The radio interview show From the Bookshelf recently did a great interview with actress Kim Darby, who starred in the original movie version of True Grit.
I wrote a post about the novel awhile back. Now I'm thinking of re-visiting that and doing a direct comparison with the movie. Both are great (though the novel edges out the movie just slightly in quality) and a look at the two together might be fun.
Besides,that would gives me an excuse to watch the movie again.
A great novel is almost always better than its movie adaptation. Gone with the Wind and The Godfather are two notable exceptions. When the recent remake of True Grit arrived in theaters, many said that it was closer to the book than the 1969 version. But practically every line of dialog in the original film was taken right from the novel, whereas the 2010 film had many invented scenes. The colors and tones of the two films are completely different. For me the bottom line is this: If you are going to spend the time and money and effort to create a great western film, why not tell a new story that had not already been told so expertly in Henry Hathaway’s 1969 True Grit?
ReplyDeleteI agree. In the end, Hathaway stayed closer to the original novel than did the Coen Brothers. The tricky thing about bringing True Grit to the screen is that much of the strength of the novel is in Mattie's delightful digressions during her narration and Portis' wonderful word choices and sentence structures. That's something that just wouldn't translate well into a movie.
ReplyDeleteI would include Jaws as a rare example of a movie improving on the book. Too much soap opera-style nonsense in the book.