Is the book always better than the movie (or tv show)? Sometimes, maybe even often. Sometimes they’re just different.
Much as I love to read I’m a sucker for spectacle, and I first heard about Babylon Berlin in the context of its recreation of 1920s superclub Moka Efti. A Google later revealed the show’s based on a series of historical crime novels, so I decided to do my homework before the show debuted in January. I’ve enjoyed both, though they’re different creatures.
The books are a standard crime procedural from a single point of view, that of Detective Gereon Rath. Most of what I know of Weimar Germany comes from “Cabaret” so the story is a revelation of the grime under the glamour. Much of the “action” is Rath’s sleuthing and suspicions, review and realizations. This close perspective is involving to read but would likely be tedious to view.
Which is why the tv series is more of an ensemble piece: inevitable because it’s impossible to convey the characters’ inner world on screen. This “outside looking in” inherently leads to numerous side stories and subplots (some say too much, but yo, Weimar Germany was messy and scary). The writers expanded and altered some backstories (some quite a bit) but they’re still true to the characters and time/place.
I think the trope of “book is always better than the movie” comes about when screenwriters aren’t true to the characters, or try to make up rules/ignore established rules for the world in which the story takes place.
What about you? Already have your favorite book cast with your favorite actors, or run screaming from any and all movie versions? Or does the movie occasionally improve upon the book (Blade Runner. Fight me)?
I’ve not read the books, or seen the show, so I’m a tabula rasa. But I’d like your advice here. My mother, born in 1938, grew up in Berlin (yes, that era). She didn’t live through Weimar, and only saw the hell that Hitler brought (and always, ALWAYS taught me that it was exactly that), but her parents and grandparents told her the stories about a wheelbarrow of money for a loaf of bread, the crazy loose morals of Berliners – her family originally came from this little cow town from the far west of Germany. So anyway, my mom has a deep fascination for the history of Berlin in the 20s.
Question – I’ve been holding off on watching this until my mom comes to visit this May. She’s not easily shocked or anything, but is it mom-appropriate? I guess I’m more asking, is it going to make me run out of the room watching it with her 😀
Good question! You know your Mom better than I do. The first scene in the first episode is a good barometer. It features the Berlin Vice cops busting a porn ring in the middle of shooting. It’s about the most explicit scene I’ve seen so far so if your Mom can stomach that (and you can stomach being in the room while she watches) y’all should be fine.
Gonna go film noir on you. 😉
“Laura”: the novel by Vera Caspary (http://jlsjlsjls.freehostia.com/booklist/author/record3759.html) is excellent and Otto Preminger’s film version (http://jlsjlsjls.freehostia.com/movielist/title/record172.htmhttp://jlsjlsjls.freehostia.com/movielist/title/record172.htm), despite his and Caspary’s disagreement over the portrayal of the title character, is fairly faithful to the original. Love ’em both.
“Bunny Lake is Missing”: the original Evelyn Piper novel (http://jlsjlsjls.freehostia.com/booklist/author/record787.html) is, again, excellent and downright chilling, with its tale of a single mother who reports her young daughter missing but cannot prove to anyone that her child actually exists. Once again Otto Preminger made the film (http://jlsjlsjls.freehostia.com/booklist/author/record787.html“) but this time he only retained the title and the question of whether or not Bunny Lake exists. Preminger changed everything else: the setting, the circumstances, the investigation, and the whodunnit. The changes piss my mother off no end … she loves the book, hates the movie … but I love Preminger’s version as much as I love Piper’s; he made a very different story from the same premise and I find it equally good (though after seeing Keir Dullea in this it’s difficult to watch him in 2001: a Space Odyssey without having the urge to wonder if it was actually him rather than Hal …)
BTW, one of the top 10 worst movie versions of a book has to be “The Beastmaster” (1982). Which was the horrifying result of somebody getting hold of the film rights to Andre Norton’s novel “The Beast Master” and somehow converting a rather nifty space western about a Navajo war veteran (who tended to be fully dressed most of the time) seeking revenge against a man he’d been raised to believe responsible for his mother’s death into a sword & sorcery fantasy featuring blonde, blue-eyed, loincloth-clad Marc Singer running around a jungle fighting evil priests in pyramids.
And I know about the above because somewhere around here I have (at least I hope I still have it) I have a letter I received from Andre Norton at the time telling me how she’d insisted (and been obliged by the moviemakers) that there be absolutely no mention of her name or her book in the movie’s credits or publicity. ;p
P.S. I’ve never seen the movie. Never ever wanted to. But I own and have re-read the book many times. And I see there is now a mention of the Andre Norton connection in the movie’s IMDB entry … poor woman must be spinning in her grave.
See? It seems that diversion from the original is what destroys the tv version when compared to the written. I’ve not read “Bunny Lake…”, or even heard of it. It sounds like it has a whiff of “Haunting of Hill House” about it. I may have to check it out!
Oh yes, I’m positive you’d love “Bunny Lake is Missing”, both the novel and the film. You lucky thing, getting to discover them for the first time … I’m jealous! The major differences in the film work, in my opinion, because while Preminger changed a great deal about the story he did retain the two vital plot points of lack of proof and motive and those are, IMO, what make the story so gripping in both versions. And yes, very much the same kind of chilling psychological tension as “The Haunting of Hill House” (you’ve reminded me that I love both Shirley Jackson’s novel and the 1963 film … I own both the book and the DVD of that one too)
P.S. Another one. Aside from the speedboat chase, “From Russia With Love” is the one James Bond movie out of the original series that actually closely followed the plot of the book. Except that in the novel Rosa Klebb actually did successfully kick Bond with that poisoned shoe blade and final sentence is “Bond pivoted slowly on his heel and crashed headlong to the wine-red floor.” Readers had to wait until the next novel, “Dr. No”, was published to learn what had happened.