More Not Politics and From Here To Eternity

One click in.  Thanks Slobber and Spittle.

So at any rate in my attempt to alienate the two or three people who actually read what I rite.  We picked up and watched the movie From Here to Eternity the other night.  It had been years (decades?) since I had seen it last and my wife never had.  It held up very well.  Since the novel even as it was originally released was quite a bit too explicit for the movies it was interesting to see how they did it.  No V.D. as we used to say it, nor S.T.D. as is the current acronym would have it nor any whores.  But still the writing and acting are so good that I cannot imagine another version ever being made.  The acting of the five main characters (and Fatso Judson) is close to perfect.  The writing, given the limitations of the time, is as good as one could, I think get.  Debra Kerr and Donna Reed both play against type, so that casting increases the impact of the movie for those of us who remember particularly Donna Reed as the perfect mom.

It started me thinking about other movies from books which haven't been remade because they are so good.  The Maltese Falcon, I think.  Which incidentally was the third version of the book to be put on film.  Gone With the Wind, perhaps although the book and the movie are so racist that I can't see it being remade is just for that reason alone.  But to be fair the movie is as good as it gets if you look at it as just movie making, and ignore the accepted racism of the period, although I no longer am able to do that.

I suggest the T.V. version of Dicken's A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott, but I suspect that will be remade again and again no matter how perfect one version is just because for some reason they seem to think the story can be improved on for the movies. (Looking this up on Amazon, I see there is a Jim Carey version, I'll pass, thanks.)  Although the Scott version follows the book nearly page for page.  There are constant remakes of Call of the Wild and The Great Gatsby, but those all "improve" on the book, so none of those are much good.  With the exception of the Clark Gable version which is so far removed from the book, that the movie stands on its own.  I'm told that the James Dickey version is true to the original book, but I have not seen it, and I'm sure that won't prevent it from being remade.

I'm probably showing my parochialism limiting myself to American movies of novels written in English, but there you go.  My ADHD or ADD (now called something else, I guess) kind of limited my ability to learn foreign languages (or at least that is my excuse and I'm sticking to it) and I seem unwilling to put forth the effort now.