Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Best Book-to-Movie Adaptations
This week's Top Ten Tuesday is a movie-themed freebie, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to do a post I'd been contemplating ever since Eva did something similar: top ten book-to-movie adaptations. Now, these aren't necessarily my favorite movies adapted from books, because there's plenty of movies I love that don't follow their books exactly; these are the ten I think are the most faithful and accurate adaptations of their source material. For the purposes of this post, I'm counting out miniseries and movies based on plays.
Goodbye, My Lady (1956) - book by James H. Street
This lovely underrated film is literally almost word for word and scene for scene with the novel, and all the characters are just about perfectly cast. I suppose a book with such a small cast of characters and so much of the story conveyed through dialogue lends itself particularly well to adaptation. In any case, it's excellently done.
Old Yeller (1957) - book by Fred Gipson
While the film script made some judicious tweaks to heighten the drama of a few scenes, again, it's almost a perfect adaptation. When I first read the book, after seeing the movie, everything I visualized as I read chimed neatly with the way it was portrayed onscreen.
Shane (1953) - book by Jack Schaefer
On the surface various things were changed for the movie—character names, scenes moved around or trimmed out, et cetera—but you don't really notice that while reading the book (or at least I didn't), because the movie catches the essentials and does it memorably. If anything I thought the character of Marian was a little more vibrant and less wistful in the book, perhaps more interesting, but the difference isn't enough to spoil anything.
Sense and Sensibility (1995) - book by Jane Austen
Hands-down, the best job of adapting an Austen novel to fit within a feature-length running time. Unlike the '05 Pride and Prejudice, where I feel like anyone who hasn't read the book would really have no idea what's going on, S&S nails all the most important aspects of the novel, and beyond that is just a beautiful film.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) - book by James Hilton
Aside from the pardonable flight of fancy in moving Mr. Chipping's walking tour from the hills of England to the mountains of Austria (and I really can't criticize anything that provides an excuse for a Viennese waltz), this is another one that does just a lovely job translating the book to screen. Being a shorter book, more of a novella than a novel, it's just the right length to turn into a film without having to chop it down to size.
Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) - book by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The book was a childhood favorite, but I didn't see the movie until a couple of years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it was done. Mickey Rooney as Dick isn't quite right, but everybody else is—C. Aubrey Smith is the Earl of Dorincourt come to life, right off the cover of the Dell Yearling Classic paperback edition I grew up with.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) - book by Harper Lee
Of course there's layers of depth in the book that are impossible to translate to the screen, but this is really a darn good adaptation. The casting is right, the setting is right, the important plot points are all there—and when the novel's author is actually pleased with the adaptation job, there you have a rare honor.
Rebecca (1940) - book by Daphne du Maurier
It's been a while since I saw this one, but from what I recall the book-to-screen job was an awfully good one. I'm still impressed by how the screenwriters managed to make a major plot change to satisfy the Production Code simply by tweaking a few lines of dialogue, but left everything else intact.
The Longest Day (1962) - book by Cornelius Ryan
Nonfiction is a little different, but the thing that book and movie have in common is the suspense-building way they trace the intersecting progress of a big cast of characters, keeping you watching or turning the pages just as if you actually didn't know what was going to happen.
Kidnapped (1960) - book by Robert Louis Stevenson
I wrote a full review of this one for a blogathon earlier this year! Even though the story is trimmed and sped up a bit to fit within the running time, the casting is great and the whole thing captures the spirit of Stevenson's novel in a way that would be hard to match.