Top 5 Based-on-a-Book Movies

This weekend the venerable old Landmark Loew's Jersey Theatre is showing three classic movies that were based on popular books: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Stand by Me (1986), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Great books do not always make great movies. For every Gone With the Wind (1939) you have The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). Screenplay adapters have to understand what makes a book resonate and translate it to the visual medium of film. Here are five movies that I think got it right- even if they didn't strictly follow the source material:

1.) Mildred Pierce (1945)

Everybody knows how much I adore this movie. Crawford is transcendent (and yes, sympathetic) and gives one of the greatest performances of her career. But interestingly enough, the movie is quite different from the book. Author James M. Cain was already a hit writer when he penned Mildred Pierce in 1941. His previous book The Postman Always Rings Twice and serialized Double Indemnity were both thrillers that swirled around crime and infidelity. Sexy stuff for the mid-Thirties. But Mildred Pierce was not a crime novel. It was a melodrama following the titular Mildred's dissolving first marriage and her struggles to give her daughters all the things she didn't have- resulting in a legendary spoiled brat. So why does the movie version of Mildred Pierce open with Monte Beragon (the slick Zachary Scott) getting filled full of lead?

It would seem that the makers of Mildred Pierce were worried that Cain's previous work and the successful movie version of Double Indemnity a year earlier had created an expectation in the audience for a crime story. Not to mention that violence sells, so why not try and meld together a film noir and a women's film? Enter the crime bookends at the beginning and end of Mildred Pierce.

Director Michael Curtiz did an amazing job weaving together the two genres and cinematographer Ernest Haller creates a wonderful visual juxtaposition between where Mildred began and the dark place she wound up using the contrasting lighting tropes of  noir and melodrama. That genre-blending is one of the reasons Mildred Pierce has stayed with us so long... and there's the slapping scene.

2.) A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Stanley Kubrick has a freak side. Sure, you see an orgy or two in his Eyes Wide Shut (1999), but nothing can top the vicious sexuality on display in A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess' 1962 book that the film is based on was likewise provocative. The tale of Alex and his gang of no-goodniks takes place in a not-to-distant dystopian England where rape and violence proliferate the city's streets, and no one proliferates quite as much as Alex and his droogs. But this book wasn't just radical for its sex and violence. It is also challenging in its stance that the measures society takes to try and fix human behavior could be just as barbaric as the crimes themselves.

The movie version of Clockwork brings Burgess' ideas to startling life through the lens of one of the cinema's greatest visual artists. It's one thing to read about a gang rape. It's another to see it- and it's yet another to see it as if it's a surreal work of art. There are several rape scenes in the film (and one consensual sped-up lovefest) and none of them are filmed realistically. The violence and terror of rape are there, but they are abstracted.

The rape of a girl takes place on an abandoned stage to the strains of Beethoven. The rape of another woman is committed by men in phallic harlequin masks, who cut strategic holes in her pantsuit, all while singing the title tune from Singin' in the Rain'. A feisty older woman is attacked in her cat and erotic art-covered home with an enlarged penis sculpture. Kubrick re-imagines the rapes of Burgess' novel as violent art pieces instead of realistic acts of violence.

In the second half of the film as young Alex pays for his crimes, he is subjected to an experimental behavioral psychology "cure" for criminal thoughts called the Ludovico Technique. Alex is strapped to a chair in a theater, his eyes pried open by some nasty eye clamps, and is subjected to the cruelest images of rape and violence. The treatment works- but leaves poor Alex unable to defend himself in the real world- or to even enjoy his beloved Ludwig Van.

Unpacking a Kubrick film will take much more space and time than this blog can handle- but a good starting point is to think about the link between the distorted images of sex and violence depicted in Kubrick's film, and the more realistic images Alex is subjected to in the theater for his treatment. Kubrick has taken Burgess' material and skillfully applied it to the cinematic medium- making the ideas visual while at the same time confronting the medium presenting those visuals.

And then there's the Clockwork fan who made Alex's bedspread.

3.) Misery (1990)

 As far as I'm concerned, Stephen King is this century's (or is it last century's?) Charles Dickens. The man's consistent stream of fascinating horror books that create unforgettable characters who leap from the page into our nightmares is truly unique in the publishing world. One of my favorites was 1987's Misery. I will never forget reading it in one sitting during a weekend in my snowed-in one-room apartment. I don't recommend reading Stephen King books if your physical environment matches the story's. Just don't.
At the time, most of King's books were made into movies, and Misery was no exception. A mere three years after the book was published, Rob Reiner shot the film version starring James Caan and relative newcomer, Kathy Bates. Caan plays Paul Sheldon, author of a hit romance book series who is tired of selling out.

On a self-imposed writer's exile in Colorado to finish the last book in his Misery Chastain cycle, his car skids off a snowy road and he comes-to broken, but alive in a room in the house of his "number one fan", Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates.) Annie goes from savior to torturer when she discovers the galley of the new book and demands that Paul re-write it so her favorite character doesn't die, or else...

Bates was inspired casting. She so perfectly embodies the homespun schizoid Annie, that you would think it was written for her. Bates is able to balance the lonely outcast with the manic curse-filled psycho to the point we are almost sad that Paul has to dispatch her. She found the dark humor that King had placed in Annie, and  it would earn Bates her first Oscar nom and to date- only win.

King has a thing for people who are stuck or trapped (think Cujo, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, The Shining, The Mist, and Gerald's Game.) In a novel, it gives his main characters time to ruminate on themselves and their lives, as well as figure out a way to get un-trapped, but in a movie, it's a dangerous choice to set a film in one location. Reiner handles the obstacle of the one-room location with a tight, fast script by Oscar-Winner William Goldman that builds tension to scream-worthy levels.

There are occasionally breaths of fresh air as we go outside the room to follow Buster and Virginia (the adorably matched Richard Farnsworth and Frances Sternhagen) as they search for the missing Paul. But mainly, we are trapped in that room with Paul, desperately trying to figure out how to escape, dreading the sound of Annie's key turning in the lock.

4.) The Stepford Wives (1975)

Ira Levin was hot stuff in the late '60's and early '70's. His books Rosemary's Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972) were hits and the release of the film version of Rosemary's Baby in 1968 was a smash success. Levin tapped into the Women's Movement in this country in a creative way- depicting women who were trapped in supernatural situations that reflected a growing dissatisfaction with traditional marriage. The Stepford Wives addressed Women's Lib and how the male-dominated culture constructed women and their views of themselves.

In the film version, Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) and her family move to a Connecticut town with the hopes of escaping the New York rat race. Everything seems idyllic- too much so. The wives of Stepford are all immaculately dressed, beautifully put together, and willing to make their husbands happy at any cost. Joanna isn't having any of this, and decides with her friend Bobbie (the hilarious Paula Prentiss) to find out what is in the water of Stepford that makes women such lovely doormats.
Not to be a spoiler queen, but it ain't the water that's the problem in Stepford, it's the men.

Critics of the movie (and they include feminist author Betty Freidan) felt that the movie dumbed down feminism and fetishized the image of the perfect woman. I hate to argue with the author of The Feminine Mystique, but she was totally missing the point. The image of the perfect wife in The Stepford Wives isn't attractive. It's terrifying.

The soft-focus perfection and robotic repetition of domestic patter about recipes and household cleaners is unsettling- not appealing. The final scene of the wives of Stepford walking through the supermarket isn't one of tranquil beauty- it is ghastly- almost like a uniformed fascist brigade that is looking for the softest two-ply.

The movie has become a camp classic due to its fashion and outdated vision of femininity- but I think it is a well-made social-issue horror movie- one that uses visuals instead of explicit ideology to spread its terror. And I think in a world where many women become more and more plastic, there is something to be learned in a movie about a town full of synthetic women.

5.) Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

Ah, Breakfast at Tiffany's- one of the great romance films from the end of the studio era where a carefree fashionista and an earnest writer fall in love living in the same New York apartment building. But if the movie had been made more faithful to Truman Capote's 1958 novella, it would have looked quite different. To begin with, Capote's main characters were a little rougher than their cinematic counterparts. In the novel, Holly Golightly is not a lovable pixie who gets through life having men give her money for the powder room. She's a hooker. Unrepentantly so. She has a foul mouth and admits to sleeping with men and women. This has little effect on neighbor Paul Varjack's interest in her, though, because in the book, Paul is a gay man.

A literary stand-in for Capote, Paul is fascinated by Holly, but has no intention of  marrying her. So it should come as no surprise that the rainy happy ending with Cat reunited with the two lovers doesn't exist in the book. In the book Holly and Paul part ways- and Cat disappears. And the wonderful character of "2E" Failenson that Patricia Neal has such delicious fun with doesn't even exist. There is a Mr. Yunioshi in the book but he is played by a real Japanese man.

So why all the changes? Simple. It was 1961. There was no way a movie could be made about a bisexual prostitute and her gay friend. The Production Code was beginning to wane- but not that much. The language in the book alone wouldn't be seen on American movie screens for another eight or nine years. So director Blake Edwards took a darkly funny story, removed the questionable parts, and made it more funny funny by throwing in a charming romance and Mickey Rooney in yellow-face (a funny fail). But the film does retain some of the sad undercurrent from the book with Audrey Hepburn's sensitive portrayal of a lost girl and Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer's unforgettable Best Song Oscar-Winner "Moon River."

What "book-to-movie" films do you love?