6 Movie Adaptations That Wisely Cut Ridiculous Details | Cracked.com

6 Movie Adaptations That Wisely Cut Ridiculous Details | Cracked.com

I don't agree that the Hollywood changes to The Natural were necessarily wise, or that the book's details were ridiculous, but I agree with the article's claim that the movie's ending is very different from what Malamud intended.

"Malamud's original novel was written as a King Arthur allegory, where a noble hero is eventually undone by his own misdeeds. However, the movie came out in the early 1980s, a decade in which nobody was interested in feeling bad about themselves, so they changed the ending to pretty much the exact opposite of what Malamud had written. After seeing the movie, the author supposedly said, "At last, I'm an American writer." Considering that his later novels touched on such cheery subjects like the hard lives of American immigrants and anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia, we're going to say that comment probably wasn't a compliment."

One thing that made the novel work was its portrayal of the cyclical nature of fame and life. As a brash young pitching prospect, Roy Hobbs pulled off a miraculous strikeout of the Babe Ruth character, "The Whammer." Years later, Hobbs had turned into a slugging outfielder who became the Babe Ruth of his own era. Like Ruth before him, he was a pitcher who became the greatest hitter of his time. Like Ruth/Whammer, he too got old and struck out in a critical at bat against the next "natural," a brash young pitcher who was like a young Hobbs or a young Ruth. So it is that we age, and others take our places. The movie completely lost the point about the inevitability of the seven ages of man, replacing it with a feel-good ending in which Hobbs defeats the young upstart with a game-winning blast into the light towers, thus setting off an impromptu fireworks-like display backed by stirring music, yadda yadda.

I like the novel's version of the story, but I can understand why the movies didn't want a philosophical feel-bad ending. They wanted to make a profitable movie, not an arthouse thought-piece. Oh, sure, I was a lit major and should defend the intellectual integrity of the novel's cynical, realistic ending, but I'm also a financial realist and a sentimental wimp, so I have no problem with the film's ending. I may even have gotten a little dust in my eye when Redford hit that winning homer.