'But Have You Read the Book?' by Kristen Lopez
Most people—film critics included—watch movies based on literature without reading the books from which they were adapted. Not Kristen Lopez. In But Have You Read the Book? Lopez claims she always reads the book before seeing the film. She adds, “reading the book gave me an opportunity to have the inside track”—a deeper appreciation of the characters and their back stories, plus “the stuff that never made it to the screen at all.”
Virtually all of the 52 lit-based films chosen for But Have You Read the Book? left out lots of “stuff”—altering or dropping characters and plots to avoid censorship, to sell more tickets and—perhaps most critically—because cinema and novels tell their stories differently. Some adaptations, hello James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), made an indelible impression on the public while nearly ignoring the source. More recently, Anthony Mangella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) retained only the framework of Patricia Highsmith’s novel.
Lopez is too polite to say so, but often, the movie is better than the book. OK, she acknowledges that To Have or Have Not was “one of Hemingway’s worst novels”; the film was memorable through the chemistry of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacal (not to mention a complete rewrite). But many other cases could be mentioned. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), perhaps the ultimate film noir, was based on a story by the crummiest crime novelist, Mickey Spillane. Little wonder Spillane hated the film. He couldn’t write as well as Aldrich’s screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides and seldom had a good idea.
Lopez is a classic film podcaster with an obvious love for movies old and recent. The newest among the 52 films essayed in the book, Passing (2021), is based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel about a light-complected Black woman “passing” as white. Have You Read the Book? is published by TCM/Running Press.
