Bad Movies from Good Novels

 

For some reason I was thinking a day or so ago about bad movies made from good novels. It certainly is possible to make a really good movie based on a good novel. John Huston’s Maltese Falcon shows that. However, I think it is difficult because of the differences between the two forms, and very few of the very good movies I have seen are based on novels, good or otherwise.

On the other hand, there are plenty of bad ones. I do not know of any movie version of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn that I could stomach watching. The movie version of the Guns of Navarone is bad in an unpleasant way. The novel is a straightforward adventure story of daring and heroism in World War II. The screenwriter Carl Foreman was a (former?) communist who according to reports wanted to turn the story into an anti-war one. If that had been done in an upfront way, keeping the title and the names of some of the characters but telling a different story (in the way the Dean Martin Matt Helm movies turned grim, tough novels into silly comedies), the result probably would have been a bad movie, but not such a dishonest one. Instead there was a shady attempt to have it both ways – keeping enough of the novel’s daring events to get an audience while preaching a minor league Bridge on the River Kwai counterpoint on the futility of war.

The most disappointing  one I know about is the movie version of The Fountainhead. Almost everything about it is bad, starting with the cast. Gary Cooper was badly miscast as Howard Roark, and gave a wooden and unconvincing performance, particularly in his droning speech in the courtroom. Patricia Neal later became a fine actress, bur her Dominique Francon got very little of the character. The performance of the actor playing Toohey was bad enough to leave a person wondering if the film was going to end with him tying Dominique to the railroad tracks. Among the main characters, only Raymond Massey as Wynand was adequate. Ayn Rand’s script as shot (and the usual story is that it was shot as she wrote it) is stilted and uncinematic. Vidor’s direction captured nothing of the strength, fire, and intensity of the book, and some of the scenes are amateurishly bad. Even the architectural drawings and sets are lame.

It is too bad. It might  have been a possible to make good movie. A person can imagine what could have been done with, say, Orson Welles directing and playing Roark, Barbara Stanwyck as Dominique, Clifton Webb as Toohey, and some cinematic freedom from the rigidity of Rand’s script. But that is just pointless wishful thinking. Maybe someday somebody good will give it another try.