I know, I know. The movie adaptation of a novel is never as good as the book. It lacks the beauty and the idiosyncrasies of the author’s language. It deprives us of the characters’ inner thoughts. It necessarily omits many elements that give the book its charm simply because those elements do not translate well to the screen.

In fact, the availability of a film or TV version just gives a lazy reader yet another excuse not to read. Given the choice, what would most people rather do: spend ten hours, two weeks, or six months plowing through the written version of a story? Or relax on the couch and get the story in two hours? People are reading less and less as it is. As every book is automatically turned into a movie or a streaming TV series, the world is spiraling downward into a post-literate era of short attention spans, shallow thinking, and screen-induced catatonia.

All are fair points, with which I mostly agree. But sometimes the screen adaptation really is better than the book.

I will attempt to defend this heretical view with a few examples.

Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (1826)

This 2nd book of Cooper’s Leatherstocking series is the most well-known of Cooper’s novels. It’s a historical drama set in 1757, during the French and Indian War, and takes place in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

Mark Twain famously harbored disdain for Cooper as a poor prose stylist, and he wasn’t wrong. Cooper practices the verbosity and purple prose for which many 19th century authors are so famous. If, like me, you find his writing cumbersome rather than charming, you may prefer one of the film adaptations. The 1936 version (which I haven’t seen) was directed by George B. Seitz and starred famed Western movie leading man Randolph Scott.

The 1992 version, directed by Michael Mann and featuring Daniel Day-Lewis in the starring role, is beautifully filmed, with many convincing performances, and lots of action—appropriate for a story set in the midst of a war. Best of all, the movie dispenses with the hero’s given name, Natty Bumppo, the unfortunate moniker given to him by Cooper, and refers to him throughout by his way cooler nickname, Hawk-eye.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)

Like most of Dickens’ work, this novel was published in serial form: 20 installments from March 1852 through September 1853. It is my favorite Charles Dickens story…but I was unable to finish the book.

Why? Ironically, it’s because of the things that made Dickens so popular in his day, namely his acuity of observation, his depth of analysis and his incisive language.

Dickens was an expert at social critique and satire. In his fiction, he “has a go” at everything from politics, criminal justice, high society, urban sanitation, the plight of the poor, and, in the case of Bleak House, the byzantine legal system in which the primary beneficiaries are not the actual human beings involved, but the law firms and the courts themselves. Indeed, so scathing was Dickens’s lampooning of the laws regarding wills and estates that it led to actual reform of the English judicial system.

But I found it increasingly difficult to plow through his many digressions into the minutiae of local politics and his long authorial commentary on numerous topics unrelated to the plot and characters of the story. I do not doubt that his contemporary readers delighted in these probably hilarious asides that skewered local magistrates and officials, but to me, a 21st century reader, this “unruly superfluity of material” was meaningless, distracting, and ultimately, defeating. I put the book down…

…and returned to the screen adaptation that was my first experience of the story, the 2005 15-episode series starring Anna Maxwell Martin, Gillian Anderson, Denis Lawson, and Carey Mulligan, and featuring Charles Dance, John Lynch, and Alun Armstrong.

Lest you think I’m a total philistine, I have been able to complete other books by Dickens. For example, his novella A Christmas Carol (1843) is delightful. Even though—like me—you’ve probably seen every screen adaptation of this most well-known of his stories, it’s well worth reading. I also enjoyed Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and Martin Chuzzlewit. These are great stories, but admittedly not easy, and I understand why many people do not enjoy reading his books.

Nevertheless, Dickens is such a great storyteller, such an expert weaver of plots, such a masterful creator of memorable characters, that you must experience his stories somehow. And for that, we are blessed to have many excellent screen adaptations of his best novels. Like the 2005 version of Bleak House, they strip away the hard-to-chew gristle of his thoughts on current events and give us the delicious meat of his stories.

Jaws by Peter Benchley (1974)

Speaking of delicious meat…

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, in the BBC series Shetland, asserts, “Jaws is the perfect movie.”

He is right about this. It is the perfect movie. It is a story of “man versus nature,” but more than that: it takes a man who is afraid of the ocean and throws him into that very ocean to confront the thing that is the source of his fear: an archetypal beast from the deep. Furthermore, there is an homage to Melville’s Moby Dick in the form of a character who succumbs to obsession and whose target for vengeance is a “great white” creature of immense size and ferocity.

The art of drama (whether on stage or on screen) is to strip a story down to its essentials, yet still reward the audience with a deeply primal and fully human experience, layered with meaning. Watching Jaws is such an experience. Don’t misunderstand: the source material is a great book, truly. Benchley is a good writer.

But…

…his novel contains some distasteful and unnecessary stuff, including an extramarital affair between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper, and a subplot about the mayor’s predicament with the Mafia. The movie’s producers, Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, wisely insisted on omitting these distracting elements from the movie. Indeed, improving the rapport between Martin Brody and his family does much to increase audience sympathy with him, much more than the book does.

The filmmakers also improved the ending by leaps. In the book, Quint is not eaten by the shark but entangled in nautical ropes and dragged to his death by the creature. In moments, the fishing boat sinks, and Brody is alone in the water with the shark. The shark, bleeding from numerous harpoon wounds, comes for the helpless Brody:

“The fish came closer. It was only a few feet away, and Brody could see the conical snout. He screamed…and closed his eyes, waiting for an agony he could not imagine.
Nothing happened. He opened his eyes. The fish was nearly touching him, only a foot or two away, but it had stopped. And then, as Brody watched, the steel-gray body began to recede downward into the gloom. It seemed to fall away, an apparition evanescing into darkness.”

I think I prefer the ending of the movie:

“Smile, you son-of-a—”

KABOOM!!!!

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1990)

Michael Crichton’s 1990 biomedical thriller was based on an intriguing and plausible premise: that scientists could harvest dinosaur DNA from the innards of pre-historic mosquitoes trapped in amber for eons, and then use the DNA to create dinosaur clones. What’s even better is that the practical application of this technology is to create a kind of safari park where visitors can see their favorite dinosaurs brought to life in a natural habitat. Naturally, things go badly wrong and mayhem ensues.

And this is where the book lost me: as the carnivorous dinosaurs wreaked bloody havoc on the island, the book devolved into one gruesome Velociraptor attack after another, and it just wasn’t interesting.

Yes, yes, I understand that the 1993 movie also devolved into one gruesome Velociraptor attack after another, but, let’s be honest: sometimes action and violence are best portrayed on film, not wordily and repeatedly described in prose.

Also, the epic scale of the dinosaurs against stunning plains and mountains is beautifully depicted in the films. As a reader, I don’t often linger over mere descriptive passages, especially of landscapes and other physical surroundings. But film is obviously the master of description, in the language of panning vistas and sweeping crane shots.

I still enjoyed the book, but if given the chance I think I’d rather watch the movie again than read the book again.I still enjoyed the book, but if given the chance I think I’d rather watch the movie again than read the book again.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

I just finished my first ever read-through of this book, and I really enjoyed it, but…

…that might be because I’m listening to it on CD (remember those??). On my long commutes, I am able to zone out during the author’s frequent long asides: encyclopedic dissertations on cetacean biology, critiques of various paintings of whales, chowder recipes.

Someone once told me that Moby-Dick is unreadable. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s not easy. Just as you’re growing accustomed to Melville’s prose style—laughing at his jokes, even—you reach an inexplicable head-scratcher, like Chapter 40: “Midnight, Forecastle.” It’s in the form of a play, and begins with the harpooneers and sailors singing “Farewell and adieu to you, fare Spanish ladies,” then devolves into a series of sailors from all over the word saying things that make no sense, such as this from the China Sailor: “Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.”

I imagine an abridged version of the book would omit this scene.

In fact, if you omitted all the passages and chapters of this kind—the history lessons, the larder and cellar inventories of the entire Dutch whaling fleet, the odd sleeping arrangements of men in port city inns, a chapter-length explication of the color white—this book’s 135 chapters might very possibly be reduced by half. The crew of the Pequod might get to do some actual whaling before chapter 47.

Still, great passages and eminently quotable lines abound.

For example, in Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” Melville shines as an uncommonly good storyteller and creator of iconic characters. This scene is foundational to the story. It appears in both of the film adaptations I’ve seen, because it shows Ahab in all his obsessed, vengeful insanity, uttering some of the best lines in American literature:

“…I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it now? I think ye do look brave.”

Numerous chapters about the mechanisms of whaling and the details of life aboard a whaling ship are interesting chronicles of a thankfully long-dead industry and way of life. And the scenes of actual whaling—“Thar she blows!!” “Lower away!!”—are really exciting.

Ultimately, I’m not sure whether to recommend the movie over the novel. Try the book and see if you can slog your way through it just to enjoy some of the gems of Melville’s text. Try it on audio during a long road trip or get a well-annotated critical edition (I’ve enjoyed the Ignatius Critical Edition) that will explain some of the jargon and allusions. If not, either of the two film adaptations I list below will give you the story and some of the best dialogue.

In any case, everyone should experience Moby-Dick, if for no other reason than to be armed with the knowledge required to understand allusions to it in the culture, in everything from cartoons to TV shows to movies. For example, one of the best film portrayals of an Ahab-like character I’ve ever seen—including dialogue ripped from the pages of Moby-Dick—is Ricardo Montalban as Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

“To the last, I grapple with thee. From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee…”

Screen versions:

Moby Dick: 1956 motion picture. Directed by John Huston, starring Gregory Peck as Ahab. A classic! The filmmakers shot footage of actual whaling for inclusion in the film.

Moby Dick: 2011 two-part TV miniseries. Directed by Mike Barker. Excellent performances by William Hurt as Ahab and Ethan Hawke as Starbuck. Billy Boyd (best known as Pippin in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings) appears as the crazy prophet who calls himself “Elijah,” and in this version his scene makes more sense than the one in Melville’s book.

Honorable Mention

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

I appreciated the laugh-out-loud satire of Heller’s modern classic, but I was so confused by the book’s non-linear structure that I didn’t finish it. And I lost patience with the movie adaptation starring Alan Arkin. I’m still waiting to view the George Clooney miniseries.

Notes:

Mark Twain’s scathing essays about Cooper’s bad prose:

“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (July 1895, The North American Review, volume 161 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25103547?seq=8)

“Fenimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses” (September 1946, The New England Quarterly, volume XIX)

The phrase “unruly superfluity of material” is a quote from literary critic Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots, 1983, page 8 and Paul Atkinson’s The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality, 1990, page 48. https://archive.org/details/ethnographicimag0000atki/page/48/mode/2up

Gillian Anderson is best known for her starring role as Agent Dana Scully in the television series The X-Files. Denis Lawson is a renowned British actor with many amazing roles, but I didn’t realize until just recently that he plays Wedge Antilles in the Star Wars movies!

The BBC series Shetland is based upon the novels of Ann Cleeves.

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When is the movie actually better than the book?