I became a fan of John Grisham around the time The Client was released. I started with The Firm and eventually read everything he had published at that point. I loved The Firm, and I couldn’t wait for the movie to come out. When I finally saw the film, I was surprised to discover that the ending was different. My best friend’s mother was just starting to read Grisham and hadn’t yet read The Firm. She was torn between seeing the movie first and reading the book. I told her that the endings were different and that I actually preferred the movie’s version. She told me that she usually watched the movie first and read the book afterward because, in her experience, the book was always better.
On my advice, she read the book first and then saw the movie. She was disappointed—she preferred the book’s ending. I felt Grisham had written his lead character into something of a corner, making it difficult to continue his story. The movie avoided that problem. Of course, Grisham eventually returned to the character in The Exchange.
That brings us to the age-old question: Is it better to read the book or watch the movie? Which tells the better story? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Each medium offers something the other cannot. A book can give you details, internal thoughts, and insights into characters that may never make it onto the screen. Movies, however, bring that world to life—but it is the director’s vision, not necessarily yours.
That’s one of the fascinating things about books: two people can read exactly the same story and see completely different versions of it in their heads. A friend of mine and I both read Stephen King’s Misery. We later saw the movie in the theater, and although it was similar to the book, we discovered that we had imagined its central character very differently. He had imagined Annie Wilkes almost exactly as Kathy Bates portrayed her. I had imagined someone more like character actress Edie McClurg—friendly, almost cute, with a Minnesota accent and a touch of humor, but with something much darker hiding underneath. That’s the risk of seeing the movie after reading the book: the actor on the screen may look nothing like the character who has been living in your imagination.
As for me, I like both. Maybe that’s the easy answer, but as a writer I’m fascinated by the way a story changes as it passes from one storyteller to another. Take Double Indemnity. It’s one of my favorite examples of classic noir. Years after seeing the film, I came across the novel by James M. Cain. Although the basic plot is familiar, I found the novel’s two central characters far more despicable. As their situation closes in around them, I found it difficult to feel much sympathy for either one. The film gives us something different. Screenwriters Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler reshaped Cain’s story for the screen, giving the characters enough humanity that we can feel some sympathy for them despite the terrible things they do. The film also gives their relationship an emotional dimension that I didn’t feel as strongly in the novel. To me, that is one of the most interesting things an adaptation can do: remain recognizable while changing how we feel about the people at the center of the story.
The Maltese Falcon offers almost the opposite experience. It is one of the defining films of the classic noir era, and Bogart’s performance as Sam Spade helped cement the hard-boiled screen persona that would follow him for years. When I finally read Dashiell Hammett’s novel, I was surprised by how closely the film followed it. Even the hard-boiled dialogue sounded familiar—the kind of language that became inseparable from Bogart’s screen image. Maybe the filmmakers simply understood that Hammett’s material didn’t need much improvement. Changing it too much would have been like drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.
So, in a nutshell, I guess I’m a story nerd. I enjoy seeing the twists and turns a story takes as it travels from book to screenplay to movie to remake—and sometimes into another movie that borrows the basic idea and takes it somewhere completely different.
Maybe that’s why I no longer worry too much about whether the book or the movie is better. I’m more interested in what changed along the way—and why. Sometimes the movie loses what made the book special. Sometimes it finds something the author never put on the page. And every once in a while, as with The Maltese Falcon, Hollywood seems to realize that the smartest thing it can do is leave a great story alone.
TF’S NOTES - Going back to The Maltese Falcon, I’ve always been left with a question: Did Bogart take elements of Hammett’s Sam Spade and carry them into his later screen persona? Bogart had played plenty of heavies earlier in his career, but after Sam Spade, elements of that character—the toughness, cynicism, clipped dialogue, and underlying code—seem to echo through many of his later roles. Even comedians doing Bogart impressions tend to imitate some version of that hard-boiled persona. Maybe Sam Spade didn’t create Humphrey Bogart. But I sometimes wonder whether he helped create the Bogart we remember.