Books and Movies One

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Movie! Book, Book. Movie!

Picture the scene:

The end of a thriller! The killer jumps on a merry-go-round at a fun fair with a group of kids still riding. He has a gun. The hero jumps on after. A shot rings out! The operator of the merry-go-round, in the centre of the machine, is hit. He slumps unconscious at his post. The merry-go-round speeds up, out of control! Terrified children, the hero struggling against the increasing velocity to reach the villain! The panicked onlookers realizing the only way to stop the machine is for someone to crawl under the madly spinning mechanism to reach the controls at its centre!

Whew!

The end of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 black and white classic, Strangers on a Train, starring Farley Granger, Robert Walker, and Ruth Roman, right?

No. Actually I was talking about the climactic scene of Edmund Crispin’s 1946 novel, The Moving Toyshop. With Crispin’s Oxford don amateur investigator, Gervase Fen, climbing onto the merry-go-round to take down the villain, while his poet companion and an obliging fellow from the carnival crawl under the wildly spinning joy ride to regain control of the machine.

Screenplay credits for Hitchcock’s movie go to Whitfield Cook, Czenzi Ormonde, and Raymond Chandler (no less!), while Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the novel Strangers on a Train in 1950, at least gets credit for coming up with the original premise the film is based on. No mention of poor old Crispin, however. Despite the fact that the sequence based almost exactly on his couple of paragraphs is possibly the most memorable in the movie.

So here we go again with another variation on that old argument, books and movies, movies and books, if you read the book first you’ll probably like it better than the movie, but if you see the movie first you’ll like that better, I never read books movies are based on, I would never go to a movie based on a favourite book, etc., etc., etcetera …

When you think about it, the issue is rather senseless. A book is a book, and a movie is a movie, they are entirely different art forms. Different methods entirely of presenting their theme, even if they’re sharing the same base material. The only thing they may have in common is the story. Other than that, the development of either property had better be true to its own form, or you’re not going to have anything worth reading or worth watching. They might share the same title, but the two are going to be different, for pity’s sake.

The Moving Toyshop is a wild, Monty Pythonesque romp of a novel, satirizing the mystery format more than exploiting it. But then right at the end, Crispin has a wild inspiration and gives us this tremendous scene of an out of control merry-go-round. Four years later, Patricia Highsmith publishes Strangers, her first novel, but unlike Hitchcock, doesn’t see any reason to include Crispin’s dramatic carnival scene. Her book’s ending is completely different from the movie or Crispin’s tale. Then Hitchcock comes along the next year, and although giving Highsmith credit for the title and premise of two strangers literally meeting on a train to concoct a scheme to kill each other’s wife and father, he completely abandons Highsmith’s novel about a third of the way into the movie to tell his own story. Raymond Chandler or not, we know Alfred’s really the man behind things in his movies. And he somehow ends up at Crispin’s carnival, for his denouement.

So the three properties are linked, but none of them tell the same story at all.

Highsmith’s novel is much darker than Hitchcock’s movie, with both “strangers” ultimately carrying out their assigned murders, forming a psychological link which bonds them in an unhealthy pact for mutual survival. The two men stare into mirrors wondering if there is in fact only one murderer … The main difference between the two protagonists nominally identifying a “hero” and a “villain” being one man has a conscience and feels guilt, and the other doesn’t. Both men are killers.

Hitchcock wasn’t about to give the public a thriller without a hero in the 1950s. I’m not certain he would have been allowed to. So the architect in Highsmith’s novel becomes a handsome young tennis player, doing everything he can to halt the other man’s madness after he does commit the first murder. There is no second murder.

You have to admire the choice of tennis player for better film effect as well. There’s a long scene where the hero desperately needs to get somewhere, but can’t until he wins an important match. The tennis battles on, while the tension mounts. Watching an architect rushing to finish the plans for a building just wouldn’t have the same effect.

So can we evaluate the three pieces against other, really? Despite their indissoluble links? They are all telling parts of the same story … So whose story is it, really?

The fact is Highsmith’s novel and Hitchcock’s movie are both great, rewarding as aesthetic experiences in almost every way. But they are certainly not the same. Crispin’s novel is a bit too silly to be anything other than all right. But the finale on the merry-go-round is a killer! Rightly lifted by Hitchcock for a wonderful film event. Even though starting off as a page or two in a novel!

So sometime the effect between the two media can work equally well in both forms.

Which leads me to another assumption.

Hitchcock made a wonderful movie out of Strangers on a Train, one of my favourites by him no doubt. But he doesn’t really tell the story in Highsmith’s novel, which I also really, really like … But Hitchcock proves with the scene he lifted from Crispin you can take a scene directly from a book and make it work just as well in a movie, despite the different delivery.

So what if Ingmar Bergman had made his version of Highsmith’s novel? Sticking more specifically to her style and plot. Now that would have been a great movie. Different from Hitchcock’s movie, Highsmith’s novel (in a filmic sense), and not likely incorporating any references to The Moving Toyshop. But showing once again the variety of experience you can create even within the same medium, putting a different twist again on a fundamental concept rich enough to support expression any number of ways to different capable effect.

So don’t compare the book to the movie or the movie to the book. Either one might just be the jumping off point. Just complain if whatever it is isn’t doing its job as a good piece of art in the first place.

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REALITY FICTION UPDATE!

And what is Reality Fiction, you may well ask?

Simple. The concept of the Reality Television Series translated to the printed page. 40 characters from my backlog of generally unpublished material are gathered together to compete in a different theme each Episode, with one or two characters being eliminated each sequence until there are only two left to fight it out in the final. The winner gets a short novel of their own as the grand prize.

But somehow, things always seem to go horribly wrong ...

What’s happening now? 

The Wedding has ended, but the Fairy Tale’s just begun! Episode Twenty-Two, to be precise. Trust me. The honeymoon’s definitely over.

Continuing Friday at:  realficone.blogspot.ca

REALITY FICTION TOO! EPISODES TO DATE

EPISODE TWENTY-ONE:     THE WEDDING

Dearly, Beloved

EPISODE TWENTY:     EXISTENTIALISM

Face the Hangman

EPISODE NINETEEN:     ABDUCTION

Abduction/Apperception

EPISODE EIGHTEEN:     MELODRAMA

“Terror in Tarnation! A Thrilling Narrative in Three Acts”

EPISODE SEVENTEEN:     POETRY

“landescapes”

EPISODE SIXTEEN:     SILLY EUROPEAN SPY SPOOF (DUBBED)

“Diet Ray of the Stars!”

EPISODE FIFTEEN:     EROTIC SUPERNATURAL ROMANCE     

“The Shadow of Her Passion”

EPISODE FOURTEEN:     FLYING:

“Sky Calling”

EPISODE THIRTEEN:     SLAPSTICK:

“The Phantom of the Werewolf”

EPISODE TWELVE:     DAIRY FARMING:

“Early One Morning”

EPISODE ELEVEN:     BURROUGHS:

“Chapter Nine”

EPISODE TEN:     WEREWOLVES:

“The Silver Solution”

EPISODE NINE:     WRESTLING:

“Suckerslam XIV”

EPISODE EIGHT:     JANE AUSTEN ROMANCE:

“The Proud and the Senseless”

EPISODE SEVEN:     THE JAZZ AGE:

“The Bucky-Dusky-Ruby Red Hop!”

EPISODE SIX:     SUBMISSION:

“Re-Org”

EPISODE FIVE:     MASQUERADE:

“The Eyes Behind the Mask”

EPISODE FOUR:     SELF HELP:

“Sausage Stew for the Slightly Overweight Presents:

Some Several Suggestions Guaranteeing Success for the Mildly Neurotic”

EPISODE THREE:     NUDIST:

“If You Have To Ask ...”

EPISODE TWO:     FRENCH BEDROOM FARCE:

“Un Nuit a Fifi’s!”

EPISODE ONE:     STEAMPUNK:

“The Chase of the Purple Squid!”

A J.H.B. Original!