War Horse
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis based on the novel War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
imdb, USA, 2011
There is an old Hollywood saying sometimes referred to as Bluestone’s Law that “Bad Books make Good Movies”. What film critic George Bluestone actually wrote in his book Novels Into Films was: “There is no necessary correspondence between the excellence of a novel and the quality of the film in which the novel is recorded.”
The point is that adapting novels into films is tricky. It is frequently necessary to rearrange, eliminate or compress events, to invent, remove or combine characters and to leave beloved scenes on the cutting room floor in the interest of the needs of the film. It’s a dangerous tightrope to walk. Adapt the book too liberally and you end up with Roland Joffé’s The Scarlet Letter; adapt it...
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis based on the novel War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
imdb, USA, 2011
There is an old Hollywood saying sometimes referred to as Bluestone’s Law that “Bad Books make Good Movies”. What film critic George Bluestone actually wrote in his book Novels Into Films was: “There is no necessary correspondence between the excellence of a novel and the quality of the film in which the novel is recorded.”
The point is that adapting novels into films is tricky. It is frequently necessary to rearrange, eliminate or compress events, to invent, remove or combine characters and to leave beloved scenes on the cutting room floor in the interest of the needs of the film. It’s a dangerous tightrope to walk. Adapt the book too liberally and you end up with Roland Joffé’s The Scarlet Letter; adapt it...
- 12/14/2011
- by Michael Ryan
- SoundOnSight
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