25 Best Book to Film Adaptations

I guess it depends on what we mean when we say “best book-to-film adaptation.” I’ve seen a lot of films adapted from books that I thought were good, but that deviated significantly from the source material. Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness is one — and it made the list. And I would certainly agree with the Gregory Peck version of Moby Dick. I loved that film as a kid, and the book is fantastic. And it could just be my preference, but I think The Hunt for Red October is an excellent adaption of Tom Clancy’s first book.

Comic book movies have put forth some really good adaptations, as well. The first Spiderman movie and the two most recent Batman movies have been really good adaptations of those universes. And I really liked V for Vendetta, despite its deviations from Moore and Lloyd’s original. (I know Alan Moore would…ummm…”disagree”.)

And I’ll risk the wrath of korg and revgeorge in saying that I like the LOTR films. I own the extended special editions and they are AWESOME!!!

I can’t believe he didn’t include The Godfather. That film is even better then the book it’s based upon. And Fight Club.

I hope that Jackson’s LOTR’s movies have been good for New Zealand tourism. They are gorgeous to look at, but they are not Tolkien. I’ve got the extended versions as well and with kids in the house and no cable/satellite have seen them many times, each time with growing frustration. Robert Inglis audiobooks for me, thank you. These are books that need to be heard as well as read. The HP movies are not as great cinema as Jackson’s films, but at least don’t turn JKR’s books inside out.

It may not have been great literature, but The Wizard of Oz is a better movie than book.

Ok, I may have to duck behind something as well but I do not agree with including “To Kill A Mockingbird” in the list. I read this book about 3 years ago and purposefully kept myself from seeing the film until I was done. I loved that book and the movie fell flat for me. Gregory Peck’s image as Atticus is so iconic that I knew it already and so imagined him as I read the book. But I so missed Harper Lee’s telling the tale.

With all film adaptation you lose an important part of the book…the voice of the author. You’re getting the same basic story but you don’t hear the author tell it…it’s told through another perspective. I don’t like the Narnia movies because I can’t hear Lewis telling the story. It’s a big hole…like if they would have left out Aslan himself!

I prefer the book every time and think of the films as supplementary material. I can enjoy many on that level (e.g. LOTR & HP films) .

The Godfather the movie is FAR superior to Mario Puzo’s book.

The Chosen the movie was a good adaptation of the book, although the rooms weren’t exactly as I imagined them; however I think in that case the movie was more accurate in terms of period setting than my imagination.

I will have to admit Serkis did an excellent job with Gollum. He should’ve won an Oscar for that role.

As for movies I thought better than the book, Jaws, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and Murder on the Orient Express. Plus any of the Christie books turned movies that starred Peter Ustinov.

The Christmas Carol version I prefer is the one with Albert Finney as Scrooge.

Hmmm. When we say “adaptation”, does that mean a film that was shown only in theatres, or would it also include television versions?
I loved the Anne of Green Gables version with Megan Followes, and the BBC version of Pride and Predudice which starred Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle is, in my view, the best version of Jane Austen’s story to date. North and South and Cranford were both great adaptations of Elizabeth Glaskell’s books, and the BBC version of Middlemarch (Book by George Eliot) was much better than the book, in my view. I loathed the film version of Dr. Doolittle, and while I enjoyed the first film version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which featured Gene Wilder as Willy, I’m not familiar enough with the Roald Dahl book to state that it’s a good adaptation. As for the LOTR films by Peter Jackson, I liked the first film, and there are parts of the 2nd and 3rd films that are all right, or even great, but I wouldn’t want to have to sit for hours in a theatre watching them again. Dave’s right about the DVD extras too, I think.

Oh yes Fricka – I fell head over heals for Mr. Darcy, but only after seeing Mr. Firth.

Wow! So many great movies/books. Much of these I can’t comment on because I’ve only experienced one and not the other. Kjetil, I thought of The Godfather, but I refrained from mentioning it since I’ve never read the book. But, yes, the film is essentially perfect as a film.

The same is true with Band of Brothers, Chris. The HBO miniseries is fantastic, but I’ve never read Ambrose’s book. However, I will make a pitch for Generation Kill. By no means is it the best miniseries HBO has done, but it is very competent. The book itself is very engaging and sometimes painfully funny, if disturbing. The miniseries maintains that feel. Last Spring, I taught a class in which my students read the book, watched an episode of the miniseries, and then played/analyzed some of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The point was to get them to see how different media depict and represent similar stories, and to see how the experiences were both similar and different. It was really fascinating (at least to a big nerd like me).

revgeorge, weren’t the Motion Picture Codes (gasp) censorship? How could the movies possibly be better? Film makers can now do what ever they want, we have a rating system!

Can this be why attendance a movies took a nose dive around 1968, and have never recovered?

Sorry to say, or maybe I’m not, I haven’t read most of those on the list, and haven’t even seen all the movies. Things like The Shining and Silence of the Lambs are not movies I want to see.

As much as I love the Harry Potter books, I don’t know that I would put them on a list – maybe the first two books, as the movies did follow the books more acurately.

And I’m one of those odd people who like the LOTR movies, sometimes better than the books. Reading them was a chore for me, at times. (I’ve also found that I like the audio book of FOTR much better than reading it.)

To Kill a Mockingbird was well done as a movie, I agree. The thing is, it’s a shorter book, so I don’t think there is quite as much challenge in turning the book into a movie as there is with a longer book.

Actually, and I’ve said this before, the only really good book to movie, IMO, is Gone with the Wind. The sets were so much like they were described in the book, and the cast was so perfectly chosen. Of course, one thing that makes it work so well is that they allowed themselves the time to do it when they made it four hours long with an intermission – something that film makers these days just refuse to do. I love both the GWTW book and the movie, and I don’t feel that way very often about books to movies.

Yes Dave the Longwinded, interesting about Call of Duty 4 and Generation Kill! I remember when I first got hooked on Half-Life thinking – hey – this is like The Mist by Stephen King! The writer I later found out was Marc Laidlaw who wrote Dad’s Nuke.

That must be one cool class you have there! How far out it would be if the prof. would say “For homework – go home and get through level 2!”

Deacondon, I see your point about MP codes – however, it wasn’t the codes that caused the drop in box office – it was the boob tube. Codes actually can give a film a boost in boxoffice nowdays. And surely as a parent you would want to know the specific content of the media imbibed by your little ones. You see, the film industry started to realize that sex sells after Mae West came on the scene and slowly but surely things got racier and racier – why? because it’s a business and more often than not, run by mysoginists. A line had to be drawn somewhere – but it’s drawn in the sand and moves with the times.

Well, after reading my initial post, I went back and read the actual list in this survey. BTW, thanks, revgeorge for bringing this to the Hogshead for us to discuss.
And now, on to the next phase of discussion for me.
I was stunned to see that Great Expectations was rated #1. Then I read that this film version was directed by David Lean, one of my all-time favorite directors. I suddenly was taken back to my eighth grade language arts class, where our teacher, Mrs. DeLay, had us reading Great Expectations, and she had the walls plastered with old stills from a black-and-white movie, which I now realize must have been the Lean version! Holy Haversham! Thank you, Mrs. D., for introducing us to Dickens! I’ve been a reader and fan of Dickens ever since.
I may disagree with the placement of many of the other films on this list, but it’s hard to state that that film is not a great adaptation.
And while I’m on the subject of Dickens, I’m surprised that none of the versions of A Christmas Carol that have been produced made it on the list. Arabella, I haven’t seen the George C. Scott version, but I like both the Alastair Sim and Reginald Denny versions very much.
For those of you who grew up watching “Lassie” on television, that’s the Lockhart family playing the Crachits in the Denny version, with a very young June playing one of the Crachit girls.
To Kill A Mockingbird was also an excellent adaptation of the Harper Lee Book, and was well acted. There’s a young Robert Duvall playing Boo Radley as well as Gregory Peck’s excellent portrayal of Atticus Finch. Best of all, the film used a voice over for Scout Finch’s narrative, so it retained that flavor that was in the book.
I did like the film version of Dr. Zhivago, and have to say it’s a great film, even though there was such overkill on the marketing of “Lara’s Theme” connected with it. Also, I actually read Pasternak’s book, and it was my introduction to Russian Literature. Believe me, the film was a much trimmed down version of the book, which is all to the good, as I remember the film had an intermission; it’s up there with Gone With the Wind in length as it is!
The Big Sleep is all right, but I agree with revgeorge and others that A Maltese Falcon is actually a better film. Perhaps Hammett is easier to translate to film than Chandler, I don’t know, but either film is still watchable.
As I read through the rest of the list, I noticed two things: the list is based on book to film adaptations( not including adaptations of plays, which leaves out Shakespeare (!) and musicals) and there are none of the children’s classics on this list.
In the interest of fair play, then, I’m going to list a few more cinematic adaptations that deserve more attention.
1. The Black Stallion
I was a Walter Farley fan back in elementary school, but I never would have expected a film to catch the nuance of the relationship between Alec and “the Black”. That was before Carroll Ballard came out with the beautifully done film. The casting was great, with a young Kelly Reno playing Alec, and an absolutely outstanding Arabian, Cass Ole, playing the title role. (Got to love it for that reason alone, lol!) There’s also a neat little cameo by Hoyt Axton as Alec’s dad, and Mickey Rooney as the trainer who helps turn the boy and his horse in to a racer and jockey. If memory serves me right, Teri Garr played Alec’s mother as well. Just a superb film, even better than the book!
2. Heidi
The book is still the best, although there are several first-rate adaptations of it, most famously the Shirley Temple one.
3. The Secret Garden
My favorite version is the one that has Derek Jacobi as Sarah’s uncle. It’s a great story of damaged lives that become whole again through magic, this time through the magic of a “Secret Garden”.
There’s another famous children’s book that got turned into a rather more famous film, but I’m going to discuss that under musicals. Clicking my red shoes now! (though in the book they were silver).
4. It’s almost a crime, the way that works other than novels were left off of this list. So I’m going to start with my all time favorite film musical, which in itself was based on a book by James Michener. Yes, I mean South Pacific. Nothing by Rogers and Hammerstein was ever less than first rate, and this film, set in the mileau of World War II, with its indictment of prejudice, as well as breathtaking scenery, humor, and romantic heartbreak as well as “love conquering prejudice,” all during the time of war, holds up to this day. I remember sitting all the way through this for the first time in college, and all of the coeds who were watching it together were just blown away. Oh, that Rossano Brazzi! He was my first cinematic heart-throb. The rest of the cast was great, too. They- do- not- make- them like- this any more, more’s the pity.
5. The Wizard of Oz
The film is great, what can I say? Even if I have had to listen to all the corny jokes that I get whenever people find out I grew up in Kansas. Judy Garland might have been getting a wee bit old to play Dorothy, but she played younger to the hilt, and there’s no one else who’s been able to top her singing of “Somewhere over the Rainbow”. A great supporting cast, including whichever dog played Toto. (All right, Margaret Hamilton was outstanding as the “Wicked Witch, too! that voice saying, ” I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!”–Now THAT’s an evil witch!)
3. Mary Poppins
For once, Disney got it right. Julie Andrews was “practically perfect in every way” for this role, and there was a great supporting cast including Dick Van Dyke, and all those wonderful songs. I’m going off stage now, singing ” A Spoonful of Sugar”.

I have a soft spot for The Sound of Music, but the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical films have rather too much distracting plot for my tastes. Bring on the singing and dancing please. Fred Astaire’s and (sigh) Ginger Rogers’s RKO musicals are perfect (and don’t even have distractions like color), especially Top Hat and Swing Time. Also, anything with Gene Kelly, like Singing in the Rain and American in Paris. Hollywood may have relied on Broadway for talent in those days, but made its own musicals. None of these are adaptations.

I too have a soft spot for SoM: who could not love Julie Andrews, the Austrian Alps and those outfits made of curtains? But I take exception to the presentation of the film as history: the facts bear little resemblance to what’s shown in the movie: Maria was not in love with the Baron, she was not sweet, The Baron was sweet, the whole family was into music before Maria joined them, they turned to singing in public to make ends meet during the Great Depression, there was no midnight escape – they took the train out of Salzburg.

The site Movie vs. Reality: The Real Story of the von Trapp Family By Joan Gearin has this to say about the matter:

http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2005/winter/von-trapps.html

How did the von Trapps feel about The Sound of Music? While Maria was grateful that there wasn’t any extreme revision of the story she wrote in The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, and that she herself was represented fairly accurately (although Mary Martin and Julie Andrews “were too gentle-like girls out of Bryn Mawr,” she told the Washington Post in 1978), she wasn’t pleased with the portrayal of her husband. The children’s reactions were variations on a theme: irritation about being represented as people who only sang lightweight music, the simplification of the story, and the alterations to Georg von Trapp’s personality. As Johannes von Trapp said in a 1998 New York Times interview, “it’s not what my family was about. . . . [We were] about good taste, culture, all these wonderful upper-class standards that people make fun of in movies like ‘Titanic.’ We’re about environmental sensitivity, artistic sensitivity. ‘Sound of Music’ simplifies everything. I think perhaps reality is at the same time less glamorous but more interesting than the myth.”

I realize that I have said repeatedly that I don’t expect the movie to be faithful to the books, as long as it works artistically, and yet I’m objecting to the departures from the book – reality – in this case. I think the reason is because the movie gets a lot of its impact from the assumption that it is real, that all this did happen. Take away that assumption, and you have a rather fanciful Cinderella story with Nazis and singing.

Yeah, Fellowship wasn’t too bad. At first, anyways. For me it started falling apart – or drifting away – when Arwen took on Glorfindel’s role at the ford. Actually, just about any scene with Arwen and Aragorn felt superimposed on the main narrative, even the bits which came from the Appendices. They also slowed the story down: my recollection is that all the Arwen/Aragorn scenes were shot in slow motion.

I don’t think it was as much more Jackson than Tolkien, as more Jackson’s understanding of Tolkien than how I understood Tolkien. For me, the romantic relationships were always secondary to the larger story of heroic good fighting overwhelming evil. Which is made very clear by the fact that the saga of Arwen and Aragorn is an appendix. Jackson brought the romance more to the forefront, to the point of making it a shipping tale. There were other things which bugged me about the movies – Denethor was supposed to be a portrayal of fallen nobility, not disgusting perversity, and Vigo Mortensen’s Aragorn was entirely too passive and reluctant to be a convincing King – but it was the (imho) misplaced emphasis on the Arwen/Aragorn relationship that really took the irritation to another level.

This cartoon just came out on 10/18/09. It show’s how it could be.
http://comics.com/speed_bump/?PerPage=10

Joivre, I somehow missed out on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Didn’t that have Angela Lansbury in it???) I think it must not have made it to the theatres in my hometown when it was first distributed. I’m looking for a DVD version that I can view now–hopefully either one of the local libraries here, or (if I get reeeealy desperate) I might rent it.
Red Rocker, I didn’t know that Sound of Music presented itself as actual history. I AM familiar with the story of Maria, as I had the privilege of hearing Maria Von Trapp speak at an assembly when I was an undergraduate, and I’ve read her autobiography, which includes details such as Georg’s suffering a lingering death from lung cancer. In spite of knowing some of the “real” details of the family’s story, I still find inspiration in viewing the film. Songs such as “The Hills are Alive With the Sound of Music,” and “Climb Every Mountain,” illustrate the inspired talent of Rogers and Hammerstein and leave me feeling uplifted every time.
As for the earlier adaptations that were being discussed, particularly LOTR, I think it’s impossible for one director to be able to match what is in each reader’s mind for that series. I myself was terribly disappointed that the whole Tom Bombadil episode was not included, but in thinking about it, I can understand why Jackson decided to omit that from the film. I can still visualize that part fine in my head, anyway. The thing about adaptations is, that if they are done well, they will bring people in to read the books after they see the film version. For those people who have read the books before seeing the moving picture, there’s no way that a director is going to get it 100% right. As a case in point, I had some problems with a few of the changes that Alfonso Cuaron made to the POA Harry Potter film. However, one of my students informed me that it was after seeing the film that he became interested in reading the books.

Thanks for that link, Joivre. That’s a lovely lullaby that he’s singing there, even though the scene is rather dark(light wise, not emotionally so.) I couldn’t even tell it was Dick Van Dyke at first!

Steve Morrison, I did not know this! No kidding! This is very interesting, I’ll have to investigate this. Where did you read of this?