Like panning for gold, producers scour the literary world for properties that can make a successful transition to the screen and in the process often debase a work of excellence. It's medieval alchemy in reverse with gold turned into base metal.
But what sort of damage is done to the original work? And can it be justified?
So little of John Buchan's original novel The 39 Steps , published in 1915, actually made it onto the screen that one wonders why the book was considered suitable material to be adapted for the cinema in the first place.
At best, the principal similarities between the source material and Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 version of The 39 Steps are the main characters and the basic plot line - an innocent man is caught up in a spy adventure, he quickly finds himself pursued by police and German agents and the chase starts with a train journey that takes the action to Scotland. Beyond these narrative strands, most of the film's principal action, the second story and the resolution are works of invention by the adapters.
In light of this wholesale reworking of the novel, the Hitchcock film bears little relation to the original book even though he undoubtedly made the narrative more cinematic.
In John Buchan's original text, the protagonist Richard Hannay has successfully tracked down the Prussian spies to a remote little seaside resort on the south coast of England .
Through some basic detective work, Hannay (in the novel) concludes the spies are located in a house that has 39 steps down to the beach. In the film, the 39 steps is revealed to be the codename for a network of spies operating in Britain .
Buchan's protagonist begins to have some doubts about the very public and apparently innocuous behaviour of the inhabitants of the suspected house - they appear to be ordinary people playing tennis and drinking tea in the time honoured tradition of English seaside resorts. None the less, Hannay confronts the suspected spies. Naturally they deny all knowledge of his wild accusations and suggest they have a game of bridge while the whole matter is sorted out.
Budding scriptwriters please note a missed opportunity here, namely how to make a game of bridge cinematically interesting. Hitchcock and his adapters didn't rise to the challenge and dropped the card game from the film.
In the dramatic climax of the novel, the mysterious German ringleader escapes the tight cordon around the house but his accomplices are captured. In effect, the hero Hannay has failed in his quest to halt a major disaster on the European continent.
The final paragraph of Buchan's book reads:
"Three weeks later, as all the world knows, we went to war. I joined the New Army the first week, and owing to my Matabele experience got a captain's commission straight off. But I had done my best service, I think, before I put on khaki."
So for a hugely popular novel, the narrative concludes with an overwhelmingly downbeat but very plausible ending - the hero fails, Europe is plunged into chaos and millions die in the process.
As soon as Buchan's novel was deemed fair game for adaptation, a number of important new elements were worked into the screenplay.
Happy ending
The most important of these is that the hero Hannay triumphs over the German spy network by exposing their ingenious method for smuggling military secrets out of the country by using a music hall act called Mr Memory. With Mr Memory's prodigious powers of recall, the spy ring steals important military research, has him commit complicated formulae and calculations to memory and then replaces the documents.
Although the ring leader in the film is not caught, his clever plan has been rendered useless with the murder of Mr Memory and in effect the fiendish Hun has been thwarted.
Love story
Another important feature of the film is the introduction of a second story with Madeleine Carroll as the love interest.
Despite being handcuffed to her, the protagonist Hannay makes good his escape from the German agents and embarks on a succession of incidents, many of them comic in nature, that softens the tone of the original book.
Pretending to be husband and wife, Robert Donat's Hannay superbly draws the humour out of being mistaken for runaway lovers. This love story eventually culminates behind the scenery at the theatre where Mr Memory is killed. The final shot of the couple, who seemed so incompatible just a short time before, shows them affectionately holding hands. This signals to us that their own story will continue beyond the screen time allocated in the cinema.
Again this is another upbeat ending that was not in the original and draws on the template of happy 'odd couples' established by Hollywood the previous year with It Happened One Night (Clark Gable & Claudette Colbert) and The Thin Man (William Powell & Myrna Loy).
Religion, race and class
For obvious reasons, the adapters of The 39 Steps omitted the blatant anti-semitic references in Buchan's novel but inexplicably introduced a cringe-making Scottish stereotype of a penny-pinching crofter in whose cottage the hero catches a brief respite. Buchan, with his deep affinity to Scotland , must have been appalled at this grotesque embellishment of his original story.
Equally at odds with the original book is the conscious shift towards a middle class viewing audience. Buchan as author produced a ripping yarn that appealed to all classes of reader and this explains why many of his works are still in print today.
Buchan's Hannay says he is most as ease in the presence of both working class people and the aristocracy. He can mingle with each with little difficulty and in fact adopts the clothes, mannerisms and dialogue of a road worker in one instance as a means of avoiding detection. And just as easily, Hannay can sit down with a duke or prince and hold his own in conversation.
Immensely popular as a spy thriller, The 39 Steps underwent a critical transformation during the adaptation phase and by the time it arrived on screen it had become a comedy romance thriller.
Shortcomings in the first screen version of The 39 Steps were left largely unchallenged by the 1959 remake by Ralph Thomas, which amounted to a scene-by-scene rendition of the Hitchcock work, but this time in colour.
Buchan fans would have to wait almost another 20 years before a Don Sharp version of the novel would deliver the closest thing to the original. Set more emphatically in the Scottish countryside, this 1978 film unfortunately threw away much hard-earned goodwill by including an absurd climax on the face of Big Ben - last carried out by Will Hay in the early Ealing comedy My Learned Friend.
Whatever sense of injustice fans of John Buchan might feel with the three film versions of The 39 Steps, it is nothing compared with the outrage expressed by science fiction fans at the travesty perpetrated on Isaac Asimov's I, Robot.
Many fans were unable to comprehend or indeed discern much similarity between the 2004 film version starring Will Smith and the original Asimov collection of short stories from the 1940s.
Cynics noted when the producers claimed their film was "suggested by Isaac Asimov", it was a commercial ploy to pull in a well-defined audience sector without having to deliver the goods.
Similarities between film and original story only amount to the title, a lead character called Susan Calvin and exposition of the Three Laws of Robotics. After that it is simply a matter of Will Smith destroying as many robots as possible in a gung-ho futuristic Hollywood blockbuster.
More serious damage, however, may have been done to Asimov's reputation by the screenwriters ignoring the central theme of his work, namely the moral interaction between man and machine.
Asimov, who died in 1992, had already collaborated with veteran sci-fi screenwriter Harlan Ellison on a script version of I, Robot that satisfied the author's desire to have science fiction cinema treat more seriously the issues facing us as individuals in an increasingly mechanised world. Although the screenplay has yet to be made, it has been available in book form for the past decade.
Perhaps hardcore sci-fi fans should be grateful no real attempt was made to film I, Robot as it leaves the original anthology unmolested this time around. All we have to do is wait for the remake.
Paul Hannon
The 39 Steps
Original novel by John Buchan (published 1915)
Adapted by Charles Bennett, Ian Hay and Alma Reville
Film directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1934)
Remade by Ralph Thomas (1959) and by Don Sharp (1978)
I, Robot
Original short story collection by Isaac Asimov (published 1950)
Screenplay by Jeff Vintar
Directed by Alex Proyas (2004)
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