Comparison Essay: The Big Sleep Novel and Movie

Introduction

The process of making a film from a book is known as adaptation. Over the period of many decades, the film makers have been making films based on the famous books including short stories, biographies, novels and plays (Kvenno, 2013); novels have been the first preference for the film makers for adaptation. A number of differences exist between a novel and the film based on the same novel. This essay compares and contrasts the features of novel Big Sleep written in 1939, with its film version made in 1946.

Preference to Adaptation

The film makers prefer to adapt the stories from the existing best seller books which include short stories, novels, biographies or plays. One of the major reasons why the film makers prefer to use the existing stories instead of writing new is the belief that a best seller book has the capability of being transformed into a block buster film. Secondly; the producers want to save money by using the existing stories instead of spending money to pay the writers who would write a new story. Also, it is a fact that readers of the novels are often found interested to see its adaptation to a movie (Kvenno, 2013).

Differences in a Book and Film

Although the film makers adapt the story from the existing text, the adaptation always remains someone's interpretation of the novel. It depends on the interpreter that what he does or does not include from the text to the film. Similarly, it depends on the person who is responsible for adapting the story, that how does he change the elements of the novel, or reproduce them according to the needs of the movie. Some elements are necessarily changed during the process of adaptation because the mediums of novel and film are totally different, and so do their requirements.

The novel writer has to play with the words, while the film makers have to play with the pictures and their visualization, sequence and many other factors. For example, some elements are added during the process of adaptation because they would become more effective on the screen as they would have been in the novel. The differences between the novels and the films can be summed by saying that the novel writer uses description, narrative, expression of thoughts, dialogues, figurative language and interior monologues. On the other hand, a film maker uses pictures for which he has to mainly consider colours, contrasts and lighting, costumes, make-up and setting, props, actors and their acting which include looks, gestures, and expressions and finally the editing of the pictures. Moreover, the essential element with which the film maker has to deal with the sound; the major considerations about sound include sound effects, environmental sounds, music and language. The Characters in the novel “Big Sleep”

One important difference between the novel and film is the number of characters in both. The film has relatively far shorter time to narrate the story to the audience in comparison to the ...