Movies that were better than the books

I saw this on--it might have been The Guardian online. They asked readers to post comments with any movies that were better than the books they were based on. I didn't want to sign up to comment on their articles, so here's my answer.

I don't read many novels anymore.

But here are books I've read where the movie adaptations were better:

The Exorcist. I read the book on the Greyhound between New York and Chicago in the middle of the night. It was creepy at first until I got to the part where the demon was causing things to move by themselves and reading the priest's mind. But the priest wasn't sure there were signs of demonic possession. He thought it could be perfectly ordinary psychic phenomenon. That killed it for me.

The Long Goodbye. The book wasn't very good, considered a sign of Raymond Chandler's decline. The Robert Altman movie was a big improvement creating some connection between events. He stood the ending on its head which was a big improvement.

Planet of the Apes. I'm talking about the original movie. The novelist Pierre Boulle saw the book as one of his lesser works and I think he was right. Rod Serling adapted it freely.

I read a couple of James Bond books. Casino Royale stunk. James Bond's mission was to ruin a French labor union so to hell with him. He survives a couple of murder attempts entirely by chance, then he wins at a card game which requires no skill at all and is purely a game of chance. He's captured and tortured until someone comes and rescues him. I wouldn't want to, but I could do all that stuff.

Goldfinger just wasn't very good. I glanced at a copy of Live and Let Die in a bookstore. They apparently published the British edition. One chapter was entitled "N****r Heaven" without the asterisks. To hell with Ian Fleming.

Kurosawa's High & Low was infinitely better than the American novel King's Ransom it was based on. I started reading the book and was surprised at how closely Kurosawa stuck to some aspects of the plot. It starts with a business meeting at the home of a shoe company executive. In the book, his name was Gordon King---in the movie it was Kingo Gondo. But the book shows the kidnappers in the first or second chapter and they're not very interesting.

Dracula. I thought the novel got kind of dumb as it went on. It ends with the guys in it going to Transylvania to finish off the vampire. I'm all in favor of killing Dracula, but I would think that the guys would have a few doubts here and there as to whether vampires exist. And one of the guys was a little too happy about giving his life to kill Dracula.

And books that were better than the movie

This won't take long since, again, I don't read that many novels.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai (the book's title was slightly different from the movie's). The book had no dialog and gave some interesting details about Japanese vs British methods of bridge construction and knife fighting techniques of French commandos.

Compulsion, with an interesting but no doubt incorrect 1920's Freudian analysis of Leopold and Loeb.

Donovan's Brain. A doctor is being controlled by a brain he's kept alive. It's written in the first person and the doctor describes all the characters he encounters in medical terms.

The Maltese Falcon. For one thing, you know the scene where Elisha Cook tells Humphrey Bogart to "shove off", and Bogart says, "People lose teeth talking like that"? In the book, Elisha Cook's character didn't say "shove off". He said "Fuck you".

Midnight Cowboy. Details in the book are only be hinted at in the movie. We get the characters' deep background.