Great Scripts, Not So Great Movies

Alfred Hitchcock famously said: “To make a great film you need three things: the script, the script and the script.” However, Hitchcock forgot to add that there are many other things you need as well, especially great directing, great acting and great cinematography because even a great script is not enough on its own to make a great film. 

Here is a collection of five great screenplays that are ultimately greater than the movies that were made from them. That is not to say that those movies are necessarily bad (indeed, at least one of them is almost universally acknowledged as a classic), merely to argue that the finished film was not quite as good as the script it was based on. 

Read More: Good Writing; Bad Writing

House of Gucci (2021)

Directed by Ridley Scott; Screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna, based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Sara Gay Forden 

Ridley Scott is a wonderful director, especially of sci-fi, where he has achieved what the late, great Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records and effectively the creator of modern Manchester, called “the artistic hat-trick” of making three great works: Alien (1979); Blade Runner (1982); and The Martian (2015). However, Scott achieved the artistic equivalent of an own-goal with House of Gucci. 

In many ways, House of Gucci is an excellent film, living up to the subtitle of the non-fiction book it is based on: “A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed.” It has typically fine direction by Scott; a superb ensemble cast, including a revelatory Lady Gaga and an almost equally impressive Jared Leto; and a story that virtually makes it a Godfather or Goodfellas of the fashion industry. 

The insurmountable problem is the inexplicable decision to film this quintessentially Italian story with all of the cast speaking English with Italian accents. The result? “Eesa bullsheet,” as one of these ridiculous-sounding Guccis might themselves put it.

Although it was probably impossible to have made such a high-profile and high-cost film in Italian rather than in English, the solution was obvious: the cast should simply have spoken English with their own (American or British) accents even though they were playing Italians. Such an approach has become increasingly common in recent years, for example in Kenneth Branagh’s BBC TV remake of the Wallander series of Swedish crime novels. Branagh’s British (and British-accented) Wallander is not as good as the superb Swedish-language version, but it is perfectly and easily watchable, in a way that House of Gucci is not. 

There is one way to enjoy House of Gucci without cringing continually at the cod-Italian accents: switch off the volume and switch on the subtitles. Alternatively, you can just read the script. 

Read More: 40 Incredible Movies Based on True Stories

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Macbeth (2015)

Directed by Justin Kurzel; Screenplay by Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie and Todd Louiso, based on the play of the same name by William Shakespeare 

Macbeth is a great gateway to Shakespeare. It is relatively short, extremely fast-paced and has a truly gripping story. Consequently, it has always been one of Shakespeare’s most successful and popular plays. 

And because of its success, popularity and relatively straightforward (for Shakespeare) dialogue, Macbeth has always been among the most filmed of Shakespeare’s plays, with the outstanding screen adaptations including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), which dispenses with the language of the play but retains its unique atmosphere of dread and foreboding, and Roman Polanski’s blood-soaked 1971 version, which almost seemed like an exorcism of the demons caused by Polanski’s own personal tragedy of two years earlier, when his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by members of Charles Manson’s “family” cult. 

There are also less successful screen adaptations of Macbeth, notably Orson Welles’s from 1948, which is ruined by the cod-Scottish accents (they are as ridiculous as the cod-Italian accents in House of Gucci) and the actors’ even more ludicrous headwear, which is more suited to sci-fi than Shakespeare. And much more recently, there has been Michael Fassbender’s performance in the title role of Justin Kurzel’s film adaptation of Macbeth. 

As with House of Gucci and indeed all the films on this list, there is much to recommend Kurzel’s Macbeth, especially the opening, which is a brilliant depiction of a ferocious medieval battle with the Witches watching on. However, what ultimately ruins the film is Fassbender’s performance. Put simply, he is more Madbeth than Macbeth, almost literally going postal (to use the 21st-century vernacular) when he sets out to kill the King and claim the throne himself. Rather than a slow, painful descent into madness, caused by the destruction of his own humanity, Fassbender’s Macbeth seems to go insane almost immediately and the film never fully recovers. Nonetheless, the script is a skillful screen adaptation and of course, the original play is even better. 

Read More: The Great Screenwriters: Part 1 – Shakespeare, The First Screenwriter

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Bringing Out The Dead (1999)

Directed by Martin Scorsese; Screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on the novel of the same name by Joe Connelly 

Bringing Out The Dead is the Scorsese-Schrader collaboration that nobody remembers because it is not a patch on their great films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980). Those films proved that Scorsese and Schrader were one of the greatest ever director-writer partnerships, ranking alongside Powell and Pressburger or Carol Reed and Graham Greene.

However, although their work in Bringing Out The Dead may not be as incendiary as in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (after the passage of two decades, that would have been almost impossible), it is not the main reason the film does not live up to its script. That is down to the casting, or more accurately the miscasting, of Nicolas Cage. 

On Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, Scorsese and Schrader had the actor or on-screen persona they needed, who could portray both quiet desperation and absolute fury. That was Robert De Niro, who was in the middle of probably the second-greatest-ever run of films by any screen actor. (De Niro’s 1970s and early 1980s imperial phase is only exceeded by Marlon Brando’s own imperial phase of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which changed screen acting forever.) By complete contrast, on Bringing Out The Dead Scorsese and Schrader had Nicolas Cage. 

Once upon a time, Nicolas Cage was a great screen actor himself. That was the 1980s, when his stunning (and, crucially, stunningly controlled) performances in films like Rumble Fish (1983) and Birdy (1984) suggested that he was the heir apparent to Brando and De Niro. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, probably starting with David Lynch’s fairly execrable Wild At Heart (1990) (it is certainly execrable in comparison with Lynch’s own masterpieces of the 1970s and 1980s), Cage seemed to lose control of his on-screen performances, was never really reined in by a director and eventually ended up becoming a parody of the great actor he once was. And that process was officially completed with the release of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), a supposedly knowing and even self-mocking parody of the buffoon he had unfortunately become. 

Cage’s performance in Bringing Out The Dead is certainly not his worst performance in a film, but nor is it any good. If De Niro had still been young enough to play a New York ambulance driver haunted by the ghosts of those he had failed to save, Bringing Out The Dead would have been a worthy addition to the Scorsese-Schrader canon. But Cage’s utterly unsubtle performance means that it isn’t. 

Read More: Mysteries of Life: 6 Screenwriting Lessons from Sofia Coppola, Paul Schrader and A24

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Jaws (1975)

Directed by Steven Spielberg; Screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, based on the novel of the same name by Benchley

It may seem like cinematic heresy to include Jaws on this list, but for all the brilliance of the original blockbuster (so named because the queues to see it literally stretched around whole city blocks), there is a strong, even compelling, argument that it is not quite as great as the script it is based on. 

That is because of Jaws itself, or more specifically the mechanical shark used in the film; it was a nightmare to film because it kept malfunctioning, especially when it was actually put into water. Consequently, Spielberg had to brilliantly shoot around it, using only a mechanical fin (which was much smaller, simpler and easier to control than the full fish) or even, crucially, the audience’s imagination to create the illusion of an actual shark.

The result was one of the greatest films ever made, where meticulous characterization and plot development were married to a fabulous premise, namely that a Great White Shark terrorizes a small town dependent upon its beaches for survival. 

It would be more accurate to describe Jaws as four-fifths or even five-sixths of a masterpiece because when the shark finally appears in all its supposed glory, rising out of the water as the fishing boat hunting it slides into the sea, it is undeniably not as impressive as the monstrous creature that Spielberg had created in the audience’s imagination beforehand. Its sheer rubberiness –  read fakeness – is all too obvious and is the only (slight) flaw in an otherwise perfect diamond of a film. 

Perhaps Spielberg should have made a complete virtue out of necessity and never shown the shark above water, simply leaving it to the audience’s imagination to picture it in all its horror and beauty. Or perhaps in time for the film’s 50th anniversary in 2025, digital wizardry and re-editing will finally allow Jaws to have an on-screen shark that is as realistic and terrifying as the film that bears its name. 

Read More: The Hero’s Journey Breakdown: Jaws

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Witness For the Prosecution (1957)

Directed by Billy Wilder; Screenplay by Wilder, Larry Marcus and Harry Kurnitz, based on the story and play of the same name by Agatha Christie

Billy Wilder is one of the greatest film directors ever. However, he is also arguably the ultimate proof that film is a collaborative medium and that no-one, however gifted, ever makes a film, especially a great film, on their own. That is because almost all of Wilder’s finest films were co-written with two great co-writers: first, Charles Brackett, with whom he wrote The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950); and then I.A.L. Diamond, with whom he wrote Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960). In between those great screenwriting partnerships, Wilder made a succession of films that were not nearly as good as his finest films, including Witness For The Prosecution.

Wilder had a great co-writer of sorts on Witness For The Prosecution, namely Agatha Christie, the doyenne of the whodunnit, who had first written it as a story in 1926 and then adapted it for the stage nearly thirty years later in 1953. However, Wilder did not work directly with Christie in adapting the play for the screen. Nevertheless, that is not the main reason that Witness For The Prosecution, for all its commercial success, is rightly not regarded as one of Wilder’s wonders. As with so many of the films on this list, the main reason is the casting, or rather miscasting, and the poor performances that led to. 

There is great acting in Witness For The Prosecution, but it comes almost exclusively from Charles Laughton, for whom it was one of his last films. In his corpulence and wit, he is the embodiment of Sir Wilfred Robarts QC, the legendary lawyer who takes on an apparently indefensible defense case. 

The problem is Laughton’s co-stars. The obvious deficiency is with Tyrone Power, a hugely successful film star of his day who, unfortunately, was not a great actor and that is painfully obvious in almost every scene he shares with Laughton (and there are a lot, as Laughton is defending Power from a charge of murder). However, the great Marlene Dietrich is barely any better, especially when she dons ridiculous make-up and adopts an even more ridiculous Cockney accent (contrary to popular belief, Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins is not the worst in cinema history) to play a supposed star “witness” who can break open the case. 

Even Wilder’s own legendarily deft direction lets him down in Witness For The Prosecution, which often betrays its stage origins, just as Stalag 17 (1953) had done a few years earlier. In short, for all the wit, skill and sheer twistiness of Agatha Christie’s original story and play, Witness For The Prosecution is a stagey, often hammily acted film that gives absolutely no clue to what lay almost immediately ahead for Wilder. 

That, of course, was the greatest screen double-bill in history (i.e. the greatest back-to-back films ever made by any director), Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, with which Wilder sealed his cinematic legacy and marked the high-point, if not the end, of the Hollywood studio system. And that should give hope to any director who makes a film undeserving of a good script, showing that even fairly terrible films can be followed by absolute masterpieces. 

Read More: Nobody’s Perfect: Explore the Movies of Cinematic Legend Billy Wilder

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