When the movie is better than the book.

When I started to write this post, I had the misimpression that the article I was linking to was going to be about movies that are better than the book they are based on. Obviously, usually people think the book is better than the movie (although people who've read the book may be a special subcategory of moviegoer whose opinion is not entirely trustworthy for those who don't like to read fiction books that much). So it's interesting when the movie actually is better. I was going to set up a post so that the comments could give a lot of examples, but then that post took a different direction.

Still, one of the commenters -- Joseph Angier -- picked up this theme and wrote:

One thing Caryn James only vaguely alluded to were the times when the movie-makers actually improved on the source book. Of course it's subjective, but off the top of my head I'd include "The Verdict" and "The Shining" on that list. Both times, the filmmakers saw powerful themes that had been given short shrift in the books. In the first, David Mamet and Sidney Lumet turned a so-so legal thriller into a meditation on Irish fatalism (yeah, I know, they're both Jewish). In the second, Kubrick and his writer (Diane Johnson?) added the writer's bloc, plus the word versus image battle between father and son. I read somewhere that Stephen King hated this movie, but as Nicholas Ray once told me (about the author of the book "Thieves Like Us," who'd written the first screenplay draft of what became "They Live By Night"): "He didn't understand his own book!"

So let's have a discussion on this topic. I'll throw out the really, really obvious example: "The Godfather." And I'll add two I feel strongly about: "Fight Club" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

Okay, your turn.

UPDATE: Botched backwards post title fixed.