How many times have you spoken to someone about a movie and they reply "the book was better"? Happens to me a lot. I'm sure that sometimes that is true, but other times, people favor the one they experience, which is usually the book.

So I wanted to see what movies others consider clearly better than the book.

The Godfather is Exhibit A in this topic. There is merit to the book of course, but it is highly superfluous and pulpy. I am glad nothing regarding Lucy Mancini after Sonny's death made the film, or most of the tedious Johnny Fontaine exploits.

My other starting points are Get Shorty and Little Children, both of which changed/streamlined the endings to make for more satisfying conclusions.

Any others? And does anyone disagree with any of my assessments?

My guess is most people here would agree about the Godfather. I certainly do.

I think that Field of Dreams is quite a bit better than Shoeless Joe by WP Kinsella. The novel True Grit is very good, but I think the Wayne movie is more interesting.

Agree about the Godfather.


The Shawshank film was far better than "Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption"

i agree about the godfather too.

One of the few books I ever read from cover to cover was the Godfather. Some of the best parts of the book were not in the movie. They did not even mention what Luca Brazi was really like in the movie. In the movie he was a guy who could not even remember what he wanted to say to The Godfather on the day of his daughters wedding. He did handle the matter of cutting off the horses head to get Fontaine that part in the movie. But if you read the book the guy was capable of anything. Oh he did wear shoes with no rubber in the bottom of his shoes. That is the way they made shoes in those days. So why weren't the rest of them making noise when they walked?

The movie version of "The Last Don" was way better than the novel because it dispensed with most of the Hollywood BS that Puzo loaded in the novel, and because Danny Aiello was so convincing.

The movie version of "Honor Thy Father" (a vastly underrated TV film from the Seventies starring Joseph Bologna, Raf Vallone and Brenda Vaccaro) was a lot better than the book (by Gay Talese) because it dealt with the "Banana War" straightforwardly, and avoided all the Mafia "honor" BS that Bill Bonanno loaded on the author.

TB, like you, I really liked Honor Thy Father. It was appropriately gritty for that genre. I enjoyed the Last Don, but I was struck by the Italian names in it (e.g., Crucifixio) and the formality of the family it was about.

Shawshank Redemption, The Running Man, A Time to Kill, and The Warriors are some that I thought were better than the books, in the case of A Time to Kill it was the performances of the actors that made it better than the book.

The Running Man, IIRC, was a Stephen King short story. Relatively straightforward. The movie hammed it up to the nth degree, which made it a fun guilty pleasure.

Didn't read Shawshank, another King work.

Seeing the trend, I'll add The Shining to my list. Kubrick took the skeleton of the book but cut the fat and added a lot of muscle. The Shining remains a top 3 horror movie for me and borderline top 20 overall.