The Best "Faithful" Novel to Film Adaptations

The conventional wisdom has become such a cliché that it has almost lost all meaning. The book was better. In many cases, especially back when books were longer than the screenplay upon which they are based, this was very often true. It was perhaps just as often, however, that many movies were better than the books they were based on. The examples of movies that surpassed their literary sources because they significantly altered the text are legion: Jaws, The English Patient, The Shining, and any movie based on a novel by Tom Clancy. In most cases where the movie is better than the book it is because the book either was too pulpy or too literary; in either case the film succeeds by focusing on the story. It is the rare case, indeed, when a great movie results precisely because of its faithfulness to the novel. It does occasionally happen, however.

The most obvious case of a great movie arising because it made so few changes to the novel upon which it was based has to be The Maltese Falcon. What even most fans of classic movies don't know is that The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart is not the first movie based on the novel. In fact, John Huston's Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon was actually the third version to reach American theaters. That Huston actually did cop an Oscar for his screenplay is rather amazing; what he basically did was rewrite Dashiell Hammett's entire novel in screenplay form. I'm not kidding; enormously large chunks of the movie's snappy dialogue were taken verbatim from Hammett. Huston's contribution to the screenplay is negligible at best. What makes the most famous version of The Maltese Falcon such a classic is that it is probably the closest thing ever made to a page for page translation of a novel into film.