Filming great literature

Fahrenheit 451 was a terrible movie...TERRIBLE. The book is one of my all time favorites, and the movie may be one of my all time least favorites. It may have been technically true to the book, but I didn't feel any of the power of the novel while watching the movie. I just found it to be stylized 60s trash, nothing you couldn't get just as well from looking at a Rudi Gernreich fashion spread. I also love Gone With The Wind. I have no idea what IMHO means, but I like War And Peace as well. It is not a good enough film to be as long as it is, but it has a few stunning visuals and really great moments that make it worth sitting through (I admit that I haven't read either book). As far as your central question goes, all I have to say is that if I thought these things through as intently as you do I wouldn't have nearly as much fun reading, or at the movies. 1940's Pride and Prejudice was a great adaptation of a great novel. 1939's Wuthering Heights was a great adaptation of a great novel. 1937's Lost Horizon was a better film than it was a book. Fahrenheit 451 just dosn't measure up. You'd probably disagee with most of what I've said, and I guess we wouldn't get along if we ever met. But you probably wouldn't want to get along with me anyway. I thought Spiderman 2 was a life-changing experience, and that the most recent adaptation of Vanity Fair should have won Oscars.

I don't think we need to be overly purist in our response to films made from great literature. "Wuthering Heights" is an example, in my opinion, of a film that did not stick to the novel but was good anyway. That being said, I also believe that there are some pieces of fiction that cannot truly be represented on the screen, and I think that War and Peace is one of them.

The fundamental problem is that literature and film are two very different media with their own qualities and disadvantages.
On the most obvious level; we wouldn't criticize a painting or even a series of paintings based on a novel for not containing the whole plot. We wouldn't expect an operatic adaptation to retain all the dialogue unchanged.
That would be evidently absurd, yet people criticize a film for not following the plot of even an average length book when the amount of plot in an original film script more closely resembles that of a novella.
What tends to have to go are sub-plots, minor characters and assorted diversions from the story. Cutting all those often necessitates creating composite characters, simplifying motivations, cutting backstory etc, etc. Counter-intuitively this might involve the creation of extra original scenes in order to smooth over the absence of many scenes which were in the book

This condensation is almost simple compared to translating the author's voice into cinema. The novelist has numerous tools for conveying information, including what is going on in character's heads, not least by directly addressing the reader. The scriptwriter usually has only what can be seen and heard by the audience, and what can be reasonably inferred from what they see and hear. The production process adds all the visual, performance and aural elements but if the meaning isn't at least implied in the script it's an uphill battle.
A novelist can make a scene fascinating where visually and aurally nothing much is happening. A film can make a rich emotional experience from a brief single shot which it would be hard to equal in pages of cumbersome prose.

It's often said that adaptations of second-rate books often work better than those of great literature. I think that's unfair.
Books which tend to concentrate on people doing things and saying things (with their thoughts seeping through because of what they say and do) tend to adapt better than books which concentrate on people thinking things but not doing much - for fairly obvious reasons. You can film people doing and saying things but if, in the novel, they are mainly thinking things you have to translate that into action and dialogue - a far harder and possibly doomed task.

In other words, the novel should do what it does well, the film do what it does well - these are usually not the same thing.

Volker Schlondorff was the great example of a director who could take great novels and turn them into fine films: Young Torless, Coup de grace, Un amour de Swann, The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum, etc. I suspect that Hollywood directors like King Vidor just grin and bear it when they are assigned to film classic novels. They'd really prefer to shoot original stories (no English professors to watch out for) which will allow them to express themselves. Can you imagine Nicholas Ray doing a Tolstoy novel? I can't.