Top 50 Film Adaptations.

[DB7]

The big 50

A month ago, we asked you to vote for the best ever film made from a novel. The results are in, and we reveal the readers' chart of the top 50 film adaptations. Our critics Peter Bradshaw and Xan Brooks cast their eyes over your favourites

Mark Lawson explains what makes an adaptation come alive

Friday June 2, 2006
The Guardian

Books on film
Top titles ... (Clockwise from top left) The Godfather, To Kill a Mockingbird, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Blade Runner


The big 20

1. To Kill a Mockingbird
Robert Mulligan (1962)
Adapted by Horton Foote from Harper Lee's 1960 novel

Lee's first (and so far only) novel was a literary sensation, scooping the Pulitzer prize and shifting 2.5m copies in its first year of publication. Clearly the screen version strikes a similar chord. This is a film we cherish in the same way we cherish It's a Wonderful Life, or The Wizard of Oz. Sensitively scripted by Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird spins a vibrant, child's-eye view of adult torments and boasts a career-best turn from Gregory Peck as the iconic Atticus Finch. Needless to say it could all have been so different. Legend has it that Peck only agreed to the role after the producers' first choice, Rock Hudson, turned it down.
Xan Brooks

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2 .One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Milos Forman (1975)
Adapted by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben from the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey

"Which one of you nuts has got any guts?" asks Jack Nicholson in his role as the swaggering Christ figure to the downtrodden inmates at an Oregon mental hospital. Where Kesey's source novel was a hippie-ish allegory on individualism and conformity, Forman's screen version adopted a more earthy, naturalistic approach. But in ditching the book's druggy flavour, Forman earned the author's lifelong enmity. Kesey disowned the movie and went to his grave without ever having seen it.
XB

3. Blade Runner
Ridley Scott (1982)
Adapted by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples from the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick

When Dick remarked that the rough cut of Blade Runner looked exactly as he hoped it would, Scott replied that he had never actually read the book (the title was changed because the studio hated it and pinched one from a book by rival author Alan Nourse). Despite that, his vision of a futuristic melting-pot Los Angeles superbly converts Dick's outlandish worldview into an exotic hybrid of film noir and science fiction. The film is now embraced as a contemporary classic.
XB

4. The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola (1972)
Adapted by Mario Puzo from his 1969 novel

Perhaps this hardly counts as an adaptation: Puzo's novel was equalled and surpassed in originality and importance by the movie version he scripted. In fact, producer Robert Evans bought the film rights to Puzo's book before Puzo had even written it, for $12,500 - to help him out with a gambling debt. The eventual epic about a Sicilian-American crime family in the 10 years after the second world war, with magnificent performances from Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and a thrilling score by Nino Rota, became part of movie history - and real life history, too, with a new generation of hoodlums using the film as a handbook on how to behave.
Peter Bradshaw

5. The Remains of the Day
James Ivory (1993)
Adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from the 1989 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's best-loved novel, a Booker prize-winner, became the best film to come out of Merchant-Ivory productions. Ishiguro's evocation of an emotionally frozen butler, who misguidedly devotes his life to a questionable employer in the prewar years, found a perfect match in Jhabvala and Ivory, who were able to open up the story, furnish it dramatically and visually, and, most importantly, amplify the thwarted romance between the butler and housekeeper: outstanding performances from Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

6. Kes
Ken Loach (1969)
Adapted by Tony Garnett from the 1968 novel A Kestrel For a Knave by Barry Hines

This classic of tough social realism established Loach in his career, although the novel has continued to have a life of its own as a school set-text. A miner's son in Barnsley, Billy Casper, attempts to train a kestrel, and finds in this pastime an ecstatic sense of fulfilment that the school system is unable to provide. The severity and power of this film have always gripped - particularly the corporal punishment scenes, which were reputedly unfaked. But there is a playful sense of humour that periodically surfaces in Loach's films, and is not a big part of the book. Hines went on to write one of television's greatest plays: Threads (1984), a horrifying vision of a nuclear war in Britain.
PB

7. Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola (1979)
Adapted by Coppola and John Milius from the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The production dragged through several years, the script was rewritten on the hoof and the star (Martin Sheen) suffered a near-fatal heart attack and was given the last rights by a passing priest. By rights, this Vietnam-era update of Conrad's Heart of Darkness should never have worked. Somehow, incredibly, it did. Leading us up-river into Cambodia, Coppola's epic jungle phantasmagoria distilled the fears of a generation, exposed an altogether modern breed of barbarism and gave fresh resonance to Kurtz's dying cry: "The horror! The horror!"
XB

8 .The Shawshank Redemption
Frank Darabont (1994)
Adapted by Darabont from the 1982 short story Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King

While purists traditionally cite The Shining as the best King screen adaptation, the public nurses a special loyalty for The Shawshank Redemption. This is a grand, old-fashioned salute to the indomitable human spirit, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as the soulful convicts who dream of a new life beyond the prison walls. Based on a novella from the Different Seasons collection, The Shawshank bloomed into a word-of-mouth hit. Having struggled at the box office, it became a video rental best-seller.
XB

9. LA Confidential
Curtis Hanson (1997)
Adapted by Hanson and Brian Helgeland from the 1990 novel by James Ellroy

Helgeland and Hanson won the adapted screenplay Oscar for their version of Ellroy's noir novel about a swamp of police corruption in 1950s LA. Their screenplay is a clever and sure-footed abridgement of the source material, omitting many minor characters and subplots, and incorporating elements from other novels in Ellroy's LA Quartet (the climactic shoot-out, for example, comes from White Jazz). The movie was to establish the careers of two future stars: Russell Crowe as the brutal cop and Kevin Spacey as the media-friendly smoothie officer, on the take from a tabloid gossip magazine. Kim Basinger got the acting Oscar, though. The movie played its part in the resurgence of interest in the nature of "celebrity" in the 1990s, and cemented Ellroy's reputation as a master of crime fiction.
PB

10. Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee (2005)
Adapted by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry from the 1997 short story by E Annie Proulx

Brokeback Mountain has to be the finest example of the art of adaptation in recent times: a miracle of sensitive and intelligent transformation. Using a short story and not a novel meant that so many things could be expanded and developed without any sense of compression. Yet Proulx's slim original seems bigger, richer and more satisfying than any bloated Cold-Mountain-style blockbuster: it covers a huge, 20-year time-frame making it an obvious choice for an expansive, emotionally involving love story. The passionate affair between the two young cowboys Jack and Ennis, superbly played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, has become a modern classic. The movie is reasonably explicit, but does not include Proulx's mention of Ennis's predilection for a certain sexual act with his wife.
PB

11. A Clockwork Orange
Stanley Kubrick (1971)
Adapted by Kubrick from the 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess

A Clockwork Orange was Kubrick's stylised take on Burgess's dystopian fable, famously yanked from circulation after it was accused of sparking copycat violence. If the film inevitably labours to match the linguistic gymnastics of the book, it is largely faithful to its malign, playful spirit. Kubrick cuts Burgess loose only at the end. Where the novel finished on a note of hope, the film bows out with a cynical cackle, installing the thuggish Alex (Malcolm McDowell) as the stooge of a corrupt and brutal establishment.
XB

12. Doctor Zhivago
David Lean (1965)
Adapted by Robert Bolt from the 1957 novel by Boris Pasternak

At almost three hours and 20 minutes, this is one of cinema's mighty and high-minded epics, for which Bolt won a best adapted screenplay Oscar. Julie Christie and Omar Sharif were the great lovers, whose romance unfolds against the background of the Russian revolution. It did rip-roaring business but had some sniffy notices in its day, mainly on account of an allegedly sentimentalised view of Pasternak's interpretation of history, and also because of Lean's fondness for vast, intricate and beautiful sets. But his movie is remarkable for effortlessly making something from the pen of a Russian Nobel Laureate into a popular entertainment for western audiences.
PB

13. The Maltese Falcon
John Huston (1941)
Adapted by Huston from the 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett

The notion that Sam Spade, the tough gumshoe, could exist independently of lisping, tightly wound Humphrey Bogart is now quite inconceivable - a tribute both to Bogart's imperishable charisma and this confident adaptation by Huston, who was directing his first movie. The Maltese Falcon is a dark and involved noir, featuring Mary Astor as the heroine, who will play off Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Bogart himself. It doesn't get harder-boiled than this, especially when Bogart snarls to Astor: "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck." Spade's surname has the unforgiving hardness of a gravedigger's shovel.
PB

14. Fight Club
David Fincher (1999)
Adapted by Jim Uhls from the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk

After being beaten up by yob campers, Palahniuk sat down, licked his wounds and bashed out a dark satire of white-collar machismo. Fincher took that blueprint and ran with it. His Fight Club is flashy and furious, a big-budget studio picture that bites the hand that feeds it, offering a crash-course in the dubious relationship between consumer culture and male identity. At times Fincher seems half in love with the world he is attacking. Perversely, that only makes the film that bit richer and more intriguing.
XB

15. The English Patient
Anthony Minghella (1996)
Adapted by Minghella from the 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje

The huge and involved novel by Ondaatje, about the mystery of a critically burned plane crash victim in the second world war, was turned by Minghella into a big, heartfelt epic that managed to retain its sense of narrative complexity, along with a surging romantic theme. Ralph Fiennes starred as the "English patient" - actually a Hungarian explorer - with Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliette Binoche. The movie became a massive talking point, but its bubble was pricked by an essay from Frederick Forsyth in the Spectator, brusquely pointing out a string of plot holes and absurdities, including the fact that a monastery was shown having double beds. ("Those naughty Cistercians!").
PB

16. Brighton Rock
John Boulting (1947)
Adapted by Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan from the 1938 novel by Greene

You can practically smell the sea and taste the vinegar in this bracing tale of switchblades and rosary beads on the south coast of England. Brighton Rock is a film where the elements gel beautifully. Greene helped write the stiletto-sharp script, Boulting's direction has a tough, tawdry glamour and Richard Attenborough is genuinely good (and bizarrely scary) as the psychopathic boy criminal, Pinkie Brown. The preposterous final scene with the stuck record was added at the insistence of the British censors.
XB

17. Trainspotting
Danny Boyle (1996)
Adapted by John Hodge from the 1993 novel by Irvine Welsh

Welsh's picaresque tale of Edinburgh junkies was a cult favourite with readers in the early 1990s. Boyle's stylish screen treatment - his follow-up to Shallow Grave, which was also scripted by Hodge, a former hospital doctor - weeded out various subplots and supporting characters, drafted in a cast of bright young things (Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller) and struck gold at the UK box office. These days it's hard not to view Trainspotting as a film of its time; the emblematic picture for the Cool Britannia era that flourished for a brief spell between the second and third Oasis albums.
XB

18. Rebecca
Alfred Hitchcock (1940)
Adapted by Philip MacDonald from the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier

This was the novel that made Du Maurier's name, a classically English mystery influenced by Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey. Wealthy and glamorous widower Max de Winter (Laurence Olivier) marries the unnamed young heroine (Joan Fontaine) and takes her back to his magnificent Cornish estate, Manderley, where she is oppressed by the creepy housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson) and the memory of the first Mrs de Winter. The themes of marital menace and sinister secrets appealed to Hitchcock, who turned his first Hollywood movie into a classic. But the Hollywood codes of the day demanded that key plot events had to be changed: what was a murder in the novel is accidental in the movie, and there is a comeuppance for Mrs Danvers that Du Maurier did not imagine. The adapter was the English-born MacDonald, a prolific and ingenious author of crime fiction who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s to write screenplays.
PB

19. Oliver Twist
David Lean (1948)
Adapted by Lean and Stanley Haynes from the 1838 novel by Charles Dickens

Dickens's tearjerker has been tackled by everyone from Carol Reed to Clive Donner to Roman Polanski. But Lean's 1948 version is still the one to beat; an operatic saga of abandonment and salvation, played out in the Victorian slums (lovingly recreated in the studio) and showcasing a cast of grotesques. At the time, opinion was split about Alec Guinness's flamboyant depiction of Fagin. His performance resulted in the film being banned in both Israel (for its perceived anti-semitism) and Egypt (for apparently making the character too sympathetic).
XB

20. Schindler's List
Steven Spielberg (1993)
Adapted by Steven Zaillian from the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally

Keneally's original novel was called Schindler's List in the United States, and the book was renamed everywhere after the movie came out with this title. The award of the Booker prize to the novel was controversial at the time, with many considering that docu-fiction should be ineligible. However, this was not a problem in the movie world, which has a well-understood tradition of fictional features being "based on a true story": the tale of Oskar Schindler, the black-marketeer and profiteer who saved more than 1,000 Jewish factory workers from the Nazi death camps. This was a thoroughly deserved triumph for Spielberg, whose seriousness and passion for the subject were unquestioned. Schindler's dark side was upstaged in the movie by a chilling performance from Ralph Fiennes as the SS officer - the role that made his name.
PB

The next 30

21. The Railway Children
dir: Lionel Jeffries (1970)
adapted from E Nesbit

22. Breakfast at Tiffany's
dir: Blake Edwards (1961)
adapted from Truman Capote

23. Dangerous Liaisons
dir: Stephen Frears (1988)
adapted from Choderlos de Laclos

24 Orlando
dir: Sally Potter (1992)
adapted from Virginia Woolf

25 Empire of the Sun
dir: Steven Spielberg (1987)
adapted from JG Ballard

26 Goodfellas
dir: Martin Scorsese (1990)
adapted from Nicholas Pileggi

27. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
dir: Ronald Neame (1969)
adapted from Muriel Spark

28. The Talented Mr Ripley
dir: Anthony Minghella (1999)
adapted from Patricia Highsmith

29. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
dir: Martin Ritt (1965)
adapted from John le Carré

30. Lord of the Flies
dir: Peter Brook (1963)
adapted from William Golding

31. Pride and Prejudice
dir: Joe Wright (2005)
adapted from Jane Austen

32. Sin City
dir: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino (2005)
adapted from Frank Miller

33. The Vanishing
dir: George Sluizer (1993)
adapted from Tim Krabbé

34. Jaws
dir: Steven Spielberg (1975)
adapted from Peter Benchley

35. Watership Down
dir: Martin Rosen (1978)
adapted from Richard Adams

36. Nineteen Eighty-Four
dir: Michael Radford (1984)
adapted from George Orwell

37. The French Lieutenant's Woman
dir: Karel Reisz (1981)
adapted from John Fowles

38. Catch-22
dir: Mike Nichols (1970)
adapted from Joseph Heller

39. Lolita
dir: Stanley Kubrick (1962)
adapted from Vladimir Nabokov

40. Tess
dir: Roman Polanski (1979)
adapted from Thomas Hardy

41. Get Shorty
dir: Barry Sonnenfeld (1995)
adapted from Elmore Leonard

42. The Jungle Book
dir: Wolfgang Reitherman (1967)
adapted from Rudyard Kipling

43. Alice
dir: Jan Svankmajer (1988)
adapted from Lewis Carroll

44. American Psycho
dir: Mary Harron (2000)
adapted from Bret Easton Ellis

45. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
dir: Tim Burton (2005)
adapted from Roald Dahl

46. Devil in a Blue Dress
dir: Carl Franklin (1995)
adapted from Walter Mosley

47. Goldfinger
dir: Guy Hamilton (1964)
adapted from Ian Fleming

48. The Day of the Triffids
dir: Steve Sekely (1962)
adapted from John Wyndham

49. The Hound of the Baskervilles
dir: Sidney Lanfield (1939)
adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle

50. The Outsiders
dir: Francis Ford Coppola (1983)
adapted from SE Hinton

[Marky B]

I'm glad to see my favourite novel at the top To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus Finch's defence speech of Tom Robinson is one of the greatest passages of literature.
Ta Ta
Marky B

[JamesM]

Day of the Triffids but no Great Expectations! I suppose David Lean had two in there already.

[djdave]

If it's an indication of how good the film adaptation is that - not having read the novel beforehand - you enjoy the movie so much you go off and read the book, then To Kill A Mockingbird is a cracker.

This happened to me, and I didn't even see the first third of the movie.

Other films that have impressed me so much that I've read the source material are 1966's A Man For All Seasons and 1971's Kidnapped.

[SimplyMoore]

I was surprised to see that Pride And Prejudice 2005 made it into the list at all. Most fans of the Jane Austen's novel consider that film a step away from the novel, a rather huge step away from it. If anything else, the BBC mini series should have made the list as one of the best screen adaptations, though the list is about movies, and the BBC version was a mini series.

[ChristineCB]

I positively hate the CUCKOO'S NEST film. I don't call that adaption any more than I'd call a hunter's killing and gutting a deer to be a "band aid". The removal of CUCKOO's central story-teller remains a bitter AND NEEDLESS crime. The adaption of Kesey's SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION is far, far superior.

[Fellwanderer]

Originally Posted by djdave If it's an indication of how good the film adaptation is that - not having read the novel beforehand - you enjoy the movie so much you go off and read the book, then To Kill A Mockingbird is a cracker. This happened to me, and I didn't even see the first third of the movie. Other films that have impressed me so much that I've read the source material are 1966's A Man For All Seasons and 1971's Kidnapped.

To change tack slightly. I enjoyed all 3 film versions of The 39 Steps but when I read the book I ... well, least said. If I'd read the book first, I probably would have given the film a wide berth.

[WiseFilms]

First of all, great movies have been made of bad novels, for sure -from 'The Birth of a Nation' -to- 'Belle du Jour' -to- 'The Bridges of Madison County'...
and yet, how often have you read an excellent book, and a movie adaptation has been the equal or superior ? I can count them on both hands personally (no toes needed): *1. 'The Makioka Sisters' (Kon Ichikawai) *2.'Portrait of a Lady' (Jane Campion) *3.'Adventures of Robinson Crusoe' (Luis Bunuel) *4.'Barren Lives' (Nelson P. Dos Santos) *5.'Oliver Twist' (David Lean) *6.'Diary of a Country Priest' (R. Bresson) *7.'Cold Heaven' (Nicolas Roeg) *8.'East of Eden' (Elia Kazan).....
I should read more perhaps, to know if 'Peter Ibbetson', or 'Night of the Demon' live up to their fine movie versions of the stories.
My picks for the worst adaptations of great novels (of which their are plenty to choose from), would have to be headed by a few wretched, insufferable botches of the '90's: 'The Age of Innocence', 'Moll Flanders', and 'Les Miserables' (the Billie August version, not the wonderful Claude Lelouch one from two years previous)
Then of course, there's the other interesting alternative of so-so books turned into very nice movies: for instance, Godard's 'Contempt (aka- Les Mepris)', which JLG asserted himself was the best way to adapt from literature, from "train novel"/light reading. There are so many of the cinematic triumph's of these, the mind boggles , indeed. I'll leave it to others to fill the gaps.

[Pip]

Day of the Triffids (1962) in the Top 50 Film Adaptations? I cannot believe that those who voted for this film have ever read the book! The BBC did a far better job with their 6 part mini-series.

Now if we were to vote for the Top 50 Worst Film Adaptations, I'd put Day of the Triffids (1962) at No1, Top of the Flops. Now, where's my weedkiller??

Pip

[MikeA]

Originally Posted by Fellwanderer To change tack slightly. I enjoyed all 3 film versions of The 39 Steps but when I read the book I ... well, least said. If I'd read the book first, I probably would have given the film a wide berth.

Absolutely agree Fell - like you I've enjoyed all three versions of The 39 Steps, possibly because they're all very different and the second and third versions don't appear to be trying to compete with what's gone before. And also like you I read the novel very much later and was disappointed. Like you say, I'd have been unlikely to watch the film on the strength of the book.

But as WiseFilms says, there really aren't that many great films made from great literature. Many of the best films come from very average (or worse) novels.