The best novels that have great screen or TV adaptations

My passion is reading novels. Generally speaking I like to read the novel before I see the screen or TV adaptation. This is partly because I do not want to know the plot, especially the ending before I read the book and partly because I want to see how it was adapted to the other medium.

But, over the years there have been several instances when it was the dramatic representation that led me to read a book I never read before. The first time this happened I was a teenager. I saw the 1940 John Ford movie version of The Grapes Of Wrath with Henry Fonda, in perhaps his greatest role, as Tom Joad. I was so affected I had to get the book and read it immediately.

Written during the Great Depression, the book was very influential when first published in 1939, but even two decades later, when I first read it, Steinbeck's vision of depression era rural America and the injustices perpetrated against the "Okies" remained a towering achievement. The depression is now distant history, over eighty years ago.

What I love about the book is that it gives us a close-up look at Depression-era America, perhaps telling the story better than the history books. 

I'm not sure the 1957 movie version of Hemingway's 1926 first novel, with terrific performances by Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, and Errol Flynn, is a great movie, but when I first saw it on my old black and white TV in the early sixties, I was so deeply affected. I had to immediately read the book.

Hemingway, was, of course, himself an expatriate American in Paris in the 1920s. What I love about the book is Hemingway's ability to capture the atmosphere of the time and place, as his Lost Generation characters booze, fight, love, and perhaps try to come to terms with the life they have created for themselves. Then there is that impossible love story between war-injured Jake and Brett!

I first saw the 1979 mini-series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, with Alec Guinness' definitive portrayal of George Smiley when it first aired on PBS. I was hooked, but I didn't immediately read the book.

Being somewhat obsessive, when I learned the George Smiley character appears in several other Le Carre books, I had to read them in chronological order, starting with Call for the Dead. Good as the others were, especially Smiley's People, this book is Le Carre's masterpiece.

Le Carre often said that he created George Smiley as a reaction to the very unrealistic portrayal of spies in Ian Fleming's James Bond books. Smiley is the polar opposite of Bond. He is elderly, mild-mannered, and sometimes seemingly befuddled, but underneath, he is clever, cunning, and the perfect choice to weed out the mole in MI 6.

I love the Smiley character and the intricately and brilliantly plotted story, keeping you at the edge of your seat throughout, with an array of colorful characters.

I watched the first episode of the sublime mini-series Brideshead Revisited when it first aired on PBS in 1981 and was immediately taken with the story of the middle-class Charles Ryder being drawn into the world of the aristocratic Sebastian Flyte.

Indeed, so much so that the very next day, I bought the book so I could read and finish it before the next episode. I loved the plot and characters and completely missed the Catholic theme running through it the first time I read it. To me it is a love story, first between Charles and Sebastian, then Charles and Sebastian's sister Julia.

I think it is one of the finest novels written in the twentieth century and should be read. But, strangely, you almost don't have to read it. What distinguishes the 1981 mini-series from all other adaptations of novels is its completeness. The book is a normal-sized novel of 432 pages. The television adaptation is approximately 11 hours long. So the Brideshead series isn't so much of an adaptation as an almost literal dramatization of the entire novel.

Still, read the book first, then watch the mini-series and see how perfectly they adapted the book.

What do you do as a follow-up to your first movie when that movie is immediately recognized as one of the greatest films ever made? Orson Welles chose to adapt Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons. Unfortunately, the film was re-edited by the studio (cutting out at least 30 minutes), with a tacked-on ending Welles didn't even film himself, and it remains the only version we have. So we will never know if Welles' original two-hour version would be classed with Citizen Kane.

But even shredded, The Magnificent Ambersons is a stunning movie. Booth Tarkington was one of the most popular and acclaimed novelists of the first half of the twentieth century; Ambersons even won the Pulitzer Prize, the first of two for Tarkington, but by the time I went to High School and College in the sixties, Tarkington was almost a non-entity in American Literature. We were assigned his contemporary, Sinclair Lewis, who covered similar territory.

In this case, I didn't immediately read the book after seeing the film. I just happened to pick it up decades later and remembering the film, decided to read it. Among the reasons I love it is because it contains some of the best writing I've ever read. As an example, the first chapter is a written tour de force description of late nineteenth-century small town middle America. I then understood why Welles chose it as his Citizen Kane follow-up.