1954: The Country Girl

Screenplay by George Seaton
Adapted from the play The Country Girl by Clifford Odets

Frank Elgin, an aging, washed-up, alcoholic actor is offered the lead in a new play. The director, Bernie Dodd, who is also a fan, is determined to help Frank make a major comeback. Frank's long-suffering wife, Georgie, also desperately wants to help her husband, but Frank turns Bernie against her in order to avoid taking responsibility for his own problems, which leads to many unnecessary arguments.

This is a significantly more faithful adaptation than most previous winners of this award. Many of the lines in the movie are taken directly from the play, and most of the changes are still consistent with the original characters and story. One change that amused me is originally, Frank starred in a dramatic play, whereas in the adaptation it's a musical comedy. I assume this has to do with the casting of Bing Crosby in the film - was he ever in a movie in which he didn't sing?

There are a few aspects of the story that are mentioned briefly in the play that the movie greatly expands on. Perhaps the most notable example is the play mentions that Frank and Georgie had a daughter who died, but never explains exactly what happened or expands on the impact that had on their marriage. In the movie, however, they had a son, and the circumstances surrounding his death are shown in a flashback. Frank blames himself for what happened, and uses this to justify his excessive drinking and his shirking of all potential responsibility. This is slightly implied in the play, but the movie makes it a focal point of the story. For the most part it works well, although it becomes a little overly dramatic in spots. A couple similar changes also make the movie somewhat more dramatic than the play, and it's a little over-the-top, but not too much. Otherwise, apart from the additional settings that almost always appear when a story is adapted from stage to screen, the film is very similar to the play.

I never would have even considered Grace Kelly for the role of Georgie, but she gives a remarkably un-Grace-Kelly-ish performance that is just right for the character and deservedly won her an Oscar. Bing Crosby and William Holden are also perfect for their parts (once they added some songs for Bing). It's a flawlessly-cast, faithful adaptation with changes that further enhance the original characters; what more could one ask of an adaptation?

Next up: Best Picture Winner Marty, which was based on a made-for-TV movie, so this is the first time I'll be watching rather than reading the source material

1953: From Here to Eternity

Screenplay by Daniel Taradash
Adapted from the novel From Here to Eternity by James Jones

This is the story of soldiers stationed in Hawaii in 1941. It mostly, although not exclusively, focuses on two in particular: Private Prewitt and First Sergeant Warden. Prewitt, aka Prew, was in the bugle corps until a disagreement caused him to be transferred and demoted. He was also once an accomplished boxer, until he accidentally blinded his friend when they were sparring. His new commanding officer, Captain Holmes, wants Prew on his boxing team, and instructs his noncoms to make his life as difficult as possible until he agrees to join. Warden doesn't think much of Prew, but he also doesn't think much of the way Holmes runs his company, so he does what he can to help Prew out, when he's not too busy falling in love with Mrs. Holmes. And of course, we all know what happened in Hawaii at the end of 1941.

I feel like this was an unnecessarily long book. There were too many characters who were described in too much detail, given how unimportant they were to the story. Also, pretty much all of the characters had very long philosophical internal monologues that could easily have been cut, or at least shortened. I enjoyed the parts when we had glimpses into what each character in a conversation was really thinking, but I could have done without the paragraphs of minor characters pondering, and the pages of major characters pondering, without coming to any conclusions. The story was intriguing, but I didn't need all the philosophy.

That being said, I think that made it relatively straightforward to turn an 800-page novel into a 2-hour movie. Once they cut all the unnecessary philosophy and some of the less important minor characters (not to mention all of the explicit, vulgar, and violent content that was definitely not allowed in the Hollywood of the 1950s), it must not have seemed nearly as daunting. In many cases, minor characters from the novel were combined into one slightly juicier minor character in the film. For instance, Bloom, who ends up killing himself in the book, is not in the film, but some of the things he does are important enough to be taken over by "Fatso" Judson and Ike Galovitch. In other cases, minor characters remained but in a significantly reduced form. Maylon Stark is quite important in the book. He's a cook who joins the company soon after Prew, and Warden finagles him into the head cook position because he's much more competent than their previous head cook. Stark also becomes pretty good friends with Prew, and even introduces him to "Lorene" - a prostitute crucial enough to the plot that they couldn't eliminate her from the movie, although her scenes are so cleaned up that modern audiences might not understand that that's what she's supposed to be. Stark also fights with Warden because he used to date Captain Holmes's wife and she treated him terribly (the details and reasons are significantly different in the book and the movie, I think mostly because of production codes). In the film, his only scene is one in which he briefly warns Warden about her. Most of the rest of his role is either taken over by Prew's friend Maggio or eliminated entirely. It's kind of a shame because book Stark is an interesting character, but I can see why they reduced his role. The one minor character change that I'm really irritated about is the squad leader. In the book, he's a Native American named Corporal Choate; in the film, he's a white man named Corporal Buckley. I mean, I guess it's better that he was changed to a white man than portrayed by a white man in offensive makeup, but only slightly.

Most of the changes that did not involve reducing minor characters, philosophical monologues, or sexual content seem to have been made to show the Army itself in a much better light. In the book, Holmes is promoted and no one really cares what he did to Prew; in the movie, he's dishonorably discharged because of it. The book also has a whole section in which Prew is in the stockade, where all the prisoners are constantly beaten, nearly starved, and otherwise abused. Maggio escapes by pretending to be insane; a different man is beaten to death after complying when another prisoner begs him to break his arm. In the film, Prew never goes to the stockade at all. The film does include someone being beaten to death by "Fatso" Judson, but it's Maggio, and it's implied that this is because of a fight they had earlier, which was actually with Bloom in the book. The film implies that this is an exceptional situation, whereas the book makes it seem more like an everyday occurrence in the stockade.

While this clearly isn't the most faithful of adaptations, it's still a very good adaptation. Everything ties together very well despite many eliminations. When you watch the movie, it doesn't feel like you're missing pieces of the story. Often, I'm annoyed with changes between page and screen, but I think for the most part the right decisions were made in this case. If the book was adapted into a movie today, it would probably be a lot different, and rated NC-17. It was remade into a mini-series in 1979, with the tagline "The whole story. The story Hollywood couldn't tell in 1953!" I imagine that's a much more faithful adaptation of the book, both because of its 6-hour length and because it was made 26 years later. Given the time constraint and the period in which it was made, this film is probably about as faithful of an adaptation as it could have been, and personally given the choice I'd much rather rewatch it than reread the book.

Coming up next: The Country Girl, which I blogged about before because Grace Kelly won Best Actress, based on the play by Clifford Odets