Tintin Forums

Thanks Balthazar, and an interesting point about comedies perhaps being more open to original screenplays than drama.
Interestingly several of the original dramas on your list are (to me) really pastiches of other movie traditions, which may come from literary traditions: Star Wars is avowedly a distillation of Flash Gordon/ Buck Rogers cartoons and serials and Asimov's Foundation Trilogy/ Robots (and Foundation is acknowledged by Asimov to have been inspired by Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire); Indiana Jones makes use of the Lash LaRue Saturday serial format and such, and E.T. is getting on for Lassie/ Flika/ Old Yeller...
But as you say, so much of Chaplin, Keaton, L&H, Harold Lloyd, down to the canon of Woody Allen are original (I'm suddenly reminded by a little voice at the back of my head that Keaton made Seven Chances, a re-make of Seven Keys to Baldpate, adapted by George "Yankee-Doodle-Boy" M. Cohan from a story by Earl Derr Biggers.
While it isn't original, it may also not be a masterpiece (your criterion above), save that it does have a man being chased by a huge boulder - did that influence Spielberg too, I wonder?).
I'm also wondering if more films actually come from sources which we now forget; the huge number of outlets for short stories in magazines and dime novels surely drove many films that we don't think of as adaptations at all - as you say Some Like it Hot, is an adaptation of Fanfaren der Liebe, which came from a story.
Casablanca may be the most famous example of this, as it was a huge hit as a film based on a play that failed to find a backer, Everybody Stops at Rick's.


Well, I do admire his ability to write, especially in short forms - his TimeTwisters in 2000AD, for example, and his For the Man Who Has Everything in Superman Annual Nº11; however, I'm not at all certain about his longer-format material.

Watchmen (the comic) starts really well, but meanders about ineffectually in places, and the trans-dimensional-psychic-squid-monster ending was just sooo disappointing at the time. I'm old enough to have been buying it as it came out in issue format, and after waiting so long, through delays and whatnot, it was a tremendous let down).

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (again the comic) also suffered from not being as good as it thought it was - other writers have done far better teams of historical/ fictional characters: Riverworld did it earlier, and Kim Newman does it much better than anyone else in his Anno Dracula books.

But I really do respect Mr. Moore for his eloquent advocacy of what comics can do and can be, and for his modest expression of his just trying to do better as he goes along.

My reservations of the book I outline above; the movie, well it perhaps suffers from being almost too slavish a staging of the comic - but in an impressive way, if that isn't too self-contradicting.

It makes as much of an effort to re-stage the look of the book as say Girl with a Pearl Earring did to recreate Vermeer - which is a lot.

Unfortunately this often results in the three-dimensional actors/characters standing around, in the poses of their two-dimensional originals, delivering the speech bubbles, as it were, without getting a cinematic vernacular of its own going.

Other draw-backs are only average acting, some really poor make-up and wigs (you really can't have a 42 year old man play his character's seventeen year old version and expect it to work, no matter how good an actor), and really ho-hum original soundtrack that so wants to be Vangelis doing Blade Runner - and isn't (although the stand-out exceptions are the extraordinary, beautiful, opening credit montages set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They are A-Changin'", and the re-working of Dylan's Desolation Row by My Chemical Romance)...

My take on Watchmen (the book):
I read it a few weeks ago, and it is still sticking with me. It is very gory and grim, so I wouldn't call it enjoyable, but it is a masterpiece of superhero comics, and is probably the closest that medium will ever get to being "literary." The use of the comic-book format for telling a story was excellent, and the symbolism and characters were larger than life, as you might say. However, this is off the subject, but I will add that I definitely do not want to see the movie.

I'm really excited about the Tintin film. I don't see why you don't even want to give it a chance!

Since there were some movies not based on books that were listed, just as a counterpoint, I would like to offer a different list
Schindler's List
The Godfather
The Wizard of Oz
Gone with the Wind
Vertigo
Jean de Florette
La gloire de mon père (this and the one above are excellent French movies based on Marcel Pagnol's work)
Cyrano de Bergerac
Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre

All of these are based on books, and were either critical or popular successes, if not both, and in some instances, Oscar winners.


Let's see, there are 3 Tintin movies not based on books: Toison d'or, Oranges bleues, Lac aux requins).
Hergé was somewhat involved with the first one, but not the other two. As a result, both Oranges and Lac don't feel right: the characters are not themselves, there's no logic to their actions, and the tone of the story feels definitely childish.

I'm happy that they start by adapting Hergé's stories, rather than making another mess like the above mentioned movies. The resulting movie might not be as good as the books, but they can not be anywhere as awful as the '60's Belvision cartoons.

So, yes, I will go see the movie, and will reserve judgement until I've seen it.

Doesn't that slightly contradict itself?
The Belvision cartoons (which I have to say I like: I saw them as a child, and they led me into loving the books, so they never did me anything but good, and I enjoy them for that) were based on the books of Hergé while he was still alive, and even that didn't stop them being "awful" by your terms.

Why would adapting the books into fundamentally new stories (which the amalgamation of Crab/ Unicorn/ Rackham must be), without input from Hergé, guarantee that they will be better? Couldn't they be as guilty of making the characters not themselves, and the stories childish?

I don't actually disagree with your opinion, and I am looking forward to the results of the new movies, I'm just not certain that the flow of your reasoning does it for me.

Mind you, I like the Belvision cartoons and Lake of Sharks, and Golden Fleece, so perhaps I just have a low threshold of enjoyment...? ;-)
Try as I might, I've not got into Blue Oranges... yet. But I am sure that I will try again...! ;-)

I guess it does.

I was going with the premise that Spielberg/Jackson intend to be as faithful as possible to the Hergé universe, based on them being fans (and on Jackson being faithful to LORT). I guess what I meant was that, having a movie done by fans of the original work, even if it isn't all that good, cannot be as bad as so-called adaptations which made no attempt at preserving Hergé's style or stories.

But I'd still rather see adaptations by admirers of the work, even if that adaptation does not live up to expectations, than somebody do a hack job of writing a bad original story, like was done for Les Oranges Bleues, and, granted to a lesser extent, Le lac aux requins.

I think my feeling comes from being disappointed by too many bad Sherlock Holmes movies and reading too many non-Conan Doyle Holmes stories that just did not get the characters right. Since I've seen what inferior work can be done by subsequent authors, I'd rather stick to the Tintin cannon than having new stories by people who don't live up to Hergé's standard.

I hope that clarifies what I was trying to say. :-)

Thanks for taking the time to do that - I see exactly where you are coming from now!
As someone else who has been irked more than somewhat by more than a few poor Sherlock pastiches, I know precisely what you mean, although by the same token when written with real care and attention to detail they can be very good indeed (for example, Denis O. Smith's "The Adventure of the Purple Hand" in Richard Lancelyn Green's anthology, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes); so let's hope Jackson and Spielberg fall into that camp, and you're proven correct!

I'll concede that there are exceptions. "Murder on the Orient Express" starring Albert Finney is extremely better than the book, but then again it is not too difficult too to improve on Agatha Christie.

Also I much prefer the TV adaptation of "Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy". I found Le Carré's original story rather heavy going - though I might try it again some time.


Have you seen the animated film version of "Prisoners of the Sun"? It was enough to make you weep until the house was a swimming pool!


Was it that much of a blow? After all, much of "Watchmen" is about how a nuclear war is on the brink and this is the way to prevent it; much like the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended WW2.

I have seen it, but I'm not sure what you mean. It was all right.

Yes, at the time it was.
I understood that the squid was being used to simulate an external menace, which could draw the world together rather than have the warring nations fight each other - so far so good. Unfortunately it was also required an extraneous sub-plot about disappearing writers, special effects people and a hidden island, as well as an uncharacteristically poorly drawn ludicrously psychedelically coloured fake trans-dimensional-exploding-psychic-squid-thing, and that just didn't have the "reality" of the rest of the story, wheich had gone out of its way to ground the ludicrous tropes of comic-book heroes, such as costumes, secret identities and gadget-packed vehicles, and - in Dr Mahnattan - actual super-power, in a world more like our own.

The film (to its credit) comes up with a far more tidy resolution, involving the need to rid the Earth of Doctor Manhattan (as per the book), and unite the nations of the world (as per the book), without resorting to the hidden island, the lost technicians and trans-dimensional-exploding-psychic-squid-thing. Everything used to frame the new finalé is basically there in the original, it's just presented more efficiently (although if you see it, watch for the very subtle in-joke when the devices are activated - there is a "hidden" squid for the purists... The "squid" still does, in truth, do it... Dave Gibbons has actually completed pages for this alternative outcome, in the manner of the comic, to show the film-maker how he would have done it on the page.


I'd have thought that the Finney Murder on the Orient Express was pretty much a text-book case of putting exactly what's in the book on the screen; it doesn't tinker with anything that I can recall, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

Finney as it happens is often said by critics to have been miscast, but frankly I think he's excellent, and can't see on what basis he is anything other than great.

As for being not difficult to improve on, I think that Agatha Christie's expertise lies in making her writing appear simple. Even the best pastiche Christie is worse than the usual new Holmes, so, in my opinion, she is a very hard act to better at what she does (and always fair to the reader in presenting facts and allowing the solution to be drawn - another very difficult task).

To get back on topic, the revising of Watchmen, and the improvement to the plot, is something to bear in mind: a skilful script could actually improve on the source material in the Tintin albums, and create "new" adventures out of the existing material that Hergé would have been proud of.