Graham,
Re your comments below:
> I have not read IN A LONELY PLACE, but based
on
> Woody Haut's description in
> PULP CULTURE, the movie is *very* different than
the
> book. It's a wonderful
> movie, though, and I think that should be
the
> criteria for movie
> adaptations, not "Is it faithful?" but "Is
it
> good?". LA CONFIDENTIAL, for
> example, is not totally faithful to Ellroy's
book,
> but it's a very good
> movie.
I haven't read Dorothy Hughes's novel so I don't really have
a basis for comparison. As for L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, given that
the massive novel had to be compressed into a feature-length
running time, it was faithful to the spirit, if not the
letter of the novel. At the time it was firt released,
reviewers familiar with botht he book and the movie said it
was fiathful in the same way that the 1953 adaptation of
James Jones's FROM HERE TO ENTERNITY was faithful to that
book. It gave us the main characters and a simplified version
of the plot (with some aspects cleaned up for 1953 consors),
and tried to put across, in a two-hour running time the
essense of Jones's novel.
> And I'm surprised no one has mentioned KISS
ME
> DEADLY, which takes
> Mike-Hammer-as-crusading-knight and turns him
into
> Mike-Hammer-violent-thug,
> but is also a terrific movie. Comments?
I've never liked that movie for the same reason I don't like
Altman's THE LONG GOODBYE. It was deliberately UNfaithful,
not only to the letter, but to the spirit of Spillane's book.
Aldrich, like Altman, went on record as saying he was making
and
"anti-Spillane" picture, which brings me back to the point I
made at the beginning. A filmmaker
(playwright, comic book writer, etc) has an obligation to be
faithful, within the limits of the medium in which he's
working, to at least the spirit of the source material he's
adapting. If he has no respect for the source material, he
shouldn't be doing the adaptation. And his obligation to be
faithful is NOT mitigated by the amount of talent or effort
he puts into bringing an antithetical version on screen
(stage, comic book page, etc.).
JIM DOHERTY
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