Three good movies not based on books -- Garbo

 Movie trailers in the Golden Age of Hollywood often touted the bestsellers from which their scripts were drawn. 

Of course, just because a book was the source of a film, the movie itself didn't have to follow the author's storyline closely.  For example, "The King & I" is very different from its source. 

This is also true for The New Prometheus and "Frankenstein." The book the monster is eloquent, and in the film, he can only moan and snarl. 

On the other hand, if a film's script was written by the director, quality may suffer. 

Even worse, the director may dispense with the script almost entirely and just have the actors improvise. You ever seen this stinker?

Skilled scriptwriters, of course, can use sources other than a book to create scenes and dialogue. Here is a list of three very different flicks, each from a different genre. None were sourced mainly from the written page. 

1. Dark Victory

This tale of a spoiled socialite learning the hard lessons from life was the film version of a Broadway play starring Tallulah Bankhead. 

The play was shortened to become a drama for old-time radio and you can find it, with Bankhead voicing the dialogue from her Broadway role, on YouTube. 

2. The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing

Joan Collins is amazing as Evelyn Nesbit in this heartbreaker of a film about a too-young artist's model who becomes a Floradora Girl and then a pawn between two powerful and headstrong men. 

The script for "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" practically wrote itself from scandalous newspaper coverage of the murder trial of Nesbit's jealous husband, who shot his wife's former lover publicly, in a highly dramatic manner. The trailer assures us that none of the sordidness of the newspaper headlines about the scandal was lost in the making of the film.

After the scandal, Evelyn Nesbit, the former star chorine,  had a rather sad nightclub career. In her free time, she searched for an answer as to why her husband could commit murder and yet, she, Evelyn, was portrayed as the villain in the story.  Here's Nesbit in 1924. 

A book by Joanne L. Yeck, The Blackest Sheep, came out a couple of years ago about a Chicago nightclub which Yeck's uncle had a hand in operating. This night spot was one of the venues which featured Nesbit as an entertainer. 

3. The Mummy (1932)

After doing so well with "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" in 1931, Universal Studios needed a new monster. For a fresh idea, they went back to the discovery of King Tut's tomb, which had happened within the last ten years. 

Here's a silent-era newsreel about the tomb's discovery:

Unlike the news events which became the story for "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing," the dusty science of digging in the Egyptian sands didn't have exciting characters or stunning plot twists. So the script for "The Mummy" grew out of a hodge-podge of fantasy fiction and very loosely-defined historical fiction.

Arthur Conan Doyle, most famous of course for the Sherlock Holmes stories, wrote the novel The Ring of Thoth, which surely inspired the Egyptian mystic rituals seen in "The Mummy."

 The basic resurrection plot came from the author Nina Wilcox Putnam, who was credited with the film's screenplay.  

Putnam wrote a nine-page "treatment" with a main character based on the real historical figure Alessandro Cagliostro, an18th century would-be magician. 

In Putnam's tale, Cagliostro revives a 3000-year-old corpse.  Universal used their talented script-fixer and in-house utility man called Richard Schayer. 

Schayer helped bring the world the film "Night World," featuring future Frankenstein / Mummy Boris Karloff as a tuxedo-clad baddie with a firm handshake and a fake smile for everyone. 

Richard Schayer's resume also included a film adaptation of a novel by Norma Lorimer. The author was to 1920s Egyptian themed romance  what Stephanie Meyer  once was for vampire / werewolf fic.  Three of Lorimer's books became films, as film site IMDb tells me. 

So before "The Mummy," Richard Schayer had helped shape Norma Lorimer's novel There Was a King in Egypt into the romantic film "The Lure of Egypt."

Schayer came back years later to recruit screenwriters and to work with Putnam to transform the tale of an Italian magician who revives the dead with injections of nitrates into a plot centering on the high priest Kharis's mastery of magic ritual in "The Mummy."

The image above is from "Meet the Mummy," a book for young readers in a series based on the Universal monsters. Movies don't always need to be sourced from books, but pedrsonally I often need books to help me understand and appreciate the movies. 

Next week: The start of a new series on books which became films

Note: The image of Evelyn Nesbit used in this post came from this history blog.

                             Garbo