Best Book-to-Movie Adaptation

[whitehall]

GWTW, Kill a Mockingbird.

 

[tonystewart1]

to kill a mockingbird

gregory peck is atticus finch

amen brother

 

[RadiomanATL]

Godfather I and II. The book was really both of those films, but it was so layered they had to make two movies to cover it.

I have no reason to post in this thread except to say ^^THIS!!

Yeah, and it also explains why the third one stank. It wasn't based on the book.

 

[QUENTIN]

Definitely The Godfather, which is maybe the biggest improvement on the source material. A good, but fairly pulpy and sensational, book turned into one (two actually) of the greatest movies of all-time.

Among the rest of the very best:
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Bridge on The River Kwai (1957)
Children of Men (2006)
The Conformist (1970)
Dr. Strangelove (1964) keeps the plot but changes tone to turn a thriller into one of the funniest movies ever
Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Gomorrah (2008)
GoodFellas (1990)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
High Fidelity (2000)
Hud (1963)
Jackie Brown (1997)
JFK (1991)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
The Leopard (1963)
Malcolm X (1992)
Miller's Crossing (1990)
Raging Bull (1980)
Sansho The Bailiff (1954)
The Searchers (1956)
Sunrise (1927)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Vertigo (1958)
War and Peace (1968)

Also fantastic:
Being There (1979)
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
Dead Man Walking (1995)
Double Indemnity (1944)
The Exorcist (1973)
Fat City (1972)
His Girl Friday (1940)
The Hustler (1960)
In The Bedroom (2001)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Night of The Hunter (1955)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Nosferatu (1922)
Out of The Past (1947)
Paths of Glory (1957)
Rashomon (1950)
Rear Window (1954)
Revolutionary Road (2008)
The Right Stuff (1983)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Solaris (1972)
Strangers on A Train (1951)
Wages of Fear (1953)
Up in The Air (2009)

Special mention for Adaptation (2002) which may be the most original and inventive adaptation ever, turning the screenwriter's process of adapting the book into a movie into the plot of the movie, adding a fake twin brother and lots of absurdity and laughs.

Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, John Ford, and the Coen Brothers have proven to be masters of adapting novels to screen and I think Larry McMurtry is the novelist whose work makes the for the best movie adaptations.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Lord of the Rings
Blade Runner

Only "The Fellowship of the Ring" was true to the book. All it did is omit Tom Bombidil and that whole forest. The second one had Elves arriving at Helms Deep and Aragon leaving his broken sword at Rivendale. The third one had Frodo and Samwise taken to the ruined city, that never happened. Further it totally changed the sequence of events for the dead army. Aragon never raised an army rather they had the dead army arrive at Gondor. Ohh and they left out the escape of Sauramon and his involvement in the Shire.

 

[QUENTIN]

Lord of the Rings
Blade Runner

Only "The Fellowship of the Ring" was true to the book. All it did is omit Tom Bombidil and that whole forest. The second one had Elves arriving at Helms Deep and Aragon leaving his broken sword at Rivendale. The third one had Frodo and Samwise taken to the ruined city, that never happened. Further it totally changed the sequence of events for the dead army. Aragon never raised an army rather they had the dead army arrive at Gondor. Ohh and they left out the escape of Sauramon and his involvement in the Shire.

"Best" doesn't necessarily mean "most faithful." Different medium with different requirements and a lot more constraints on focus and time. I thought the movies could have used even more trimming and condensing, especially with the 45 endings on the last one.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Lord of the Rings
Blade Runner

Only "The Fellowship of the Ring" was true to the book. All it did is omit Tom Bombidil and that whole forest. The second one had Elves arriving at Helms Deep and Aragon leaving his broken sword at Rivendale. The third one had Frodo and Samwise taken to the ruined city, that never happened. Further it totally changed the sequence of events for the dead army. Aragon never raised an army rather they had the dead army arrive at Gondor. Ohh and they left out the escape of Sauramon and his involvement in the Shire.

"Best" doesn't necessarily mean "most faithful." Different medium with different requirements and a lot more constraints on focus and time.

Absolutely disagree. When major elements of the story line are CHANGED it can not be considered best adaptation of a book. Leaving parts out is acceptable so long as the story line is left intact.

 

[Midnight Marauder]

Lord of the Rings
Blade Runner

Blade Runner was a TERRIBLE adaptation of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Phillip K. Dick.

You kidding?

 

[QUENTIN]

Only "The Fellowship of the Ring" was true to the book. All it did is omit Tom Bombidil and that whole forest. The second one had Elves arriving at Helms Deep and Aragon leaving his broken sword at Rivendale. The third one had Frodo and Samwise taken to the ruined city, that never happened. Further it totally changed the sequence of events for the dead army. Aragon never raised an army rather they had the dead army arrive at Gondor. Ohh and they left out the escape of Sauramon and his involvement in the Shire.

"Best" doesn't necessarily mean "most faithful." Different medium with different requirements and a lot more constraints on focus and time.

Absolutely disagree. When major elements of the story line are CHANGED it can not be considered best adaptation of a book. Leaving parts out is acceptable so long as the story line is left intact.

I guess it depends on what you're judging. I look at "best book-to-movie adaptation" as best movie(s) adapted from book(s) not "most faithful adaptation." I think it's ultimately more important that a movie be good than that it strictly or closely adhere to the source material.

Apocalypse Now for instance is based on a book about an Englishman in Africa going after an ivory trader, but in transposing it to Vietnam and inventing most of the scenes I think a much better and more relevant movie resulted. The Birds is about one English family attacked by birds and Hitchcock opened it up, changed all the characters, and just took the premise to depict a world overrun and tap into universal fears. Children of Men and Minority Report also more or less only take their novels premises and invent most of the story and characters and are much better -more focused, more entertaining, more involving and effective - than their book sources. Most movies make fairly significant changes (they usually have to) and when a movie strays from the source and winds up worse for it, then it should be criticized on that basis, but if it's as good or better I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it. There's a liberty and license that comes with adaptation (which is "the process of making changes" or "recasting in a new form") otherwise you'd just have people read the original and leave it at that.

I don't know what the OP's intent was, but "most faithful adaptations" seems a different question to me than "best adaptations."

 

[midcan5]

'Focus,' I actually think the movie conveyed the idea better than the novel. And 'Being There,' in this case the book may be better, but Peter Sellers is excellent as the gardener who would be president. The premise is brilliant given American politics today.

 

[editec]

I don't know if its the "best" but one of the adaptions that was TRUER to the text than most was Stephen King's adaption of The Stand.

He also redid an adaption of the Shining, which was much truer to his text than the more famousadaption of the Shining starring Jack Nicholson.

 

[Sunni Man]

"A Beautiful Mind"

 

[RetiredGySgt]

"A Beautiful Mind"

YouTube - ‪A Beautiful Mind - Nobel Prize Speech - Ending Scene‬‏

It left out tons of damning information.