1962: To Kill a Mockingbird

Screenplay by Horton Foote
Adapted from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Jean Louise "Scout" Finch is growing up in small-town Alabama during the Great Depression. Her happiest days are spent in the summer with her brother Jem and friend Dill, playing and speculating about their mysterious and reclusive neighbor, Arthur "Boo" Radley. Then Scout's life is turned upside-down when her father, an attorney named Atticus, is appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman.

This is one of those cases in which both the movie and the book are fantastic, but they're also quite different. Overall, the story and its messages are fairly consistent, but many of the details were changed. The book has a lot of minor characters whom the film eliminates, combines, or makes even less important. For example, Scout and Jem meet up with Dill when he comes to stay with their neighbor, who is his aunt, for the summer. In the book, two of their neighbors are Miss Stephanie and Miss Rachel, and Rachel is Dill's aunt. In the movie, these two are combined into one character: Dill's Aunt Stephanie. Another character, Mrs. Dubose, is very important in a section of the novel that is completely eliminated from the film, although she at least makes an appearance in the movie, unlike Atticus's sister, Aunt Alexandra, who is absent entirely.

Most of the changes, including some of the character eliminations, have to do with the length of time the story spans. Both versions begin in the summer and end on Halloween, but in the book this is the Halloween two years later, whereas in the movie, it's only one year later. In this way, it makes sense that a lot happens in the book that is cut out of the film, since the book has a whole extra year to account for. While the novel does include some wonderful scenes that I would have liked to see in the film, I completely understand why the filmmakers decided to condense the story. The movie introduces the trial much earlier than the book does, and thus shifts more of the focus of the story to that aspect. There's an added scene in which Scout, Jem, and Dill sneak into the courthouse to try to see where Boo Radley was allegedly locked up at one point, and unintentionally witness the indictment. The book doesn't even mention Tom Robinson until much later, although his trial does dominate the second half.

In short, while the book spends a lot of time establishing what everyday life in that town is like, the movie skips right to the more dramatic parts of the story. I think to some extent the extra background information in the book adds to the tragedy because we get to know more of the people involved better, but the movie includes enough that it doesn't suffer too much from the missing secondary character development. Some of the sections of the book, while riveting on the page, would probably have been fairly boring in the film. For the most part, I think the right choices were made regarding what to keep, what to eliminate, and what to alter.

Well, it's been a year since I started this project, and I've gotten through 31. I'm hoping to get through even more this coming year, but that might be unrealistic, especially given that the next winner is adapted from an 18th century novel that is over 900 pages long. But if I ever get through it, I'll be blogging about Tom Jones, based on the novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding.

1961: Judgment at Nuremberg

Screenplay by Abby Mann
Adapted from the teleplay Judgment at Nuremberg by Abby Mann

Four men are accused of crimes against humanity for their involvement in the judiciary of Nazi Germany. A tribunal of three American judges must determine to what degree these German judges and prosecutors were responsible for the actions carried out by others under their orders, given that they were merely upholding the law of the land. Meanwhile, the political tide is shifting, and Americans are becoming less concerned with punishing Nazis and more concerned with fighting Communists, creating pressure on the judges to be lenient, despite condemning evidence.

Though the subject matter is obviously very different, this adaptation reminded me a lot of Marty, the only previous Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar winner that was based on a teleplay. In both cases, the teleplay and screenplay were written by the same person, and in both cases the movie was about twice as long as the TV version. Like Marty, Judgment at Nuremberg also had several cast members playing the same role in both versions: Maximilian Schell played the defense attorney in both, although his character's name was different, and two of the Nazis on trial were played by the same actor in both. Almost all of the lines from the teleplay were in the feature film, so most of the changes were additions, with a few notable exceptions.

The TV version begins with footage from earlier Nuremberg trials, with narration explaining what had happened and that people were getting tired of them. This is not shown in the feature film, but the audience gets a clear picture of what's been happening from added dialogue between the characters. Similarly, when the head judge is looking around Nuremberg, in the TV version there is footage of Hitler and the Nazis gathered where he's looking, whereas in the movie we hear the remembered Nazis without seeing them. The historical footage is quite powerful in the original, but I feel like not seeing any early on gives the footage of the Holocaust survivors more power later in the movie.

There were only two other major changes I noticed that weren't additions. In the original version, Chief Judge Haywood is married, and his wife appears briefly, whereas in the movie he's a widower. I assume this was changed to facilitate the addition of Mrs. Bertholt, whose husband was executed as a result of an earlier trial. Haywood spends a lot of time with her in the movie, and even though no romance ensues, this would have been a little weird if he was married. Her friendship provides yet another temptation for Haywood to be lenient with the men on trial, which adds to the tension of the story. The second change comes toward the end, so to avoid spoiling too much I'll just say that the tribunal is slightly harsher on the defendants in the feature film than in the original version. It's not actually that different, and it doesn't end up mattering very much, but I found it rather fascinating that Movie Haywood has even more pressures to be lenient than TV Haywood, and yet ends up being less so.

I thought the TV version was very well done, but I also thought many of the movie's additions greatly enhanced the story, like the German servants who tremblingly protest that they had no idea what was going on, and a couple of added scenes of the defendants interacting outside the courtroom. The main defendant, Ernst Janning, doesn't say or do much for most of the TV movie, which definitely contributes to the shock factor of his outburst toward the defense attorney, but I also liked how we got to know him just slightly more in the feature film before that scene. Overall, both versions tell the story very well, and make powerful statements about humanity and society, so I would highly recommend both of them. The TV version can be found on YouTube, complete with the added bonus of the original commercials from 1959.

Coming up next is another politically charged courtroom drama, albeit a very different one: To Kill a Mockingbird, based on the novel by Harper Lee