Reading List (that goes with the Watching List published above, or below)

(First of all, the autotype suggested I call this blog post "How do I get rid of a demon?" Which is, well, interesting, I must say. I can either feel creeped out about why the computer would just spontaneously make that offer; or just put it down to assuming that my wife Angie or my daughter Greta recently typed that title for a blog entry... and, you know, get creeped out about that, instead.)

(By the way, now that I've finished writing the entry that consisted mostly of typing a long list of movies, I'll revert to capitalizing all movie titles, which was standard stylebook for all the websites I wrote for, last time I was publishing anything. If anyone thinks capitalizing movie titles looks wrong for some reason, let me know.)

Another sort of parenthetical note: because I've just read over the list I typed over, I happened to notice that STARSHIP TROOPERS somehow vanished, at some point; I don't know how it disappeared - it was certainly supposed to be on the list, and I'll correct the other entry, as soon as I'm done typing and posting this one. It sure makes me nervous, knowing that every detail of any project I undertake, is entirely in the hands of one heavily medicated guy, who does things like accidentally deleting titles from his final recommended viewing list, without remembering how or when it happened... I suppose that means I ought to read over some master list of Oscar-nominated titles for every year, one more time, just to look for other slips of the typist's hand... then again, maybe I'll just set this matter of doublechecking the list of titles aside, for now, at least until I watch, I don't know, another thousand movies or so, from the rest of the list. Maybe two thousand. Maybe I'll just check when I think I'm done...

Okay, a reading list. Books the movies were based on. Here we go:

THE THIN MAN is that serendipitous rarity, a movie based on an excellent novel which faithfully translates the book to the screen, adding and embellishing only where it undeniably helps tell the story. THE THIN MAN was such a success as a movie, it spawned five (increasingly slight and silly) sequels; Dashiell Hammett never wrote a sequel to his novel, but the novel he wrote, is worth reading at least twice.

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is based on a notable book, one that's been filmed several times, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall; I haven't read this book, but it concerns true events, so maybe if the excellent 1935 movie inspires you to further reading on the subject, the Wikipedia page would be a good place to start.

I find unexpectedly that MY MAN GODFREY is actually based on a novel called 1101 Park Avenue, written by one Eric Hatch. Who knew? Not me. Mr. Hatch seems (from my present perspective - that of someone looking at his imdb page) otherwise most notable for having written the screenplay for the once-popular and sequelized romantic comedy/ghost story TOPPER, and another novel he wrote served as the basis for the Disney picture THE HORSE IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT. Again: who knew? Apparently he wrote 25 novels, but unless I'm mistaken, his work has gone way out of fashion; anyway, I've never heard of him.

Disney's SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS is based on a story "written" by the well-known German folklorists collectively known as The Brothers Grimm. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were central figures in the German literature of their time; the lifetime of work they put into gathering, writing, and publishing the wild, rich, and previously entirely oral folklore of their country, is only their most prominent and enduring among many notable literary contributions. Here in the United States "the Brothers Grimm" are commonly misapprehended as authors of fairy tales for children; in fact, a lot of the folk tales they gathered, are not only too frightening for small children, but also, too deeply strange, for any adult who actually reads them to misunderstand as "children's literature" of any kind. A collection of their stories edited for an adult audience - many editions of the "complete Brothers Grimm fairy tales" are available; I believe I read Signet paperbacks - belongs in rare literary company - I would go so far as to say that it constitutes one of the great semi-inexplicable works of world literature, alongside The Bible, The Thousand Nights and One Night, The Mabinogion, and the Satyricon by Petronius (which will come up at length later on in this list, when I get to the Fellini movie based on it). I can't recommend reading Wilhelm & Jacob Grimm's "fairy tales" highly enough, and comparing their "Snow White" to Disney's movie is as good a place to start as any.

GONE WITH THE WIND is based on the Margaret Mitchell novel of the same title, a novel which remains a much-loved perennial cult classic, mostly, as far as I can tell, in the "deep South," among, you know, white people. Well, white women, actually. (Let's go ahead and call a spade a spade, if you know what I mean.) I tried to read it once, and found it, well, I hate to just pass on a superficial impression of the first twenty pages of a gigantic novel, twenty years after I read them, but that superficial impression was that Gone with the Wind, the novel, is badly marred by racist sentiments, many of them, variously expressed, throughout several levels of interpretation of the text... but then, I was only twenty, twenty years ago, and if my synchronicity-obsessed friend Andras were sitting here, he'd point out that the Motown song that happened to be playing, just now, while I wrote this paragraph (I bought the Motown box set for Angie for Christmas), mentioned, seemingly significantly, that "you can't judge a book by its cover," right, you know, when I was doing pretty much just that. I'm sure I know some folks who love this novel, and I would love it if you'd append a comment here, to defend it; I'm also sure that, whether or not the book was  intended to express or project racist ideas or attitudes, it's well worth reading, anyway, even so, just to compare it with a movie adaptation that very carefully and cleverly avoids being, itself, racist (or even commenting often or directly on the race-related matters that insistently prodded the historical events that GONE WITH THE WIND uses for backdrop). It's true that the enduring popularity of the novel, Gone with the Wind, is at least in part directly due to the enduring popularity of GONE WITH THE WIND, the movie, arguably the crowning acheivement of Hollywood's studio era. It's also safe to say that if this novel were simply terrible, no one would be reading it still, and it remains a reliable seller, so... so judge for yourself, I guess.


I find that my reliable problem with chronic logorrhea, has put me in the position of promising to continue this "reading list" business, next time. If anyone does take up watching these movies in tandem with reading these books, let me know; perhaps we can make a club out of it. (No - seriously.)