From codex to multiplex

by David Benjamin

“Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts … ”
—James M. Cain, Double Indemnity

MADISON, Wis.—Recently, as I watched the opening credits of the 1944 classic, Double Indemnity, I suddenly whispered, “Wow!” The writers listed for the movie—based on James M. Cain’s darkly compelling novel—were Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder. If ever there was a “murderer’s row” in film writing …

Early in the movie, a dialog between Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray crackles with such wit, seethes with such sexual tension and moves so fast that I was tempted to rewind and savor it all over again. The marks of Cain, Chandler and Wilder are all over this conversation.

Besides being great film noir and a Wilder masterpiece, Double Indemnity illustrates how to turn a book into a movie that remains true to its source.

Every year, Nick Hinauslehnen, editor of a film quarterly, Flashback—to which I contribute the odd essay—challenges his readers with a history question. This year, he’s asking opinions about the best-ever flicks derived from books. As someone who writes books, this is a problem about which I’ve actually thought.

For example, it’s clear that a screenwriter has to do some heavy trimming to adapt a book that’s more than two hundred pages long. My copy of Double Indemnity clocks in at 136 pages. A good screenwriter can (and did) replicate Cain’s entire plotline without excisions. When the source is that tight, moreover, the adapter can add dialog—which Chandler and Wilder did with the conversation I mention above—and throw in a few nicely filmic visual elements.

To move a longer book from codex to multiplex, cuts are unavoidable. Hollywood has given us a version of War and Peace, several editions of Les Miserables, almost every Dickens novel and even an attempt at Ayn Rand’s 1,200-page doorstop, Atlas Shrugged. Several of these made pretty good flicks, but to fit them into two-odd hours of screen time, some scenes, speeches, details and even characters were sacrificed. The resulting movie version of, say, The Magic Mountain, might have tickled film critics pink but it posed the danger of disappointment to people who had read and admired Thomas Mann’s hefty novel.

I’ve read Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and I’ve come around to liking David Lean’s heralded 1965 film. But even in 200 minutes, Lean could not squeeze into the movie the full complexity of Pasternak’s cast, his plot nuances, the story’s byzantine politics. The movie is celebrated as brilliant—it is—but brilliant because its auteur had the sense not to stick reverently to the introspective, circuitous and distinctively Russian narrative that Pasternak had provided him.

An exception to the rule that long books pose crises for screenwriters is the turgid military thrillers of Tom Clancy. Most Clancy novels, especially the Jack Ryan series, e,g., The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games, have been turned into well-crafted, swiftly paced action movies. These adaptations should have been difficult if not impossible because Clancy, a writer so pedestrian that I find him painful to read, violated Mark Twain’s fourteenth rule of literary art: “Eschew surplusage.” But this is a strange case of more being less. There’s so much surplusage in a Clancy tome—technical details, military jargon, logorrheic description and sheer wordiness—that a competent editor can strip away two-thirds of the author’s 600 pages and leave out not a single important episode.

It’s no accident that many of our best adapted-script flicks are based on short novels authored by forgotten journeymen. We got the plot for Shane, perhaps our greatest Western movie, from Jack Schaefer, whose other most successful novel was Stubby Pringle’s Christmas.

Among my favorite proofs that short books translate into good movies are Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, based on Stephen King’s short story, “The Body,” Cannery Row, a poignant adaptation of Steinbeck’s short novel, directed by David S. Ward, with Debra Winger and Harrison Ford, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an 87-page Truman Capote novella that Blake Edwards turned into a cultural touchstone.

It’s no coincidence that Agatha Christie rarely wrote a mystery too fat to fit in your hip pocket.

Besides narrative brevity, another technique that screenwriters apply when adapting a novel is psychological economy. For example, a character whose print original carries too much emotional baggage—lots of angst, guilt, ambivalence and internal turmoil—is hard to put on the screen without confusing people. And people who go to the movies don’t take kindly to being confused.

Consider, for example, Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. The two dominant facets of Bogart’s Spade are toughness and quick wits. Everything else about Sam is left to Bogart, whose portrayal suggests depths of feeling and insight that subtly enrich his character without slowing down the action. This is what good actors do. Spade’s client and erstwhile lover, Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), is a grab bag of moods and contradictions, which might be confusing. But Sam cuts through Brigid’s facade and saves the viewer from having to figure out the ditzy dame.

My role model for filmworthy fiction is a little-remembered midcentury author of alleged “suspense” named Charles Williams. He wrote twenty-two novels, all of which went quickly to paperback and sold on drugstore spinners for prices ranging from 25 cents (A Touch of Death) in 1954 to $2.95 (The Wrong Venus) in 1983. The lengthiest among my collection of Williams’ novels, River Girl, is 224 pages. Fourteen (64 percent!) of Williams’ stories were adapted for film, among them Confidentially Yours directed by François Truffaut from the novel The Long Saturday Night, Diamond Bikini produced in France and directed by Gérard Pirès and The Hot Spot, a wonderfully steamy 1990 noir based on Williams’ Hell Hath No Fury, directed by Dennis Hopper and featuring Don Johnson (post-“Miami Vice”) in probably the best performance of his life.

Williams had the rare quality among dark novelists of having a sense of humor, a virtue he shared with better known peers Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Robert B. Parker. His 1956 novel, The Diamond Bikini, is a crime comedy every bit as entertaining as Donald E. Westlake’s series of caper novels featuring hapless burglar John Dortmunder (five of which have been made into movies).

For me, one of the riddles of Hollywood’s constant hunt for material is why there’s no film version of The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s profane and charming evocation of teenage dysphoria. It’s the right length for adaptation, possibly with a narration like Jean Shepherd’s voice-over in A Christmas Story. Salinger’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is a mess, but he’s funny and totally accessible. The story is full of vividly filmable scenes. Of course, it’s likely that Salinger, modern lit’s most notorious recluse, refused to sell the film rights. And now, the premise might be too dated and innocent to merit the production costs.

Still, wouldn’t it be interesting to try?

There was one novelist, author, screenwriter, commentator, critic and raconteur with the literary and cinematic chops to rescue Salinger’s “catcher in the rye” from days of yore and make him relevant to the 21st century’s attention-deficient moviegoers. But he’s been lost to us since since 2018.

William Goldman—Harper, The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, etc.—could’ve revived and redone Holden Caulfield, without breaking a sweat.