Gore Vidal, Shelby Foote, and other discriminating judges ranked the 100 best novels of the 1900s. How good were the movie adaptations of their Top 100 novels?
The “Brideshead Revisited” mini series is exceptional, though it is slow. That said I think a screen adaptation has to be that way, to stay true to the book. Otherwise you end up with the awful 2008 movie version.
Is the early 1980s "Brideshead" miniseries when people first discovered that they really liked slow shows? I can recall trying to watch it on videotape perhaps in the later 1980s and giving up because it was so slow.
Now that I think about it, perhaps the first slow sensation was the "Shogun" miniseries in 1980. They had all the scenes of Europeans talking to Japanese transmitted via two translations.
It was very calming. I recall spending a lot of time looking around at the imperial court hairstyles and the like.
On the other hand, I don't recall anybody mentioning "Shogun" for many years.
On the other hand, the recent TV series "Shogun" is said by everybody who has seen it (I haven't) to be one of the greatest TV series ever.
Near the end of the third season of White Lotus I said to my wife that 7 or 8 episodes is a long time to be in contact with some of the characters. You get some great bits like Sam Rockwell’s bonkers monologue or the nice minor plot-line about the security guard. But I spent a lot of time thinking, get on with it already.
That's because season three of White Lotus had the fewest interesting characters or storylines. I recall one of the episodes that didn't advance the story at all (when the three women go partying). Season two was much more engaging, particularly the machinations of the escort, Lucia, and her friend.
King Rat, both the book and the film (7.5 IMDB) made more of a mark on me but at 400 pages it was a third of the length of his other books so perhaps it was better suited to a film whereas Shogun (1152 pages) is more suited to the mini-series format.
Clavell got shot in the face and spent the rest of the war in Changi, wrote and directed To Sir with Love and wrote the screenplay for The Fly and The Great Escape. Just having The Great Escape on the CV would suggest you knew a bit about making great movies
I agree, it’s the weakest of the three seasons. Also agreed that the escort’s story is the best part of season two. But it sort of proves the point that slow shows can’t afford more lulls than a movie just because they’re longer and broken into episodes. It might be the other way around.
Or maybe it’s just me. I couldn’t make it through highly-praised shows like Deadwood or Game of Thrones, for instance. At the end of season three, my attitude was, yes, yes, everyone wants the Iron Throne and lots of people are going to get naked and/or killed while it’s sorted out. Let’s find something else to watch.
"Brideshead Revisited" was a slow-moving novel. It virtually had no action. Evelyn Waugh wasn't exactly Ernest Hemingway or Ian Fleming as a man or novelist. But the 1982 mini-series was excellent. The director was Charles Sturridge and he later married Phoebe Nichols who played Cordelia. Sturridge was a no-action director. He later directed "Shackleton" and it was terrible because Sturridge can't do action.
She married Charles Sturridge in about 1983 and was in his film "Shackleton" in about 2003. Phoebe Nicholls would have to have been devious indeed to sleep her way into "Persuasion" in 1995.
I thought Persuasion the best of the Austen adaptations. The seething yet repressed passion portrayed by Ciaran Hinds and Nicholls was an acting tour de force
“Brideshead” might seem slow but it’s notable for compressing what would have been a three-volume, 500 page plus saga in Victorian times into an easily digestible 200+ pages.
Evelyn Waugh was working under wartime constraints. He was lucky to get time off to write "Brideshead Revisited." I do wonder whether George Orwell's "1984" heroine- if that's what she was- was named after Julia of "Brideshead Revisited." Julia in "Brideshead Revisited" does immoral things but disavows her immorality at the end of the novel and ends her romance with Charles Ryder. Julia in "1984" is completely immoral and never disavows what she did. But she does give herself up to Big Brother.
The dystopian opening of “Brideshead” is rather “1984”-like in a way that doesn’t get much noticed. The dialogue with the old man in the pub in “1984” is also rather Waugh-like. They definitely influenced each other. (Waugh’s wartime satire “Put Out More Flags” also had an episode set at the real-life Ministry of Truth.)
Great post. I’ll add my own hot take: Kubrick’s Lolita is better than the book, but you have to read the book first.
Less stridently put, Kubrick’s adaptation does justice to the greatness of book by faithfully taking everything that could be made great on film and leaving behind what couldn’t, namely, the weight of Humbert’s voice on every page. In doing so, Kubrick made a superb and demented love story. How much sympathy did you feel for Humbert in the book vs. the movie? For me, not much. He’s a terrible man, obviously, but in the movie you (or at least I did) pity and perhaps even sympathize him as a man wrecked by not merely obsession, but love. That’s art. And I think it’s a strength that it’s clearer in the movie than in the book that eventually the girl takes control of him.
The problem with making a movie of Lolita is that in the novel the nymphet, Dolores Haze, is 12 years old, flat-chested, and barely pubescent. In the film she is played by a fully developed 14-year-old Sue Lyons, who could have passed for 18, which doesn't seem nearly as creepy.
Fair enough, if you mean Kubrick had a lesser hurdle to overcome if sympathy for Humbert was the goal. To say with any confidence that sympathy of any kind for Humbert was important to the book, it’s been long enough that I’d have to go back and reread it. But I’d rather rewatch the movie.
As far as I am concerned, publishing is one thing, Hollywood is another. Very few films are even close to the novel or story they are based on. Hollywood films are Hollywood fluff.
I love Brideshead, both book and series, it's probably my favourite culture thing. I used to have a theory that, as you say, literary fiction is hard to translate (takes a genius like Coppola), but that potboilers like John Grisham are great source material for films - things like "The Firm", "Jaws", indeed "The Godfather", "Fight Club".
Back in the day the canonical film from a book, where both film and book were highly rated, was "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". I recently watched the film with my teenage daughter, it is kind of mad, but fun, 50 years old. There's lots they wouldn't do if they made it today, probably top of the list is the reason that Jack Nicholson is in the asylum, which is kind of laughed off in what was a much more masculine cultural universe (statutory rape, ha ha).
I agree, good book, good film, but it pushed the mistaken theory that crazy people aren't really crazy, it's society that is. The belief that mental illness was a social construct was promoted by psychiatrists R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, who wrote “The Myth of Mental Illness.”
Yeah, that was a bizarre side trip in the history of psychiatry. I can see why laymen bought it. I do not understand how anyone who treats people with schizophrenia could ever fall for it. OTOH they also fell for the idea that a cold mother could somehow cause it so...
I guess it comes down to the fact that even the late sixties, as religion was in decline, pretty much no one was willing to go full on materialist, at least WRT the human mind. The mind they thought is kind of a spirit trapped in the skull so a disease of the mind must be a problem of disordered thought rather than, e.g., a virus messing with the physical structure of the brain.
Though there are plenty of properly crazy characters in the film, and the point of Jack Nicholson's character is that he isn't crazy, just pretending. Billy, who tragically kills himself, is on the margin, and Jack tries to normalise him, but for the most part the OFOTCN characters are pretty mad. I totally agree that we used to be better at treating crazy people as crazy, rather than, say, 'trans'.
Brideshead, both book and adaptation, are among my all-time favorites. The last passage in the book brings me to tears. Sorry but I couldn't stand Cuckoo's Nest: the Nicholson character is such a Mary Jane figure that I actually had (dashed) hopes for the recent Nurse Ratched series, which managed to be atmospheric without making a lick of sense.
Yes, it isn't a perfect film by a long way, his character isn't plausible. I think you mean 'mary sue', it is a bit OTT how dominant his character is - though he does have flaws, and it doesn't end well for him, which isn't how mary sue characters work in feminist films. Nurse Ratched was such a great baddie, we just couldn't cope with her today, I haven't seen that new series, but I can imagine they would struggle to make her bad, mary sue is the dominant trope today for sure.
Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews played similar aristocratic / climbing friends in the mid 70s Palliser miniseries (8.2 rating), which inspired me to read Trollope in the 80s, giving me many hours of enjoyment. For one of them, they were originally cast in the other's role, but I can't remember which series it was, probably BR, because Sebastian and Julia are supposed to look much alike, part of Charles's attraction.
Diana Quick's only marriage was to Kenneth Cranham. Cranham had a bit part in "Brideshead Revisited" a few years after they divorced. Cranham played Corporal Jack Salt in "Danger UXB" in 1979 which is an excellent television series.
The center of cultural gravity has shifted away from both movies and written fiction. In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a decent living by writing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. (And so could other writers with less staying power than FSF.) That's obviously impossible today. Likewise, in the 1940s, Americans went to the movies three times a week.
Like plays and poetry, novels and feature films, though still extant and appreciated by sophisticates, have simply become less relevant art forms that attract less funding and talent. This is what cultural stagnation doomsayers like Ross Douthat miss: yes, movies are getting worse, but that's because television and computer games are getting better.
The most relevant formats of fiction today are TV and computer games, especially for young people. No novel comes close to the cultural impact made by shows like Succession, the White Lotus, the Bear, etc. It's not that people never read novels, it's just that they can't imagine how much more enticing it was to read fiction when you didn't have unlimited access to video entertainment.
The only books that move numbers these days are fantasy/romance/YA novels for women that could reasonably be classified as "adult" entertainment.
I think I'd add graphic novels and comics. I don't think humans will tire of narrative fiction but to assume they will always favor the same format is, of course, incorrect.
The one thing that will preserve the novel is that it is the only kind of narrative fiction that you can create yourself. Everything else requires you to put a team together and get them to pull in the same direction. This is difficult, frustrating, to do unless you have money to spend.
Erik, your comments at this site are generally excellent. When a reply of yours indicates that the original comment was insightful, I'll read that one, too.
As here with Max Avar's perceptive remarks, that effort is usually rewarded. Please keep writing, both of you.
My favorite Shelby nugget from Wikipedia: “Foote was raised in his father's Episcopal faith. He also attended synagogue each Saturday with his mother until the age of eleven.” BTW, I’m a philo Semite so not trying to stir the pot.
My tobacco road juvenile court judge grandfather said JFK got what he deserved for interfering (and being Irish Catholic) (he was also dead within a year). White men have been seriously constrained the last 50 years by the R word.
What's interesting in considering the list is that, in terms of influence, genre writers usually have less contemporary, but more posthumous, relevance than literary ones. For example, I would say that JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, and Philip K. Dick collectively have notably more impact on current writers/culture than e.g. William Faulkner, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov. (Directly and indirectly: for example, REH's Conan stories were a major inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons, which was a major inspiration for computer role-playing games.)
Great art is determined by people who like it enough to go into art history. Great music is determined by people who become music critics. There are plenty of commercial artists, comic book artists, and illustrators, that I have gotten more enjoyment from than the official great painters.
Quick reaction to the first part before I read into the list-- I am shocked that you question whether the Godfather is one of the two best movies of all time but not that Shawshank is the best.
Sir, you are playing in a higher league, I have no idea what "insists upon itself" means. The Danceteria scene with Mark Blum is the funniest in movie history.
I find it hard to think of anyone better suited to playing Marlowe than Mitchum. Liam Neeson made a decent fist of it recently but age had caught up to him.
Novel writing and screenwriting are different skills. I read a book by a screenwriting professor in which he noted that in studio days it wasn't called the 'Script Department' it was called the 'Story Department'.
Not having read most of those books or seen most of those movies, I wonder if it's that's a big factor. Not all official great novels have great stories and non literary fiction can have great stories with perhaps worse writing. I must confess I'm not certain what makes a book literary fiction.
John Ford's film "How Green Was My Valley" was much better than the novel. But he was John Ford. "The Searchers" was a fine novel by Alan LeMay but the Ford film was even better. The film version of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is better than the Harper Lee novel.
I debated Rod Dreher about eight years ago about Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" which is still not filmed. "The Moviegoer" is one of my favorite novels but it has barely any action. I told Dreher that "The Moviegoer" would likely be not filmed because it has little action. Even the sex element is handled obliquely by Percy. The lead character, Binx, is a man in search of truth and reality who escapes by watching movies and dating his secretaries. His eventual romantic interest, Kate, not only is nuts but hard to like. The most sympathetic character, Lonnie, is a fourteen-year old cripple.
A lot of decent novellas seem to make better movies
Shawshank, Stand By Me, Running Man all adaptations of King
Valdez is Coming and 3.10 to Yuma-Elmore Leonard
The now popular mini-series from 6 to 10 episodes seem to be a good way to adapt novels with their more dense stories and range of sub-plots
This is awesome!
The “Brideshead Revisited” mini series is exceptional, though it is slow. That said I think a screen adaptation has to be that way, to stay true to the book. Otherwise you end up with the awful 2008 movie version.
Is the early 1980s "Brideshead" miniseries when people first discovered that they really liked slow shows? I can recall trying to watch it on videotape perhaps in the later 1980s and giving up because it was so slow.
Now that I think about it, perhaps the first slow sensation was the "Shogun" miniseries in 1980. They had all the scenes of Europeans talking to Japanese transmitted via two translations.
It was very calming. I recall spending a lot of time looking around at the imperial court hairstyles and the like.
On the other hand, I don't recall anybody mentioning "Shogun" for many years.
On the other hand, the recent TV series "Shogun" is said by everybody who has seen it (I haven't) to be one of the greatest TV series ever.
Near the end of the third season of White Lotus I said to my wife that 7 or 8 episodes is a long time to be in contact with some of the characters. You get some great bits like Sam Rockwell’s bonkers monologue or the nice minor plot-line about the security guard. But I spent a lot of time thinking, get on with it already.
That's because season three of White Lotus had the fewest interesting characters or storylines. I recall one of the episodes that didn't advance the story at all (when the three women go partying). Season two was much more engaging, particularly the machinations of the escort, Lucia, and her friend.
King Rat, both the book and the film (7.5 IMDB) made more of a mark on me but at 400 pages it was a third of the length of his other books so perhaps it was better suited to a film whereas Shogun (1152 pages) is more suited to the mini-series format.
Clavell got shot in the face and spent the rest of the war in Changi, wrote and directed To Sir with Love and wrote the screenplay for The Fly and The Great Escape. Just having The Great Escape on the CV would suggest you knew a bit about making great movies
I agree, it’s the weakest of the three seasons. Also agreed that the escort’s story is the best part of season two. But it sort of proves the point that slow shows can’t afford more lulls than a movie just because they’re longer and broken into episodes. It might be the other way around.
Or maybe it’s just me. I couldn’t make it through highly-praised shows like Deadwood or Game of Thrones, for instance. At the end of season three, my attitude was, yes, yes, everyone wants the Iron Throne and lots of people are going to get naked and/or killed while it’s sorted out. Let’s find something else to watch.
"Brideshead Revisited" was a slow-moving novel. It virtually had no action. Evelyn Waugh wasn't exactly Ernest Hemingway or Ian Fleming as a man or novelist. But the 1982 mini-series was excellent. The director was Charles Sturridge and he later married Phoebe Nichols who played Cordelia. Sturridge was a no-action director. He later directed "Shackleton" and it was terrible because Sturridge can't do action.
Nichols was miscast as supposedly handsome Elizabeth Eliot in '95's Persuasion. Who'd she have to sleep with to get that job?
She married Charles Sturridge in about 1983 and was in his film "Shackleton" in about 2003. Phoebe Nicholls would have to have been devious indeed to sleep her way into "Persuasion" in 1995.
I thought Persuasion the best of the Austen adaptations. The seething yet repressed passion portrayed by Ciaran Hinds and Nicholls was an acting tour de force
"Where's my toast?"
“Brideshead” might seem slow but it’s notable for compressing what would have been a three-volume, 500 page plus saga in Victorian times into an easily digestible 200+ pages.
Evelyn Waugh was working under wartime constraints. He was lucky to get time off to write "Brideshead Revisited." I do wonder whether George Orwell's "1984" heroine- if that's what she was- was named after Julia of "Brideshead Revisited." Julia in "Brideshead Revisited" does immoral things but disavows her immorality at the end of the novel and ends her romance with Charles Ryder. Julia in "1984" is completely immoral and never disavows what she did. But she does give herself up to Big Brother.
The dystopian opening of “Brideshead” is rather “1984”-like in a way that doesn’t get much noticed. The dialogue with the old man in the pub in “1984” is also rather Waugh-like. They definitely influenced each other. (Waugh’s wartime satire “Put Out More Flags” also had an episode set at the real-life Ministry of Truth.)
_Scoop_ has been made into a movie? Must have been terrible, if it captured the book it would be a famous comedy classic.
Great post. I’ll add my own hot take: Kubrick’s Lolita is better than the book, but you have to read the book first.
Less stridently put, Kubrick’s adaptation does justice to the greatness of book by faithfully taking everything that could be made great on film and leaving behind what couldn’t, namely, the weight of Humbert’s voice on every page. In doing so, Kubrick made a superb and demented love story. How much sympathy did you feel for Humbert in the book vs. the movie? For me, not much. He’s a terrible man, obviously, but in the movie you (or at least I did) pity and perhaps even sympathize him as a man wrecked by not merely obsession, but love. That’s art. And I think it’s a strength that it’s clearer in the movie than in the book that eventually the girl takes control of him.
A rating of 7.5 is too low.
The problem with making a movie of Lolita is that in the novel the nymphet, Dolores Haze, is 12 years old, flat-chested, and barely pubescent. In the film she is played by a fully developed 14-year-old Sue Lyons, who could have passed for 18, which doesn't seem nearly as creepy.
Fair enough, if you mean Kubrick had a lesser hurdle to overcome if sympathy for Humbert was the goal. To say with any confidence that sympathy of any kind for Humbert was important to the book, it’s been long enough that I’d have to go back and reread it. But I’d rather rewatch the movie.
As far as I am concerned, publishing is one thing, Hollywood is another. Very few films are even close to the novel or story they are based on. Hollywood films are Hollywood fluff.
I love Brideshead, both book and series, it's probably my favourite culture thing. I used to have a theory that, as you say, literary fiction is hard to translate (takes a genius like Coppola), but that potboilers like John Grisham are great source material for films - things like "The Firm", "Jaws", indeed "The Godfather", "Fight Club".
Back in the day the canonical film from a book, where both film and book were highly rated, was "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". I recently watched the film with my teenage daughter, it is kind of mad, but fun, 50 years old. There's lots they wouldn't do if they made it today, probably top of the list is the reason that Jack Nicholson is in the asylum, which is kind of laughed off in what was a much more masculine cultural universe (statutory rape, ha ha).
I agree, good book, good film, but it pushed the mistaken theory that crazy people aren't really crazy, it's society that is. The belief that mental illness was a social construct was promoted by psychiatrists R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, who wrote “The Myth of Mental Illness.”
Yeah, that was a bizarre side trip in the history of psychiatry. I can see why laymen bought it. I do not understand how anyone who treats people with schizophrenia could ever fall for it. OTOH they also fell for the idea that a cold mother could somehow cause it so...
I guess it comes down to the fact that even the late sixties, as religion was in decline, pretty much no one was willing to go full on materialist, at least WRT the human mind. The mind they thought is kind of a spirit trapped in the skull so a disease of the mind must be a problem of disordered thought rather than, e.g., a virus messing with the physical structure of the brain.
Though there are plenty of properly crazy characters in the film, and the point of Jack Nicholson's character is that he isn't crazy, just pretending. Billy, who tragically kills himself, is on the margin, and Jack tries to normalise him, but for the most part the OFOTCN characters are pretty mad. I totally agree that we used to be better at treating crazy people as crazy, rather than, say, 'trans'.
Brideshead, both book and adaptation, are among my all-time favorites. The last passage in the book brings me to tears. Sorry but I couldn't stand Cuckoo's Nest: the Nicholson character is such a Mary Jane figure that I actually had (dashed) hopes for the recent Nurse Ratched series, which managed to be atmospheric without making a lick of sense.
Yes, it isn't a perfect film by a long way, his character isn't plausible. I think you mean 'mary sue', it is a bit OTT how dominant his character is - though he does have flaws, and it doesn't end well for him, which isn't how mary sue characters work in feminist films. Nurse Ratched was such a great baddie, we just couldn't cope with her today, I haven't seen that new series, but I can imagine they would struggle to make her bad, mary sue is the dominant trope today for sure.
Yes, Mary Sue. Thanks. Don't bother with the new series, or turn the sound off.
Whenever Nurse Ratched and her inimitable bedside manner comes up I'm afraid I always think of Kathy Bates administering to James Caan in Misery
Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews played similar aristocratic / climbing friends in the mid 70s Palliser miniseries (8.2 rating), which inspired me to read Trollope in the 80s, giving me many hours of enjoyment. For one of them, they were originally cast in the other's role, but I can't remember which series it was, probably BR, because Sebastian and Julia are supposed to look much alike, part of Charles's attraction.
"The thin bat-squeak of sexuality...."
The novel, which I re-read this Winter, presents that Sebastian and Julia looked very much alike. Charles Ryder fell for both of them.
Diana Quick, who played Julia, has some dot Indian blood, which was more obvious in her late middle age on Midsomer Murders.
Diana Quick's only marriage was to Kenneth Cranham. Cranham had a bit part in "Brideshead Revisited" a few years after they divorced. Cranham played Corporal Jack Salt in "Danger UXB" in 1979 which is an excellent television series.
'A Dance to the Music of Time' was adapted as a miniseries, 7.5 rating.
Part of that rating must surely accrue to Simon Russell Beale who played the egregious Widmerpool.
The center of cultural gravity has shifted away from both movies and written fiction. In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a decent living by writing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. (And so could other writers with less staying power than FSF.) That's obviously impossible today. Likewise, in the 1940s, Americans went to the movies three times a week.
Like plays and poetry, novels and feature films, though still extant and appreciated by sophisticates, have simply become less relevant art forms that attract less funding and talent. This is what cultural stagnation doomsayers like Ross Douthat miss: yes, movies are getting worse, but that's because television and computer games are getting better.
The most relevant formats of fiction today are TV and computer games, especially for young people. No novel comes close to the cultural impact made by shows like Succession, the White Lotus, the Bear, etc. It's not that people never read novels, it's just that they can't imagine how much more enticing it was to read fiction when you didn't have unlimited access to video entertainment.
The only books that move numbers these days are fantasy/romance/YA novels for women that could reasonably be classified as "adult" entertainment.
I think I'd add graphic novels and comics. I don't think humans will tire of narrative fiction but to assume they will always favor the same format is, of course, incorrect.
The one thing that will preserve the novel is that it is the only kind of narrative fiction that you can create yourself. Everything else requires you to put a team together and get them to pull in the same direction. This is difficult, frustrating, to do unless you have money to spend.
Erik, your comments at this site are generally excellent. When a reply of yours indicates that the original comment was insightful, I'll read that one, too.
As here with Max Avar's perceptive remarks, that effort is usually rewarded. Please keep writing, both of you.
Wow. Thanks! enjoy yours as well.
My favorite Shelby nugget from Wikipedia: “Foote was raised in his father's Episcopal faith. He also attended synagogue each Saturday with his mother until the age of eleven.” BTW, I’m a philo Semite so not trying to stir the pot.
Foote was brave enough to drive through Mississippi with a LBJ bumper sticker in 1964.
My tobacco road juvenile court judge grandfather said JFK got what he deserved for interfering (and being Irish Catholic) (he was also dead within a year). White men have been seriously constrained the last 50 years by the R word.
Yes, most intellectual conservatives quiver at the R word.
What's interesting in considering the list is that, in terms of influence, genre writers usually have less contemporary, but more posthumous, relevance than literary ones. For example, I would say that JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, and Philip K. Dick collectively have notably more impact on current writers/culture than e.g. William Faulkner, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov. (Directly and indirectly: for example, REH's Conan stories were a major inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons, which was a major inspiration for computer role-playing games.)
Great art is determined by people who like it enough to go into art history. Great music is determined by people who become music critics. There are plenty of commercial artists, comic book artists, and illustrators, that I have gotten more enjoyment from than the official great painters.
Quick reaction to the first part before I read into the list-- I am shocked that you question whether the Godfather is one of the two best movies of all time but not that Shawshank is the best.
The greatest movie of all time is Desperately Seeking Susan. Second is Farewell My Lovely.
I don't like Desperately Seeking Susan; it insists upon itself. I would enjoy reading your defense of this choice whether or not you are joking.
Sir, you are playing in a higher league, I have no idea what "insists upon itself" means. The Danceteria scene with Mark Blum is the funniest in movie history.
I find it hard to think of anyone better suited to playing Marlowe than Mitchum. Liam Neeson made a decent fist of it recently but age had caught up to him.
It's a joke from "The Family Guy". No one knows what it means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pnwE_Oy5WI
Novel writing and screenwriting are different skills. I read a book by a screenwriting professor in which he noted that in studio days it wasn't called the 'Script Department' it was called the 'Story Department'.
Not having read most of those books or seen most of those movies, I wonder if it's that's a big factor. Not all official great novels have great stories and non literary fiction can have great stories with perhaps worse writing. I must confess I'm not certain what makes a book literary fiction.
Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" was a great novel and a horrendous film. It deserved much better.
John Ford's film "How Green Was My Valley" was much better than the novel. But he was John Ford. "The Searchers" was a fine novel by Alan LeMay but the Ford film was even better. The film version of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is better than the Harper Lee novel.
"Shane" is a better film than it is a novel.
I debated Rod Dreher about eight years ago about Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" which is still not filmed. "The Moviegoer" is one of my favorite novels but it has barely any action. I told Dreher that "The Moviegoer" would likely be not filmed because it has little action. Even the sex element is handled obliquely by Percy. The lead character, Binx, is a man in search of truth and reality who escapes by watching movies and dating his secretaries. His eventual romantic interest, Kate, not only is nuts but hard to like. The most sympathetic character, Lonnie, is a fourteen-year old cripple.