When possible, I like to watch a film rendition after
completing a classic, and I include a brief comment at the end of my book
review. However, I’ve fallen behind a bit, and just recently got to film
adaptations of four of my books from last year – three of which were of major
tomes.
Atlas Shrugged: Three
film serial production: Atlas Shrugged
Part I (2011), Atlas Shrugged Part II (2012), and Atlas Shrugged: Who is John
Galt (2014). Three films was probably a good idea, but entirely recasting each
successive film was not. No exaggeration – 100% recast each film. There were a few other minor problems, but it
was pretty faithful. I don’t recommend it though. If you are a fan of Atlas
Shrugged the novel, you should probably skip the films. If you are not a fan of
the book, you should definitely skip the films.
War and Peace: 1956 starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda.
I was pretty skeptical that a single film could do this justice, but this was a
pretty decent adaptation and the 3 ½ hour length helped. It was a little light
on War, both in how much of the film portrayed the war, as well as how it
portrayed war. The war scenes should have been epic – cast of thousands – but
it looked like they tried to cut costs with a cast of hundreds. But I’ll
forgive it. It isn’t the most compelling part of the story, and the rest of the
film adaptation was pretty faithful. It cut some parts down considerably, but
the man themes – the lives of Pierre (Fonda) and Natasha (Hepburn) were pretty
complete.
Great Expectations: 2012 starring Jeremy Irvine as Pip and
Holliday Grainger as Estella is faithful to the book, well cast, well
portrayed. I’m usually not a fan of film adaptations of Dickens, but this was
quite good. Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch was especially good.
Tom Jones – I watched two versions: 1997 A&E / BBC 5 hour
television mini-series was pretty good, but I expected to prefer the 1962 film
with Albert Finney as Tom and Susannah York as Sophie. It won the Academy Award for best picture
after all and four other Oscars, and five more nominations including Best Actor
for Finney. I am apparently no film critic, but I thought it was rather awful.
As usual in my experience, BBC does a better job with Fielding, Austen,
Dickens.
Have you seen any of these films? Can you recommend a better version?
.
I remember Tom Jones with Albert Finney and Susannah York very fondly. I saw it a couple of times in my youth and rewatched it about 10 years ago, and still enjoyed it. I remember when I was in college in the 1970s, I had a history professor who did a showing of the film (this was before VHS, DVD, streaming, etc) because he felt it was an accurate depiction of 18th century rural English gentry. It is campy but I always thought the tongue-in-cheek approach worked for the story. I haven't seen the 5 part mini-series, and probably won't until I finally get around to rereading the book itself.
ReplyDeleteCampy is a good way of putting it, and probably what I didn't like. I don't know, maybe I would have liked it better if I had not first watched the BBC version.
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