Best Adapted Screenplay: 1963

“To speak out boldly at once, she was in love, according to the present universally received sense of that phrase, by which love is applied indiscriminately to the desirable objects of all our passions, appetites, and sense, and is understood to be that preference which we give to one kind of food rather than to another.” (p 420)

My Top 10:

1. Tom Jones
2. Shoot the Piano Player
3. White Nights
4. Hud
5. The Great Escape
6. The Leopard
7. Captain Newman, M.D.
8. Sundays and Cybele
9. Irma La Douce
10. Charade

Note:  There are 14 films on my list.  The other four are all listed towards the bottom of the post.
Note:  There are two films not appearing in this post that require explanation.  The first is The Bad Sleep Well, which ranked at #2 in the Nighthawk Awards.  Looking further at it, I don’t think it qualifies as adapted (Kurosawa’s nephew wrote a script which was unproduced and which Kurosawa reworked into this film), as it would just be considered an earlier draft of the film that was made.  The process of the script’s development is discussed in The Emperor and the Wolf by Stuart Galbraith IV, starting on page 284.  The other is America America, which was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in spite of the book that preceded it, but that book is essentially a novelization of the script that appeared first because funding difficulties pushed filming back.  The script was not actually adapted from the book, in spite of what you might read (you can read about the process in Elia Kazan: A Biography by Richard Schickel on pages 391-392). 

Consensus Nominees:

1. Hud  (200 pts)
2. Tom Jones  (160 pts)
3. Lilies of the Field  (120 pts)
4. Captain Newman, M.D.  (80 pts)
5. Sundays and Cybele  (40 pts)
6. The Balcony  (40 pts)
7. Charade  (40 pts)
8. The Great Escape  (40 pts)
9. Irma La Douce  (40 pts)
10. The Ugly American  (40 pts)

Oscar Nominees  (Best Screenplay – Adapted):

• Tom Jones
• Captain Newman, M.D.
• Hud
• Lilies of the Field
• Sundays and Cybele

WGA Awards:

Drama:

• Hud
• The Balcony
• Captain Newman M.D.
• The Great Escape
• The Ugly American

Nominees that are Original:  America America

Comedy:

• Lilies of the Field
• Charade
• Irma La Douce

Nominees that are Original:  Love with the Proper Stranger, The Thrill of it All

Musical:

The category takes a year off, thank god.

BAFTA (Best British Screenplay):

• Tom Jones

NYFC:

• Hud

My Top 10

Tom Jones

The Film:

The winner of Best Picture in 1963 and I’m gonna go ahead and say it won by a mile.  Of course, we won’t ever know the actual results.  But it was already only the fourth film to win the Globe, NYFC and NBR (and the Globe – Drama winner wasn’t nominated).  The only other film nominated for both Picture and Director had only four nominations (while this film had ten).  And it’s miles away the best of the five films.  Indeed, earning a 94 in a year where the average nominee earns a 64.6, it has the second highest difference in Oscar history (just behind All Quiet on the Western Front) and along with All Quiet is the only film to be more than 20 points better than the next best nominee (they are at 24 and 31 points respectively and no other winner is more than 10 points better than the next best film).  It is a great and lively Comedy, a fantastically fun film that looks scrumptious with a wonderful, career-defining performance from Albert Finney.

The Source:

The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749)

Sometimes the old ways are not the best.  That’s not meant as a slam on the novel itself, though, like most early novels, it doesn’t really work for me (the only two books prior to 1830 that really win me over are Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein).  I am referring to the tendency of many publishers to publish it in the same way that it was originally published Including its Seemingly random Capitalization.  That may not bother some people but it took me at least three tries before I was ever to finish reading the book originally.  Thankfully, I no longer have that copy and the edition I got out of the library, published by Everyman’s Library, didn’t go for that nonsense, making it much easier to read.

Of course, you still have to claw your way through 18th century prose, through books that begin with sentences like “Peradventure there may be no parts in this prodigious work which will give the reader less pleasure in the perusing than those which have given the author the greatest pains in composing.  Among these probably may be reckoned those initial essays which we have prefixed to the historical matter contained in every book; and which we have determined to be essentially necessary to this kind of writing, of which we have set ourselves at the head.”  Actually, the first chapter of many of the books (of which there are eighteen) are entirely like this.  You could basically skip the first chapter in every book and not lose a moment of what is actually going on.  That’s the way they wrote in the 18th Century, of course, and it kills me.  When you get a chance to actually focus on Tom you get some fun adventures with a lively character, but for a book that runs over 800 pages, there’s not nearly enough of that.

The Adaptation:

” [Speeding up the action] clearly diverges from the rhythm of the novel: Fielding’s narrator relishes telling his tale, slowly unfolding details which the reader follows at his own pace, whereas the film acknowledges uniquely cinematic time – compressed, ceaselessly moving, imposing itself on the spectator as if he were riding a wild horse.  The pace is also quickened to the point of breathlessness for transitions between scenes.  In the novel, Fielding frequently heralds a change with ceremonious words; the film marks such passages with an ornamental device, either a flip frame or a wipe.”  (“A Whisper and a Wink” by Annette Insdorf and Sharon Goodman in The English Novel and the Movies, p 37)

But all of that is a blessing in this film.  Over 800 pages of prose is delineated into a couple of hours on film.  Much of the actual action in the book makes it into the film and the story remains pretty faithful to the original.  Most of what is cut are those ceremonious words.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Tony Richardson. Screenplay by John Osborne. Based on the novel by Henry Fielding.

Tirez sur le pianiste

The Film:

Francois Truffaut was not only one of the first and most prominent of the directors in the French New Wave he was also the best.  He could use the best aspects of the concept, utilizing American notions and themes, but using them to tell stories that also were distinctly French.  His best films showed how he worked as both a writer and a director to make a fantastic coherent film with a vision: The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, Day for Night.  But Truffaut, like Godard, could also experiment.  He just didn’t allow the experimenting to get the best of him and he didn’t allow it to take the place of substance and coherence in his films.  Perhaps the film that best exemplifies that is Shoot the Piano Player, his masterful second film that opened to less than stellar reviews in France and England and therefore ended up getting delayed before getting to the States, the year after Jules and Jim had reminded people that he was a film force to be reckoned with.

Charlie is a relaxed, low-key guy.  He plays the piano at a dive bar in Paris.  He might be interested in the attractive waitress but that’s more because she seems interested in him (elements of that will come back in Hitchcock’s Frenzy and it won’t work out for the waitress either time).  He’s content to just kind of sleepwalk through life until the night the guy comes into the bar being chased by gangsters.  Charlie helps him out, getting him out the back door and delaying the gangsters because, well, the guy’s his brother and he feels like he needs to.  It will only slowly come out after that, that Charlie is a fake name, something for former classical pianist Edouard Saroyan to hide behind.  Saroyan was successful and was still rising with a pretty wife and a good career until the day he found out his wife had slept with his manager to get him his big break.  Something breaks right there and his wife can see it and when he turns to leave, she leaves as well, but going a shorter route out the window and Edouard stumbles around, trying to pick up the pieces of his life, eventually ending up at the bar.  But, with a couple of gangsters who are less than stellar at their jobs after his brother, Charlie is drawn back into his old life.

All of this comes together in a variety of ways and all of is American film noir filtered through Truffaut’s New Wave sensibilities.  The writing is first rate, as we get a clear vision of who Charlie is and how he came to be the sleepwalker that he is now.  He’s played quite well by Charles Aznavour, one of the most famous musicians of the 20th Century with an almost ironic detachment except that no Truffaut character would ever actually have an ironic detachment.  He’s been broken and he’s trying to come out of his dream.  Truffaut himself keeps us in something close to a dream, with fantastic music, some great editing between scenes, some amusing little side bits (the gangsters are really quite pathetic at their jobs) and a beautiful girl determined to keep Charlie from slipping away.

In a lot of ways, this is Truffaut’s most New Wave film.  Because of that, it might not stand as high as Jules and Jim or Day for Night.  But that doesn’t mean it should be pushed aside in any way.  It finds a new way to embrace film noir, with a touch of humor and some nice romance, not to mention beautiful shots out in the snow when Charlie and the waitress flee to the countryside to reunite with his brothers.  This was one of the first Truffaut films I ever saw and it has remained one of my favorites from one of the world’s foremost directors.

The Source:

Down There by David Goodis  (1956)

Though published as a paperback original, Goodis’ novel has come to be appreciated and not just by Truffaut (he loved the book and wanted to make the film to show his American influences after his very French debut, The 400 Blows).  In 1997, with still lots of great American writers yet to be included in their series, Library of America reprinted the novel (alongside such now highly regarded noir novels as Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley) in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s.  The novel, indeed, is quite good, the noir story of a man who left his life behind after his wife’s suicide and hides out playing piano in a small bar in Philadelphia until the day that his brother comes in, chased by gangsters and he’s forced to go back and deal with his former life.  Like many such novels, it is fairly short (it runs 158 pages in that copy) but is extremely efficient.  It is definitely one of the better novels I have read for the first time specifically for this project.

The Adaptation:

Anyone interested in the film or how it was adapted should definitely try one of the specific books on the film like Focus on Shoot the Piano Player, Leo Brady, ed. or the more readily available Shoot the Piano Player, Peter Brunette, ed. from Rutgers Films in Print which has many of the same essays and reviews that the previous book had.

The most significant change, of course, is that the entire story is moved from Philadelphia (and rural New Jersey) to Paris (and rural France).  There are a number of small details that are different between the book and the film (there is no little brother being cared for by Charlie in the original novel) but the basic plot and certainly the style of the novel come through quite clearly in the film.

The Credits:

d’après le roman de David Goodis, Down There.  Adaptation de F. Truffaut et Marcel Moussy.  Dialogue et Mise en scène de François Truffaut.

Le notti bianche

The Film:

I wonder what I would have thought at the time.  Sometimes it’s not so bad getting things later.  In 1963, when White Nights finally made it to the States, Marcello Mastroianni was already an international star.  But he was a star because of films like La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, where he is an observer (and partaker at times) of wild decadence and while his roles had some drama, the films were more comedic.  So what then to make of him in a film like White Nights, which had actually been made years before either of the Fellini films but hadn’t gotten a U.S. release until now, where Mastroianni is the heartsick young man walking in desperation in a lonely Italian city where has only recently arrived.  Being the protagonist of a film based on a a Dostoevsky story is about as far away as you can get from the world of Fellini and yet Mastroianni’s acting has never been better.

Mastroianni is Mario.  Mario doesn’t really know how to relate to other people which is why he’s down here at the canal during the night, away from other people, just trying to find something in his life.  What he finds is Natalia.  She is also alone, but for different reasons.  She lives in a poor part of the city, caring for her grandmother and she has a man that she loves but who she can’t manage to get to commit to her.

What we get between them over the course of the film is a beautiful friendship that seems like it could blossom into something more but in the end, is nothing but two lonely people reaching out to push back the loneliness but leaving and going back to their own lives.  It would be a kind of in-between stage for Luchino Visconti, who had been a neo-Realist director but was starting to transition towards more symbolic stories (he would later make The Leopard, a fantastic film reviewed down below but would end up making messes like Ludwig).  Of all the films that Visconti would make, this, to me is his clearest vision, the most solidly directed and written.  He brings out the best acting in Mastroianni and a solid performance as well from Maria Schell (who would return to Dostoevsky a year later, but in a Hollywood version of The Brothers Karamazov that’s not nearly as good).

And yet, isn’t the film a form of realism?  Have you never met someone while out for the night and found yourself talking to them, making some sort of connection, and then just gone back to your actual life?  That’s part of what makes life worth living, those kind of connections where you realize that you’re not alone, that there are others like you.

The Source:

Белые ночи by Fyodor Dostoevsky  (1848)

Dostoevsky was never a prolific short story writer (most of his work comes from the late 1840’s and then there are a few from his later years) and this is almost certainly his most well-known short story, often included in collection of his “short works” with his well-known novellas like Notes from Underground, The Eternal Husband and The Double.  It’s the story of a young man and woman who meet over the course of four nights in St. Petersburg, slowly overcoming their loneliness in each other, only, in the end, to split up and go their separate ways when her former lover returns to her.  It’s a nice story, but Dostoevsky’s power is really in his longer prose, which is why he made so many appearances in my Top 100.

The Adaptation:

Visconti changed the location of the story from St. Petersburg to Livorno not because of an artistic reason (though both of them being port cities with beautiful architecture helped the change) but because political issues at the time of the film’s production (the Soviet invasion of Hungary) made filming in the then-Leningrad impossible.  In the end, Visconti actually filmed most of it in the studio for financial reasons. (info courtesy of A Screen of Time: A Study of Luchino Visconti by Monica Stirling, p 119-120).

There are some other changes as well.  The best comparison between the original story and the film can be read in an essay here, written for Criterion.

The Credits:

Regia di Luchino Visconti.  dal racconto omonimo di Fedor Dostoevskij.  Soggetto e Sceneggialura: Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Luchino Visconti.

Hud

The Film:

A young man heads into town to go find his uncle, Hud.  He’s maybe at the cafe or the pool-hall.  Maybe he’s getting some breakfast.  Or maybe he’s at the home of a woman whose husband is out of town getting himself a different kind of breakfast.  Actually, there’s exactly where he is and it’s just the first time we see the kind of trouble he’s going to cause all the way until the final minutes.  He’s tired of dealing with his cantankerous old father who tries to run his ranch with an iron first.  Hud is rude, unbearable, arrogant and things take a really ugly turn when he decides he’s had enough of watching their housemaid, Alma and that he’s going to take what he wants.

James Dean’s rebel might not have had a cause but Hud isn’t even a rebel.  He’s just an impatient man tired of waiting for his time to come and he’s going to take whatever he wants.  He’s the forerunner of people like Clyde Barrow, at least on film.  Kids looked at him and they didn’t see the bar rights or the attempted rape or the way he’s just waiting for his father to die.  They saw a good-looking guy who walked with a definite swagger (highlighted by a magnificent performance, certainly one of the best of Paul Newman’s career if not the best) and they wanted to be him.

Hud is kind of a fascinating film.  It’s easily the best film from Martin Ritt, who made many with Newman.  The cinematography is fantastic and it is well written and well directed.  It has very strong supporting performances from Melvyn Douglas as Hud’s father (even if I don’t agree with his Oscar) and a performance from Brandon de Wilde that almost redeems his performance in Shane.  It also has a performance from Patricia Neal as Alma that won the Oscar (and the Nighthawk) in spite of being shorter than any other lead performance; she’s just that powerful in her time on-screen that you think she’s on-screen a lot more than she is.

This film is also unique in the way that it was appreciated by the Academy without earning a Best Picture nomination.  It was nominated for Actor, Director and Screenplay and won for Actress, Supporting Actor and Cinematography.  Yet it was passed over for a critically reviled film that lost massive amounts of money and almost sank a studio that didn’t receive nominations for Director or Screenplay: Cleopatra.

The Source:

Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry  (1961)

This was the first novel by Larry McMurtry, published when he was just 25 years old.  Like all of McMurtry’s novels it is compulsively readable.  It’s a first person narrative from Lonnie, a young man living on a ranch with his grandparents and his step-uncle, Hud.  He must deal with Hud’s antagonism against Lonnie’s grandfather, a breakout of hoof-and-mouth disease that threatens to destroy their ranch and Lonnie’s own urges as he is starting to reach manhood.  It’s a fairly short novel (179 pages) but it creates memorable characters in a changing west, showing the pattern that later McMurtry novels would often stick to.  In fact, The Last Picture Show would take place in the same town as Horseman.

The Adaptation:

“One such vehicle came to Ritt and Newman in the form of Larry McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman Pass By.  Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., (who had scripted The Long Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury) believed that there was a great part for Paul Newman in any movie that might be made from McMurtry’s novel.  There was a secondary character in it named Hud, who, along with several other people, poked cows and lived in the bunkhouse on his own father’s ranch.  Hud was a person given over completely to his appetites.  He drank, smoked, cursed and caroused to his heart’s content.  Ravetch and Frank wanted to revise Horseman Pass By to show the despicable nature of someone who lived entirely without a sense of responsibility.”  (Picking Up the Tab: The Life and Movies of Martin Ritt by Carlton Jackson, p 69-70)

All of the above is true.  Jackson does mention that in the book Hud is only a secondary character but there are a lot more changes rather than just making him the primary focus.  These include changing Hud from being the stepson to the son of the ranch owner, the elimination of Hud’s mother from the story (she’s still alive in the book) and the changing of Alma from a black woman to a white woman (and changing her name from Almea).  Surprisingly, given those major changes, most of the film actually follows fairly closely on from the original source novel, just focusing more on the scenes that involve Hud.

The Credits:

Directed by Martin Ritt.  Screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr.  From a novel by Larry McMurtry.

The Great Escape

The Film:

When I was a kid, my favorite actor, no question, was Harrison Ford.  He was both Han Solo and Indiana Jones after all and I saw all of those films numerous times, sometimes every day.  But then I watched two films around the time I started high school that added two others to that list: Humphrey Bogart (The Maltese Falcon) and Steve McQueen.  This is the film that makes McQueen the coolest guy around, a great War-Adventure film that combines first rate film-making with a really fun feel (which is amazing given the topic and the ending, yet is still the case).

The Source:

The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill  (1950)

Many true war stories are written by writers or reporters long after the events have happened and involve interviews and research.  Paul Brickhill was well suited to write about “The Great Escape”, the event in 1944 when 76 POW’s escaped from Stalag Luft III prompting a massive manhunt that helped tie up the Nazis in the months leading up to D-Day because he was there.  He was an Australian pilot who had been shot down and was part of the group that helped organize the escape but because of claustrophobia he was not included among the men who actually went down into the tunnel and escaped.  Of course, this may have saved his life as all but three were re-captured before long and 50 of those were murdered by the Gestapo in violation of the Geneva Accords.

The book is a straight forward account of what happened during the time of digging the tunnel, a brief few chapters detailing what happened to the men after they escaped and then an epilogue in which the British authorities pursued the truth about what happened to the 50 men murdered after the escape.  It doesn’t have the zest and feel of the film but that’s almost an adventure film while this is an account of prisoners at work.  It lacks the humor and ease but it does have the power of truth behind it and the epilogue is perhaps the most compelling part of the story.

The Adaptation:

Most of what we see in the film is true in general and false in the specifics.  There are some particular moments that come straight from the book, like the line about all the passports being fake or the bed collapsing without the boards in it.  Most of the characters are stand-ins for specific real men (or a combination of two) but rarely do they have any actual similarities in personality or looks (or even, sometimes, nationality).  Richard Attenborough’s Roger Bartlett, the stand-in for Roger Bushell is by far the closest.  There was no daring escape made like Steve McQueen tried and no plane crash like with James Garner.

Two specific details that are notable in the changes are that the escape happened in March when there was still snow on the ground and that of the 50 men who were killed by the Gestapo, it included every non-Brit (there were in fact no Americans involved in the escape) who had escaped.  The details of the three men who did manage to elude recapture and escape back to England are all accurate though the personalities and nationalities don’t match those of the film characters.

The film itself acknowledges in a title after the opening credits that characters have been made into composites and that time has been compressed in the telling of the story, so they’re not trying to claim that everything happened exactly as its shown but that the story is basically true and it is.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by John Sturges.  Based on the book by Paul Brickhill.  Screen Play by James Clavell and W. R. Burnett.

Il Gattopardo

The Film:

What would I have thought of this film if I had seen it earlier?  I had always intended on seeing it because it was nominated for Best Costume Design at the Oscars (which deserved to win given that Tom Jones somehow didn’t even manage a nomination).  But, because that was it for its award accolades (winning the Palme d’Or didn’t really matter for my list), it was low on the list for a long time and by the time I finally saw it, Roger Ebert had added it to his list of Great Movies.  If I had seen before then, when it was still viewed as an American box office failure, before the various versions were released on DVD by Criterion in all their splendid glory, before knowing what a triumph of artistry this film really was, would I have just viewed it as another boring Cannes winner that worked for Europeans but didn’t really satisfy?  Hopefully not.  Hopefully I would have seen one of Burt Lancaster’s more subtle performances, would have appreciated the story of a changing country, falling apart even as it was uniting, of a family clinging together around one man, culminating in one big event and seen the great film that was in front of me.

Indeed, the critical and commercial failure of this film when it was released in the United States had a lingering effect, from pushing Lancaster away from this kind of more artistic film, to him getting Arthur Penn fired off The Train and pushing it towards a more commercial appeal.  Director Luchino Visconti, whose only better film appears just a little bit higher on this list, in my opinion never fully recovered from the American release of this film and his remaining films all bear the mark of a director who is unable to find his true vision and lingers in overlong films that drag and stumble.

I am a bit of a loss what more to write about this film, not because there aren’t things to be said about it, about its beautiful cinematography or its moving music or the performance from Lancaster or the direction and writing from Visconti or the magnificent costumes that were Oscar nominated and the art direction that wasn’t.  I am at a loss because this film clearly touched Ebert’s heart in a way that made his review one of the better ones to appear in his Great Films series.  So, if what I’ve already said isn’t enough to make you seek out this film, if being released on Criterion hasn’t already made you seek it out, well then read what Ebert had to say on the matter and decide for yourself.

The Source:

Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe di Lampedusa  (1958)

Unlike Ebert and Lancaster, I do not necessarily think that this is a great book.  But that’s not to say it’s a bad book either; it’s nothing of the kind.  It’s a fascinating book, a good portrait of a man at the twilight of his power, knowing the world is changing, knowing that he must do what he can in order to ensure a good way of life for his family after he is gone.  If it feels like it comes from the heart, well, of course it comes from the heart since it’s basically the story of Lampedusa’s great-grandfather.

Most of the book is the story of the man himself, a prince in Sicily at a time when the island is facing a much different future.  Perhaps if I had any notion of Italian history (which I don’t), I would find my way through the political ramifications discussed in the novel a bit easier.  As it is, it is just a bit distracting for me, though I can see how well it works the changes on the prince and how much he is determined to settle things for his family while he can.  The last two sections of the book deal with the man’s death and then the aftermath, years later.

Much like the film, which was a critical and commercial failure in the United States, the book met with considerable difficulty and Lampedusa himself did not live to see the book published in spite of the time he spent working on it (the Pantheon paperback has a Forward that explains the difficulty in getting the novel published).

The Adaptation:

“The only way in which Visconti’s version of The Leopard differed – in letter, not in spirit – from the novel was in the ending.  The novel is divided into eight parts, of which the first six, occupying six-sevenths of the entire book, go from 1860 to 1862 and culminate in the great ball at the Palazzo Ponteleone.  Then, after a gap of twenty years, ten pages are devoted to the death of Prince Fabrizio and, after a gap of twenty-seven years, to the old age of the Prince’s spinster daughters and their sister-in-law Angelica, widow of Senator Tancredi.  Visconti thought that, cinematographically, everything that happened after 1862 could be implied or foreshadowed at the ball – which occupies a third of the film and, since it is the Prince’s meditation of things past, conveys the essence of Lampedusa’s book.”  (A Screen of Time: A Study of Luchino Visconti, Monica Stirling, p 169-70).

The Credits:

Regia di Luchino Visconti.  dal romanzo di Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Feltrinelli Editore-Milano).  Adattato e sceneggiato da Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli Massimo Franciosa e Luchino Visconti.

Captain Newman, M.D.

The Film:

I have never been a particular fan of Tony Curtis, but there was a stretch, running from roughly 1957, when he starred in Sweet Smell of Success through 1963 when he co-starred in Captain Newman, M.D. as the irrepressible orderly Leibowitz where he really was one of the best actors working in Hollywood, with films in between that included The Defiant Ones, Some Like It Hot and Spartacus.  In this film, it was Bobby Darin, trying to tick off the artistic boxes who earned an Oscar nomination for his stand-out performance as the damaged Little Jim but I was actually more impressed with Curtis and the way that he brings the film to life.

Leibowitz is the foil for Captain Newman, the much harried staff psychiatrist at an army mental ward during World War II.  He must deal with, among other things, top brass that want soldiers back in the field, a crazed colonel who wants to kill Newman (and almost manages to kill Leibowitz instead), a nurse who thinks she’s being dated when she’s being recruited, numerous shell-shocked soldiers that just want to get better or at least find an escape from the pain and Leibowitz himself.  He’s played solidly by Gregory Peck who is perhaps perfect for the role.  He might not have much of an interior presence as an actor but he’s the right role for such a father type figure trying to keep everything around him calm.  Curtis, on the other hand, is perhaps perfectly suited for the man who is least likely to keep things calm, certainly something he had been honing in his recent stand-out performances.  Once he arrives, he starts leading the patients in a sing along of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”, steals the salami from another orderly and blackmails him into sharing it with the entire ward and eventually hatches a plan to help bring Christmas to everybody while still giving hell to those at the top.  The two roles work so well, not just because they play off each other, but also because they help show two different ways to approach therapy and how both sides can be helpful.

Many of the moments with Leibowitz, even when they are stressful, are also tinged with humor and those are the moments when the film comes most to life.  When it is forced to dig too deep and deal with the issues at the heart of the patients it can be detrimental to the film.  The biggest irony with that is in the performance of Bobby Darin.  Darin shows he was just as natural an actor as he was a singer and his performance as a soldier trying to explain what has been haunting him is some of the most effective acting in the film, but the way it is written and edited, it almost stops the movie dead, with several moments of everyone just standing around watching Darin act.  You can understand why it’s in the film (the same thing happens later with scenes involving a very young Robert Duvall, who is still acting while pretty much everyone else in the film is dead) but it also keeps you from getting too invested in the film because it bogs down.  The film has very serious issues at its heart, yet it seems to be most effective when it can push those to the back-burner and almost step up to become a light comedy.

I hadn’t expected that much from this film when I first watched it, years ago.  But I was very impressed with the acting, thought there was some very solid writing and found that it was actually quite a solid film.  It earns a 75, which is a tough rating, because it means it’s only *** and isn’t considered on my Best Picture list but it does place it at the very top of that *** list and that’s a sign of a good film.

The Source:

Captain Newman, M.D. by Leo Rosten  (1961)

The copyright page of this novel indicates dates of 1956, 1958 and 1961.  The LCC number begins with 61 and I assume that’s when the novel was published but I wonder if the chapters in this book had perhaps seen first light as stories in magazines.  Certainly while you can step back and look at this as a novel about a doctor and the army mental ward he is dealing with out in the California desert during World War II it also seems very much like a collection of various little pieces.  In fact, the narrator of the book seems to disappear into his own story at various times and you start to forget that it’s even written in first person and I’m not sure that’s a strength of the book.

The book is fairly standard.  It doesn’t deal as much with various tics as lots of novels about psychiatrists or people under psychiatric care often do but perhaps that’s because it is dealing with soldiers and you often don’t have to look for an underlying cause, so much as deal with the stress of having been a soldier in combat in the first place.  You can deal with the results and not worry as much about the cause.  It is mostly the story of the rigid but caring Captain Newman and Laibowitz, the orderly that is much more of a free-spirit when it comes to working with the patients and the results the two men find when working together and against each other.  There are bits of humor (like the Christmas chapter that closes the book) but it’s mostly pretty dark stuff as they deal with patients who have come back scarred from war and are trying to cope and some of them will simply return to the war and never come home.

The Adaptation:

Most of what we see in the film comes straight from the book, including a lot of the dialogue.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some significant changes.  A lot of the names are changed slightly for some reason (Laibowitz becomes Leibowitz).  The colonel played by Eddie Albert in the film doesn’t kill himself in the film but instead starts cross-dressing and I can’t imagine Hollywood trying to deal with that in 1963.  Several of the stories are more self-contained in the book but are spread out across the film, like the Albert character whose story is entirely dealt with in the penultimate chapter of the book but moves across much of the film, from the opening minutes and Little Jim, whose story is simply one chapter in the middle of the book, but whose death brings the poignant moment that makes the ending of the film so bittersweet.  There are a lot of things cut from the book in its entirety.  But perhaps what would be most surprising to a fan of the film is to point out that the book is written in the first person but the narrator is actually Lt. Alderson, the character played by Dick Sargent who starts the film and then is barely seen for the rest of it.

The Credits:

Directed by David Miller.  Screenplay by Richard L. Breen, Phoebe and Henry Ephron.  From the Novel by Leo Rosten.

Les dimanches de Ville d’Avray

The Film:

A young man spies a young girl.  There are so many directions that things could go beyond the end of that sentence.  Some of them are dangerous.  Yet, some of them are innocent.  It depends on the man, it depends on the girl and it depends on the circumstances.  In this case, the young girl, Cybele, has just been dropped at an orphanage by her father.  She is lonely and somewhat lost and what she needs is a friend, someone who will care about her.  So, when a young man comes to the orphanage pretending to be her father and giving her a chance to escape on Sundays, to be free and have fun and remember what it was like to have someone care about her, she takes it.

The young man was a military pilot in French Indochina.  His memories of that past are somewhat disjointed and it’s unclear what he knows.  He crashed a plane.  Did it kill someone?  Was it war?  Is his past damaged or just unclear?  He doesn’t know and we aren’t quite sure ourselves.  He lives in a Paris suburb now and is cared for by a nurse who might be interested in something more than just a patient-nurse relationship.  But when he sees the lonely young girl, he reaches out to her.  For most people watching the film, we can see that this is an innocent relationship, that he is torn by her loneliness and wants to relieve it in a way that he is capable of.  Yet, for others, that kind of relationship could never be so innocent and they probably think something devious is at his core.  I speak to this because of personal experience of working with children in child care and because I was a male, there was always suspicion from at least some of the parents that I must be someone who was after their children in some ways.  I left because, in spite of loving to work with children, I was tired of all the constant suspicion that at heart I had a base nature.

There is nothing in the film to suggest that Pierre, the pilot, has anything but innocence in his heart.  He sees loneliness and he reacts to it.  But that’s not what the people around him believe.  In spite of not telling her, his nurse eventually discovers the relationship and the steps that she will take it in response to it eventually lead to tragedy in a way that marks this as a European film because an American film would be so much less subtle about it.  It is the beautiful story of two lost souls who try to find something in each other and in the end, it is life that takes it away.

The Source:

Les Dimanches de ville d’avray by Bernard Eschasseriaux  (1959)

The original French novel that is the basis for the film has never been translated into English so even if I had been able to get hold of it (which I was not), I still wouldn’t have been able to read it.

The Adaptation:

While the English Wikipedia page says nothing about the novel, if you look at the French page on the film you can see that the novel was “freely” adapted and that the author of the original novel, Bernard Eschasseriaux objected to the changes in the work and in December of 1962 had some back and forth in the press with Serge Bourguignon over the changes made when it was adapted into the film.

The Credits:

Un film de Serge Bourguignon.  Scenario de Serge Bourguignon et Antoine Tudal.  d’après le roman de Bernard Eschasseriaux “Les Dimanches de ville d’avray” publié aux Éditions Bernard Grasset.  Dialogues de Serge Bourguignon et Bernard Eschasseriaux.
note:  Only the “un film” credit is in the opening credits.  The rest are from the end credits.

Irma La Douce

The Film:

There are things about me that Veronica doesn’t understand.  Well, many things, but relevant to this is my taste in women (ironically).  She agrees that Cate Blanchett is a brilliant actress but doesn’t understand why I find her so hot.  Likewise, Veronica can’t divorce her image of the workout star and the kook from the crazy hot actresses that Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine were in the 60’s.  I watch MacLaine sashay her way up the stairs at the start of this film, swinging her rear and it’s not just her acting I admire and Veronica stares at me like I’ve gone nuts.  But the attractiveness of MacLaine is a key part of this film, as a young strait-laced policeman who gets his beat changed to include a street famous for street-walking hauls in an entire house worth of whores and their customers mainly because he feels betrayed by the beautiful young woman he was staring at.  Since one of those is the chief of police that gets him thrown off the force and the young prostitute takes pity on him, especially once he gives her pimp a pounding he’s not likely to forget (in a humorous fight, since after all, this young man is played by Jack Lemmon).

You tell me who’s right.

Lemmon must now deal with the fact that he’s in love with Irma, a prostitute (and is also now living with her).  She brings in her own income and that just drives him mad, because he doesn’t want her sleeping with anyone else, even if it’s what’s needed to pay the rent.  So he comes up with an elaborate scheme to pretend to be an English lord and pay her just for companionship and keep her from sleeping with anyone else, but when he’s not pretending, he’s working his ass off to earn enough money to pay her in an downward spiral that seems to have no good outcome.  Ending his charade just ends up with him in jail supposedly for murdering the man that he was actually pretending to be.

If all of this seems like a Billy Wilder film, well then you’ve come to the right place.  It’s got Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, with a bit more frivolousness than we saw in The Apartment.  The film is funny and goofy (there’s a great scene where Lemmon, hunted by the police after escaping from jail, hides in the closet while the police search the apartment and then simply emerges in his old uniform, disguised as one of the police).  Unfortunately, it doesn’t really live up to the level of the classic Wilder films and it’s the first dropping off point that would be the long, slow decline of Wilder through the last 20 years of his directorial career.  It has solid acting from Lemmon and MacLaine but most of the supporting cast is weak (except Lou Jacobi as the bartender across the street, who gets the hilarious last line), it is far too long (at 143 minutes, it’s easily thirty minutes longer than it needs to be) and the comic timing just isn’t what it used to be.  I can’t say, this is a must-see, but if you’ve seen the truly great Wilder films, then this isn’t a bad next film to cross off your list.

The Source:

Irma La Douce by Marguerite Monnot and Alexandre Breffort  (1956)

I was unable to get hold of the original stage musical.  It was a big enough hit that it started in 1956 in France (running for four years), was translated and became a West End hit in 1958 (running for three years) and then even made the transition across the pond to Broadway in 1960.

The Adaptation:

“One of the aspects Billy found lacking in the Broadway musical was the presence of other prostitutes. The show was overloaded with meces, but lacked whores.” (On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, Ed Sikov, p 469)

That’s not the only change that Wilder made.  Of course, the biggest change is that the original stage production was a musical and the film, while keeping the score, dropped the songs.  There are also at least a couple of other big changes from the original, namely that Nestor in the original stage production was a law student who falls in love with Irma rather than a policeman (which probably helped make up for the lost songs and pad the running time, with the long, slow introduction to the character and the circumstances that ended up with him living with Irma) and that when he is imprisoned it is actually on Devil’s Island, rather than just in a prison in or near Paris.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Billy Wilder.  Based on the Play by Alexandre Breffort.  Screen Play by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond.

Charade

The Film:

I’m never quite sure what to think of this film.  What do I call it?  A wrongly acknowledged classic?  A disputed classic?  This is a film that almost everybody likes (including me).  It’s got Cary Grant being charming and a bit mysterious.  It’s got Audrey Hepburn in a delightful role as a woman caught up in a mystery.  It’s got solid supporting performances from James Coburn, Walter Matthau and George Kennedy.  It’s fun and entertaining.  But, I put it at a high ***, which means it doesn’t make my Best Picture list and I wouldn’t call it a classic.  In some ways it reminds me of another film from this year, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which had been billed to me as a classic before I ever saw it and it was good and I enjoyed it but I didn’t think it merited such a description.

The story, well, how do I describe the story?  Audrey Hepburn plays a woman who wants a divorce only to discover that her husband has been murdered and then three strange men show up at the funeral who turn out to have been part of a conspiracy to steal money aimed for the French Resistance during WWII and now they want the money and they think she might have it.  In the middle of all of this is Cary Grant, as the debonair man Peter Joshua that Hepburn meets on the train to the funeral.  Or maybe he’s Alex Dyle and is part of the plot.  Or perhaps he’s Adam Canfield and he’s just trying to steal the money for himself.  He’s the least honest person in the film and yet he’s the man she finds herself trusting because, well, let’s face it, because he’s Cary Grant.  This only works because he’s Cary Grant.  That’s part of the fun, but also a little part of why the film doesn’t really rise to the level of an actual Hitchcock film and seems like a light version of one instead (in the same year that Hitchcock threw most of his humor aside and had birds flying down to kill people).

This film manages to be many things at once.  It is a suspense-thriller wrapped up in a mystery.  It is a comedy.  It is a romance.  It has two stars that everyone loves in roles that work well for them and a plot so ridiculous that you wonder how anyone ever thought of it.  It may not really be a classic but it is the kind of film you sit back and enjoy any time it happens to be on.

The Source:

“The Unsuspecting Wife” by Peter Stone  (1961)

I have been unable to get the original version of the story.  It’s hard to know precisely what to call it or what date to put on it.  As mentioned in Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies by Stephen M. Silverman, this novel began actually as a screenplay, but when it got rejected throughout Hollywood, Peter Stone’s wife convinced him to fill out the script a little and turn it into a novel. “The book was published as a twenty-five-cent paperback by Fawcett as part of its downscale Gold Medallion series, and its first serial rights were sold to Redbook. ‘Redbook had to change the title of the story,’ Stone explained, ‘because the magazine in those days had to have ‘dog,’ ‘wife,’ ‘Lincoln,’ or ‘God’ on the cover.’ Charade was rechristened ‘The Unsuspecting Wife’.” (p 286-287)

Now, there seems to be some issues with that statement.  First of all, it’s the Gold Medal series, not Medallion (nitpicking).  But more importantly, the novel Charade wasn’t published until 1963, after the film rights had been secured and the film started production while it had appeared in Redbook in the June 1961 issue which makes me think the “first serial rights” aspect of that sentence is untrue.  It seems more like it was sold to Redbook, and then after the film was secured, they were able to sell the story on as a novel in its own right.

The Adaptation:

Though I haven’t read the book, there are those on the web who have and it does seem that there are some significant differences between the novel and the film.  But, since the film was a script first, does that mean it’s really the novel that changes things?  In which case, does this not really qualify as adapted in the first place?

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Stanley Donen.  Screenplay by Peter Stone.  Story by Peter Stone and Marc Behm.

Consensus Nominees That Don’t Make My Top 10

Lilies of the Field

The Film:

I’ve written about the film before, because it was nominated for Best Picture.  It’s the second best of the nominees but this is one of the weakest years for Best Picture in the history of the Oscars and so that’s not saying much.  It’s an okay film with a good performance from Poitier but it definitely didn’t deserve to be nominated and Poitier’s Oscar win is kind of silly, especially when you look at his magnificent 1967 performances that didn’t even earn nominations.

The Source:

The Lilies of the Field by William E. Barrett (1962)

I’m a little surprised that this got published as a novel.  It runs just 92 pages with sizable margins and illustrations at the top of each of its seven chapters.  It even mentions on the dust jacket that he has previously published a collection of novelettes, which this seems appropriate for.  Perhaps it wasn’t meant for adults?  After all, the writing level is quite low, it’s got illustrations and it’s got a plot that’s very simplistic (and moralistic): a black man after leaving the army is driving across the country and he ends up trading some service to a group of nuns for some water and that leads to him building a church for them.  It could be a little primer for young Christians, seeing how races can get along and how a man in one denomination (Baptist) could be willing to help out a group from a different one (Catholics).  It’s a really quick, easy read and I can see how Hollywood would instantly go for it because it’s totally Oscar bait (as the Oscars themselves proved).

The Adaptation:

The filmmakers didn’t have to do much to make this one.  The key thing was just getting the casting right and they did that with Sidney Poitier, who would become the first black to win Best Actor.  Most of the film comes direct from the book.  Basically the only thing the film does differently is drop that final chapter where Homer basically passes into legend and which is just too much to cope with anyway.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by Ralph Nelson. Screenplay by James Poe. Based on a novel by William E. Barrett.

The Balcony

The Film:

There are moments when things start going to hell in the city outside.  Most of the action of the film has been relegated to the interiors of a brothel (a quite extensive brothel that has a lot of money set aside for sets and costumes) but there has also been a revolution going on in the city outside.  When things start to go bad, building start to go down and there are explosions.  It takes you out of the film for a second because most of the film has dealt with the main actors and suddenly we have what is clearly stock footage of explosions and demolition.  Then I began to wonder.  What if that was on purpose?  This film is all about the illusions that we create in our life, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident, and was this more of the same?  Are the filmmakers, by giving us what is clearly stock footage, adding to the notion of the illusions that we create?  They are creating illusions themselves and this time they aren’t being subtle?  Or am I giving them too much credit and did they just not have a big budget and in 1963 thought they could get away with such cheap stock footage and expect no one to notice?  Either way, it works with the film itself.  The film isn’t great, but it has something to say about what we do with our lives and it made me think and there’s always something to be said for that.

The Balcony is adapted from one of the best known plays by Jean Genet, one of the towers of 20th Century French drama.  While the revolution is going on outside, the madame of a brothel, Irma, is putting on her own show with a bishop, a judge and a general.  Except that they aren’t real.  Except when the Chief of Police visits and needs them to be real because the real bishop, judge and general have all been killed in the revolution.  So what is real and what isn’t begins to blur.  In fact, it was beginning from the start, because in the opening scenes of the film, we get the bishop talking to a woman and it’s only after several minutes, when Irma pops her head in that we realize what the situation is.  Up until that point, we think it’s an actual bishop.

If the film never really quite comes into its own in spite of the talents of Shelley Winters (Irma) and Peter Falk (Chief) it’s because Joseph Strick wasn’t really that good of a director (he would later direct adaptations of Joyce’s Ulysses and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man so he clearly loved great literature) and the budget was clearly small.  The film seems to almost be made as a guerilla exercise in underground film-making and it’s strange to realize that it earned a WGA nomination, a group that was normally dominated by bigger budget films.  Yet, it is fairly satisfying and you do come away wondering how much is real, not only in the film but in your own life as well.

The Source:

Le Balcon by Jean Genet  (1958, revised 1962)

I know I read a play by Jean Genet in my Studies in Drama class as an undergraduate.  Was it this one?  I suspect it might have been.  It’s certainly well-suited to being read by college students as they try to deconstruct what is going on.  The entire play is set in a brothel and for the most part consists of men pretending to be what they are not at the same time that women do what they always do what they do in brothels: pretend to be what the customer wants.  It all adds up to a heightened sense of irreality, of the idea that nothing is quite what it seems, not only in the play, but also in life.  It seems to bring together the existentialism of Camus and Sartre with the surrealistic atmosphere of Beckett.  It’s a fascinating play and there is a reason that it has been continually studied and performed since it was first produced in 1958 (and, indeed, Genet continued to work on it, making several revisions over the next several years).  And yet, there is also a revolutionary tenor to the play, right down to the final words, spoken by the main character, the madame, Irma, straight to the audience: “You must now go home, where everything – you can be quite sure – will be falser than here . . . You must go now.  You’ll leave by the right, through the alley . . . It’s morning already.”  (tr. Bernard Frechtman)

The Adaptation:

While Joseph Strick wasn’t a great director or screenwriter, part of his weakness in the later is his faithfulness to the original.  His Ulysses wasn’t great and earned an Oscar nomination more for the fact that he managed to get a coherent film of it made rather than the quality of the script and his Portrait was kind of a mess, but quite faithful.  Here, he does his best job of balancing fidelity to the text (at times quite solid) to making it work as a surrealistic film (at times also quite solid, especially when it has to depart from what it is on the page).  The most faithful parts, straight from the page, are the opening and closing of the film.

The Credits:

Directed by Joseph Strick.  From the play by Jean Genet as translated by Bernard Frechtman.  Screenplay by Ben Maddow.

The Ugly American

The Film:

We’re in the middle of what is essentially the fourth long scene in the film.  There is the first, where revolutionaries set up an American driver to look like a drunk in order so that they can protest, the second, where the new American ambassador to Sarkhan (a stand-in for Vietnam) is confirmed in the Senate, then after a riot erupts when he lands, he berates his staff for not knowing about it beforehand.  Then we discover the ambassador’s old friend, a native Sarkhanese who knew him from the revolution.  The former is played by Marlon Brando and the latter by Eiji Okada, the Japanese actor known to international film audiences for Hiroshima Mon Amour and Woman in the Dunes.  They discuss what is going in the country and the role the US will play in that.  Then they discuss it some more.  And some more.  As I often do, when re-watching a film I have already seen, I was working on something else as well and I looked up and realized they were still talking and we were now almost an hour into the film.

That’s what we get in this film, a film that really bores more than it entertains.  It wants to preach, but it doesn’t really have a firm idea of what it’s preaching.  It wants to be entertaining, but it keeps Brando spouting platitudes instead of allowing him to act.  This is why Brando needed directors like Kazan and Coppola.  He may have fought with them as much as he could, but they could find a way to focus his intensity on to the screen and the results were always worth it.  It’s easy to see Brando as a louse, as an officer fighting the top, a rebel going against whatever you’ve got.  But as a diplomat?  As an ambassador?  That’s a waste of his talent.

But what about the rest of the film?  Well, the film didn’t really know what it was doing.  It’s directed by George Englund, who was apparently good friends with Brando, which is perhaps why he couldn’t bring any life to his performance.  It’s written by Stewart Stern who seems to have missed the point of the book and definitely missed the point of the title, as least as to how it was applied in the book (see below).  But in some ways this film is simply a document of its time.  It was released in April of 1963 at a time when most Americans still had no idea what the importance of Vietnams was or even where it was.  Yet, this is a stand-in for that conflict, with well-meaning Americans trying to hold back the tide of Communism through any means that they can.  It shows a basic understanding of why Communism was winning over hearts ands minds in Southeast Asia but not really what we were supposed to be doing about it.  That the script was nominated by the WGA says something both about the idea that it was trying to say something and that the state of American filmmaking in 1963 was really pretty low and there wasn’t much to celebrate.

The Source:

The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick  (1958)

The original notion of this book was as a non-fiction book of essays and historical incidents that showed the problems that the State Department was causing in countries (specifically in Southeast Asia) by sending career politicians who didn’t have any experience dealing with the country in question, didn’t know the language and just tried to ramrod American policy through to the natives.  But the publishers convinced them to fictionalize it a bit and present it as a novel instead (which sort of works).  It became a publishing sensation because John F. Kennedy, then a Senator grasped the importance of what Lederer and Burdick were trying to say.  That part of what they were saying had to do with holding back the tide of Communism worked perfectly in line with Kennedy’s Cold War thinking.  Some of the ideas for the Peace Corps come directly from this book, with the idea of people working with the natives in countries rather than at odds with them.  JFK supposedly bought a copy for everyone in the Senate but it clearly didn’t work as the State Department continues to be dominated by political appointees that have no place in the country where they are stationed.

Most of the actual ideas in the book are presented through a basic few characters who embody the ideas that Lederer and Burdick were trying to promote: knowing the language, studying the culture, studying the work of communists to know why they were winning, working with people instead of railroading your own priorities through.  Most of these ideas are promoted by MacWhite, the new ambassador to the fictional country Sarkhan, which seems like a stand-in for Vietnam, except that Vietnam and the problems after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu are constantly referenced.

The Adaptation:

The original novel doesn’t have that much of a story, but instead has various incidents that go towards promoting Lederer and Burdick’s conclusions.  Some of those appear in the film while others are created wholesale for the film.  The main character of MacWhite in the film isn’t portrayed as nearly as open-minded as in the book and his past is combined with a character who only appears at the beginning of the book, a man who had worked there during the War and knew the language and was friends with the primary revolutionary.  That character was massively expanded for the book and made MacWhite’s friend instead (and is killed at the end of the film).

If you think of the phrase “ugly American”, what you probably think of is those tourists who go to countries without knowing anything and just like Americans no matter where they are, expecting everyone to speak English and act like them.  If you watch the film, you probably think MacWhite is the ugly American, pushing to get his ideas through no matter how much they may push up against the priorities of the people actually living in Sarkhan.  MacWhite believes he is doing right and he is certainly doing a much better job than the man he replaces but he still has the American arrogance that you would think the book is warning about.  But, in fact, in the book, the ugly American is Homer Atkins, the character played by Pat Hingle and he’s only ugly because of his physical characteristics and because he goes against the general American grain at the time by working with the locals to try and get things done, presenting them with ideas that they can build upon, not trying to push them down or patronize them, but genuinely help them develop their economy and way of life.  You would never have a sense of that in watching the film and you have to wonder if the screenwriter even grasped the idea when he was reading the book.

The Credits:

Produced and Directed by George Englund.  Screen Story and Screenplay by Stewart Stern.  From the novel by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick.

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

• This Sporting Life  –  The second year in a row (and fourth in a decade) that the Oscars nominated a film for Actor and Actress without Picture, Director or Screenplay nominations (it’s only happened four more times in the 53 years since).  Very strong performances from Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts.  Based on the novel by David Storey.
• The Trial  –  An adaptation of the Kafka novel by Orson Welles.  The novel ended up at #6 all-time on my list so there’s a review of the film here.
• Dr. No  –  The first James Bond feature film (there had been a television production of Casino Royale) though an adaptation of the sixth novel.  A fun novel and a strong film which is reviewed in full here.
• The Sword in the Stone  –  Disney’s take on King Arthur comes from T. H. White’s novel which would later become the first part of The Once and Future King, a book I really admired when I first read but didn’t sit nearly as well when I recently went back to it.  An enjoyable Disney film which ended up at #22 when I ranked the first 50 films.

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

• The Birds  –  Alfred Hitchcock returns to Daphne du Maurier (whose Rebecca had won Best Picture when directed by Hitchcock).  The last great Hitchcock film (there would be very good ones but this is the last one that receives **** from me) but the script is the weakness.
• The Haunting  –  Between his two Best Picture winning Musicals, Robert Wise directs an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s famous The Haunting of Hill House.  An effective and disturbing film that I score 56 points higher than the 1999 remake.
• The L-Shaped Room  –  Scandalous for its time (about an unmarried, pregnant French woman played, in an Oscar nominated performance by Leslie Caron) but time for today.  Adapted from the novel by Lynne Reid Banks.
• Fires on the Plain  –  A 1959 Japanese Kon Ichikawa World War II film getting a U.S. release.  Based on the novel by Shohei Ooka.
• The Elusive Corporal  –  Jean Renoir makes kind of a lighter side of The Grand Illusion.  From the novel by Jacques Perret.
• Term of Trial  –  Filmed after Billy Budd (see 1962) but released before, it’s technically Terrence Stamps’ film debut.  Solid drama with good performances from Olivier and Simone Signoret.  Based on the novel by James Barlow.
• King Kong vs Godzilla  –  Technically adapted because Kong and Godzilla were pre-existing characters.  Reviewed in full here as one of the earlier RCM posts (and it only waited that long because I was specifically holding it back for Thanksgiving).  In a post with The Great Escape and Dr. No, this is actually the film in this post I have seen the most.
• The List of Adrian Messenger  –  At mid ***, it’s weak for a John Huston film but he’ll bounce back the next year with The Night of the Iguana.  The 15th film based on a novel by Philip MacDonald and surprisingly, the last.
• Good Soldier Schweik  –  The 1960 West German film that was Golden Globe nominated (in 1961, though apparently it didn’t get a U.S. release until 1963 which is why it’s here) that I tried to get from Netflix which ended up with me getting the Czech version.  The novel is quite good (in my Top 200) and you can read a full review of it here.  A solid film, though not as good as the Czech version.
• Lady with the Little Dog  –  Solid 1960 Soviet version of the Chekhov story.
• Night is My Future  –  When I first saw this, it was generally referred to as Night is My Future but is apparently now known by its more accurately translated title Music in Darkness (though not at oscars.org, which listed this in this year even though it was originally released in Sweden in 1948 and still listed it as Night is My Future).  It’s an early Bergman film which he co-wrote with the novel’s author Dagmar Edqvist.
• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner  –  The film that helped establish Tom Courtenay, it’s a solid film based on the short story by Alan Sillitoe.
• Move Over, Darling  –  Remake of My Favorite Wife with Doris Day and James Garner.  Remaking Irene Dunne with Doris Day?  Ugh.  But not a bad film thanks to Garner.
• Come Blow Your Horn  –  The first play by Neil Simon, who by a lot of measures is the most successful playwright in American history, becomes the first film based on a Neil Simon play but there will be a whole lot more over the next 30 years.
• The Victors  –  With the Blacklist gone, Carl Foreman writes, directs and produces his adaptation of The Human Kind, a World War II novel.
• The Running Man  –  A film kind of forgotten thanks to Stephen King and Arnold but a solid Carol Reed film with Laurence Harvey based on the book by Shelley Smith.
• Antigone  –  A 1961 Greek version of the classic (and boring) tragedy with Irene Papas.
• The Wheeler Dealers  –  Another James Garner rom-com, but this one is with Lee Remick.  Based on the novel by George Goodman.
• Chushingura  –  Hiroshi Inagaki directs the latest film about the 47 Ronin, this one starring Toshiro Mifune.
• Nine Hours to Rama  –  Film based on the nine hours of the life of Gandhi’s assassin leading up to the assassination based on the non-fiction book by Stanley Wolpert, America’s most prominent Indian historian.  We’ve reached low-level *** at this point.
• The Raven  –  The latest Corman/Poe film is one of the weaker ones in spite of a cast that includes Price, Lorre, Karloff and Nicholson.
• Twilight of Honor  –  A film that drove me nuts for a long time as I was trying to track it down (it was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and may have been the last one I finally saw for that category).  Based on the novel by Al Dewlen.
• The Haunted Palace  –  More Corman/Poe but only technically (the title) as the story comes from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by Lovecraft.
• The Incredible Journey  –  A Scottish children’s book becomes a sappy Disney film.
• Candide  –  A 1960 French version of Voltaire’s famous social satire.
• Lord of the Flies  –  Another Top 100 novel but I didn’t review the film, perhaps because it isn’t all that great.
• Twice-Told Tales  –  It’s got Vincent Price and uses some classic American literature (several Hawthorne stories) but it isn’t Corman and it isn’t all that great.
• The Loves of Salammbo  –  A 1960 Italian film that’s a loose adaptation of the classic Flaubert novel.
• The Caretakers  –  Essentially a weaker version of The Snake Pit, based on the novel by Dariel Helfer and starring Robert Stack.
• The Prize  –  Irving Wallace’s novel about the Nobel Prize become a bit of a lackluster film starring Paul Newman.
• The Hook  –  Korean War film starring Kirk Douglas based on the novel by Vahe Katcha.
• Papa’s Delicate Condition  –  Jackie Gleason stars in this Oscar winner (Best Song) based on the memoir by Corinne Griffith about her father.
• Toys in the Attic  –  No, not the Aerosmith song, but George Roy Hill’s second film (his first had been based on a Tennessee Williams play), this one based on the Tony winning play by Lilian Hellman.
• The Courtship of Eddie’s Father  –  Yes, the sitcom was based on the film which was based on a novel by Mark Toby with little Ron Howard as Eddie.
• The Lion  –  Jack Cardiff’s follow-up to his Oscar nomination for Sons and Lovers had William Holden, Trevor Howard and Pamela Franklin but still isn’t very good.  Based on a novel by Joseph Kessel (better known for writing Belle de Jour).
• A Ticklish Affair  –  A Shirley Jones and Gig Young rom-com based on a short story called “Moon Walk” by Barbara Luther.
• Under the Yum Yum Tree  –  Another romantic comedy, this one based on the successful Broadway play.
• The Mouse on the Moon  –  A sequel to The Mouse That Roared (based on the sequel novel) from director Richard Lester before he found The Beatles.  We’re now into **.5 territory.
• The Condemned of Altona  –  A de Sica film of a Sartre play which should be better than it is.
• Lancelot and Guinevere  –  Also known as Sword of Lancelot.  Cornel Wilde becomes the latest director to make a disappointing version of the Arthur legend.
• PT 109  –  The non-fiction book by Robert J. Donovan about what happened to JFK in the Pacific during World War II becomes a Cliff Robertson film.  Released four months before the assassination.
• Tarzan’s Three Challenges  –  Jock Mahoney’s second and final turn as the ape man.  Like most Tarzan films, based on the characters and not on any specific Burroughs novel.
• The Tell-Tale Heart  –  Not a Corman/Poe film (Corman would skip this story) but a 1960 British film that predates those films just now reaching the States in 1963.
• The Ceremony  –  Laurence Harvey goes behind the camera for his take on Le ceremonie by Frederic Grendel and the results are low **.5.
• In the French Style  –  Jean Seberg stars in a romance based on a short story by Irwin Shaw.
• A Child is Waiting  –  Wait, Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland in a film written by Abby Mann and it’s directed by John Cassavetes?  Can that be right?  It is and it’s not really worth it and that’s why he would turn to true independent film-making in 1968 and become of the most prominent independent directors in film history.
• Bye Bye Birdie  –  I have a fondness for this musical that has nothing to do with the film.  My high school put it on and I saw it twice because one of my best friends was in it, and to this day, I can picture her in the cast singing “The Telephone Hour” and it makes me smile.  On the other hand, the film just isn’t very good.
• The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze  –  Well they had done Snow White, so why not Jules Verne?  Because it’s stupid, that’s why.
• The Cardinal  –  Not the worst film to win the Globe for Best Picture – Drama (hello Love Story) but pretty damn far down the list (a close contender with The Greatest Show on Earth for the second worst).  Based on the novel by Henry Morton Robinson, it’s the second (and last) film to win the Globe and fail to earn an Oscar nomination.
• The Stripper  –  Based on a lesser known William Inge play (A Loss of Roses), this stars Joanne Woodward as an actress turned stripper.  I only finally saw this film recently (since doing my Nighthawk Awards where it was listed as the only Oscar nominee from this year that I hadn’t seen).
• Mary Mary  –  Weak Mervyn LeRoy film based on the play by Jean Kerr.
• Summer Magic  –  I first knew of this film when I bought the Disney collection cd’s that were released in the mid-90’s and heard the song “Ugly Bug Ball”.  Veronica would come to love the song and we imagined a nice animated sequence but it’s a pretty weak scene with Burl Ives singing to an actual bug and it’s by far the best thing in the film.  Based on the novel Mother Carey’s Chickens it’s the weakest of the Hayley Mills Disney films.
• Miracle of the White Stallions  –  Not a great year for Disney as we reach all the way into low-**.  Based on the novel which was based on a true story but you shouldn’t bother to care.
• Ladybug Ladybug  –  Another terrible Frank Perry film because that was what he did.  Based on an article in McCall’s.
• In the Cool of the Day  –  Not nominated for an award, not based on anything major (a Susan Ertz novel), not an important director.  My only explanation is that TCM was having a Jane Fonda day and I’ll always watch young Jane Fonda at least once.
• A Girl Named Tamiko  –  This did have a major director (John Sturges) but is still terrible.  Based on the novel by Ronald Kirkbride.
• Beauty and the Beast  –  Terrible version of the fairy tale (using the de Beaumont version).
• Cleopatra  –  You can read my rant about it here or here.  Terrible terrible film.  Based on a book by Carlo Maria Franzero and a variety of historical sources but just a mess.  After two straight years with all five Best Picture nominees being adapted this is the third and final one this year.  But we’ll be back to all five in 1964.
• The Day of the Triffids  –  I’ve never actually read the famous sci-fi novel so I’m not sure why I bothered to watch the film especially since it’s so damn awful (low *).

Adaptations of Notable Works I Haven’t Seen:

• The Girl with the Golden Eyes  –  A 1961 French adaptation of the Balzac novella.
• The Prisoner of the Iron Mask  –  1962 Italian-French swashbuckler.  Neither Wikipedia nor the IMDb lists it as being based on Dumas but I think oscars.org must have when it existed because otherwise I can’t imagine why I would have wanted to see it.
• Resurrection  –  A Soviet film released in two parts in the USSR (in 1960 and 1962) but released in the States in 1963.  Based on Tolstoy’s lesser known last novel.