WELL, THEY GOT 11 RIGHT:

The big 50: A month ago, we asked you to vote for the best ever film made from a novel. The results are in, and we reveal the readers' chart of the top 50 film adaptations. (Peter Bradshaw and Xan Brooks, June 2, 2006, The Guardian)

1. To Kill a Mockingbird
Robert Mulligan (1962)
Adapted by Horton Foote from Harper Lee's 1960 novel

Lee's first (and so far only) novel was a literary sensation, scooping the Pulitzer prize and shifting 2.5m copies in its first year of publication. Clearly the screen version strikes a similar chord. This is a film we cherish in the same way we cherish It's a Wonderful Life, or The Wizard of Oz. Sensitively scripted by Foote, To Kill a Mockingbird spins a vibrant, child's-eye view of adult torments and boasts a career-best turn from Gregory Peck as the iconic Atticus Finch. Needless to say it could all have been so different. Legend has it that Peck only agreed to the role after the producers' first choice, Rock Hudson, turned it down.
Xan Brooks

2 .One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Milos Forman (1975)
Adapted by Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben from the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey

"Which one of you nuts has got any guts?" asks Jack Nicholson in his role as the swaggering Christ figure to the downtrodden inmates at an Oregon mental hospital. Where Kesey's source novel was a hippie-ish allegory on individualism and conformity, Forman's screen version adopted a more earthy, naturalistic approach. But in ditching the book's druggy flavour, Forman earned the author's lifelong enmity. Kesey disowned the movie and went to his grave without ever having seen it.
XB

3. Blade Runner
Ridley Scott (1982)
Adapted by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples from the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick

When Dick remarked that the rough cut of Blade Runner looked exactly as he hoped it would, Scott replied that he had never actually read the book (the title was changed because the studio hated it and pinched one from a book by rival author Alan Nourse). Despite that, his vision of a futuristic melting-pot Los Angeles superbly converts Dick's outlandish worldview into an exotic hybrid of film noir and science fiction. The film is now embraced as a contemporary classic.
XB

4. The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola (1972)
Adapted by Mario Puzo from his 1969 novel

Perhaps this hardly counts as an adaptation: Puzo's novel was equalled and surpassed in originality and importance by the movie version he scripted. In fact, producer Robert Evans bought the film rights to Puzo's book before Puzo had even written it, for $12,500 - to help him out with a gambling debt. The eventual epic about a Sicilian-American crime family in the 10 years after the second world war, with magnificent performances from Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and a thrilling score by Nino Rota, became part of movie history - and real life history, too, with a new generation of hoodlums using the film as a handbook on how to behave.
Peter Bradshaw

5. The Remains of the Day
James Ivory (1993)
Adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from the 1989 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's best-loved novel, a Booker prize-winner, became the best film to come out of Merchant-Ivory productions. Ishiguro's evocation of an emotionally frozen butler, who misguidedly devotes his life to a questionable employer in the prewar years, found a perfect match in Jhabvala and Ivory, who were able to open up the story, furnish it dramatically and visually, and, most importantly, amplify the thwarted romance between the butler and housekeeper: outstanding performances from Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. [...]

13. The Maltese Falcon
John Huston (1941)
Adapted by Huston from the 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett

The notion that Sam Spade, the tough gumshoe, could exist independently of lisping, tightly wound Humphrey Bogart is now quite inconceivable - a tribute both to Bogart's imperishable charisma and this confident adaptation by Huston, who was directing his first movie. The Maltese Falcon is a dark and involved noir, featuring Mary Astor as the heroine, who will play off Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Bogart himself. It doesn't get harder-boiled than this, especially when Bogart snarls to Astor: "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck." Spade's surname has the unforgiving hardness of a gravedigger's shovel.
PB [...]

17. Trainspotting
Danny Boyle (1996)
Adapted by John Hodge from the 1993 novel by Irvine Welsh

Welsh's picaresque tale of Edinburgh junkies was a cult favourite with readers in the early 1990s. Boyle's stylish screen treatment - his follow-up to Shallow Grave, which was also scripted by Hodge, a former hospital doctor - weeded out various subplots and supporting characters, drafted in a cast of bright young things (Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller) and struck gold at the UK box office. These days it's hard not to view Trainspotting as a film of its time; the emblematic picture for the Cool Britannia era that flourished for a brief spell between the second and third Oasis albums.
XB

The rest of their top 20 is pretty bad. Among those that ought to be included:

Shane

Ben Hur

Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Cool Hand Luke

The Wizard of Oz

The Searchers

Gone With the Wind

Bridge on the River Kwai

African Queen

Double Indemnity

From Here to Eternity

Silence of the Lambs

The French Connection

The Princess Bride

Lord of the Rings

The Night of the Hunter

The Exorcist

In the Heat of the Night

Anatomy of a Murder

The Big Sleep

Planet of the Apes

The Three and Four Musketeers

The Count of Monte Cristo

Les Miserables

Mary Poppins

Dr. No

Diary of a Country Priest

Lillies of the Field

Solaris

Spartacus

The Sand Pebbles

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 2, 2006 7:00 AM