Joyce's The Dead was made into an exceptional screen version

In the latter case the Coen brothers have gone out of their way to adapt the novel rather than remake Rosetta Stone the John Wayne classic. 7 Days and The Social Network were also adapted from literary sources, albeit non-fiction ones. Barney's Version might stand as a textbook demonstration of the pitfalls, as well as the rewards, of transferring literary material to the screen. It is an entertaining, funny, well-crafted film. It broadly adheres to the narrative highlights of its source material and was obviously made out of love and reverence for Richler, both as a writer and as a Canadian public figure. (Friends and younger members of his family appear in walk-on roles.) And yet there is no getting away from the fact that it is radically unfaithful to the tone and the narrative strategies of the novel. Richler's long, complex, tricksy novel is probably unfilmable. It's a construct, which in Truffaut's phrase, "has already found its definitive form", and any attempt to transfer it to another medium is doomed to do no more than skim the surface. More faithful adaptations can be found at the other end of the literary spectrum in shorter literary works. Joyce's The Dead was made into an exceptional screen version by director John Huston. The story itself is an odd, beautifully misshapen thing. Roughly 40 of its 50 pages are devoted to a detailed description of the annual Christmas party of two elderly Dublin sisters and Huston follows this narrative contour with absolute fidelity. From the early 1900s, literature and film became storytelling bedfellows, and it must be for this reason that nearly all the best Rosetta Stone Language adaptations are of modern books, while attempts at doing the pre-th-century novel on celluloid usually end up as mummification rather than reinvention. (As always, there are exceptions: I have a soft spot for Tony Richardson's Tom Jones and John Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd, although these are both really swinging '60s romps in period costume.) Joseph Losey's 1967 Accident, with Dirk Bogarde and Michael York, presents another example of modernist literature and cinema conjoining as if made for one another. Nicholas Mosley's novel, published in 1965, must have seemed gleamingly strange and original at the time. Today it feels even more so. Harold Pinter adapted it and wrote probably the best of his produced screenplays. We seem, in fact, to have a case of novelist and adapter so in sync with each other that a sort of symbiosis starts to operate. The thought and speech rhythms of Mosley's central character Stephen, an Oxford philosophy don, seem to have seeped into Pinter's consciousness. Moreover, Pinter appears to be so tuned in to Rosetta Stone American English Mosley's cadences that he is able to transpose some of his dialogue verbatim and then improve upon it.