What movies were better than their books?

Entertainment Weekly has a list of 23 disappointing movie adaptations. I must say, what a useless list. The films on the list could have been joined by hundreds of films - most of these felt like just personal gripes by the writes. Nearly every single movie made from a book is worse than its source material. It's the nature of adaptation. You leave things out, you have to change things, it's what needs to happen. Look at the first two Harry Potter films as examples of films that follow their source material to the letter. I consider them awful. Once they started to change things for the third film onwards that the Potter films became... ok.

Anyway, digression aside. A far more interesting (and shorter) list would surely be which movies are better than their source material? Out of the top of my head, some frequently mentioned ones would be the likes of The Godfather (Pauline Kael described Puzo's novel as trash - though I've also heard it described as a masterpiece. Guess I'll need to read it before passing judgement), Psycho (I guess, didn't Hitchcock buy up all the copies and hide them so he could keep his ending a secret?), Fight Club (Well, I hated the novel - the novelist even admitted that Fincher's ending was better), M*A*S*H (paraphasing Altman, the novel by Richard Hooker was awful - full of racism and sexism), Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick completely changed the tone. The novel (Red Alert) was meant to be completely serious), The Shining (Kubrick again - King hated Kubrick's version and made his own inferior version)... That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Time to search for some actual lists...

This New York Times article from 2005 is interesting... mainly for the introduction.

"Honestly, I much prefer the book," a young-looking François Truffaut says, comparing his film "Jules and Jim" to the novel that inspired it. In an old television interview included on the recent DVD of the film, Truffaut recalls finding Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 novel in a second-hand bookshop. "It made me sad to think it did something films couldn't do," he said of the book, which mesmerized him. "In a movie, if a woman loves two men, one man is nice and the other isn't."

He did more than figure out how to translate that blameless story of a femme fatale whose love swerved back and forth between two best friends; it became his masterpiece. Truffaut succeeded so well that today it's easy to say: "Jules and Jim" was a novel?

This 2003 blog has a post about it. Another 2003 blog post talks about the Lord of the Rings movies and this cracked article here also has a list.