A Man With An Agenda

This collects 18 stories that were later made into classic films and it was enjoyable even if I'd only seen five: 'Freaks!', 'Psycho', 'Rear Window', 'Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House', and 'It's A Wonderful Life'. And I suppose you could count the 1980s remake of 'The Fly' with Jeff Goldblum, but from the story I can tell they covered very different ground.

From the short list that I've seen you can already tell the collection is pretty diverse, ranging from Horror to Drama, Suspense, and Satire, along with Westerns, Science Fiction, and Romance.

I enjoyed everything in here and the stories I had seen the film versions of gave me a a great perspective on the influence of a director or writer's vision on a project. "The Real Bad Friend" is almost unrecognizable as Psycho, while "Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle" had its teeth removed along with its battlements when made into '...Dream House'. 'It's A Wonderful Life' on the other hand, seems a perfect progression from the slim "The Greatest Gift."

Almost all of the stories, like "The Day of Atonement," "The Wisdom of Eve," and "Night Bus" make me want to see their film interpretations: 'The Jazz Singer', 'All About Eve', and 'It Happened One Night'. I've never been a fan of westerns, but I can see how the stories that became 'Stagecoach' and 'High Noon' became classics of the genre.

What this book lacked was more background on the stories themselves, each story was given a page or two introduction - almost all of which was devoted to details on the movies. This got a little irritating as I wanted to know more about these authors, all cited as prolific, but most of whom I'd never heard of.

But, in this age of Google and Wikipedia I suppose I shouldn't be too picky. The book ends with a "selected short list" of 41 other stories made into classic films, from 'The Hustler' to 'The Thing'. I'm going to have to seek out a few of those, too.