With Revolutionary Road and Watchmen soon to hit our screens Gentry takes a look at the very best books on film.

5. Jaws

The finest of page-turners meets its match in perhaps the greatest ever populist filmmaker, Steven Spielberg. Jaws is mean and lean thriller – a perfect representation of what paperback fiction—traditionally—is all about, because you can’t turn your attention from the action for even a second. In fact, complete within its own world, Jaws is one of the few “perfect” films of the genre (along with The Birds and The Thing), terrorizing the sense of security it so effortlessly creates. Spielberg’s golden touch helped shift hundreds of thousands more of Peter Benchley’s already best-selling novel – so there’s never been any complaints from the author about the vast changes to the original manuscript.   

4. The Big Sleep

The plot of The Big Sleep is so enjoyably complex that director Howard Hawks, the first and most successful of the filmmakers to adapt it for the movies, admitted that he never did understand who killed one of the characters—and when he telegraphed Chandler for clarification, Chandler himself was unable to provide a definitive answer. That aside, this is without doubt the definitive Raymond Chandler adaptation. The wet heat, the cracking dialogue and Bogart leaning into the crotch of every scene as an irrepressibly slick Marlowe – The Big Sleep is a fascinating noir and a singularly stylish piece of Hollywood storytelling from Hawks. Throw in a script by William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett and you’ve got a movie masterpiece that brings to life better the decadent L.A. so well sketched by Chandler.

3. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Blade Runner

One of the most perfectly realised, integrated visions of the future, Ridley Scott's masterpiece is a seamless transition from now to when: a deconstructed, impersonal world in which corporate interests have obliterated any social cohesion. Harrison Ford, as the transposed film noir detective, Deckard, stalks the rain swept belly of the metropolis, terminating replikants who are, in almost every way, more human than himself. At once visceral and literate, grave and romantic, Blade Runner is a vast improvement on Philip K Dick's visionary but unevenly comic novel. The gloomy, dreamy soundtrack from Vangelis echoes the theme of synthesis and processed emotion that reverbs through the film, the sodden, warped sounds haunting Deckard's every uncertain step into unknown territories. The film will stand as Ridley Scott's best work, reigniting a decaying genre and defining forever our imaginings of things to come.

2. Othello

Should I ever be strangled, be sure it will be by an enraged academic. And the reason? For the statement I’m about to relay: Orson Welles was as good as Shakespeare. Shock, horror, choke! Othello is as good a film in the hands of Orson Welles as it possibly could have been on the stage of any play house. Welles has, if anything improved on The Bard’s beguiling tale of power and envy. The funereal opening scene, the improvised bath-house scramble, Michael MacLiammoir as the insidious, lank-haired Iago, and the heart-crushing tenderness of Welles as he lingers over the dead body of Desdemona – Othello’s exploration of the rich themes is wretchedly compelling.  By some distance the most accomplished and inventive Shakespeare adaptation to date.  

1. Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse now 

Tapping the rich, throbbing vein that runs through Joseph Conrad’s novel, Apocalypse Now transforms the slight into the spectacular and the evocative into the epic. What's so effective about the film is the hallucinogenic incongruity of it—Coppola has created a stunning piece of historical imagery: a violent, pornographic dream—nightmare escaped from the mind of a bored, frightened, horny grunt. Kurtz could never be realized more effectively by any other force than that of Brando. Gigantic and mad, he looms over every frame, his senile ramblings and whirlpool of a mind sucking Willard further and further toward his inner void. A great novel bettered still by perhaps the greatest of all films.  

 

If you can think of any other books on film that should make the top 5, just let us know…

Mr. Paolo Cabrelli

Related Features:

1. Top 5 Dystopian Movies by Paolo Cabrelli
2. The London Film Festival hits town…
3. Film Review: Gainsbourg
4. A Twist of Lime
5. Top 5 Worst Best Picture Oscar Winners:

Category: 5 best, Art & Culture