Films – Interesting Literature

Literary Film Review: Michael Crichton’s Westworld

This month’s classic film review is an analysis of the 1973 film Westworld, a notable first in movie history

Michael Crichton published his most influential early novel, The Andromeda Strain, in 1969 while he was still in his twenties. Pleasingly, when the novel was adapted into a film two years later, Crichton was given a tour of the set by a young Steven Spielberg, who was on his first day at work as a film director. (Spielberg, of course, would later direct the film adaptation of Crichton’s Jurassic Park.)

10 Fascinating Film Adaptations of American Novels

In this guest post, Andrew Dix discusses ten cinematic adaptations of US novels

Film, right from its beginnings very late in the nineteenth century, has been obsessed with literature. Literary adaptation appealed to early filmmakers as a source of cultural respectability: the first movies were shown in venues of popular entertainment such as fairgrounds and circuses, and an association with literature, it was felt, would give film greater artistic prestige. Literature, and novels in particular, also offered a ready source of stories to feed the new medium’s appetite for narrative material.

It was not only English, French and other European novels that proved attractive to these pioneering filmmakers, but American novels too. The earliest screen version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in 1903, condensing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s long novel into nineteen minutes. Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women made the first of many appearances on film in 1917; Twain’s Huckleberry Finn debuted in cinemas in 1920. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was adapted for the first time in 1926, as a silent movie entitled The Sea Beast. There are several curious things about this adaptation, one being that it was remade as a ‘talkie’ four years later (this time called Moby Dick), another that it invented a half-brother for Captain Ahab and gave him the unlikely name of Derek.

Five Fascinating Facts about Bambi

Fun facts about Bambi, the children’s book on which the classic Disney film was based

1. The classic Disney film Bambi was based on a largely forgotten book. Bambi: A Life in the Woods was written by Felix Salten (born Siegmund Salzmann), an Austrian author, and published in 1926. A perhaps surprisingly fact, given that Salten would go on to pen a children’s classic, is that he was also the probable author of an anonymously published erotic novel, Josephine Mutzenbacher – The Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself, which appeared twenty years before his Bambi book.

Five Fascinating Facts about The Maze Runner

Interesting Maze Runner facts: James Dashner’s a-mazing series of dystopian novels

1. Although some fans have made comparisons between The Maze Runner and other recent young adult dystopian novels, the idea for the series came to its author some ten years ago. Many readers and moviegoers have noted the superficial similarities between The Maze Runner (Maze Runner Series) and the most successful dystopian series of the last decade, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. (We’ve offered some interesting Hunger Games facts in an earlier post.) Dashner has discussed the book’s genesis, which dates back to November 2005: ‘I went to bed, and somehow this idea popped in my head about a bunch of teenagers living inside an unsolvable Maze full of hideous creatures, in the future, in a dark, dystopian world. It would be an experiment, to study their minds. Terrible things would be done to them. Awful things. Completely hopeless. Until the victims turn everything on its head.’ The first novel, which establishes the world in which several further books are also set, is a cleverly plotted page-turner (Dashner is not afraid to draw on the cliffhanger device at the end of his brief, action-packed chapters), and the film adaptation garnered largely positive reviews.

Five Fascinating Facts about Ben-Hur

Interesting facts about the Lew Wallace book Ben-Hur, and its subsequent life on film

1. It was the bestselling American novel of the nineteenth century. Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur (1880) even outsold that other runaway bestseller, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). And this was despite slow sales: in the first seven months it didn’t even shift 3,000 copies. The novel’s protagonist, Judah Ben-Hur (a figure invented by Wallace, and not someone who is known in history), is a Jewish nobleman and prince who is taken slave by the Romans (fitted up on a false charge of attempted murder, when a piece of his roof accidentally dropped on the Roman parade passing his house) and becomes a charioteer in the Roman games.