Great books make bad movies. Bad books make great movies. That seems to be an old movie theme. A terrible novel like "The Godfather" made for an excellent movie. And well, if you want an example of a great novel turned into a bad movie look no further than "The Sun Also Rises" made in the 1957 and shown on Cinemax the other day. A story about the post World War I generation wasting their young lives in 1920's Paris and Spain, Fox decided to cast the movie with 40 year olds and turn it into a movie about people having middle age crisis. And the magic of Hemingway's novel is completely gone.
There are some ok scenes most of them shot during the running of the bulls during the San Fermin festivities. But they don't compensate for a really big, pretentious, boring movie. All in Cinemascope to make the fiasco even bigger. Sometimes I complain about how today's movies are big and empty. Well, producer Daryll Zanuck was making them back in the 1950's during his reign in Fox. No wonder he was fired after churning out disaster after disaster. But that's another story.
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