THE FILM
FILM DIRECTOR: Howard Hawks
SCREENWRITER: Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett, B.H. McCampbell
FILM STARS: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson, Ward Bond, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, John Russell, Claude Akins
COUNTRY: USA
THIS BOOK
AUTHOR: Brackett, Leigh
TYPE: Novelization
PUBLISHER: Bantam
THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1959
COUNTRY: USA
COVER: Paperback
THE ORIGINAL BOOK
ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above
YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1959
ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title
NOTES
GENRE: Western
WORDS: A magnificent film. One of the greatest of all films (well, in my Top 3). Everything works in this film. And, for a western there is a lot of hanging out and talking which makes it that much more enjoyable. Screenwriter, Leigh Brackett, who novelized the screenplay was a favourite of director Howard Hawks and co-wrote this and the other two westerns in this loose “trilogy”, El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970), as well as *the great) Hatari (1962) and The Big Sleep (1946). Oddly, she also wrote a lot of science fiction.
I could wax lyrical about the film but I wont. You can google it. Often watched by me (and luckily I saw it on the big screen at a revival once as well) it’s one that gets better even though i know where it’s going.
LINKS
TRAILER
SONG FROM THE FILM
Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson the wonderful new cowboy song, “My Rifle, My Pony and Me”
Dean Martin sings the title song
Never quite understood the whole novelization thing. Still, a quick Google search demonstrates I may have been too quick to judge. A page by a group called Film 14 offered up these fun facts:
1. the Third Man was a film before it became a book – Graham Greene novelized his own screenplay; and
2. Isaac Asimov novelized Fantastic Voyage – his book appeared six months before the film was released in ’66 so the assumption has always been that the film was based on the book.
In an unrelated aside, Film 14 produce cinematic trailers for books. Go figure.
Paul, I think, also, the novelisation was a way of “reliving” the film in days before VHS, DVD and streaming. Otherwise all you had to rely on was Super 8 (which did not have a wide range), film retrospectives (which concentrated on classics), revival cinemas (if you happened to live near one), or TV re-runs.
I knew about Third Man but not Fantastic Voyage. Writers would do novelisations to keep the money coming in between novels. (Jim Thompson , Alan Dean Foster, and many lesser ones). Also as I said on the “about” page was I like them because they are sometimes based on the script so you have scenes that weren’t filmed or were cut (so you have “deleted scenes”) and because they sometimes give back story.
Getting off the track, perhaps, but in the same spirit of “reliving” the film, films were also made into comics for the same purpose I assume, and overseas they had books of frames from the film with dialogue bubbles. The most extreme form of the latter were the books by Richard Anobile (which are actually invaluable in some ways). In the 70s he released large format books on some classics (Stagecoach, Casablanca, Frankenstein) using a movie frame blow-up technique with dialogue underneath to recreate entire films in book form.