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How the Great American Novel made it to the movies

Presenting five adaptations that have turned into Hollywood classics...
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The 19th-century writer Frank Norris was famously scathing about the very idea of the Great American Novel: it is not, he said, “extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff”. Which is puzzling, perhaps, because, unlike a hippogriff – a half-horse, half-eagle hybrid – most of us have seen one. That is, we have read a book that does an artful job of articulating the American experience at a certain time and in a certain place. They may not be perfect platonic forms of that notion, but who’s expecting that? Still, those books don’t come along very often – and it’s certainly not a given that they’ll translate well onto celluloid. These adaptations of Great American Novels new and old, however, have pulled it off. And all of them are available right now on CHILI, the streaming service where you only pay for what you watch...

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

James Baldwin’s 1974 novel is a moving tale about a black Harlem couple torn apart when the husband is falsely accused of rape, spurring his pregnant wife to clear his name before their baby is born. Despite its bleak assessment of American racial politics, it is a warm piece of work that finds hope in the love that binds a community and also this particular couple. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’ Academy Award-winning adaptation is in the same key as the book and manages to closely transpose into pictures the quiet lyricism of Baldwin’s prose.

American Psycho (2000)

Some would argue that this novel’s cartoonishness disqualifies it from Great American status, but Bret Easton Ellis’ excessive imagination is precisely what has made this satire of Eighties greed-is-good culture and white privilege so adhesive. In the film adaptation, Christian Bale throws himself into the role of the psychopath exec with abandon, a performance that has come to anchor our idea of yuppiedom just as firmly as Gordon Gekko. While it is not as violent as the novel, the film is no less saturated in the lurid and the surreal – and no less memorable in its presentation of the darker desires for which acquisitiveness is an acceptable proxy.

To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)

America’s best-loved novel is also a Great American Novel: Harper Lee’s narrative is driven by the perennial conflicts that lie at the heart of the American story from its origins through to, regrettably, today. In its tale of a black man falsely accused of rape lies a vivid exploration of gender, class, morality and, of course, race in Thirties Alabama. Robert Mulligan’s screen adaptation is a thoughtful piece entirely in sympathy with Lee’s art; Gregory Peck plays the lawyer, Atticus Finch, with a captivating gravity.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Another archetypal Great American Novel, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby’s story of the enigmatic yet ostentatiously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his infatuation for the egotistical socialite Daisy Buchanan is a wholesale critique of the American Dream. It has been adapted on multiple occasions, but we have chosen Baz Luhrmann and Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2013 version for its sheer visual fireworks, which, better than any of its cinematic rivals, captures the empty glamour of the lives it depicts.

East Of Eden (1955)

John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize-winning novel marries the stories of two families in California’s Salinas Valley with a Biblical sense of grandeur. The work writes itself into and out of the book of Genesis, drawing parallels that throw light on notions of goodness, deficiency, guilt, love and loss. Elia Kazan’s cinematic take on Steinbeck’s vision put James Dean in his first major big-screen part. It was a performance that some argue was the best of the actor’s career, his boundless, authentic manner pointing ahead to a more freewheeling mode of acting with which he was to become synonymous.

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