’s hair while she wears just a bikini and he’s wearing a long beaded necklace completely embraces that trope (I found a different poster for the right).  Of course, we are combining them here because it will turn out that the two live next door to each other and they will fall in love and there will be some lessons learned with a happy ending as if we just watched a Saturday morning cartoon.

It does not help the film that the two main characters are played by Edward Albert and Goldie Hawn.  Albert is the son of Eddie Albert and he was never a big success on film because, perhaps, he’s what would happen if you took Stephen Collins and made him even more bland.  The free spirit is played by Goldie Hawn (of course she is, which at least explains the bikini).  While Hawn, unlike Albert, has a measure of talent, it is an unbearably annoying talent and this is not exactly one of her shining film moments like Cactus Flower or Private Benjamin.  This is Hawn at her most coy and annoying.

The only saving grace for the film is Eileen Heckart who plays Albert’s mother.  She’s the kind of mother who writes books about her son (a son who must have an amazing memory in that not only has he read all of Dickens in braille but actually remembers a specific quote and is able to correct Hawn on it, leading to the title) and suffocates him with love and care.  She can’t bear to have him go off to the big city and she worries about him, especially now that he’s found the damn hippie.

When I first reviewed this film, I gave it a 67.  I can’t imagine what I was thinking.  Perhaps it was Heckart’s performance, which is good, but didn’t deserve the Oscar even in a weak year like 1972 (a weak year in Supporting Actress anyway).  If I were to think about it again, it would probably be lucky to escape with a 63 (the lowest score you can get and still be ***).

The most perplexing thing about this film is that it was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Sound.  The Godfather and The Emigrants weren’t nominated for the former and Deliverance wasn’t nominated for either but this film was nominated for both.  I can not, for the life of me, explain that.  Blerg.

The Source:

Butterflies are Free by Leonard Gershe (1969)

I can not blame the filmmakers for putting two annoying tropes together. Playwright Leonard Gershe had already done it in the original stage production.  Almost everything you see in the film had already been done on stage.  If the ages of the main characters had been a bit younger, this would have worked well as an Afterschool Special if not for the fact that it didn’t exist yet and that the two main characters sleep together.  On stage, the main roles were played by Keir Dullea and Blythe Danner (Heckart had also played her role on stage).  I can understand replacing Danner, who hadn’t yet made a film, with Hawn (who’s also, much as I find her annoying, a better actress).  But why replace Dullea, who had been the star of 2001, with Albert?  Dullea isn’t a particularly good actor (see David and Lisa, or really, don’t), but he’s not as bland as Albert.

The Adaptation:

Aside from changing the location of the film from New York to San Francisco, almost nothing in the film is changed from the play.  There are a couple of extra scenes added outside the apartment that weren’t in the original play (which confined itself to the apartment), some of which are just location shots out in the city.  But basically, the play is right there on the screen.

The Credits:

Directed by Milton Katselas.  Screenplay by Leonard Gershe.  Based upon his play.

The War Between Men and Women

The Film:

If you’re going to market your film as a Romantic Comedy, then there are two things that your film must have.  The first is that must have romance and the second is that it must have comedy.  This film, nominally based on the writings of James Thurber, but really just throwing some Thurber style illustrations into a terrible story, doesn’t really have any of either.

Jack Lemmon is a cartoonist, a rather snarky one who doesn’t seem to get along with anyone but is somehow a bit of a womanizer (the start of the film is him explaining how he’ll never be trapped into marriage so right away we know he’ll be married before the end of the film).  One day, while blind from a visit to the ophthalmologist he literally bumps into a woman and makes a connection with her that continues when he later runs into her (not literally this time) at a party.  Of course, she has kids and an ex who the kids adore and it’s nothing like what he wants but apparently he can’t get enough of the sex because he manages to talk himself into marriage.

The rest of the film will deal with Lemmon dealing with his new wife (Julie Harris), her annoying kids, the ex-husband who eventually becomes a drinking buddy (Jason Robards) and his declining eyesight (a serious problem for a cartoonist).  There is one funny moment where he draws characters with no clothes (like Thurber does) and is accused by his editor of being pornographic but he insists “I don’t draw well enough for pornography”.  But that’s about it for the comedy and since the couple is actually really annoying, there isn’t much in the way of romance either and you can pretty much skip this film and chalk it up to the WGA being desperate for an Adapted Comedy in a year that’s weak for them.

The Source:

The Last Flower by James Thurber  (1939)

This is a short little animated parable about the potential for war to wipe out mankind and how, even if we survive, we end up coming back to war yet again.  Drawn in that simple Thurber style (which works for the amusing Lemmon line above), it’s short and sweet.

The Adaptation:

It’s only an adaptation of The Last Flower in that the Lemmon character actually makes this story during the course of the film.  But really what this does is take a character who does humorous illustrations like Thurber and creates a romantic comedy around him.  It really is only technically an adaptation.

The Credits:

Directed by Melville Shavelson.  Written by Melville Shavelson and Danny Arnold.  Suggested by the Writings and Drawings of James Thurber and including “The Last Flower”.

Golden Globe Nominee

Frenzy

The Film:

The Production Code was gone.  Alfred Hitchcock was returning to England to make a film that, at least in part, reminded him of his childhood (he was the son of a greengrocer and there were scenes that he wanted to set in the produce market at Covent Garden before it was done away with).  He wanted to escape the critical and commercial drubbings that had accompanied his last two films, both Cold War thrillers (Torn Curtain, Topaz).  He had a novel about a serial killer and the man who is mistaken for him (partially because the killer has killed the man’s wife in circumstances that make the innocent man look guilty of it) and a chance for some sex, for some nudity, for some violence and no Production Code to get around like with Psycho.  So now we get to Frenzy, the penultimate film from the great director and in the opinion of many (including myself), the only really good film he would make after The Birds in 1963.

Jon Finch is Dick Blaney.  He’s not good at getting along with people.  He gets himself fired from the bar where he’s been working.  He goes to his ex-wife to argue with her (an argument which is overheard by her secretary).  The next day, Blaney’s ex-wife is raped and murdered.  Later, the woman from the bar where he’s been working (and who he has been staying with) is also murdered.  The first was a coincidence that it was connected to Blaney.  The second is because the killer knows him and wants to throw more suspicion on him.

The second murder is an exquisitely filmed scene, a hearkening back to the great work Hitchcock had done in earlier years.  As the killer (we know he’s the killer at this point) walks into the apartment with Blaney’s girlfriend the camera slowly pulls away, moving down the stairs and even across the street.  We know what’s happening but, even with the allowance to show more on screen (there was nudity in the first rape / murder scene and some nudity with the body that is found at the beginning of the film), there is no need to be explicit in this scene and in fact, it’s more disturbing in that we can imagine what is happening rather than seeing it depicted on-screen.  We get more of that classic Hitchcock later in the film when the killer must dispose of the body and he accidentally leaves a clue behind and he’s forced to ride with her in the back of a potato lorry, trying to get his tie pin back from her (literally) cold, dead hand.  It’s moments like these that really make the film stand above all of the other post-1963 work from Hitchcock.  If it doesn’t rise up to the level of his best films (and indeed, I have it at ***.5, not ****) it’s because the writing and the acting isn’t at nearly the same level as the great Hitchcock films.

Released from the Production Code, Hitchcock could have gone with a more downbeat ending.  But, like always, the innocent man is actually discovered to be innocent and the guilty man is found.  But what we get is a classic scene where the killer realizes the game is up.  I won’t reveal the brilliant last line that ends the film but will just remind you that as the last hurrah from the great director this is a film you really need to see.

The Source:

Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern (1966)

This is a decent book about a man marked by the war (and a friend’s suicide) that ends up, due partially to circumstance, and then partially because the real killer knows him and realizes he can lay a path towards him and escape justice, suspected of a number of serial killings.  La Bern’s most famous book was It Always Rains on Sunday (which you can read about here) but this book isn’t quite at the same level.  The book goes to some extreme circumstances both to throw shade on the main character (we don’t know at first who the real killer is) but also the keep him out of the hands of the police.  That being said, this is a far better book than Raymond Foery, the author of a book on the film (see more below) would have you believe.  If you check the index for mentions of the original source in Foery’s book, almost every time the original book is mentioned he finds something denigrating to say about it.  All things considered, this book is actually considerably better than the source material for a lot of Hitchcock films.

The Adaptation:

This is one of those films (like a lot of Hitchcock films) where an entire book has been written about it.  The specific place to look is Chapter 4 of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy by Raymond Foery where he goes into detail of the screenplay as it was developed by Anthony Shaffer (more famous for writing Sleuth) along with notes and ideas from Hitchcock himself (who rarely wrote scripts but often contributed to them).  As is so often the case with Hitchcock adaptations, the basic premise comes from the original book while a lot of the details are not present there.  While some of the key moments come from the original novel (like being caught in the truck trying to remove evidence), a lot of the film is simply original (including the whole motif of the necktie).  A key part of the book, that Finch’s character is marked by the war (and a friend’s suicide after the war) is completely dropped adding more to the feeling of an innocent man than a broken man who wants to stay away from the police.  There is no scene at home with the inspector in the original novel and we find out who the actual killer is much later in the novel than in the film.

There might be more on the differences between the film and the novel but this was one of the pieces that was lost when my computer died and since the book was hard to get the first time, I have tried to recreate it mostly from memory rather than to get the book again.

The Credits:

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  Based on the novel “GOODBYE PICCADILLY, FAREWELL LEICESTER SQUARE”, by Arthur LaBern.  Screenplay by Anthony Shaffer.

Other Screenplays on My List Outside My Top 10
(in descending order of how I rank the script)

• The Hot Rock  –  The only film to make this list in the first half of the 70’s, where it was often difficult to even get a full list of 10 (original screenplay were blossoming).

Other Adaptations
(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Jeremiah Johnson  –  Unless I have miscounted, the first of six collaborations between Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford.  Solid Western based on two books about the real life Johnson.
• The Getaway  –  Panned when it was released, this is the film that lost Robert Evans his wife.  It’s garnered better reviews since and I think it’s a solid ***.  Steve McQueen Crime film based on the novel by Jim Thompson.
• Utamaru and His Five Women  –  A 1946 Mizoguchi film just making it to the States.  Based on the novel by Kanji Kunieda.
• Snoopy, Come Home  –  One of the better Peanuts films, it’s based on the series of strips where Snoopy returned to his first owner, Lila.
• The Poseidon Adventure  –  Definitely the best Disaster film I’ve ever seen (the only one that even comes close is 2016’s The Wave) but it’s still just mid ***.  Based on the novel by Paul Gallico (who, amazingly, also wrote Pride of the Yankees).  Inspired sequels, remakes and a very good Doctor Who Christmas Special.
• Une Femme Douce  –  A 1969 Robert Bresson film that is actually adapted from a Dostoevsky short story.
• The Valachi Papers  –  I saw this after seeing it listed in a list book for my Crime post.  Solid adaptation of the non-fiction book by Peter Maas (whose Serpico will be in the next post) based on a real Mafia informer.
• Boxcar Bertha  –  An early Scorsese film adapted from the book Sister of the Road about the real Boxcar Bertha.
• São Bernardo  –  A Brazilian film based on the novel by Graciliano Ramos.
• 1776  –  A lackluster musical that does give William Daniels a plum role as John Adams.  I probably should have watched it again during the two years when I lived just a couple of blocks from the Adams birthplace but I can’t bear the thought of sitting through all two and a half hours of those songs again.  Based on the Tony winning stage musical that was a big hit.  We’re into lower *** films now.
• The Nightcomers  –  A film prequel to The Turn of the Screw that stars Marlon Brando.  Better than it should be.
• Zee and Co  –  Also known as X, Y and Zee, it’s a British film with Michael Caine and Elizabeth Taylor based on the novel by Edna O’Brien.
• Uncle Vanya  –  Andrei Konchalovsky does a mediocre job with the great Chekhov play.
• Case of the Naves Brothers  –  A 1967 Brazilian Drama that was submitted for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film (but not nominated).  Got a U.S. release in 1972.  Based on a book by the lawyer for the two real life brothers who were tortured into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit.
• Living Free  –  The sequel to Born Free isn’t actually based on the sequel book Living Free, but the third book Forever Free.
• The Nun  –  A 1966 Jacques Rivette Drama that earned an Oscar qualifying run in 1972.  Based on a novel by 18th Century French writer Denis Diderot.
• Man of La Mancha  –  Don Quixote as a musical via a Broadway musical and a Broadway play (I, Don Quixote).  I’m not a fan.  “To dream the impossible dreammmmmmmmmm!”
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin  –  This one’s from 1965 and it’s West German but it still got a U.S. 1972 release.  Based on the novel, of course.
• The Adventures of Barry MacKenzie  –  Director of a future Best Picture winner, Bruce Beresford directs this adaptation of the comic strip created by Barry Humphries and yes, Humphries brings his Dame Edna character to the screen here (although she’s not yet a Dame).
• Uphaar  –  The Indian submission for the Oscars in this year (not nominated), it’s based on a Tagore short story.
• Tomorrow  –  Originally a Faulkner short story, then a play by Horton Foote.  It stars Robert Duvall and I feel like I am supposed to like it, but it’s barely a *** film.
• Kidnapped  –  Delbert Mann directs a lackluster adaptation of the classic Stevenson novel (and the first half of the its sequel Catriona).  The last *** film on the list.
• The Ruling Class  –  The second film in which Peter O’Toole gives a solid performance in a meh film (the other is Man of La Mancha).  He was Oscar nominated for this one.  Based on the play by Peter Barnes.
• Savage Messiah  –  Another mediocre Ken Russell film.  This one is based on a book about sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
• The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds  –  For years, I thought of this as “that play with the weird title I chose not to read for my summer reading for AP English and read Cyrano de Bergerac instead”.  But Paul Newman turned the play into the film, starring his wife.  The play was by Paul Zindel and won the Pulitzer.
• Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb  –  The fourth and final Hammer Mummy film.  Based, very loosely, on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars.
• A Separate Peace  –  I really liked the John Knowles novel when I read it in 9th grade (and it was similar in theme to Dead Poet’s Society which happened to open that same year) but it has not aged well and my brain now just thinks of the Simpsons line “Although I hardly consider A Separate Peace the ninth grade level.”  The film is very mediocre and stars Parker Stevenson before he was a Hardy Boy.
• Tower of Screaming Virgins  –  Known in Britain as She Lost Her . . . You Know What.  A 1967 West German film that’s actually based on a lesser known Dumas novel.
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  –  It’s got a lot of British stars in small roles (Ralph Richardson, Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, Roy Kinnear) but it’s utterly dull.  Based on the two brilliant books of course.
• Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance  –  It’s the first of the film series but the films were based on the manga series that began in 1970.  We’re down to lower **.5 now.
• Ten Days’ Wonder  –  A weak Chabrol film based on an Ellery Queen novel.
• Across 110th Street  –  Mediocre Crime film based on the novel by Wally Ferris.  The soundtrack would be the most memorable and enduring part of the film.
• Child’s Play  –  Sidney Lumet dips into mediocrity yet again before his stretch of great years begins in 1973.  Based on a play by Robert Marasco.
• The Decameron  –  The first of the “Trilogy of Life” in which Pier Paolo Pasolini brings his strand of hedonism to classic works of literature which will also include The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights.  This one is based on the classic collection of 14th century novellas.
• Cool Breeze  –  A Blaxploitation remake of The Asphalt Jungle.
• Under Milk Wood  –  The second to last film to star both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (the last, Hammersmith is Out, also in this year, a very loose telling of the Faust legend, I consider original and isn’t on the list but is actually worse than this one).  Weak Comedy based on the radio play by poet Dylan Thomas.
• Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde  –  The second Hammer Jekyll film takes the great Stevenson novel and turns it on its side by having him transform into a female.  Also throws in aspects of Jack the Ripper and Burke and Hare.
• Fritz the Cat  –  Ralph Bakshi adapts the famous Crumb comic strip about a horny cat.  One of those films where, when you finally see it, you think, “well that wasn’t worth the build up.”
• Last of the Red Hot Lovers  –  Neil Simon was a great playwright (I write was because he died three days ago) but this was not of his good ones.  The New York Times agreed, commenting “In the dismal history of Neil Simon screenplays and adaptations for the screen, The Last of the Red Hot Lovers may represent the lowest ebb”.  We’ve entered ** territory now.
• The Public Eye  –  Also known as Follow Me, this was adapted by Peter Shaffer from his own play and obviously is not the Shaffer adaptation in this year to choose.  Carol Reed’s last film is a mystery but a boring one.
• Tales from the Crypt  –  Not a Hammer film, but an Amicus one, the other British company that Freddie Francis directed Horror films for when he wasn’t winning Oscars for Cinematography.  It’s an anthology film based on the old EC Comics series that helped usher in the Comics Code and went out with the Code in 1955.
• Conquest of the Planet of the Apes  –  The fourth Planet of the Apes film and it is not a winner.
• One is a Lonely Number  –  Also known as Two is a Happy Number.  Based on a short story called “The Good Humor Man”.  Star Trish Van Devere was nominated for Best Actress at the Globes.
• Dracula A.D. 1972  –  The seventh Hammer Dracula film and the first since the original to have both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.  Sadly, it’s still terrible.
• Dr Phibes Rises Again  –  The sequel to The Abominable Doctor Phibes, which was an original script.
• Play It As It Lays  –  Another Globe nominee for Actress, this time for Tuesday Weld.  Written by Joan Didion and her husband, based on Didion’s novel.  Low **.  Directed by 1962 Best Director nominee Frank Perry.
• The Other  –  We’ve skipped all the way down to *.  Also directed by a 1962 Oscar nominee, this time Robert Mulligan.  Terrible Suspense film based on the first novel by actor Tom Tryon (The Cardinal).
• Blacula  –  Do I list it as the sub-genre Blaxploitation or Vampire (Dracula)?  I went with the latter.  It’s terrible either way.  I have a strong feeling they came up with the title and then fashioned the story around it.
• Dracula vs Frankenstein  –  The Adamson film, not the Franco film.  I count this one as Monster (Frankenstein).  Other titles it’s known by are Blood of Frankenstein, The Revenge of Dracula, Teenage Dracula and They’re Coming to Get You.  Whatever you call it, it’s mid *.
• Portnoy’s Complaint  –  One of the funniest novels ever written and I finally tracked down the film and good lord is it bad.  Like Goodbye Columbus, it stars Richard Benjamin but that one was good and this is just awful.  Not the worst film ever made from a major literary book (the 1995 Scarlet Letter is worse) but, because I refuse to see the James Franco Sound and the Fury and have no idea how bad it is, there is no worse adaptation of a greater book that I have ever seen.
• Ben  –  Just awful (low *) sequel to Willard that is mostly known for the Michael Jackson theme song (or the great line in the Pearl Jam songs “Rats”: “Ben, the two of us need look no more”).  Not even bad enough, though to make the Bottom 5.
• Night of the Lepus  –  Let’s get the Wild Nature sub-genre thriving in the 70’s.  Terrible title for a film based on a book with a just as bad title: The Year of the Angry Rabbit.  Low .5 film that was only the third worst of the year.
• Grave of the Vampire  –  Also not the worst of the year because the worst, The Thing With Two Heads, was original (so very original).  This isn’t.  Or isn’t it?  Written by David Chase (yes, the same one who created The Sopranos) supposedly based on his novel The Still Life.  But the internet is full of people trying to find confirmation of the novel’s existence and it’s clear it doesn’t.  So if based on the supposed novel, then the novel was unpublished, which really makes it more of an original script.  Either way, this Horror film about an undead rapist is appallingly bad.  It’s actually a big year for bad Vampire films as there are also, not listed because they are original, Countess Dracula (nothing to do with Dracula), Vampire Circus and Baron Blood.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen

• Treasure Island  –  Orson Welles plays Long John Silver in this adaptation of Stevenson’s classic adventure story but it’s hard to find.
• When the Legends Die  –  I remember reading the book while growing up (Junior High, maybe?) and not liking it.  Didn’t stop me from wanting to see the film version but I wasn’t able to.

Adult Films That Are Also Adaptations

• The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide
• Erotic Adventures of Zorro
• Flesh Gordon

“As he reached for his hat, Chris was nodding her head, and then suddenly she was looking into eyes that overwhelmed her, that shone with intelligence and kindly understanding, with serenity that poured from them into her being like the waters of a warm and healing river whose source was both in him yet somehow beyond him; whose flow was contained and yet headlong and endless.” (p 291)

My Top 10

1. The Exorcist
2. Serpico
3. The Day of the Jackal
4. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
5. Don’t Look Now
6. Paper Moon
7. The Last Detail
8. A Doll’s House

Note:  This is my full list for the year.  It used to have one more film but as I was writing the review of Bang the Drum Slowly (comparing it to Brian’s Song, both of which are early 70’s films, though Brian’s Song was originally a tv film, that star major actors in their pre-Godfather roles as athletes forming an important friendship while dying of cancer, though of course Brian’s Song was a true story and this was based on an overrated novel), I realized that it really didn’t belong on the list.  The film succeeds, not on its writing, but on the performances of Robert De Niro and Vincent Gardenia and the moving scene with the song “Streets of Laredo”.  So I cut it from the list and since it wasn’t nominated for anything, I didn’t bother to include it.

Consensus Nominees:

1. The Exorcist  (184 pts)
2. The Last Detail  (160 pts)
3. Serpico  (120 pts)
4. Paper Moon  (120 pts)
5. The Paper Chase  (80 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium):

• The Exorcist
• The Last Detail
• The Paper Chase
• Paper Moon
• Serpico

WGA Awards:

Adapted Drama:

• Serpico
• Cinderella Liberty
• The Exorcist
• The Last Detail
• The Paper Chase

Adapted Comedy:

• Paper Moon
• 40 Carats
• Godspell

Golden Globe:

• The Exorcist
• Cinderella Liberty
• The Day of the Jackal

Nominees that are Original:  The Sting, A Touch of Class

BAFTA:

• The Last Detail  (1974)
• The Day of the Jackal

note:  The Last Detail co-won the award with Chinatown (both were written by Robert Towne).

My Top 10

The Exorcist

image from the MFA exhibition of Kirk Hammet’s Horror Poster collection

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film.  It is a brilliant and terrifying film (unless you are Beetlejuice, in which case it is hilarious).  I don’t personally rank it as the greatest Horror film ever made but I would not argue with anyone who does rank it as such.  What’s more, it has acting the likes of which have rarely ever been seen in a Horror film.  It may very well have the single performances in the Horror genre in Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress.  If you are a serious film fan, you can’t avoid seeing this film, which leaves my wife out of being considered a serious film fan because she absolutely refuses to ever see it.

The Source:

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty  (1971)

I remember when I finally decided to read this book, sometime around the time when I wrote my original review of the film, I was considerably disappointed.  I just didn’t feel the same kind of horror and terror when reading the book to even approach what I had felt in watching the film.  Yes, Blatty has some interesting ideas, but he also got pulled in too many directions.  Witness the character of the movie-obsessed detective.  He’s such a strain of a character, one with an obvious affectation that keeps coming in for almost no reason and distracting the book away from its real strengths, which is what is going on with Regan.  Later, I would read more Blatty which would actually be much worse (it’s coming in the 1980 post), so I just don’t thing Blatty is that good a writer.

The Adaptation:

“We threw out [the original script] which was full of a lot of flashbacks and flash-forwards, and started from scratch. I just wanted to tell a straight-ahead story from beginning to end with no craperoo. I literally just marked up the book, gave it to [William Peter Blatty] and said, ‘This is the script.’ He rewrote it from that. From day to day we would get new ideas and bring new stuff in.”(William Friedkin interviewed in Conversations at the American Film Institute with The Great Moviemakers: The Next Generation, ed. George Stevens, Jr, p 190)  That original script is also mentioned in the worthwhile but now out-of-print book The Story Behind the Exorcist co-written by Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers with this description of it: “In this script, the first third of the novel was condensed into twenty-two pages of screenplay.  Blatty related that his opening sequence was a montage of all of the possessed girls’ symptoms while the screen credits were being flashed.”  (p 24)

There are definitely changes from the book to the film, but as Friedkin explains above, he tried to stay more true to the book.  The whole back and forth is actually reminiscent of what Peter Bogdanovich went through with Larry McMurtry with The Last Picture Show.  Friedkin does make some changes, of course (Karras’ mother is actually found dead early in the book and thus all of the back and forth with her just adds pathos to the film but is a significant change).

“In hindsight, I think that if the film has relevance, it’s due to the tension between Blatty’s tightly structured script and absolute faith and my improvisational, agnostic approach to it. Blatty’s stated goal in the novel and the film was apostolic. I simply wanted to tell a good story. Its conclusion to me was inherent: the girl was possessed, and the exorcism was successful. Blatty wanted that underscored; I did my best to eliminate underscoring.” (The Freidkin Connection: A Memoir by William Freidkin, p 271)

As flawed as Friedkin is as a director (has any director other than perhaps Michael Cimino so failed to live up to the reputation he set for himself early on?), he is a fascinating person and I definitely recommend reading his book.

The Credits:

Directed by William Friedkin.  Written for the Screen and Produced by William Peter Blatty.  Based on his novel.
note:  These are from the end titles.  Only the title is in the opening titles, one of the first films to do that.

Serpico

The Film:

This is the start of something special and it doesn’t seem to get mentioned very often.  Books about Hollywood in the 70’s tend to focus on the Film School Kids, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, the ones who did something new and made themselves very rich and changed the way we look at films.  When it stretches a little bit, there will be something about someone like Friedkin.  But let’s take a moment and talk about Sidney Lumet.  Lumet had been dismissed by Andrew Sarriss as “strained seriousness”.  By 1973, it had been almost a decade since Lumet had made an Oscar nominated film and 16 years since he was nominated for Best Director for his feature debut 12 Angry Men.  But this is the start of five amazing films in five years, films that combine for 27 Oscar nominations and four Oscars.  How we can talk about the risky film-makers of this decade and not discuss the man, who, in a stretch of five years, directed Serpico, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon, Network and Equus.  No director had ever had three consecutive years with a Best Actor nomination from his films and only a handful had done it twice in a row.  These five films combined for six Best Actor nominations (two for Network).

It all starts with Serpico, a film that has the bad luck to be released in 1973.  It’s one the 40 best films of the decade but it has the misfortune to be sitting behind Cries and Whispers, Mean Streets, The Exorcist, American Graffiti and The Sting.  Serpico is a timely film, the story of Frank Serpico, a man who all his life just wanted to be a cop.  But, more importantly, he wanted to be a cop.  This meant he wanted nothing to do with graft, no matter if it was big (scamming money from drug dealers) to quite small (getting a free meal at a deli in return for not ticketing the deli for double parking on delivery days).  To Serpico, being a cop is about doing something good for the community.  So he decided he was going to be a different kind of cop.  He doesn’t tell people what he is.  He grows a mustache and grows his hair long and wears clothes more befitting a hippie so that when he is eventually posted as a plainclothes man he won’t look like a cop and he can blend in and actually do his job properly.  But important cops don’t like beat cops telling them how they should do things and the people on the take don’t like people who aren’t taking anything because it makes them look and feel bad.  So, Serpico found himself hated by everyone.  He was the one person who wanted to do things right and to fix the problems and no one would listen to him.  This gets to a point that the film opens after Serpico has been shot in the face and is being rushed to the hospital and the first question on everyone’s mind is whether it was actually a cop who shot him.

Of course all of this was a true story and it was so vibrant and alive because it hadn’t been very long.  Serpico had been shot in the winter of 1972, the book was published in early 1973 and the film would be released in December.  For people living in New York, this was their police force being exposed on screen for all its problems.  The Production Code had kept things like this under wraps for years but thing had loosened up now and a New York director (Lumet) and a New York actor were willing to tell this story.  The actor, of course, is Al Pacino, who was in the midst of his own Oscar streak.  He had been nominated the year before in Supporting Actor for The Godfather and this would be the first of three straight nominations for Best Actor (all against Jack Nicholson).  If his performance in The Godfather showed that Pacino was a discovery this was the film that proved it wasn’t a fluke, that Pacino was one of the greats in screen history and could hold his own against anyone else.  If, somehow, in your own journey through the great films of the 1970’s and the daring filmmakers who brought them to the screen and you have somehow missed Serpico, then you need to rectify that.

The Source:

Serpico by Peter Maas  (1973)

This is mostly a straight-forward non-fiction book about Frank Serpico and the job that he did trying to get rid of corruption and graft in the NYPD.  It begins with his shooting in February of 1971 and then jumps back to the beginning of his career in the NYPD (with a bit on his early life) and goes in a linear fashion from there.  One odd thing is that throughout the first several chapters, Maas moves back to Serpico in the hospital and his reactions to other people’s reactions but then after about half the book, it simply drops that line of narrative.  I suspect that Maas, a journalist, managed to get the book because he had already written The Valachi Papers (Valachi himself gets a one line mention in the book) and it is told in a journalistic fashion but there is nothing special about the book itself.  All the real fuss is about the man himself and what he managed to do with everyone working against him.

The Adaptation:

Much like the book, the film begins with shooting, deals with the fallout from that (including the question of whether cops actually did it or at least lead to it and the nasty cards that were sent to Serpico in the hospital from other cops who hated him and wished him dead) and then backtracks to the beginning of his police career and moves forward to the shooting.  Some of the names are changed and some of the incidents and details are compressed but the film actually does a very good job of keeping to the book, including little details like the superior officer who thought Serpico was gay because of an incident in a bathroom (fully explained in both the book and the film) or the superior officer who told him to get a haircut with Serpico replying how was he supposed to be a plainclothes man if he looked like a cop.  A very good adaptation of the book that really keeps all the core material and stays faithful to what really happened.  It does cut some of Serpico’s family down a bit, but that’s natural to focus on his career and his interactions with his fellow cops.

The Credits:

Directed by Sidney Lumet.  Based on the Book by Peter Maas.  Screenplay by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler.

The Day of the Jackal

The Film:

Unlike Sidney Lumet, Fred Zinnemann had enjoyed a strong measure of success in Hollywood.  By 1973, he had been nominated for an Oscar a remarkable six times and had won twice, giving him 360 Oscar points, tied for 5th all-time (even today he is tied for 3rd all-time with six other directors with 405 points).  But, because he spent three years trying to make Man’s Fate and then four years after that fighting in a lawsuit with MGM over the collapse of the film, it had been seven years since his last film, even if that film, A Man for All Seasons, had won Picture and Director.  Could Zinnemann, now 66 years old and an emblem of years past and dismissed in 1968 by Andrew Sarris as “His inclusion in any objective history of the American cinema is mandatory, but his true vocation remains the making of antimovies for antimoviegoers . . . Perhaps there is not in Zinnemann enough of the redeeming outrageousness of the compulsive entertainer,” still be an important filmmaker?  Could he still be a great filmmaker?  The answer, it turned out, was yes.

Did Zinnemann take Sarris’ words to heart?  Did he even know them?  Well, it had been almost 20 years since he had made anything other than a straight Drama and here he was venturing right into Suspense territory, something more like a Hitchcock film.  But he had good ideas about how to do it.  The first was his decision that the Jackal, who could slide into ordinary situations, who could disappear into different characters and even nationalities, shouldn’t be a star (Michael Caine was considered) but should be someone much more unknown.  In the end, he went with Edward Fox.  Fox, though he has been in many important films, is still primarily known for his role as the Jackal and it was certainly one of the few times that he got to play the starring role on screen.  He slides effortlessly into the part and you never know what he might do next.  After a forger tries to blackmail him, he kills him with ease and quickness and you wonder if he will do the same for his gunsmith (that was a plan in the script but was changed, ironically making it fit the book more).  The Jackal has been hired by the OAS, the dissident group in France that tried several times to kill President Charles de Gaulle after they felt he betrayed the country by allowing Algeria to slip away from the French.  The Jackal acts with meticulous care and does what he needs, whether it’s seducing the wealthy Baronness (and he even gives he a casual smile when he reunites with her, something we’ve barely seen from him) or making a move on a homosexual so that he can find a place to stay outside of a hotel so he can’t be reported.  He can strangle someone, kill with the snap of his wrist or kill from afar.  We know his plan for de Gaulle could well work because one of the most memorable scenes in the film is when he practices on a melon to get the sights right and then, once he has determined he’s got the aim down, using an explosive bullet and “the target it had once contained was unrecognisable as anything but pulp.”

But the Jackal is not our only character.  The film would still probably be good even if we just followed the Jackal through to his goal, watching his methods and the way he moves ever closer to Paris with a set plan that he barely deviates from (where he is forced to deviate, he has planned for and his contingencies).  But we also have Lebel, the brilliant police detective who is called upon by the government when they learn of the plot.  Lebel is played by Michel Lonsdale, the brilliant French actor.  Lonsdale, a few years later would make a ridiculously bland James Bond villain but he was made for this kind of role.  It’s not an action role, but something that plays upon his intelligence and he conveys that intelligence in an impeccable way.  He controls the situation in every instance.  When he is able to discover why the Jackal has been able to stay one step ahead (the mistress of one of the ministers is an informant) and he finds it out he is asked how he knew which phone to tap and just like in the book, he replies, with casual ease “I didn’t, so last night I tapped all your telephones.  Good day, gentlemen.”  He is also helped by a very able assistant played by a young Derek Jacobi before he was well known to anyone other than the patrons of the English theater.

It’s always tricky to make a film that you know can only have one result.  If you make a prequel about characters that are in the first film, you know they have to survive (and the ones who weren’t in it usually won’t) and it robs the film of suspense.  In a film that deals with real characters, there are only so many ways things can go.  But there are still ways to ratchet up the suspense (Argo is another great example).  Zinnemann had grown up in the studio system, learning how to direct by seeing all of Hollywood working together and he knew how to put together a film.  This wouldn’t be the film that would earn him a seventh Oscar nomination (that would be Julia, which isn’t nearly as good a film) but it made it clear that even with seven years off between films and working in a genre he hadn’t touched since the 40’s he had lost none of his ability.

The Source:

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth  (1971)

This is among the myriad of books I used to own, especially genre books, which I used to have a lot more of.  I read it once and found it enjoyable but I didn’t think I was likely to read it again and over the years, space considerations has prompted me to sell thousands of books (not an exaggeration).  So, this time I had to get a copy from the library and instead of an pulp paperback (which I liked), I got a new trade edition which has a little introduction from Forsyth about how he never really wanted to be a writer.  Given that I have always wanted to be a writer, that made me less inclined towards the book.  So, it’s to the book’s credit that I still found myself rather enthralled by it, especially since not only had I read it before but I had seen the film at least four or five times.  It does mean I’m much less likely to read any of Forsyth’s other books (I also used to own The Fourth Protocol because I had liked the film) but this book still stands up well.

This is the story of a fictional assassination plot against Charles de Gaulle in 1963, not long after a real assassination attempt against him the year before (which is detailed in the first chapter of the book).  Since de Gaulle obviously wasn’t assassinated so we know the plot must fail (something which prompted several publishers to turn down the book), it’s to Forsyth’s credit that we keep reading because he does such a good job detailing the plot, the intricate machinations of the Jackal, the mysterious killer (even more mysterious than we realize when we get to the end) and then the attempts of Lebel, the brilliant French police detective to stop the plot in time.  The book is broken down into three parts, the first focusing almost entirely on the Jackal (Anatomy of a Plot), the second focusing more on Lebel without leaving the Jackal behind (Anatomy of a Manhunt) and the third the final race against time to either kill or save de Gaulle (Anatomy of a Kill).

The Adaptation:

Ironically I watched and read this immediately after doing the same for Silence of the Lambs, another thriller that rises above its genre (even more so than this one as a book and a film) and another thriller that is remarkably faithful to the source novel.  The film and the novel aren’t identical – the film brings in Lebel much earlier and has him on the case while we’re almost halfway done with the book before we meet him and the scenes involving the Baronness have some real differences (including her being interviewed by the police beforehand and him having a car crash instead of deliberately leaving his car behind) and there are some minor changes (like the gay man he is staying with being in the flat when he sees the Jackal on television as opposed to seeing him and returning back to the flat to tell him) – but this is a remarkably faithful adaptation.  A great majority of the dialogue comes straight from the book including those last few lines that really make you wonder how much you have actually known about the Jackal.

The Credits:

directed by Fred Zinnemann.  from the book by Frederick Forsyth.  screenplay by Kenneth Ross.
note:  Credits from the end credits.  The only credits from the opening titles are Fred Zinnemann’s film of The Day of the Jackal and the Forsyth credit.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

The Film:

I have already reviewed this film as my under-appreciated film of 1973.  I already countered your arguments that the film is not under-appreciated, devoting an entire paragraph to it in my review of the film.  The first time I saw it, of course, I was living in Boston.  This time I am no longer living in Boston and it’s a nice reminder of the violence and ugliness that really mar a city I love quite a lot.  I would also like to say that, aside from a great performance from Robert Mitchum, this film has a solid performance from one of my favorite under-appreciated actors, Richard Jordan.  If you have never seen this film, it’s definitely one you need to see.

The Source:

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins  (1971)

“Let’s start with the title, The Friends of Eddie Coyle.  Eddie Coyle has no friends.  Eddie barely has acquaintances.  Eddie Coyle is our hopeless, helpless, hapless Everyman in the Boston criminal underworld of 1970.”  That’s Dennis Lehane writing in the introduction to the 40th Anniversary Edition of the novel.  He’s well suited to write the introduction, of course, and I would not be surprised if this book was a massive influence on his own writing (which I actually mentioned in my review of the film).  Lehane’s books are much thicker, filled with much more overflowing detail and characters than this sparse book that runs only 173 pages and doesn’t give us much in the way of characters outside of Eddie himself.  Oh, there are other people involved, but we really only see glimpses of them, the same kind of glimpses that Eddie sees as he tries to negotiate through a life that involves him illegally procuring guns while trying to sell people out to the Feds and trying to get the Feds to help get him out of the jail sentence he has to go up to New Hampshire to find about soon.  If this novel won’t eventually appear on the endlist of Novels That Were a Joy to Discover, that’s because I actually read the book back when I originally saw the film.

The Adaptation:

Going back to the novel after watching the film again, I realized that the description of the characters is fairly minimal.  It never describes much about Jackie Brown, the gun seller but for some reason my mind was thinking he would be black which I think is only because of the character of Jackie Brown in the Tarantino film.  But Brown is written in the film exactly how he is on the page.  The biggest change from the book to the film in my mind is that when Jackie is arrested after trying to sell machine guns to the young terrorists, in the book, Foley just taps on the window and arrests him but in the film they gave it some action (which makes sense given that, for a Crime film, the film is actually surprisingly absent of action) by having Jackie try to flee.  Other than that, it’s really quite a faithful adaptation of the original novel.

The Credits:

Directed by Peter Yates.  Based on the Novel by George V. Higgins.  Screenplay: Paul Monash.

Don’t Look Now

The Film:

“Red, for me, represents the interior of the soul.”  Ingmar Bergman said that, talking specifically about Cries and Whispers, which is my #1 film of 1973.  It could have also been talking about this film, because when we see red on the screen, horrible events are about to happen that will reduce people to the bare basics of their souls.

Horrible events sadly abound in this film.  It begins with children playing out in the garden of a British country house, but then the young girl somehow ends up drowning in the pond and the father, played by Donald Sutherland in one of his best performances, comes rushing out and pulls her out.  Set against that are scenes of the mother, played by Julie Christie (I don’t say it’s one of her best performances only because of her amazing work in Darling and Away from Her), who doesn’t yet know what is going on outside.  These counterpoints will be returned to later in the film when the couple, attempting to come to terms with their grief, are in Venice for him to do work.  This is the stage for what might be the greatest sex scene ever put on film.  It is tender and intimate (a rare moment in mainstream film, especially this early, for oral sex on a female).  Yet, intercut with shots of their lovemaking are shots of them afterwards, dressing for dinner.  Time becomes one, and what was done partially to evade the censors (they were told there could be no thrusting, and because of the intercutting, we never do so any thrusting) makes it clear how love and pain and duty all come together in the end.

Soon after the sex comes a red coat.  It is a child’s coat, the same type of coat that their daughter was wearing when she drowned in the pond.  Christie’s character doesn’t see it, but she has been told by a pair of psychic sisters that their daughter is trying to send them a message.  Sutherland, who pulled his daughter from the pond, does see it, and unbeknownst to himself (but the sisters know) is that he himself has psychic abilities.  This will come into play soon afterwards when their son is hurt in an accident and his wife returns to England.  Just after she is gone, he sees his wife and the sisters.  He doesn’t know how he could possibly be seeing this, and really, he’s not.  But, sadly, that vision will set in motion the tragic events that engulf the end of the film.

What is this film?  Is it a suspense thriller?  Is it a family drama of pain and grief and love that survives it (most love does not survive such an event).  Is it a supernatural horror film?  Perhaps it is all of these, and with exquisite cinematography and editing that is among the most carefully crafted in film history, Nicolas Roeg creates one of the most unforgettable films ever made, certainly one far better than any other he would ever make.

The Source:

“Don’t Look Now” by Daphne Du Maurier (1971)

This is an effective and creepy story.  It’s the story of a man and woman vacationing in Venice after having lost a child.  In the midst of this, two women take an interest in them, one of them supposedly psychic.  Suddenly, strange events start happening – their son falls sick, they are warned that they are in danger if they stay in Venice, the man sees a vision of his wife on a funeral boat after she has gone back to London to be with their son.  All of this would just be a strange little story if not for the horrifying ending, when the man follows a child, only to have her suddenly turn around: “He stared at her, incredulity turning to horror, to fear. It was a not a child at all, but a thick-set woman dwarf, about three feet high, with a great square adult head too big for her body, grey locks hanging shoulder-length, and she wasn’t sobbing any more, she was grinning at him, nodding her head up and down.”  That’s the end for him, a knife suddenly thrown through the air, piercing his throat and it concludes with him thinking to himself “What a bloody silly way to die.”  Du Maurier manages to crank up the tension and the horror, though I can’t imagine she would have a notion of how Roeg would crank it up even more.

The Adaptation:

The first, and probably most important difference is in the death of the child.  In the film she drowns, the kind of accident where, even though the parents weren’t around, you know they feel the weight of responsibility.  In the book she dies of meningitis.  They also change the reason to go back home (instead of appendicitis, it is now an accident).  The couple are in Venice because he is actually working.  But, aside from the manner of death, the most important detail that changed is the red coat.  In the story, it is the wife who is wearing the red coat (it’s an important detail when he spots her on the funeral boat) rather than the daughter (the story begins in Venice with her already dead) and the dwarf, that rather ethereal connection between the two of them.

The Credits:

Directed by Nicolas Roeg.  from a story by Daphne Du Maurier.  Screenplay by Alan Scott and Chris Bryant.

Paper Moon

The Film:

My family is not particularly inclined towards the O’Neals.  My father hasn’t particularly liked Ryan since he was in the seventh grade and Ryan was in the ninth and he beat up my dad to impress a girl.  I have never been a fan because that incident proved he was a bully and because he starred in Love Story.  My sister used to have a grudge against Tatum because she was married to one of her big childhood crushes (John McEnroe).  Given all of this, which was well established long before I ever saw the film Paper Moon, it’s a measure of how good and entertaining it is that not only have I always really liked it but can sit back and enjoy how good both O’Neals are playing a con man and daughter team moving across the Midwest, conning old women out of their meager savings in the middle of the Depression.

This film has an interesting dichotomy at its core.  First of all, there is death and mourning and loss.  The first shot of the film after the credits is of a grave with dirt being poured into it.  Standing by the grave is young Addie, whose mother is in that grave.  Soon after, she will be placed in the hands of Moses Pray, who might be her father, but might not and certainly doesn’t want to admit to the possibility either way.  Moses takes in some money meant for her ($200) and is intending to send her off to some distant relatives.  But she’s not having any of it.  She’s either going to stay with him or she’s going to get her $200.  Her insistence is so persistent and voiced in such a way that I thought that Savage Steve Holland must have gotten the idea for the psychotic paperboy who wants his two dollars in Better Off Dead from watching this film but it turns out that was based on a real paperboy.  Still, you see the determination in her eyes and it’s no wonder she would go on to win the Oscar.  Would you look at her and not vote for her?

So Moses is stuck with her.  That can be awkward when your main job is going to recently widowed women (he finds them by looking in the obituaries), embossing their names on Bibles and convincing them that their late husbands ordered it for them before they died.  It doesn’t take long for Addie to figure out what he’s doing.  What’s surprising is how good she turns out to be at it when she decides she’s going to get into the game.  That’s most of the first half of the film, Moses and Addie working as a team, annoying each other but also realizing how well they work together (there’s a great long shot in a car when Moses is talking about putting her on a train and sending her off again and it becomes a conversation about where there is a train and then which towns are before then and then how they could get some good business going in those towns and before the shot is over, they’re just heading towards lunch before continuing on with their business and any talk of sending Addie off is forgotten).

The second half of the film settles down more, focusing on two specific parts.  The first part is when they get off the road for a bit because Moses has been taken in by Miss Trixie Delight (played wonderfully in an Oscar nominated performance from Madeline Kahn) and how Addie must scheme to try and get rid of Trixie and the second part involves a scheme where they rob a bootlegger only to discover that this bootlegger is also the sheriff’s brother and it will have larger repercussions for both of them.

As I said, there’s an interesting dichotomy at the heart of the film.  It’s a black and white film, it’s taking place in the heart of the Depression, it starts off with a funeral and there are all the hard working people that they are ripping off from their few available dollars.  But, on the other hand, it’s a rather dark Comedy and we can’t help but be sucked in by the slickness of Moses, the supposed (but actually nonexistent) innocence of Addie and the magnificent performances from both of them.  It’s a sure bet that neither one of them had ever or would ever give another performance anywhere near this good.  In a year where Comedies rose to the top of the pile, where The Sting won Best Picture, it’s a surprise that this film, from a director who had just been Oscar nominated two years before, wouldn’t rise with it, especially given its Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (not my choice but a good one) and nomination for Adapted Screenplay, instead getting pushed out in favor of the vastly inferior A Touch of Class.

The Source:

Addie Pray: a novel by Joe David Brown  (1971)

This is a charming, entertaining novel about a young teen (Addie) whose mother dies and ends up on the road with a man who might be her father (there were two other possibilities as well).  It turns out the man is a con man and his speciality is conning widows that their recently deceased husbands ordered them a special high-priced Bible, an interesting ploy in the middle of the Depression.  It’s a charming book and well-written with a convincing first person voice from young Addie herself.  Like so many books that received a new title when adapted to film, it was later reissued under the film’s title, so you may say it advertised like that and to be frank, Paper Moon is a better title (supposedly Orson Welles told Bogdanovich it was such a good title that he didn’t even need to make the film but just release the title).

The Adaptation:

There are a few differences between the book and the film, such as Addie’s age (reduced so that Tatum O’Neal could play the role) and the location (the book takes place mostly in Alabama and Georgia while the film moves the action to Kansas and Missouri).

There is one considerable difference, though.  The book is 313 pages long.  The actions of the film cover, fairly faithfully (with the exceptions listed above) until page 145 and then the film ends (with a natural and satisfying conclusion).  You could easily release a version of the book that only runs eight chapters instead of sixteen and you would think that the film covered the book without knowing that there is a whole second half of the book that involves learning to run bigger, longer cons and getting Addie set up with a family that takes her in (also more long cons).  I wonder if Brown had read The Grifters, which was published eight years before, and thought more about getting the characters into the long cons because it’s similar to the progression that Roy Dillon makes in that novel.

The Credits:

Directed and Produced by Peter Bogdanovich.  Based on the novel, “Addie Pray,” by Joe David Brown.  Screenplay by Alvin Sargent.

The Last Detail

The Film:

After the Oscars, when he had lost to Jack Lemmon, Jack Nicholson was upset, feeling that The Last Detail had been his best role so far, wondering how often a role like that comes along.  Well, Jack had nothing to worry about.  He had already done a couple of roles for which he would be more remembered than for this one (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces) and the next couple of years would bring two more that he would be more remembered for (Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and would finally bring him that Oscar in his fifth nomination.  Today, when we think of Jack Nicholson as one of the most honored actors in history with his three Oscars, do we think about how it took him five nominations before he actually won the Oscar?  And does anyone think of The Last Detail as his best role?

I actually ranked Nicholson 4th in this year for Best Actor with all three of the people above him having been nominated as well (Brando, Pacino, Lemmon).  Of course, this is a really strong year for Best Actor and the Academy noticed that for once, getting it mostly right.  And this is a strong role for Jack as a sailor who is tasked with taking a young kleptomaniac from Washington to Portsmouth so he can begin eight long years in the brig because he tried to steal $40 from a Polio fund that was the base commander’s wife pet charity.  The film itself is also quite good as is thought of as one of those films that got made in the 70’s because the studios were willing to take more chances.  After all, it involves three big names that were part of that explosion of talent and independence in the decade: Nicholson, writer Robert Towne and director Hal Ashby.

While there are two other main roles in the film, Otis Young as the other sailor given the task and Randy Quaid, young and dumb and goofy as the stupid kid who can’t help but steal and has thrown away his youth because of it (Quaid was Oscar nominated and is strong but got bumped all the way down to 11th on my list in this very strong year) but the film is rightfully Nicholson’s.  In fact, without Nicholson’s star power championing the script the film never even would have been made which brings me to Towne.  Towne had read the book and turned it into a script full to the brim with profanity (supposedly more uses of the word “fuck” than had ever been put on screen before) and when asked to tone it down refused because he said that this was how people who had no power spoke.  That the script was made at all was something that never would have happened before this point, of course, but that the script also earned Towne an Oscar nomination (it is true that it’s down here in 7th but there is very little difference on this list between 4th and 7th) says something about the Academy in this time period.  Then there is also Ashby.  Hal Ashby is a director who is almost perfectly emblematic of the decade, making a serious of very independent (in the stylistic sense, not the studio sense) films that managed to find both critical and commercial acclaim.  Ashby was actually going to be turned down by the studio but Towne and Nicholson stood by him (and again after he was arrested for marijuana possession in Canada while scouting locations).

What is perhaps most interesting about this film is deciding precisely what it is.  On the surface it might be appear to be a Drama with the serious aspect of two sailors having to drag another one to jail and it deals with some serious moments, such as the three of them fighting some army men in a bathroom, getting denied service in a bar and Nicholson applying a severe beating to Quaid when he tries to run at the end of the film.  But there are a lot of comedic moments as well, such as their drunken ramblings in a hotel room or getting Quaid laid at a brothel before he is thrown in the brig.  It is an interesting mixture of comedy and drama.  It is very much a film of its time and there is everything right with that.

The Source:

The Last Detail by Daryl Ponicsan  (1970)

This is the second Ponicsan novel I have read (the first is actually down below) and I was a bit more impressed with this, which was his first novel, than I was by Cinderella Liberty which was his fourth (if it makes him appear quite prolific that he would publish two books in three years between the two, I should point out that these books are very short).  Ponicsan had been in the Navy, which is no surprise to anyone who reads either book and I suspect he deems himself of an intellectual bent who ended up there kind of by accident because that’s how he writes the main character in both books (Buddusky in the book reads quite a lot and is reading The Stranger when we first meet him, though you have to learn that by clues as the title is never flat out said).  There’s not that much to the book and it ends kind of awkwardly in an altercation that I don’t think is really borne out by the actions that came before.  Given a choice, I would say watch the film and forget the book.

The Adaptation:

“‘I didn’t want Buddusky and Mulhall to feel overly guilty about transporting Meadows to jail,’ [Robert Towne] explained. ‘I wanted to imply that we’re all lifers in the Navy, and everybody hides behind a job, whether it’s massacring in My Lai, or taking a kid to jail.'” (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind, p 174)  Towne does do that a bit, less in the journey itself than in the way it ends.  In the book, the two of them are so disgusted by what they have done that they actually go AWOL, throwing their guns in a mailbox (after trying to pawn them) and then getting into a fight with the M.P.’s that come to get them and Buddusky is actually killed in the fight which is one hell of a down note to go out on.  It is a reminder that the book really has a lot less humor than the film does and that’s all thanks to Towne’s script.

Along the way there are a number of other changes.  In the book, the mother of the imprisoned sailor is actually home and they have a visit with her.  Later, in New York City they run in to Buddusky’s ex-wife.  Towne cut those and created his own other scenes in place.  But, of course, the main difference is the ending.  Towne essentially chops off the book on page 144 and drops the remaining thirty pages and the film is better off for it.

The Credits:

directed by hal ashby.  screenplay by Robert Towne.  based on the novel The Last Detail by Darryl Ponicsan.
note:  The source credit is only in the end titles.

A Doll’s House

The Film:

First of all, you have to know which A Doll’s House.  Even though it has long been acclaimed one of the stage’s great plays, there had not been an English language film of Ibsen’s play since the Silent Era.  Then, suddenly, in 1973, came two different film versions.  The British version was directed by Joseph Losey and starred Jane Fonda and David Warner.  Since it was a film version, I list it on the list at the bottom even though in the U.S. it only ended up on television instead of in theaters (except for the New York Film Festival).  Then there is the Patrick Garland version.  Certainly Garland, who spent most of his career doing stage work is much less known than Losey.  Also, star Claire Bloom isn’t nearly as well known or as highly regarded as Jane Fonda.  But this version was written by a young Christopher Hampton (it’s unclear if Hampton actually translated it though he did translate many French plays later in his career) and Bloom would become so identified with the role that when she later write a memoir she would title it Leaving a Doll’s House.

Ironically, even though this version has Anthony Hopkins in a key role, he doesn’t actually add much to the film.  The real strengths in this film lie in Bloom’s performance (deeper, more nuanced than Fonda’s, which is odd since Fonda is so much better an actress) and in the supporting performance from Denholm Elliot, who, of course, is the consummate supporting actor as I wrote about here.  Or perhaps it’s not so surprising that Hopkins isn’t as strong because he plays such a weak character.  It’s really the interplay between Bloom and Elliot and then Bloom and Ralph Richardson that makes the film because it is those scenes that make the play.

For anyone who has never managed to read A Doll’s House, well I’ll save the admonitions for the next part, and suffice to give you a summary.  Nora and Torvald Helmer seem to be a happy couple.  They have three children, they clearly seem to adore each other and they are planning a trip away, partially for Torvald’s health, which has suffered recently.  They then get some visitors and what happens with each of the visitors will tear their happiness to shreds.  It is a story very much of its time, as it will turn out that Nora borrowed money when Torvald was sick and she did by forging a signature.  It will not be the act itself that causes the downfall of the marriage but the way that Torvald responds to it.  Throughout the play, Nora is trying to keep this information hidden, dealing with Elliot (who knows about the forgery and is trying to use it to blackmail her into keeping Torvald from firing him), Dr. Rank (a good Richardson trying to balance his own emotions for Nora with the knowledge that he is dying) and Christine (a good Anna Massey), the woman who once loved Elliot and is an old friend of Nora’s.

What the film does, just like the play, is get at the heart of how people feel for each other.  What matters more, your appearances or your love?  Your family or your duty?  What you did or why you did it?  All of these are questions that different people in the film have firm beliefs on and they aren’t always the same answer.

Patrick Garland wasn’t really a film director.  He directs the film much more like it’s a play.  But, getting a career best performance out of Bloom as well as being able to rely on the first-rate play itself as well as having a timely theme (there is a strong theme of feminist empowerment that comes through at the conclusion of the play at the same time that ERA was still being voted upon) he does provide a satisfactory film version of one of the stage’s great plays.

The Source:

Et dukkehjem by Henrik Ibsen  (1879)

I first read this play in high school.  It was easy to see how brilliant it was, how the characters were all fully formed but all had their own views on right and wrong and doing what they would or could do to survive and to thrive.  It was also easy to see how daring the play was.  Hell, when I first read it in 1991 it still seemed like a daring statement to make, the strong ending where Nora finds the will to do what she must, knowing what she now does about her marriage and her husband.  There was another ending that was forced upon Ibsen for the German production of the play which he loathed and which has almost never been used in which Torvald forces Nora to look at their children asleep in their beds and she relents.  It’s a terrible ending that doesn’t fit at all the woman that we have come to know over her time on stage.

I have never really done a list of the great plays of all-time in the way that I have for novels and films, perhaps because, while I see everything and read everything, I have never lived close enough to New York or London to really see enough new plays to get an idea of what the truly great stage works are.  Sure, there are some easy ones, like the best of Shakespeare, the major plays of O’Neill, Williams and Miller as well as certain plays that have risen above like Angels in America.  Suffice it to say that every time I have culled down the Drama section on my bookshelf (which is a lot), I have always made certain to keep a copy of Ibsen’s Plays.  Ibsen is one of the all-time great playwrights and while there is probably a considerable argument over whether A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler is his best work, I am inclined more towards the former, perhaps because I find the ending to be stronger (and so much less depressing of course).

The Adaptation:

This is a fairly straight forward adaptation of the play and doesn’t even bother to really open it out, keeping the action pretty much confined to the Helmer household, just like in the original.

The Credits:

Directed by Patrick Garland.  Screenplay by Christopher Hampton.  Based on the Broadway Play, Produced by Hillard Elkins, Written by Christopher Hampton, Directed by Patrick Garland.
note:  The title Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is the only non-acting credit in the opening titles.

Consensus Nominee

The Paper Chase

The Film:

A young man is not prepared on his first day of law school.  There was advance reading which he did not do and when he is called on by the rather imperious professor, he doesn’t know what to do.  After the class, he runs to the bathroom and throws up.

This sounds like it should be the start of a good film, an interesting one.  But the sad thing is that, with the exception of the performance from John Houseman, who had long been known as a producer (he was a friend of Orson Welles and you should definitely watch Cary Elwes do a hilarious performance as him in The Cradle Will Rock) and was finally breaking into acting gives a first-rate performance, the film is mostly a drag.  He is the kind of man who just wants to pass his knowledge down and do it in such a way that it makes you feel as if you didn’t know anything, let alone anything that he wants to teach you.

But his is a supporting performance.  Yes, the film keeps coming back to that class, as if this poor student had no other classes during his first year in law school.  So we get a good enough amount of Houseman.  But we get far too much of other things, like the students panicking, like the pedantic romance between the student and a woman, who of course, turns out to be the daughter of the imperious professor in the first place.

Houseman won the Oscar, and while he doesn’t win the Nighthawk, he does easily earn a nomination.  It’s a great performance and it deserved its accolades.  But the film also somehow managed to earn a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination while films like The Day of the Jackal, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Don’t Look Now were overlooked (in the case of the last two, overlooked by the Academy completely).  The writing is just standard classroom drama mixed with standard romance drama.  It’s the performance that you want to watch the film for.

The Source:

The Paper Chase by John Jay Osborn, Jr. (1971)

As the author points out in a new 2003 introduction to the novel, this was wildly successful.  The novel spawned the film (which won an Oscar) and then a television series that was created for CBS and then revived by Showtime several years later (one of the first shows that Showtime ever did).  Yet, for all of its success, the book is neither very good nor all that substantial.  With sizable print and margins, the novel runs only 223 pages.  It covers the first year in law school for a student who’s kind of a pain, kind of a jerk and isn’t all that good at dealing with the other people around him.  Osborn wrote it after his first year at Harvard Law, the seminal year of 1969 when a lot of things were happening at Harvard (as he writes in the introduction).  The main interest is the contentious relationship that sort of develops between Hart (the main character) and Professor Kingsfield.  But the best moment in the book isn’t even part of the action of the book, it’s a little side bit about some rumor about something someone once said about the professor.  I suspect the book might have just been completely forgotten had not the film been made, and more specifically, had not John Houseman been so remarkable in the film.

The Adaptation:

“The movie, which follows the book almost line by line, won an Academy Award and is viewed every year in almost every law school in the United States.”  I suppose that might be true, but it doesn’t seem all that plausible.  The film just isn’t that good.  But that line, written by Osborn in the anniversary introduction to the novel, sums up the adaptation.  Basically, they put the novel up on screen.

Remarkably, the two most memorable moments in the film are both changes.  The moment of Hart going to puke in response to his first class isn’t in the book at all.  The part where he calls Kingsfield a son of a bitch is in the book, but it’s the moment I mentioned above, as a rumor about some student who supposedly said it to Kingsfield, not as something actually done by Hart in the book.

In the book, while Hart also throws his grades out the window, we never know what the grade was, while in the film, we at least know he got an A.

The Credits:

Directed by James Bridges.  Based upon the novel by John Jay Osborn, Jr.  Screenplay by James Bridges.

Multiple Nominations

Cinderella Liberty

The Film:

In 1973, Marsha Mason was nominated for an Oscar and actually won the Globe for her performance in this film in the same year that Liv Ullmann, giving one of the great all-time film performances in Cries and Whispers failed to even earn a nomination from either group.  Mason shouldn’t be blamed for it but that the voters were suckered in by this sentimental claptrap of a sailor and a prostitute and decided to reward it with anything is proof that just because a film earns awards doesn’t mean it’s really all that good.

Let’s look at what we have here.  First, we have James Caan.  He’s a sailor who is stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare.  His paperwork has been lost and as far as the Navy cares, he doesn’t really exist.  So he can leave the base until midnight but has to be back each night.  While away one night, he falls for a prostitute.  Well, really, he likes her, but he kind of falls for her poor kid, a half-black boy who is in desperate need of some dental work.  Caan is tired of the naval life and is looking for something more and so he embarks upon a romance that doesn’t really go anywhere.  Part of that is because of the script and part of is it that we don’t really care about the characters.  Mason is good and Caan is okay but that’s the only thing that draws us in because, honestly, they’re both just really annoying.  To add to all of this, there’s an old sailor played by Eli Wallach that Caan runs into who has been drummed out of the service and Caan thinks he can maybe solve a couple of problems in one go.

The film is described as a Drama (and was nominated as such at the Globes) but I always thought it was trying to be a romantic comedy and so I have always classified it as such.  Mason’s Globe win would have been much more acceptable if it had been in Comedy (and she actually win the Nighthawk for Comedy), not only because of Ullmann but also because of Ellen Burstyn’s magnificent performance in The Exorcist (which lost to Mason, which I can not for the life of me understand, especially since The Exorcist won Picture, Director, Screenplay and Supporting Actress at the Globes).

The Source:

Cinderella Liberty by Daryl Ponicsan (1973)

At the moment that I write this review (for the second time, mostly from memory), I have not yet read The Last Detail (whose review will be up above).  So I don’t know if just don’t think much of Ponicsan as a writer or if it’s just this book.  This is the story of a Naval sailor who, after some medical issues, finds his files lost and ends up in a red tape nightmare.  He will meet a prostitute and then fall for her and become a father figure to her kids (who he actually seems to like more).  He wants to leave the Navy and is able to do so partially because of the red tape and partially because he finds the old C.O. he’s been wanting to beat to a pulp for years and lets him rejoin the Navy in his place.  That’s just one of the ridiculous things about the novel (like the way the sailor was supposedly a divinity school drop-out but doesn’t speak or act in any way like an educated man, let alone a formerly religious educated man).  None of the characters are very interesting and the plot just goes over the top and there’s no question I never would have finished the book if not for the project.

The Adaptation:

If you’ve read the two bits above, the main thing you will notice is that in the book there are two kids while in the film they reduced it to one (probably a wise move).  The other major changes are that in the film we are introduced to him after he’s in Seattle and dealing with his issues while in the book we meet him long before that and get a full description of how he ends up in this trouble as well as the former C.O. he’s been looking for.  It’s actually kind of amazing how they managed to film an almost two hour movie from a book that wasn’t that long to begin with and which they chopped the first 50 pages out of.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Mark Rydell.  Screenplay by Darryl Ponicsan.  Based on his novel Cinderella Liberty.

WGA Nominees

40 Carats

The Film:

Liv Ullmann is one of the greatest actresses to ever appear on film.  She was never better than she was in the 70’s, dominating the decade with six Nighthawk nominations and earning the Nighthawk itself in 1973.  Whether you want to count the film that qualifies for the Nighthawk in 1973 (Cries and Whispers) or the one that was actually released in Sweden in 1973 (Scenes from a Marriage), she was phenomenal.  Unfortunately, because of some truly terrible casting, she was also the star of two of the worst films of the year.  It’s not that Ullmann can’t act in English (she can), it’s not that she can’t be in a Comedy (though it’s not her forte), but casting her in this stupid film was almost as dumb as casting her as the lead in the musical Lost Horizon (and she can’t sing, so there are limits to her abilities).

You can have film stars be in all sorts of roles but sometimes you have to find the right ones and in those cases, looks can matter (at least somewhat).  My Fair Lady was never as effective a film as it could have been with Julie Andrews because Audrey Hepburn just isn’t a guttersnipe.  Andrews, who could also be beautiful and sexy, could also be a guttersnipe.  Ullmann, a gorgeous actress, can play an average woman.  But it’s ridiculous to ask her to play a 40 year old woman who is so insecure that she will lie about her age on multiple occasions and will become completely flustered when a 22 year old man falls for her.  Of course a 22 year old man would fall for her.  She’s Liv Ullmann!  Roger Ebert nails this one right: “It is simply not possible to accept her as a conservative 40 year-old woman, uncertain of her attractiveness and shy about accepting love.”  It’s not that Liv Ullmann can’t play the part, but we can’t accept her in the part.

It might have been easier to take the film as a whole even with Ullmann miscast if not for the other terrible casting job in the film and that’s choosing Edward Albert as the young man who is so infatuated with her (he claims he’s in love with her but he doesn’t seem to put enough thought into anything to be able to really make that claim).  In my review of Butterflies are Free for the previous post in this series I described Albert as “Stephen Collins if he were more bland”.  After his bland, boring performance in Butterflies, what made anyone think he could be an interest for Ullman?  Well, re-reading that review, I noticed that the film (and original play) of Butterflies was written by Leonard Gershe, a name that sounded familiar because he wrote this terrible film.

There is an odd little bit of tragedy when it comes to this film.  There is a charming performance by Deborah Raffin as Liv’s daughter (who initially thinks Albert is after her but he’s just using her to get to her mother – classy guy), a pretty, young actress who didn’t make a lot of films and there is a ridiculous subplot about a man Liv’s age who it turns out is after the daughter.  The tragic part is that Liv, the 40 year old in the film (35 when it was filmed), is still going strong at 79 while Albert and Raffin have both been dead for years, neither making it out of their 50’s.  I should also mention a decent performance from Gene Kelly, namely because it was his first film performance in six years and he only took the job because he wanted to act opposite Ullman (he plays her fading television star ex-husband).  The sad thing there is that he only made two more films after this one and both of those were actually worse than this one (Viva Knievel and Xanadu).

The Source:

Forty Carats: A Comedy in Two Acts, Adapted by Jay Allen from a play by Barillet and Gredy (1969)

This play, which was a hit on stage, was based on an original French play from the team of Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, the same play-writing team that had written the original French play that became Cactus Flower (and was directed on Broadway by Abe Burrows who had directed and adapted Cactus Flower).  The play itself is not terrible and when it was originally produced on stage it starred Julie Harris who is much more believable as a woman who would lie about her age and might not believe that a young man would fall in love with her.  That’s not a knock on Julie Harris any more than it’s a knock on Julie Andrews to say that she can realistically play a guttersnipe.  It’s just that Harris isn’t Liv Ullman.  There’s still not a lot of realism in the play.

The Adaptation:

Most of the film follows closely to the play except two things which Roger Ebert notes, though if you just read his description you might be confused about what was changed.  In the original play, when Ullman’s character meets the parents of her young lover, the father is exceedingly nasty while in the film he is a bit more manipulative and not as awful (Ebert’s description here is confusing).  As for the ending, well, she is still planning to go after and marry her young man but in the film, since they had a budget and locations to use, they are actually back in Greece where they met so that they can give you a beautiful visual to counteract the stupidity of the whole film.

The Credits:

Directed by Milton Katselas.  Stage Play Adapted by Jay Allen from a Play by Barillet & Gredy.  Screenplay by Leonard Gershe.

Godspell: A musical based on the Gospel according to St. Matthew

The Film:

Roger Ebert and I don’t always agree.  In fact, when I first started watching Siskel and Ebert I almost always sided with Siskel over Ebert though I would learn later that Ebert was the much more serious writer.  For instance, he gave four stars to Bang the Drum Slowly, a film I mentioned at the top of the post as being knocked off the list when I watched it again and decided that the writing wasn’t up to the level I thought necessary to be on the list.  Now here is Godspell, another film which Ebert rated it at four stars.  But, if I thought Bang the Drum Slowly was a bit trite with subpar writing, I find Godspell to be a smarmy obnoxious slice of hippie ridiculousness.  In his review, Ebert mentions “Remember “West Side Story,” where all the allegedly teenage dancers looked like hardened theatrical professionals in greaser wigs? “Godspell’s” cast is not only young but is allowed to look like a collection of individuals. These could conceivably be real people, and their freshness helps put the material over even when it seems pretty obvious.”  I prefer to think of it that West Side Story cast actual actors in its film that were taught to sing and dance (or taught to dance and had their singing dubbed).  Their acting was phenomenal.  This is is a bunch of rank amateurs parading around New York City patronizingly teaching the Gospel through hippie parables without an ounce of acting talent among them except for Victor Garber and Garber survives much more on his singing talent than his acting here.

This film reminds me of my uncle and I see by clicking on his own review of the film through the IMDb that he gave it a 7 both for Education and for Entertainment, because, yes, he’s the type of person who rates things for those values.  My uncle has long been interested in Jesus, not as a messiah, but as a teacher of peace and love.  I would think Godspell would be absolutely up his alley but maybe even he could see that the songs aren’t actually all that good and the acting, direction, editing, almost everything about the film leaves a lot to be desired.

Now, here is where we get into the religion aspect.  Do I have no use for this musical because of its content?  Well, no, and that’s where I want to bring up another musical that made the leap to the screen in 1973 that also had Jesus as a leading character.  Other than those two things, there is almost nothing in common between Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar.  The latter story tells the actual story of Christ and does deal with the issue of whether he is the messiah.  Godspell couldn’t care less – it just wants to spread his message of peace and love.  But that’s actually exactly what I can’t stand about Godspell; it’s just a preacher’s lesson put into different form and not even a particularly entertaining one.  Now, Jesus Christ Superstar is a vastly flawed film as I mention below because Norman Jewison made some disastrous directing decisions.  But as a musical, I absolutely love it (we’ll see if this post goes up before the Emmys and we see whether John Legend earns his EGOT and the only issue I would have with that is that Judas is clearly the leading role and they nominated Brandon Victor Dixon, who was amazing as Burr when I saw him on stage in Hamilton in supporting and that version was fantastic, everything Jewison’s wasn’t – note on that – it didn’t make it up before the Emmys and Legend did win an Emmy and get his EGOT but not for acting) and that’s the one that deals much more with religion.  So I refuse to accept that I hate Godspell because it’s about Christ.  I hate it because it’s not about Christ, but is just a pandering, annoying way to beat us over his head with his message by using subpar songs and a total lack of acting.

The Source:

Godspell: A Musical Based Upon the Gospel According to St. Matthew, music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, book by John-Michael Tebelak  (1971)

Would I hate the play on stage as much as I hate the film?  I would think so.  I don’t much care for the songs and it’s the way they are trying to get the message across, which might work really well for some people, that turns me off.  I know there are people who love this but I couldn’t remember a single song as soon as the film was over.  Some may say the same about Andrew Lloyd Webber, so it’s all a matter of personal preference.

The Adaptation:

This is one of the ones I am going to punt a bit to the Wikipedia page.  There are people who are crazy about Broadway musicals (technically this was an Off-Broadway musical, but for the purposes of this comment, that’s not relevant) and they like to write on the various Wikipedia pages for the film versions all the various changes between the stage and screen.  So, here you go.

The Credits:

Directed by David Greene.  Screenplay by David Greene and John-Michael Tebelak.  Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz.
note:  There are no opening credits other than the title.

Other Adaptations

(in descending order of how good the film is)

• Battles Without Honour and Humanity  –  A very good Japanese gangster film, the first of a series by Kinju Fukasaku.  Based on a series of newspaper articles about a Yakuza conflict in post-war Hiroshima.
• Charley Varrick  –  Solid Crime film, a top-level *** film with a solid performance from Walter Matthau for which he co-won the BAFTA (with his performance in Pete ‘n Tillie).  Based on the novel The Looters.
• The Iceman Cometh  –  The short-lived American Film Theatre made 13 films over the course of three years out of significant plays.  This was the first and possibly the best, starring a fantastic cast (Lee Marvin as well as the last film performances of both Fredric March and Robert Ryan) in an adaptation of the great O’Neill play.
• The Adversary  –  Good Satyajit Ray Drama from the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay.  A 1970 film.
• The Hourglass Sanatorium  –  Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes with a smuggled print because Polish authorities wouldn’t let director Wojciech Has submit it.  An adaptation of the classic Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schultz which I read as part of the Writers from the Other Europe series published by Penguin thanks to Philip Roth as well as other Schultz stories.
• Papillon  –  I always want this to be slightly better and be a contender for Best Picture at least because it stars Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman but it’s just a high *** with good performances from both and a fantastic Oscar-nominated score from Jerry Goldsmith.  Based on the memoir by the real Papillon, Henri Charrière and remade in 2017 which I doubt I will bother to see since this time it stars Charlie Hunnam.
• Bang the Drum Slowly  –  As mentioned at the top of the post, originally on my list but cut after I re-watched it and decided the writing wasn’t good enough.  Based on the novel by Mark Harris, which is okay, but certainly not a baseball classic like it’s purported to be.  The other film aside from Mean Streets that helped make Robert De Niro a breakout star in 1973.
• Charlotte’s Web  –  A solid Hanna-Barbera adaptation of the classic kids book (which I didn’t read until I was a senior in high school).
• The New Land  –  The sequel to The Emigrants, which was reviewed in 1972 and using the last two books in the series (see that review).
• Le Samourai  –  One of those films that I want to think more highly of than I do.  Widely considered a classic but just high *** on my list.  Jean-Pierre Melville Crime film with Alain Delon based on the novel The Ronin by Joan McLeod though the film doesn’t credit it.
• The Dawns Here are Quiet  –  A 1972 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film, a Soviet War film based on the novel by Boris Vasilyev.
• Two English Girls  –  A 1971 Truffaut Drama based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, whose only other novel Jules and Jim, had already been filmed by Truffaut.
• A River Called Titas  –  An Indian Drama, mid-***, based on the novel by Titash Ekti Nadir Naam.
• Late Autumn  –  One of multiple Ozu films that made it to the States in the 70’s and the rare one that is actually adapted, in this case from a story by Ton Satomi.
• Days and Nights in the Forest  –  A second adaptation of a Sunil Gangopadhyay novel directed by Satyajit Ray.
• Robin Hood –  I ranked this at #33 of the first 50 Disney Animated Films.  I always hope it will be better, the Robin Hood legend told with anthropomorphic animals but other than the song “Oo-Ded-Lally” it’s not really that great.
• A Delicate Balance  –  The third of the American Theatre series (the second is below), this one is based on the Edward Albee Pulitzer winning play.
• A Doll’s House  –  This is the Jane Fonda version mentioned in the review of the Claire Booth version above.  A better director and actress but because it was British and because of the other film version, it played on ABC instead, though it was made for theaters and did play the New York Film Festival which is why I include it.
• The Offence  –  Sidney Lumet Drama with Sean Connery that is based on the play This Story of Yours.
• The Hireling  –  After the success of The Go-Between, another L.P. Hartley novel is adapted.
• The Spider’s Stratagem  –  A 1970 Bertolucci film getting a U.S. release.  Based on the Borges story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”.
• Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me  –  Another Truffaut Drama, this one based on the novel by Henry Farrell.
• The Priest and the Girl  –  A prominent 1965 Brazilian film that is adapted from the poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
• Love  –  A Hungarian Drama submitted for Best Foreign Film in 1971.  Based on two short stories by Tibor Déry.
• Family Life  –  A rare adaptation from Ken Loach but only in that it’s based on a BBC production that Loach had done four years earlier.
• Four Nights of a Dreamer  –  Robert Bresson gives his version of Dostoevsky’s “White Nights”.  As with most Bresson, it doesn’t really work for me.
• The Last American Hero  –  The best thing about this film is the song “I Got a Name” that Jim Croce wrote for it which the Oscars long-listed but didn’t nominate because they’re a bunch of idiots.  This story of race car driver Junior Johnson, played by Jeff Bridges, was based on an Esquire article by Tom Wolfe.
• Her Third  –  One of the rare Oscar submissions from East Germany, this was based on a short story by Eberhard Panitz.
• Hunting Scenes from Bavaria  –  The West German Oscar submission from 1969, this Drama is based on the play by Martin Sperr.  We’re into low *** now.
• Live and Let Die  –  Roger Moore takes over as Bond with mixed results.  I ranked it at #18 among the Bond films and you can read the full review here.
• Soylent Green  –  Well known to even those who haven’t seen it (except my sister) for the famous line “Soylent Green is people!”, this Sci-Fi dystopia was adapted from the novel Make Room! Make Room!, though there is no cannibalism in the original.
• Lady Snowblood  –  A Japanese Action film based on the Manga series.
• The First Circle  –  Not a Soviet film, of course, since there’s no way they would have been allowed to adapt a Solzhenitsyn novel but a West German-Danish adaptation.
• Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades  –  The third of the film series which was based on the famous Manga series.
• Saudagar  –  This Bollywood Musical, based on a story by Narendranath Mithra, was the Indian Oscar submission for Best Foreign Film in 1973.
• England Made Me  –  An adaptation of an early novel by Graham Greene (when he was still more of a thriller writer than a real literary force).  It was nominated for Art Direction at the BAFTAs.
• The Homecoming  –  This adaptation of the Pinter play was the second American Film Theatre production.  Gloomy, as you would imagine from Pinter.
• The Long Goodbye  –  I may no consider Le Samourai to be a classic but at least I think it’s good.  I can’t grasp the love for this film.  Maybe I’m just too locked in to Bogie as Marlowe.  Altman directed Elliot Gould (who I hated as Marlowe) in this sub-par (**.5) adaptation of the Chandler novel.
• Jesus Christ Superstar  –  More disappointment as noted in the review of Godspell above.  I actually love this musical and have seen it on stage with the stars from this film in 1993.  They were fantastic.  But Norman Jewison’s decision to have it randomly set in the present with weird hippie trappings to it just killed the film version.  If you want to see it, watch the 2018 television version instead.  For a long time the best thing about this film was “Can We Start Again Please” which I thought was written for the film but it was actually written for the stage, left off the original recording (which is the one I own) and included later on stage before the film was produced.  Not even close to the biggest film screw-up of a stage musical that I love (just wait until 1977).
• Medea  –  Passolini tackles the classics yet again.  The film is from 1969 but was released in L.A. in 1973.
• Wedding in White  –  One of the weakest films (that I’ve seen) to win the Canadian Film Award, a bland Drama based on the play by William Fruet.
• Tom Sawyer  –  Even having Jodie Foster as Becky Thatcher can’t save this Musical film version of Twain’s novel.  I’d say just read the novel but I’m actually not a big fan of the novel.
• The Day of the Dolphin  –  The downward trend continues for Mike Nichols but thankfully will be reversed a little with his next film.  A boring film based on the novel A Sentient Animal.
• Siddhartha  –  Someone named Conrad Rooks adapts the Herman Hesse novel.
• A Day in the Death of Joe Egg  –  Depressing melodrama based on the play by Peter Nichols.  We’re well into mid **.5.
• The New One-Armed Swordsman  –  Now we hit low **.5.  A 1971 Hong Kong Action film that was the third in the series.
• Magnum Force  –  The second Dirty Harry film and a big drop off from the first one.
• Scalawag  –  Kirk Douglas directs himself in a Western version of Treasure Island.
• The Castle of Fu Manchu  –  The fifth (and final) outing with Christopher Lee as the famous criminal mastermind.  This film has horrible ratings on the IMDb (2.7) but I found it to be just a low **.5.
• The MacKintosh Man  –  A John Huston dud, a Cold War thriller based on The Freedom Trap by Desmond Bagley.
• The Spook Who Sat By the Door  –  The original novel by Sam Greenlee is apparently a satire but the film is just a dud of a Drama.
• Kazablan  –  An Israeli Musical based on the play.  Wikipedia says it got a 1974 U.S. release but the old oscars.org listed it in 1973.
• Charley and the Angel  –  Dumb Fred MacMurray Disney film based on the novel The Golden Evenings of Summer by Will Stanton.
• Battle for the Planet of the Apes  –  The last of the original Apes series which is good because the film is not.  Mid **.
• Godzilla vs the Smog Monster  –  This is the U.S name for Godzilla vs. Hedorah.  Not one of the better Godzilla films.  Fnord may have stopped his Marvel Chronology but you can still read his Godzilla reviews including his one for this one here.
• The Legend of Hell House  –  Richard Matheson adapts his own novel (Hell House) for the screen and it’s terrible.
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull  –  A smarmy New Age book (that was insanely popular) becomes a smarmy New Age film that was not.
• Scream Blacula Scream  –  A sequel to Blacula.  Low **.  You either love it for what it is or you don’t love it at all.
• Hitler: The Last Ten Days  –  A film I avoided for a long time because I didn’t want to watch my favorite actor (Alec Guinness) playing Hitler.  He does.  It’s terrible.  Everything about the film is just a mess.  Based on the book by Gerhard Bolt, who actually survived the Bunker.
• Lost Horizon  –  The worst film of the year, a terrible Musical version of the classic Hilton novel with Liv Ullmann in the lead.  My full review is available at the Nighthawk Awards.  It’s still available to watch on YouTube if you feel like torturing yourself.

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen

• Samurai Saga  –  I wish I could find it to see it because it’s Mifune in an Inagaki adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, but set among samurai.
• Topele  –  A 1968 Israeli production of the Sholom Aleichem story that is so little seen it doesn’t yet have the five votes necessary on the IMDb to show the number of votes.

Adult Films That Are Also Adaptations

• Behind the Green Door