Monday, Nighttime Opine Thread - Adapt or Die

I watched John Huston's Wise Blood last week. Other than being set in the 70s instead of the late 40s/early 50s of O'Connor's book, it was remarkable in its faithful adherence to her story. Kept most of the memorable lines from the book. " No man with a good car needs to be justified!"

Brad Dourif in a rare leading role as Hazel Motes

Some familiar faces: Ned Beatty, William Hickey, Amy Wright, Dan Shor, John Huston, and Harry Dean Stanton; Career character actors with an occasional starring role.

Amy Wright as Sabbath Lily and Harry Dean as Asa Hawks

Not every faithful adaptation makes a good movie, and this one was... all right, I guess. It's breezy, grotesque, perverse, and often very funny, just like the novel which itself is a bumpy ride, assembled from short stories and reworked into novel form, that I was hoping Huston would smooth out somewhat.

Here are some film adaptations of written work that I like, some more faithful to the source and some a whole lot less. They keep to the spirit of the books they adapt so I won't include The Shining since it's easy to view as a separate entity from the novel. In no particular order:

• The Haunting  - 1963, Robert Wise, from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House
• The Innocents - 1961, Jack Clayton, from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
• The Third Man - 1949, Carol Reed, from Graham Greene's novel
• The Silence of the Lambs - 1991, Jonathan Demme, from Thomas Harris's novel
• The Maltese Falcon - 1941, John Huston, from Dashiell Hammet's novel
• Nosferatu - 1922, F. W. Murnau, from Bram Stoker's Dracula (also Herzog's 1979 version)
• Shoot the Piano Player - 1960, François Truffaut, from David Goodis's Down There
• Beau Travail - 1999, Claire Denis, from Herman Melville's Billy Budd (ok stretching a bit)

... and a few dozen others.

Do you have some favorites? Not just books to movies either. The first classics I read as a kid were Classics Illustrated (or a knockoff) adaptations of The Call of the Wild and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I read Junji Ito's comics versions of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and "The Human Chair" by Edogawa Ranpo, and they were good but not in the least bit faithful. As tedious and painful as I would have found it to be, I still regret I didn't see Todd Machover's opera of Philip K Dick's Valis. 

Codename: SQRL, over and out.