The movie Quentin Tarantino thinks is better than the “fucking terrible” book
The page-to-screen pipeline has always been one of cinema’s most fruitful, not to mention one of the most inconsistent. The quality of adaptations may vary, but Quentin Tarantino was nonetheless shocked to discover that a movie he loved was inspired by a book he absolutely hated.
For the most part, Tarantino hasn’t been beholden to the work of others when crafting his own filmography, with Jackie Brown the exception that proves the rule. Other than bringing Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch to cinemas in his own inimitable style, the filmmaker’s stories have come directly from his own mind, even if he’s been influenced by countless others along the way.
If the average cinephile was tasked to name their favourite release of 1939, then it stands to reason that most answers would cover the expected candidates. After all, that was the year Victor Fleming changed the face of the industry twice, when Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz both arrived to transformative fanfare.
It was also the year of Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington with James Stewart on iconic form, Basil Rathbone’s feature debut as Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Busby Berkeley’s timeless musical Babes in Arms with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and John Ford’s Stagecoach giving John Wayne a star-making central role.
However, Tarantino has never been one to bow to convention and instead opted for a swashbuckler. Derived from the final chapters of Alexandre Dumas’ The Vicomte de Bragelonne, The Man in the Iron Mask saw screenwriter George Bruce and director James Whale inject the narrative with their own creative flourishes. So many, in fact, that the two-time Academy Award winner regretted heading to the source.
“My favourite movie of 1939 is The Man in the Iron Mask,” he told Bill Maher. “It’s based on a very famous Alexandre Dumas novel. It’s a pretty famous story. In ’39, they hired this really terrific screenwriter named George Bruce to take the novel and turn it into a movie, and he did. That’s the movie that I like.”
Tarantino blindly accepted that the film was a faithful adaptation, seeing as it would go on to serve as the inspiration for further movies released in 1977 and 1998, which followed the outline of their 1939 predecessor, only to make the mistake of assuming they were cut from identical cloth.
“Because I like the story so much, and I like a couple of other versions of it, I decide to read the book,” he continued. “The book is fucking terrible.” Tarantino isn’t alone in being hoodwinked by The Man in the Iron Mask, with each new spin on Dumas’ story taking its cues more from the 1939 feature instead of the author’s writing, a distinction he was completely oblivious to until the novel opened his eyes to the truth.
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