Book-to-Film Traffic: Fiascoes and Pleasant Surprises
Sunday, March 5, 2006; Page BW09
BEST TO WORST
Myra Breckenridge (1970). Gore Vidal immediately disowned this mauling of his splendid comic novel, but who really could own it? It's like a horrible opium haze through which one catches glimpses of Raquel Welch, sharing sheets with a very young Farrah Fawcett, and a senescent wraith calling herself Mae West.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972). Have you ever seen children literally bent back by G-forces of boredom? That's what happened to my brother and me when we saw this movie for his 10th birthday. Lewis Carroll's classic should be a natural for the movies, but when it comes to finding a live-action equivalent, Hollywood keeps diving down the rabbit hole. This dreadful "musical" is only slightly worse than the 1933 version, with W.C. Fields as a dyspeptic Humpty Dumpty.
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). I'm in the minority that finds Tom Wolfe's satirical takedown of the Wall Street aristocracy overrated, but precious little of Wolfe's zesty wit or dead-on sociology finds its way into Brian de Palma's off-kilter movie. Starring a weirdly miscast Tom Hanks, this was a legendary failure that became (thanks to reporter Julie Salamon) a case study in literary-property mismanagement.
The Scarlet Letter (1995). If you wanted to make Nathaniel Hawthorne suffer as much as his Puritan protagonists, you would yank him through time and force him to endure Roland Joffé's soft-porn salmagundi, in which Hester Prynne (phlegmy-voiced Demi Moore) is drawn into adultery by a wittle orange birdie and saved from hanging by Indians. Oh, and that scarlet "A" turns out to be kind of a clip-on.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997). John Berendt's tale of lust, murder and cross-dressing in Savannah was one of the most enjoyable reads of 1993 -- and one of the most tedious movies of the 1990s. No amount of Johnny Mercer music could dispel the Spanish-moss torpor of Clint Eastwood's glacially paced flick.
WORST TO BEST
To Have and Have Not (1944). Hemingway wrote it for quick bucks. Let's hope the money was good because the book was, in director Howard Hawks's fine parlance, "a piece of junk." Which didn't stop Hawks and co-screenwriter William Faulkner (yes, that Faulkner) from renovating it into a crackling Bogart-Bacall yarn that wisely jettisons nine-tenths of the original story and turns the rest into a batting cage of innuendo.
Touch of Evil (1958). "Pulp fiction" is all too apt a term for Whit Masterson's Badge of Evil , a shoot-'em-up that's worth less than the paper it's printed on. In the hands of the mercurial Orson Welles, it blooms into a gaudy, mesmerizing look at lives on the border. Peopled by debauched cops, tranny bikers and a gypsy fortune teller who looks an awful lot like Marlene Dietrich, this is a movie we're still catching up to.
Rosemary's Baby (1968). Ira Levin is the granddaddy of literary hacks, but somebody forgot to tell director Roman Polanski, who turned this devil-spawn scenario into a rich and deeply unsettling Gotham Guignol, rooted in motherhood's most primal terrors.
The Godfather (1972). Mario Puzo used to say that, if he'd known so many people would end up reading his Mafia pasta-boiler, he'd have "written it better." He didn't, and his subsequent books ( The Last Don , anyone?) were even worse. We can be grateful at least that he provided the scaffolding for Francis Ford Coppola's magnificent portrait of a family at war.
The Bridges of Madison County (1995). Robert James Waller pens the kind of sweat-lodge prose that gives men a bad name. But director and lead actor Clint Eastwood (redeeming himself for his Berendt botch) scraped away the book's crust of Y-chromosome fantasy and discovered an affecting midlife romance, with a luminous Meryl Streep at its center.
-- Louis Bayard
