Making up any list of modern classics always poses a problem. A definitive classic supposedly survives the test of time; it shouldn't date, it appeals to successive generations - and although the first half of the 20th century is now receding, who is to say that most of the Beats won't go the way of the Victorian Spasmodics? And then, with the recently extended copyright law giving an author a full posthumous span of three score years and 10 in which his or her estate can collect royalties before falling into the public domain, no single publisher is in a position to select freely anyhow.
One of the prime marks of recognition of a book as 'classic' in the century of cinema has been the award of a movie adaptation. Sometimes this comes after the book has long been a hallowed part of the literary canon. On the current list Merchant Ivory's grand 1992 Howards End, with Anthony Hopkins, appeared 82 years after the book was published; Coppola's (very free) version of Conrad's 1902 Heart of Darkness, updated to Vietnam in his majestic, suicidal Apocalypse Now, came 77 years later; and John Huston's film of The Dead was 73 years after James Joyce placed it as a troubling, elegiac close to his collection, Dubliners (1914).
After such a gap, there are too often inflated expectations, and an air of hushed reverence before the original: the press releases for the resulting big productions typically spend many more words on the elaborate recreation of period costumes and settings than on the meaning and interpretation of the original book.
Better films tend to be produced, I think, when a bit less of the patina of awe has encrusted itself on the 'classic'. Richard Brook's 1967 drama-documentary version of Truman Capote's 1966 work of 'faction', In Cold Blood, or John Ford's beautiful though flawed 1940 film of Steinbeck's 1939 bestseller of the Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, certainly did not pause to let the sediment stirred up by publication settle so as to decide on the quality of the vintage.
The insatiable appetite of the film industry for stories gets books optioned long before they reach the bookshops. As the 20th century went on, its fiction became more and more influenced by film and film genres, so that one is not surprised to find the adapted authors themselves working on the screenplay - as Graham Greene (with Terence Rattigan) did on the 1947 John Boulting film of his Brighton Rock (1938), released in America as Young Scarface, or as Nabokov did on Kubrick's 1961 Lolita. This tends, except with the most defensive egos, to allow an energising measure of fresh thought and invention to come into the process of refitting a story for the different medium.
We are used to Victorian classics being adapted, often for television in serial form (and thus coming closer to the way Dickens and others would first have found their audience). Conveniently for the adapters, Middlemarch and Our Mutual Friend achieve their poetic or symbolic resonance within a framework of narrative realism and indeed a comparatively melodramatic plot. Eisenstein wrote of the way in which the great silent melodramas of DW Griffith recast the vision of Dickens and made it the idiom of mainstream cinema. The modernist literary classics of the early 20th century, on the other hand, and the works of avant gardists following in their tracks, make a radical challenge to earlier conventions and are seldom rattling good yarns in the same way.
Before watching it, one wonders why Joseph Strick wanted to make his 1967 film of the astonishingly intricate verbal structure called Ulysses, with Milo O'Shea (of the sitcom Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width) as Leopold Bloom; and afterwards one still numbly wonders why - especially given the stiltedly hip updating. Louis Malle's frenetic 1960 customising of Raymond Queneau's playful, compulsively punning novel Zazie in the Metro uses speeded-up motion less amusingly than Dick Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964) and is in David Thomson's words 'a crushingly unfunny film'. Even the great Orson Welles stumbled in 1962 over Kafka's masterpiece The Trial (1925) Ð which one likes to imagine being instantly turned into a German Expressionist silent psychological horror like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919). Welles updates it to include tower blocks and computers, although his version is full of gloriously nightmarish felicities.
Modernist narrative techniques seem to work best in cinema indirectly, when reconfigured and applied to genre subjects, as in John Boorman's fragmented noir Point Blank (1967) or this year's The Limey by Steven Soderbergh Ð whose underrated Kafka (1991) shows his modernist credentials. Less ostentatiously experimental narratives like Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), keeping within realist conventions, working through portrayal of character, and telling a story of coming of age, but none the less a brilliantly poised piece of literary art, do best as films.
But one should not generalise too inflexibly about the relations of books to films. After all, a 50-page novella by Colette about the paradoxically genteel world of Parisian mistresses became a full-blown MGM musical by Vincente Minnelli, Gigi (1958), that was surprisingly faithful. Kipling's Jungle Books (1894-5) became an unforgettable Disney cartoon musical in 1967. And Norman Mailer's spellbinding book The Fight (1975) on the Ali-Foreman 'rumble in the jungle' is obviously an inspiration for the wonderful documentary When We Were Kings by Leon Gast (1996), in which Mailer appears, retelling his story. Indeed, even where the film versions have been successful, these are all cases where it pays to go back to the book.