When Blindness opens Oct 3rd we'll have to have a discussion about what type of books can be transferred to the screen and which can't. Or rather: which should and shouldn't. Everything can transfer.I was thinking about this topic because of Brittanica Blog's count down of the top ten films of 1968. Today's selection (#9) Romeo & Juliet is, of course, drawn from an eminently transferable property. I love Franco Zeffirelli's celebrated film version for roughly the same reasons everyone else does: it understood how youthful the play was and finally portrayed it that way lushly onscreen. It's interesting to me that Baz Luhrmann's terrific similarly fresh & hormonal Romeo + Juliet (1996) wasn't greeted as ecstatically by the Oscars when it came out three decades later. "It's too much. It's too fast!" you could hear the naysayers naysaying when confronted with its chaotic emotional and visual rollercoaster. But too much too fast is the brilliant dagger point of that particular Shakespearean tragedy.
The first 1968 selection (#10) was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the movie adaptation of Carson McCuller's fine ensemble novel. I am usually curious to see movies based on books I loved and this would definitely qualify as a book I love. And yet... I can't bear to think of this one as a film, so I've never sought out the feature. The book's prose, characterizations, the lyrical projected tragedy... I can't see them in the same way visually as I do in my head. The book only devastates through the knowledge that slowly seeps as to what will come to pass... not what happens really. It's an emotionally projected tragedy and when movies try to do that, well, they do it through narration. It rarely has the same effect as your own internal voice.Is there any book you've loved that you never want to see onscreen?
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