I recently read Robert L. Pike's Mute Witness (actually it
was a movie tie-in paperback retitled Bullitt). It had been
several decades since I'd seen the movie and, to tell you the
truth, all I really remembered was the car chase in and
around San Francisco, so I came to the book relatively
fresh.
I was a bit surprised to find that the book is set in New
York and started wondering where the car chase was going to
be. There wasn't one. Instead I got a pretty tight police
procedural that reads very fast, although the degree to which
this previously, by all accounts, by-the-book cop stretched
the rules in this case was sometimes a bit suspect. All in
all, though, a very satisfying read with a well drawn main
character.
So I watched the movie. It was interesting to see the changes
that were made. First, the locale was shifted. Second, a
major subplot was deleted, and the rules were stretched more
than broken. Everything was stripped down (except for a young
Jacqueline Bisset, alas, who played the added-in small role
of the cop's girlfriend). The book was very detailed about
what was going on in the cop's mind and investigation. The
movie had long spaces with no words whatsoever, using just
visuals. In other words, each played to its medium's
advantages, which rendered them equally satisfying.
One other thing: the movie changed a few names. Clancy became
Bullitt, of course, I guess to make it harder, more catchy.
The name change I found most interesting, though, was that of
the two brothers in the
"Organization." In the book, they were Rossi. However, the
movie drops the "i," making the name less Italian (though the
roles were still played by actors whose names and looks were
Italian). And they changed one of the cop's names from
whitebread to Italian. I don't remember Italian
anti-defamation leagues starting until a few years later,
with The Godfather movies. Were the studios already answering
complaints about the stereotyping of Italians as mobsters in
the '60s? Man, they really lost that battle.
Mark
ps -- As for the rumors that 6 hubcaps came off the Charger
during the chase scene, I counted 4 (although two other bits
go flying off the car that could be mistaken for
hubcaps).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 31 Dec 2006 EST