Midway (1976) Novelization

Based on the 1976 film written by Donald S. Sanford and directed by Jack Smight. It starred Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, James Colburn, Glenn Ford, Hal Holbrook, Toshiro Mifune, Robert Mitchum, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner and Edward Albert.

Once again, I've devoted time to an old novelization based on nostalgia. I have strong memories of watching this film on TV back in the late 70's. Growing up it was always on TV so over the years I watched it many times. Is it a good movie? Well, it's a decent movie, let's leave it at that. Imagined as a World War II movie with a star-studded cast a la THE LONGEST DAY or A BRIDGE TOO FAR, it is mostly populated by stock players from the Universal TV family. Still, we do get Charlton Heston, Robert Mitchum and Henry Fonda.

The story is inherently interesting: it depicts THE pivotal sea battle between the Allies and Japan in the Pacific. The loss was devastating to the Japanese, and although they soldiered on, the losses they incurred in this battle ensured their eventual defeat, nuclear bomb or no. There is high drama with leaders being decisive and taking chances and the overall power of the battle comes across well.  What's more, the personalities of the people involved come through. Fonda's portrayal of Admiral Nimitz effectively conveys the enormous risk he took directing the remains of the U.S. Navy to Midway, more or putting Hawaii at risk in the process.

There is a fictional plot involving Heston and his son that is less interesting, but it also serves as a way to bring up how American of Japanese descent were imprisoned after Pearl Harbor.  Everybody tries hard for the most part, and the complex story is told in a clear fashion.

What is a definite mood killer, however, is the bland work of just about all of the TV actors. Some of the Japanese characters use their normal American accents and the mixture between them and, say, Toshiro Mifune's broken English is jarring at times.

Almost all of the battle footage is vintage World War II footage. This works surprisingly well in fact, but the decision to use footage like that was based on how much it would cost to produce acceptable visual effects. The penny-pinching isn't horrible, but not because they had the film's best interest at heart. And this is ultimately the knock against MIDWAY—it is a decidedly low rent "big" movie.

Still, I like it and will continue to watch it.

This novelization was written by the listed author of the screenplay. He obviously knows his stuff and the book, minus the subplot with Charlton Heston and Edward Albert, is a pretty accurate retelling of the events.  It is clear, however, that his screenplay was worked on by others as the final film has more humor than is in the book.

Excerpt:

Along "battleship row" at Pearl Harbor, the jagged outlines of the sunken vessels thrust their accusing fingers out of the bay, a grim reminder to a once complacent, overconfident nation. The easygoing camaraderie of its officer corps, characterized by Admiral Yamamoto as a socializing elite too preoccupied with their clubs to give serious attention to the war, had disappeared.

A new man had taken over CINCPAC Headquarters. He was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, recently appointed Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet and Commander in Chief Pacific Ocean Area. His first task had been to tighten ship.

Uniforms, now, were smarter and more aggressively correct. Salutes were edged with an overt display of discipline. There was a sense of direction, an air of urgency. The wounded giant was stirring and gathering his strength.

The navy-gray jeep sped through the simmering heat-waves which rose from the hot asphalt, its radio antenna whipping the air as it headed toward the huge concrete blockhouse. From the radio came the nasal twang of America's dean of newsmen, H. V. Kaltenborn.

"Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle led the raid with a force of sixteen B-25's and an all-volunteer crew of airmen. Most of the planes carried three five hundred-pound demolition bombs and single incendiary clusters which were dropped on oil stores, factory areas, and on some of the military installations of Tokyo. A few planes went on to make minor strikes on Kyoto, Yokohama, and Nagoya, with one bomb hitting the Japanese aircraft carrier Ryujo.

"News of the raid has had a most heartening effect on American morale and the morale of our allies, while at the same time constituting a blow to the prestige of the Japanese."

Captain Matt Garth was at the wheel, a tall, angular man in his late forties, with a sharp, aquiline face and piercing blue eyes. His shoulders were squarely set, his waist kept slim by daily exercise. There was a look about him that, while not quite hostile, seemed to indicate an intolerance of human frailty, and more---an acute dislike for what he liked to call muddy thinking.

He was in a furious temper now. He snapped off the radio, swung the wheel hard over, and skidded to a stop at the blockhouse. Outside the ten-foot-high, barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence which encircled the blockhouse was a small guard station. It was manned by a young Marine lieutenant and two enlisted men. They were armed with tommy guns and were grinning as they watched Matt Garth climb out of the jeep and approach them.

Patrick (1978) Novelization

From the back of the book:

THREE YEARS IN A DEADLY COMA-- AND ONE KNOWS HE’S WATCHING.

Three years ago Patrick electrocuted his mother and her lover in the bathtub. After two years of unresolved scientific observation, he still lies in a coma in the intensive care ward of a private clinic, a medical enigma, is body is in perfect condition. His eyes are wide open.

In every other way he is dead. When beautiful, blonde Kathy Jacquard becomes Patrick’s private nurse, strange things begin to happen. Doors and windows open and slam shut by themselves. Her apartment is brutally ravaged. Her husband disappears. A doctor almost drowns after flirting with her at a party.

Then the electric typewriter next to Patrick’s bed comes alive and types a terrifying message.

HELP ME. TRYING TO KILL ME. TONIGHT.

Patrick is not dead.

And only Kathy knows.

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What do we want from a novelization?  I mean, when it comes down to it, why do we read them in the first place?  From a historical perspective, novelizations were meant as a form of advance advertising for the film's release.  Thus, they were considered disposable and so by and large not much effort was put into them.  Granted, I am painting with a very broad brush here.  A good writer can make a very readable novelization from a poor script, just as a poor writer can make a forgettable novelization from a great script.  Historically, many writers used novelizations as a quick way to make a buck.

I started reading novelizations when I realized that sometimes they included things cut out of the final film.  Most novelizations can be counted on to at least offer a glimpse of some version of the screenplay prior to normal changes that may occur after production begins.  The novelizations that truly stand out are the ones that go the extra mile and flesh out details and fix problems with the screenplay itself.  Depending on the legal terms with the film company, this may or may not be prohibited.  I once had a brief interaction with Steven McDonald, the author of the novelization for the 1997 film Event Horizon.  He told me that he wanted to expand the story for the novelization but the film company nixed it and told him to conform to the final released film. On the flip side of that Orson Scott Card expanded James Cameron's The Abyss with Cameron's full support.

Patrick was created by a group of Australian and New Zealand filmmakers looking to get into the world market.  At this point in time the Australian film industry had not quite taken off yet, but Patrick (and Mad Max) would go a long way to proving to the world that there was money to made down under.  Patrick was intended solely as "entertainment" but the people involved--director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Everett De Roche and especially the cast--brought a high level of craftmanship to the film.  Everyone involved was trying to prove they could make a good film--it remains a very enjoyable film almost fifty years later.

But it is a low budget film that was written and made very quickly, so it is not perfect. One aspect that I never really considered until the novelization addressed it was exactly how Patrick ended up in a comatose state.  The film doesn't really offer an answer, but the novelization does. PATRICK was written by an experienced writer and is way above average as a novelization. The author fills in the considerable gaps of logic in the original screenplay while staying absolutely true to the spirit of the plot. He makes the characters more believable and the action more justified.  

Excerpt:

Patrick had decided to kill his mother. There was no other way. She had to die.

The decision had come to him with surprising ease, within minutes of his arrival at the dark and empty house in Collingwood. He had stripped half-naked in his room, turned on the electric radiator and laid down on the bed, curled up in the foetal position, briefly returning to the warmth and silence and security of the womb. A retreat.

His own bed always had that effect on him---and he had slept in everything from a humidicrib, after he had entered this life two months prematurely, through bassinettes, cots, bunks, camp stretchers, to sleeping-bags, normal beds and, once, a waterbed. Countless times in his life his bed had been the only refuge.

No one believed that he actually remembered the time he had spent in that humidicrib, monitored by tubes and wires and tiny electrodes taped to his barely-living body. They said it was post-association of images gleaned from pictures and films seen in later life of premature babies struggling for survival under plastic, tended day and night by nurses and doctors. They said he could not possibly remember that time.

He let them smile smugly in the assurance of their convictions. But Patrick knew. He remembered every detail---the fight for each tiny breath in an effort to expand minute lungs and oxygenate thin blood; the jarring of his frail frame with each concussion of the pulsing heart not much bigger than a fifty-cent piece; the traumatic terror and pain of full-sized needles violating his paper-thin skin; seeing the world as a succession of peering, expressionless faces, eyes above sterile masks, gloved fingers prodding, probing. . .

He had not gained those memories from films. He had lived the experience.

Just as he had lived that other experience ten years later, the one that had never left him, the one that had ruined his life. The one that made him decide to kill his mother.

Something had happened to her money, the monthly cheques she lived on suddenly stopped coming. He never knew the details, only that he saw her grow old in a week while she lived in hope that there had merely been some delay in the mail. Then, after the realization that there would be no more cheques, she had taken to crying a lot and drinking more. They moved from the old house in Kew to a small flat in Prahran and finally to an Abbotsford bed-sitter, where he had to sleep on a camp stretcher beside his mother's huge brass bed.

He knew she always had a lot of men visiting her, even vaguely understood what happened when they went into her bedroom. But, in a room of his own, lost in his imaginings, emulating Robinson Crusoe or the father who he had never known, the father who had deserted his mother even before he was born, it had not concerned Patrick.

In the bed-sitter, it was different. He couldn't help but hear---and see---what went on in the big double bed. It hadn't bothered him unduly. Normally it meant only about twenty minutes of giggling, fumbling and mild thrashing about, after which he could go back to sleep.