1964: Becket

Screenplay by Edward Anhalt
Adapted from the play Becket by Jean Anouilh

King Henry II of England is tired of constant power battles with the Church. When the Archbishop of Canterbury dies, the king stumbles upon what he thinks is a perfect solution: nominate his best friend Thomas Becket as a replacement. Henry assumes Becket will remain loyal to his king first and church second, but Becket takes his new position much more seriously than his old friend anticipated.

My experience with this one is kind of the opposite of the previous year's Best Adapted Screenplay winner, Tom Jones. In that case, I had seen the movie before, but reading the book helped me appreciate the movie much more the second time. In this case, I had never seen the movie, but watching it helped me appreciate the story a lot more than I had while reading the play. I didn't really understand the play when I read it. Many significant events occurred offstage between scenes and were only vaguely referred to afterward, so I kept feeling like I had missed a scene. Most of these were added to the film, so the story made a lot more sense. I realize that the screen is more conducive to scene changes than the stage, but I still feel like the play could have shown a little more than it did. Perhaps the intended audience of the play was already familiar with its historical context, but I must confess to know relatively little about the state of England and France in the mid-12th century. The movie filled in the gaps, clarifying what the characters were referring to later, which I greatly appreciated.

Apart from these additions, the movie and the play are quite similar. Most of the lines from the play made it into the film with few alterations. A couple of the cruder lines were eliminated, but otherwise the script was fairly consistent, as far as it went. The film added so much that it's probably a good half hour longer than the play, but overall the characters and themes remain true to the original, with some added clarity. I wish I had more to say about this adaptation, but there's not much to be said. The movie was basically just a longer and more comprehensible version of the play.

One side note that I found interesting: Peter O'Toole played King Henry II in this movie, and went on to portray the same monarch a few years later in The Lion in Winter, which won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar of 1968. So I'll be watching O'Toole's Henry II again relatively soon. But in the immediate future my focus will be on 1965's winner, Doctor Zhivago, based on the novel by Boris Pasternak.

1963: Tom Jones

Screenplay by John Osborne
Adapted from the novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

The title character is discovered as an infant in the bed of one Squire Allworthy, who raises the foundling as his own son (which he isn't). When Tom grows up, he falls in love with Sophie Western, the daughter of a neighboring squire, but the situation of his birth makes it impossible that her family will approve of their relationship. Squire Western wants Sophie to marry Squire Allworthy's nephew, Blifil, whom she despises, so she runs away. Meanwhile, Blifil convinces his uncle that Tom is a scoundrel who has taken advantage of Allworthy's kindness, and in light of this falsified evidence, Allworthy disowns Tom. Thus, Sophie and Tom set off on separate but intersecting journeys.

Re-reading my post about this movie on my Best Picture blog, I don't think I really did it justice. The story is actually pretty good; I certainly found it a lot more interesting the second time. The book is WAY too long, but I think after reading it, I appreciated the movie more. Considering the novel is about 950 pages long and the movie is just over 2 hours, the story remains surprisingly consistent. Obviously the movie had to cut out quite a bit, and knowing about those eliminated sections probably helped me follow the story better this time. For the most part, I think the filmmakers did a good job deciding what to cut and what to keep, but having to cut so much makes it harder to develop all of the characters enough for the audience to understand their motivations.

For example, the character of Mrs. Miller is much more important in the novel than in the film. She is a landlady who knows Squire Allworthy, and Tom ends up staying at her house once he gets to London. In the book there's this whole thing about Tom helping her relatives without knowing who they were, and then later her daughter gets pregnant and Tom helps convince the father to marry her. This explains why she tries so hard to persuade Allworthy to reconsider his position regarding Tom. None of that is in the movie, so it seems like she's just praising him out of the blue. The character of Partridge, who was suspected of being Tom's father and later becomes his servant, is likewise much reduced in the film, while he's almost obnoxiously important in the book. I wouldn't have minded seeing a little less of him, but I think they went too far, so that there was hardly any point of including him at all.

Character development notwithstanding, most of the cuts actually improved the story. Fielding spends a lot of the novel making political and philosophical statements and arguments, and while I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing in fiction in general, the way he does it in Tom Jones often detracts from the story. Apparently he felt very strongly about puppet shows, so there's this whole section with a puppet show that doesn't really have anything to do with anything, and therefore was most appropriately not in the film. Much of the journey to London is fairly repetitious in the book; Tom and Sophie keep just missing each other over and over again. Many of these encounters are combined into one in the film, and I feel like the audience still gets the gist of it.

I don't want to give the impression that I hated the book. It wasn't bad, and I actually enjoyed it more than I anticipated. And like I said earlier, reading it helped me appreciate the movie more. But my main objection to the book was that it was too long and rambling, and the movie, for the most part, did a terrific job of remedying this. Therefore, I agree with the 1963 Academy that this adapted screenplay was Oscar-worthy, even if I didn't think it deserved Best Picture when I watched it seven years ago.

Next, I will get a brief respite from long novels in the form of the play Becket by Jean Anouilh, which inspired a film of the same name.