You'd be wrong, and it would be a different End of the Affair than you might think.
In December I read Graham Greene's celebrated 1951 novel The End of the Affair, which was recommended to me by a friend who called it his favorite book. Since I'd actually borrowed his copy, I moved it straight to the top of my reading list in order to avoid one of those "perpetual loan" situations we all dread.
I really liked the book. Not a personal favorite maybe, but quite a quick read and quite an anguished look inside the head of a narrator full of jealousy and loathing, which I hadn't remembered being the default condition of Ralph Fiennes' character in the 1999 Neil Jordan film, where he was opposite Julianne Moore. Nor had I remembered the story was so much about spiritual yearning, involving a promise to God and then a desperate urge not to believe in that God in order to break that promise.
Usually when I finish reading a book that has a well-known film version, I watch the film version pretty soon afterward, whether I'd already seen it or not. Therefore, I expected to queue up the Jordan film, which I'd also quite liked, pretty soon after the start of January.
That being my busy time of year in terms of viewings, though, I hadn't gotten to it until Sunday night.
But when I couldn't find it on any of my streaming services, including the streaming service everyone has (Internet Archive), I turned to iTunes, where I noticed not one, but two filmed versions of Greene's novel to choose from.
Instead of choosing the one I'd seen, I spontaneously decided to choose the one I hadn't seen.
That's the 1955 version directed by Edward Dmytryk whose poster you see above. It stars the always fascinating Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson (whom I've seen plenty of times, but whose films I could not identify without the assistance of IMDB) and perhaps most importantly in terms of clinching the decision for me, Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars.
And I think I liked it even more than Jordan's version.
I wasn't sure that would be the case at the start. Dmytryk's film, from a screenplay by Lenore Coffee, tells the story of Henry and Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix chronologically, which is a departure from a book published only four years earlier. In the book, we meet narrator Bendrix, appropriately, after his affair with Sarah has already ended. From my limited memory of Jordan's film, that's where that film starts as well -- and perhaps one of the reasons Jordan wanted to adapt the material was to correct the "mistake" made by Dmytryk and Coffee. It definitely seemed like it would be the less courageous choice, to feed this classic novel, which at the time was really only a contemporary novel, to audiences in the most common chronology available that they would be able to understand most easily.
By the end of the film, though, I was so wrapped up in the characters, in the performances, and in the choices made to adapt the book that I found myself giving the film 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, half a star higher than the admittedly flawed 4-star rating for Jordan's film -- flawed because I gave it out retroactively, some dozen years after I'd seen it.
Is this one of those recency bias things, or a case of me already trying to stack the deck for next year's "ten best movies I saw in 2024 that weren't from 2024?" Or another sort of bias, the "I just read this book and therefore would be more favorably inclined than average toward an adaptation of it" sort of bias?
Possibly. But Coffee and her director made all the right moves here, which I won't discuss in detail because it's likely you haven't recently read this book or seen either version of the movie, so it would fall on deaf ears.
One thing I am wondering, though, is whether this means there will be one more Affair in my near future. Now it feels like I must rewatch Jordan's version. If comparing a recently read book and its film adaptation is a good exercise on a blog -- or really, just a good cinephile exercise that helps expand your appreciation of the screenwriting process -- then comparing that book with two different adaptations, separated in time by 44 years, is even better.
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