Best there ever was, best there ever will be

Roxanne has a short post that has sparked a fun discussion in the comments.  Picking up on something from Majikthise, Rox writes:

Lindsay laments that the Hitchhiker's Guide flick won't be as good as the book, which got me thinking that films made of books are seldom what fans expect. A notable exception is John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath which is far and away better than Steinbeck's story. Can you think of other films which are as good as the book or better?

(Requisite disclaimer:  Links to movies in post quoted above not Rox Populi authorized.  I put 'em in.)

One of my picks for a movie that's better than the book it was adapted from is The Natural.  I'm one of the few people I know who've read the book who prefers the film.  Without saying whether she agrees, Leah from Corrente asked me to defend the movie.

(I definitely agree with two of her picks for movies that were better than the books---The Age of Innocence and Last of the Mohicans, the Daniel Day-Lewis version, not the Randolph Scott one.   Hmmm.  Both her picks star Daniel Day-Lewis.  Probably just a coincidence.)

I wrote back to say that because it's been a long time since I last saw the movie I could probably do a better job of arguing why Bernard Malamud's novel isn't that good.

This isn't that argument, just some notes for it.  Don't know if I'll ever get around to a post on either the movie or the book, although now I'm itching to watch the movie again.

Anyway, here are some things I don't like about the book.

First, the novel suffers terribly from the fact that neither of the two baseball heroes Roy Hobbs is based on, Ted Williams and Babe Ruth, failed themselves or let down their fans the way Hobbs does in the book.  The ball player who did fail that way, Shoeless Joe Jackson, was never the sort of national hero that Ruth and Williams were, and by the time time the book appeared---and certainly by now---Shoeless Joe is known only for the Black Sox Scandal.  He is purely a tragic figure.  But Hobbs is not a tragic hero and he doesn't earn the right to Jackson's tragedy.

(Coincidentally, Jackson is a character in two movies that are better than the books they were based on---Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams.)

The ending is weakened further by every baseball fan's knowing that the kids whose hearts were broken by Shoeless Joe's betrayal of their faith---"Say it ain't so, Joe!"---had their wounds healed and their faith restored by...

Babe Ruth!

It seems pretty twisted to me to assign the sin to the man who redeemed the sin.  But see Point Three coming up.

Second, and more damaging to the book---none of the real baseball history would matter if Hobbs came alive as a character in his own right.  He doesn't.  He's just a collection of tics and eccentricities and oversized appetites with, and this is the worst thing about him, a point.

Malamud's Hobbs is an object lesson which Malamud is using to scold America.  He's not a character or even a caricature.  He's a stick figure out of an allegory.

Third, the allegory Malamud was writing was tired 50 years ago and it has not aged well since:  Heroes don't just have feet of clay, they are clay from head to toe.  America is a gluttonous, self-indulgent nation of rubes enthralled by the cheapest and gaudiest forms of fame.  Faith in heroes is for suckers, and enjoyment of life is grotesque if not downright wicked.

This happens to be similar to the themes of Miller's Death of a Salesman, but Miller's play is redeemed by Miller's sympathy with Willy Loman and his own liking for the things Willy puts his faith in, good cars and new refrigerators and sports and money and coming out of life ahead.  Which is to say, Miller sympathizes with what it's like to be a human being in America, even as he criticizes it, and Malamud is merely disgusted.

Malamud's novel represents the absolute worst traits of Liberalism---the mean little person's envy of strength and beauty, success and happiness.

Fourth, and what really gripes me, is in the book Malamud shows no sign of liking or even understanding baseball!

For all baseball matters to either the plot or to Hobbs as a character, the book might as well have been about football or boxing.  It might have been better if Malamud had made Hobbs a boxer, since boxing is a more solitary sport and the kind of hero worship Hobbs inspires in the book doesn't really exist among baseball fans because there are too many heroes all around even a towering figure like Ruth, while there is only one Champ at a time.

For everybody who was rooting for Ruth to hit a home run, there was someone else rooting for Walter Johnson to strike him out.

Which reminds me of one of the many things the movie does better than the book.  In the novel, the young pitcher who faces Hobbs at the climactic moment is only a mechanism for bringing Hobbs down.  Malamud doesn't know or doesn't care, except in that the rookie is in his mind just another version of Hobbs, that the pitcher is a great player to be and a hero to many other fans.

In the movie the rookie doesn't have a line nor is he given any back story, but he is photographed as a young hero.  Just looking at him you know that he is not simply just as good a ballplayer as Hobbs, he's probably even better and that he can strike him out and at some point in the future he will strike him out.  He doesn't this time, of course, which is something that a lot of people don't like about the movie---they'd prefer to see Hobbs fail.  But the possibility of Hobbs failure and the certainty of his future, not failure, but displacement, his inevitably having to step aside for new, younger heroes to take the stage, is there in the look on that kid's face.  It is not there in the book, because the kid does not have a face.  He's not a character, he's as I said a machine, a deus ex machina.

Malamud was a very good writer, but he had a serious defect for a writer.  He didn't like people all that much.  Since his best work was short stories and his short stories were fables and there aren't any real human beings in fables, this didn't cripple him too badly.  But it made it very hard for him as a novelist. 

All this is off the top of my head, without going back to re-read the book, so take it all for what that's worth, which is not a whole lot.

Like I said, I haven't seen the movie in a long time either, and I should correct that before writing anything more.  Next stop on the web:  Netflix.

One last thing, though.  Malamud did manage to create one fully realized character in the book, the sportswriter Max Mercy.

Who in the movie was played by Robert Duvall.

Point, movie.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

Conventional wisdom seems to be that Malamud's story was inspired by the real-life shooting of Eddie Waitkus. I admit that when the film came out (I've never read the book) Waitkus was the man I thought of after hearing a plot synopsis.

That said, I liked the flick as much for its cinematography as for the story itself. I do think Redford actually looks and throws more like an athlete than most other actors playing baseball players.

[Lance]

Link, that's the first part of the book. Second part, the longer part, is the Ruth and Williams and Jackson mishmash. There are lots of bits of baseball trivia and lore woven into the book, but they don't convince me that Malamud loved the game, only that he had researched it.

[douglass truth]

I'm a huge fan of Philip K Dick, but I liked the movie Blade Runner more than the book it was based on. The novel was funnier, but something about the darkness and portentousness of the movie really hit me. Also, some of the great lines of all time, eg, "Do you think I'd be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?"

I'd love to see a movie made from Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Don't think it could be as good as the book, since the language is one of the best things about it, but it would be great to see someone attempt it.

[Josh Canel]

It feels strange to say it, but I think the movie The English Patient is just a notch above the book. I loved both of them, but the movie just seemed to feel better steamlined, so to speak.

[sfmike]

I was about to say that there are NO movies better than the books they're based on, but then "The Godfather" popped into my brain. The exceptions, however, are few.

[David Rubien]

You can pretty much count on most Hitchcock films to be better than the books on which they're based.

One movie that definitely outshone the book: Cutter's Way, a great 1981 film by Ivan Passer, starring Jeff Bridges and John Heard. The book is called Cutter and Bone, and it's a perfectly fine thriller, too.

Other movies better than the books? Oh yeah... Jaws.

[Tom W.]

Lance - easy one. The Godfather as a book is a nifty work of pulp fiction. The movie transcends it and has entered the cultural canon.

[Neddie Jingo]

Need to quibble about one tiny thing, Lance: When working at Simon & Schuster (or Satan and Shyster, as I cheerfully came to slander it) in the mid-Eighties I did the production work on the Pocket Books edition of "Eight Men Out" (which means that I pretty much memorized it), and that book is absolutely redeemed by the Greek Chorus presence of Ring Lardner, who is reduced in the film to a virtual cameo. Ruined the flick for me, not seeing him in there.

[Lance]

Ned, old sport,

Missing the presence of Ring Lardner is too fine and noble a sentiment for me to dare contend against it. I concede the point, happily, in honor of Ring.

Sayles was spookily like him in the movie, though, wasn't he?

[grishaxxx]

Malamud - only read "The Assistant" - I thought good, tight, small, compelling, and
"The Fixer" - that was supposed to be his big, epic one, and it hasn't survived.
The thing all of you seem to miss with "The Natural" is how it mirrors the Parsifal story - spear/bat - wound - good girl/bad girl - Kundry - blah, blah....
Don't mean to be a *nudge*, but Malamud was classed with Bellow and Roth at a cetain point, and I suspect that his hiding out at Oregon State for so many years drained him of his vitality. He went mythic, which can be very destructive - lotta air seeps in, some of it hot.

[grishaxxx]

On adaptations - that should be EASY - "The Godfather" is far superior to the book that Puzo wrote (and, I think he said as much). Philip Jose Farmer spits on the John Huston version of "The Maltese Falcon" - but I think he's wrong. There's a weird episode in the book about a guy who vanishes, and it's fascinating, but the movie is tighter and better, more suggestive, without it - not to mention ideally cast.
Is "Vertigo" inferior to the Pierre Boileau novel?
Is "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" sub Edmund Naughton's "McCabe"?
You really want to have to read "Gone With the Wind" instead of see it?
How long does this list have to be? C'mon, fight me!

[KevinNYC]

Jaws is based on a book. So was Psycho, though Psycho was loosely based on a work of nonfiction. Goodfellas is fantastic and so is the book Wiseguy. A lot of that amazing narration comes straight from the book. I don't know if that is Nicholas Pileggi's work or comes straight out of the mouth of Henry Hill, but in the book, it's presented as Hill just talking. A lot of good movies have been based on forgettable books. I have a copy of the hardcover of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three on my shelf. Do you know that movie? It's sooo good. I also have the nonfiction book The French Connection. The book does not contain a car racing against a train on the Brooklyn El.

Anyway, Lance do you get Turner Classic Movies? They are showing The Lady Eve this weekend. Either Sat or Sun at 2:15PM I think. You should set your vcr.

[Chris Quinones]

Lance, I disagree with you about Field of Dreams, which I felt manipulated by.

Count me in agreement with douglass truth about Blade Runner; it's better than I think a faithful adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would have been.

KevinNYC: I adore Pelham One Two Three. The book isn't as lovable, but I did enjoy the bit that wasn't in the movie about the conductor calculating the change in weight of the train when the passengers get on and off.

I've never read The Bridges of Madison County, but the movie kills a couple of hours pleasantly.

The Thin Man is a terrible novel. Haven't seen the film in a dog's age, but it isn't a terrible movie. The Maltese Falcon isn't as negligible, but boy, Hammett strikes me as overrated. I'd take James M. Cain over him any day.

[Jason Miller]

I imagine a lot of pulp falls into this category. One of the best movies of the 1950s is Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (with Ralph Meeker very, very cool as Mike Hammer). A terrific movie. Spillane's novel? Not so much...

Oh, and grishaxx, if you mean the part of the Maltese Falcon that I think you mean (Spade recounting a past case to Bridgid O'Shaughnessy), yeah, it really had no place in the movie, but the passage does contain my favorite line from the book:

"But that's the part of it I always liked. He got used to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and then he got used to them not falling."

[Jason Miller]

Speaking of Cain (better than Hammett, Chris? I don't know. We could quibble), how about Double Indemnity?

[Trish Wilson]

Two movies that were as good as the book:

"Jurassic Park"

The original "The Haunting"

One movie that was better than the story:

"Psycho" (the story (either a short or a novellette, I can't remember which) was written by Robert Bloch.

[mrs. norman maine]

Ah, Field of Dreams: Remember when Amy Madigan -- who was a little TOO deadpan about the appearance of Shoeless Joe and Co., if you ask me -- reacts to their presence in the ballfield by going inside to put on a pot of coffee??!!

I was hoping Joe would say something like, "No thanks, Ma'am -- it goes right through me."

[sfmike]

Patricia Highsmith's first novel, "Strangers on a Train" is not particularly satisfying, but the Hitchcock adaptation with Raymond Chandler doing the script and Robert Walker as dear, degenerate Bruno is about as good as movies get.

[burritoboy]

I'd want to move the discussion up a notch.

The question is why do we ask the question (is the movie as good as the book?). I think the question itself betrays an inherent assumption that the two media are somehow more connected than they are. Nobody asks if the painting is as good as the play, for instance. That question just doesn't compute.

Yet painting is as close to movie-making (for example, Fritz Lang, Mizoguchi, Nicholas Ray and Minnelli were originally either painters or design students) as movie-making is to writing (and, of course, many directors began as screenwriters too).

Also, the question tends to imply that literary writing is somehow superior to film-making. I don't think that this is correct, first of all. Second, as Ray Carney points out, there's a lot of cultural capital attached to literary criticism and conversely very little cultural capital to film/TV criticism. The difference isn't merely trivia, but affects what sort of movies and television we get. Admittedly, the blockbusters would remain, but there could be a huge advance if film critics avoided the fashionable but shallow (Oliver Stone, most of Spike Lee, Coen Bros, Tarantino) and instead heralded something else (whether Carney's hobbyhorses, or mine (Hou, Kiarostami, Linklater, Albert Brooks, etc)).

Lastly, as a lot of people have pointed out, what about such examples as:

Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly / Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly

Godard's Made in USA / Donald Westlake's The Jugger (movie is excellent, book is terrible)

Visconti's Ossessione / Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (both are great art)

Godard's Bande a part / Hitchens' Fools' Gold (movie is a masterpiece, book is nothing special)

David Rubien's excellent suggestion of:

Passer's Cutter's Way / Cutter and Bone

Tarkovsky's Solaris / Lem's Solaris (I prefer Tarkovsky over Lem)

Tarkovsky's Stalker / Strugatsky Brothers' The Roadside Picnic

Walsh's They Drive By Night / Bezzerides' Long Haul (movie is far superior to book)

Preminger's Laura / Vera Caspary's Laura (movie is infinitely better than the novel and multiple plays)

Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place / Dorothy Hughes' In a Lonely Place (novel is interesting, but Nicholas Ray's take on it is on the masterwork level)

and many others.......

and many more

[harry near indy]

i can only think of one example now where the book and the movie are both good:

the big sleep.

burrito boy is right. comparing books to movies is like comparing apples and celery.

[Lex]

Count another vote for "Jaws."

Also, and if you had asked me beforehand I would have said this was impossible, "The Shawshank Redemption" was better than the Stephen King novella from which it was adapted. And that novella was pretty damn good -- certainly the finest fiction King has written.

[Genevieve]

Ones where the book and movie are both good:

To Kill a Mockingbird
A Little Princess (Alfonso Cuaron version)
Anne of Green Gables
The Princess Bride
Girl with a Pearl Earring (though I prefer the book)
High Fidelity (ditto)
Persuasion
Sense and Sensibility (I prefer the movie, but it's my least favorite Jane Austen book)

Kramer v. Kramer is a much better movie than book.