From Novel to Film pt. 6: Nothing Lasts Forever / Die Hard

Novel (1979) written by Roderick Thorp. Film (1988) directed by John McTiernan and written by Steven E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart.

THE NOVEL

"Policemen had a view of the world that few others understood. It was the way humanity had wanted things arranged. (...) People expected the Lelands of the world to dispatch the Little Tonys as simply as the butchers turned (cows, hogs, and chickens) into cutlets. But you'd better not demonstrate just how thin the veneer of civilization actually was. If you covered yourself in blood, you, too, had to be scourged."

"The difference between heroes and villains is only a matter of time, anyway."

The "Leland" of the above passage is Joe Leland, a WW2 veteran, retired cop, private detective, terrorism expert, security consultant, private aviator, divorced widow, and recovering drunk. He's visiting Los Angeles to spend Christmas with Stephanie, his estranged daughter, and his grandchildren. Stephanie works for Klaxon, an American oil company who has just signed a multi-million dollar deal with some oil-rich South American nation, and it is while he is visiting her at Klaxxon's Christmas party that terrorists attack and take everyone hostage. Except for Leland, who then must wage a one-man war against them from floor to floor, one terrorist at a time.

I'm going to wager that like myself most of the people reading this are more familiar with the movie than the book, so the first thing that jumps out here (besides his not being named "John McClane") is probably how much older the protagonist is. And that he is visiting his estranged daughter, not his estranged wife. 

Leland's daughter's married name becomes McClane's wife's maiden name in the film. Ye Freudians, take note.

The differences don't stop there: the terrorists are actually terrorists - wonderful 70s Baader-Meinhof/ SLA types - and not just long-haired Euro thieves masquerading as them. Gruber is called "Hans" in the film and "Anton" in the book (aka "Little Tony.") 

Gruber's radical past is hinted at in the film, but he is pointedly not a terrorist but a common exceptional thief.

Instead of an all-guy outfit, the terrorists have a few female members.

Also? Stephanie dies, and Leland may, as well. His fate is left uncertain as he is carted away on the last page with a gunshot in his belly.

Delivered by Karl, Gruber's right-hand man in both film and novel.

Karl is taken out the same way as in the film, by LAPD sargent Al Powell, who just like in the film, is Leland's sympathetic partner over the radio. (In the book, he's only 22 - no mention of Twinkies, either.) Unlike the film, though, Leland speaks with many more people over the radio, including a pirate radio operator named Taco Bill and a woman with whom he forms an improbable bond named Kathi Logan, the flight attendant who tried to pick Leland up on his flight to Los Angeles.

The ending of the novel is much more cynical than the film. The title refers not only to Leland's life/ family/ career, but an entire way of life for a certain type of American male altogether. Let's call that type the "cop" type, active from 1950 to about 1980. Maybe even America itself, entering the terrorist age. It's not altogether successful in this regard, for reasons I'll get into momentarily.

 

 
Nothing Lasts Forever is actually a sequel to Thorp's The Detective, a 1966 book that was made into a 1968 film with Frank Sinatra. (Neither of which I've seen or read.)

Which made me wonder two things: 1) Has there ever been another franchise-creating film that was based on a sequel to an altogether different work? and 2) Did a more straightforward adaptation of the book starring Frank Sinatra reprising his Joe Leland role ever almost materialize? (Answer: yes. It likely would have been terrible. Frank was seventy-three years old in 1988 and in rough shape: his ability to carry an action movie, even one heavily retooled to accommodate his septuagenarian sluggishness, seems unlikely.) 

With regard to Leland's pedigree (ex-detective, security consultant, etc.) Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) gives a speech in "Money," the 4th episode of the 4th season of The Office (US) that I thought of a few times while reading:

"Here's the thing about Die Hard 4. In Die Hard 1, the original, John McClane was just this normal guy. You know, he's just a normal New York City cop, who gets his feet cut, and gets beat up. But he's an everyday guy. In Die Hard 4, he is jumping a motorcycle into a helicopter. In air. You know? He's invincible. It just sort of lost what Die Hard was. It's not Terminator."

Michael Scott is right. Not just about the Die Hard franchise, but about Nothing Lasts Forever. At one point, Leland even tells Gruber over the walkie-talkie that he is the one person he (Gruber) should have wished wasn't in the building when the terrorists came. Far from being "an everyday guy," Leland is the author and architect of just about every anti-terrorism strategy and protocol the United States had in place by the late 70s. 

"He had participated in the secret seminars and conferences that had developed the contingency plans of many of the nation's municipal police departments. This was the real, only and true reason for the creation of SWAT team. The Symbionese Liberation Army shootout was a case in point. Ex-LAPD Chief Ed Davis had tipped the strategy completely with his so-called jocular response to the problem of air piracy: "Hang 'em at the airport." The strategy: kill them all. (...) There now existed a world-wide network of people in their twenties and thirties, some acting independently but most in combination with other groups, orchestrated from and protected in sanctuaries like Syria, Lebanon, South Yemen, and Libya, who had committed their lives to the destruction of social order in the non-communist world."

All of which is just saying: both the protagonist and the context of the book are much different than the film. This wasn't tough to negotiate, though, as dialogue like this -

"'Hey, creep! Do you speak English?'

'Yes I do, you human filth!'

'Take a good look at those emergency lights by the elevator!'

He laughed. 'I saw that movie, Sergent York! Gary Cooper made a bird call!'

'Look again, dummy!'"

Or this:

"Four of them, one of whom he recognized, goddamn it - goddamn it - all armed with the world's best one-man weapon, the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle. Leland shook with rage and self-reproach. He should have done better than this!"

I suppose that's just a style choice and not a failing of the author or anything. Fair enough. So I leave it up to you. If a paragraph like this -
 

"Karen would have loved it, he knew. Everything from arriving at the airport in St. Louis to this moment. Pulling a gun in a traffic accident. Kissing Kathi Logan. Letting this happen. And then making one bad decision after another, until he could not make a move, or say a word. Hubris. The All-American Hero. The sin of pride. He'd seen an example of it in an interview with a pretty-boy ballplayer: My wife was just another co-ed, but then more and more she became a complement to me. Leland shuddered. He had hurt many people in his life, but he had hurt Karen more than anyone."

doesn't make you want to scream, my guess is the novel's writing style won't present a problem for you. For me, reading Nothing Lasts Forever made me appreciate how much more to my liking novels in the same conceptual terrain like The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald or The Running Man by Richard Bachman are.

THE FILM

Like many guys my age, I saw Die Hard two or three times in the cinema and then something like 50 times once it came out on VHS. Add in another 50 viewings at the very least in its laser disc, DVD, and cable incarnations and lord knows how many times I've seen the movie. But I haven't sat down to watch it start-to-finish in many years, possibly as many as 20. 

It can be tricky reviewing a movie as well-known and pored over as Die Hard. Alexandra DuPont at DVD-Journal does a commendable job in highlighting the whys and wherefores of its memorability and impact. 

"Aside from the fact that it is terrifically entertaining action/suspense filmmaking — (it) had more influence on '90s Hollywood filmmaking than any other '80s film. (...) Typical elements of the direct (and indirect) sub-genre descendents largely credited to Die Hard:

1. Multiple characters, broadly and quickly sketched.

De'voreaux White as Argyle.

Alexander Godunov as Karl.

James Shigeta as Joe Takagi. 

(Remember him from "Nightmare," the Outer Limits episode?)

Clarence Gilyard, Jr. as Theo.

 Hart Bochner as Ellis and Bonnie Bedelia as Holly.

And of course Reginald VelJohnson as Al.

2. A particular mix of bloody mayhem and wisecrack humor. 

"Welcome to the party, pal!"

"Now I have a machine gun... Ho Ho Ho."

  3. A well-spoken, colorful, and/or Eurotrash villain, preferably played by a critically acclaimed actor.  

Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber

Even if his American accent (as the director admits in the commentary) is not especially convincing, making McClane's "You should get an Oscar for that accent" remark somewhat puzzling. But hey, movie magic.

4. A blue-collar, vulnerable protagonist who gets the absolute hell beat out of him. 

5. A tightly controlled locale. 

   

It's tough to distinguish in this 'cap, but I love this bit, where Al looks down the street and up at Nakatomi Plaza and sees mysterious flashes of light, not knowing he's seeing the gun battle between McClane and Karl et al.

6. Policemen and other officials cast as bumbling bureaucrats/hapless objects of ridicule.

The media, too, of course.

Much of McClane's verbal back and forth with Deputy Chief Dwayne Robinson is verbatim from the book.

"Send in the car. Send in THE CAR." (My buddy Al and I used to say that one a lot when quoting this movie. The SWAT guy just says it so bizarrely.)

It's true there are earlier films of the 80s that combine these elements (not the least of which is its director's immediately previous effort, Predator) but Die Hard is perhaps the slickest entry of them all. It certainly felt like a crystallization of action movie efforts preceding it. At least until its sequel, Die Harder, but we'll get to that one (and 58 Minutes, the book it's based on, kinda sorta) in due turn.

As mentioned above, the novel's title works on a few levels. The film's does, too, but in different ways. Most obvious, I suppose, is the battery-powered allusion, but I remember the original trailer for this had the movie-guy announcer saying something like "They told him to quit, but old habits... die hard." This was dropped from subsequent trailers, though, and "die hard" became more of an existential machismo state of being.

Speaking of machismo, much has been made of the film's "anti-feminism." From DVD-Journal once again: "a patriarchal blue-collar fantasy — a less-educated white guy saves corporate doofuses and his overly assertive wife by conquering effeminate, high-class thugs in a phallus-shaped exploding tower." But as the same review points out, "while the class conflict is certainly there (and, let's face it, a big part of the movie's appeal), the story's too nuanced to serve as mere anti-feminist propaganda. For one thing, over the course of the movie McClane loses his absolutist stance on his marriage — specifically, he gets it beaten out of him. For another, McClane's wife is the only corporate executive to successfully tangle with terrorist leader."

I'd also like to add that surface appearances aside, the last-name thing is actually effective script-building, from the "if you introduce a gun in the first act it better go off in the third" perspective. It serves a purpose, both for the plot and for John and Holly's character arcs.

Watching it in 2014, a few other things popped out at me:

- Willis really oversells (in a fun and not inappropriate way) some of the drama, particularly in the scene where he tries to get the fire department to come to Nakatomi. ("I'LL KISS YOUR FUCKING DALMATION! NO, DON'T TURN AROUND! NO, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS, NO! (smacks window) NO! (smack!) NO! (smack!)" 

But I doubt anyone would consider this too over-the-top for an 80s flick.

(ding)

- Al's whole deal is he has to get over an earlier incident in his career where he fatally shot a kid who was waving a ray gun at him. 

Thankfully for him - and for audiences at the time - there was no culture of instant reactionary punditry to call for his beheading.

And as with the married-last name issue, it serves a point to the script; Al must draw his weapon and shoot Karl dead in a split-second decision. As with Holly, John McClane's sweaty, bloody, barefoot heroism has helped him overcome his own block. 

- I've always referred to Die Hard as one of my favorite Christmas movies. And while it has little in the way of explicit yuletide themes, the scene where the thieves finally break into the vault, as accompanied by the choral stretch of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, always has an "opening the greatest gift ever" feel to it for me.

And the McClanes are ferried away by their own waiting sleigh at film's end. No need to answer any questions, Mr. McClane - off you go!

Mer-rr-ry Christmas!

Final Verdict: Not a bad action book but not my cup of tea. Much better as a movie. And as an 80s action movie, should be time-capsuled for alien civilizations.

From Novel to Film pt. 5: First Blood

Novel (1972) written by David Morrell.
Film (1982) directed by Ted Kotcheff and written by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone.

I hadn't read First Blood since I was twelve, which makes it yet another damn thing from the mid-80s that I am revisiting through a blog, darkly. 

THE NOVEL

I was surprised at how much of it I remembered. Most things that I do not re-enforce with a re-read/ re-watch are pushed over the precipice of mental recall; revisiting them is like experiencing them for the first time. But not so, here - I guess it made more of an impression on my younger self than I thought. By way of comparison: I read Peter Benchley's Jaws the same year I read First Blood and never revisited it, either, but outside of Hooper and Brody's wife sleeping together, I couldn't tell you anything about Benchley's book. 

(I considered doing Jaws for this From Novel to Film series. Maybe I will. I don't own the book, though, and I'm trying to avoid picking up anything new. Well, "new." Anyway.)

David Morrell's stated intent in writing First Blood was "to transpose the Vietnam War to America," and in this he was mostly successful. I say "mostly" only because any book with that intent and topic is going to be handicapped somewhat for having been published in 1972. Vietnam wasn't quite the known quantity it became in the years after. But it didn't have to be. Nothing in this novel relies on any understanding of Ho Chi Minh, the Phoenix program, Nixon, or anything like that. The idea of a maladjusted vet-turned-drifter who is hassled one too many times by the local authorities and snaps is applicable to just about any era, but it has a certain enhanced resonance coming out of the 60s. 

Morrell wrote an essay on the subject, Rambo and Me, which you can purchase here if you're so inclined.

On the off chance you're unfamiliar with the plot, here it is: John Rambo, a Green Beret who has walked from points unknown to Kentucky to visit a fellow vet (whom he discovers is deceased,) is picked up by the local Sheriff and told to scram. Rambo doesn't, nor does he make any effort to identify himself as a veteran or volunteer any information at all. 

When Teasle arrests him and threatens to throw him in a dank jail cell, Rambo's memories of being a prisoner of the North Vietnamese are triggered and all hell breaks loose.

He kills one cop and wounds several more.

In the book, he's naked when he makes his escape, but more on that in a bit. (Incidentally, this look on Stallone's face is classic.)

When the police (and eventually the National Guard) chase him into the hills, he kills dozens more. His old Colonel, Sam Trautman, is flown in, 

 

and he tries to diffuse the situation. Rambo damn near blows up the whole town, before Trautman manages to blow his head off with a shotgun. The Chief dies of a heart attack. (His heart trouble being a symbolic motif throughout the novel.) The End.

John Rambo and Chief Teasle mirror each other pretty well throughout the book. Both suffer hidden scars and stubbornly pursue their courses of action against their own better judgment and ultimately at the cost of their lives. 

Both are drawn sympathetically.

The chapters alternate between their point of view, a very useful narrative device for the story. Here's Rambo from early in the book:

"Dead animals lay here and there along the roadside, likely hit by cars, bloated and speckled with flies in the sun. First a cat, tiger-striped - looked like it had been a nice cat, too - next a cocker spaniel, then a rabbit, then a squirrel. That was another thing the war had given him. He noticed dead things more. Not in horror. Just in curiosity of how they had come to end."

And here he is at the end, as he begins to realize he's going to die:

"(...) What a lot of horseshit, freedom and rights. He had not set out to prove a principle. He had set out to show a fight to anyone who pushed him anymore, and that was quite different - not ethical, but personal, emotional. He had killed a great many people, and he could pretend their deaths were necessary because they were all a part of what was pushing him, making it impossible for someone like him to get along. But he did not totally believe it. He had enjoyed the fight too much, enjoyed too much the risk and the excitement. Perhaps the war had conditioned him, he thought. Perhaps he had become so used to action that he could not ease off."

Teasle gets many similar inner monologues. Part of the novel's effectiveness comes from his and Rambo realizing things about themselves and their worldviews independent of one another. This next section, though ascribed to Rambo, could just as easily be from Teasle's p.o.v.:

"If he had really wanted to control himself, he could have. He simply had not wanted to control himself. To live his way, he had been determined to fight anyone who interfered. So all right then, in a way he had fought for a principle. But it was not that simple, because he had also been proud and delighted to show how good he was at fighting. He was the wrong man to be shoved, oh yes he was, and now he was dying, and nobody wanted to die, and all that he was thinking about principles was a lot of crap to justify it."

(Incidentally, in the last Rambo film (Rambo, 2008) Stallone, in conversation with the author, mentioned how he wanted to return to the tone of his original novel rather than the emphasis on action in the second and third. How successful he / the movie was in this is beyond my scope here, but it's worth mentioning that there's at least one line that echoes all of the above: "I didn't kill for my country. I killed for myself. And for that, I don't think God can forgive me.")

Also a nice moment: Rambo ends with Stallone walking along a country road, wearing the same clothes he wore at the opening of First Blood (above.)

Before I move on to the film, there's one scene in the novel that made little sense to me. After he escapes from the prison he is as aforementioned naked as the day he was born. He wanders through the Kentucky hills until nightfall and then, to draw attention to himself, he starts screaming and hurling obscenities into the darkness. This brings him to the attention of a man and his son operating an illegal moonshine still. He explains to them he just killed a cop and needs help. Whereupon the man sends his son back to their house to get him some clothes and an extra shotgun.

Is that at all believable? You come across some naked man, hurling obscenities at no one in the dark, who then admits to killing a cop, and you agree to help him, no (or at least few) questions asked? I guess we're supposed to think they have being outlaws in common, since the man has an illegal still, but... really? Surely there was a better way to solve the problem of Rambo's getting clothes. The film, wisely, excises it altogether.

THE FILM
 

"There are no friendly civilians."

David Morrell discusses the differences between his novel and its bigscreen adaptation in a documentary on my DVD and on the commentary track of the blu-ray:

"The film switches the locale from Kentucky to the Pacific Northwest. It removes the importance of Teasle’s war experience in Korea and the medals he received there. It makes Rambo a victim rather than somebody who’s pissed off about what happened to him in Vietnam. Finally it changes the ending. But for all that, I love the movie. Ted Kotcheff’s direction, Jerry Goldsmith’s music, Andrew Laszlo’s photography, Sylvester Stallone’s acting, Richard Crenna, on and on. It’s a terrific movie that seems more realistic with each year because its action scenes don’t use computer effects. The realism of the stunts is amazing."

100% agreed on all of those points. 

Particularly the stunts and the cinematography.

But as he notes, the biggest difference is in its tone. In the novel, Rambo is unfairly harassed, but he's a bit unhinged to begin with. The training he received in Vietnam and his experiences there warped him to such a degree that he was a time bomb. In the film, he is forced to use his training to defend himself against the cops who keep coming after him. His body count in the novel is huge; in the film, he only kills the one dude, shooting at him from the helicopter (above) and in self-defense. 

There's also the big ADR-dubbed speech at the end, which I can never hear without remembering my buddy Chris from junior high cracking me up in study hall/ on bus trips: "HE AIN'T GOT NO FUCKING LEGS!!"

Said Roger Ebert at the time:

"(...) the screenplay gives Stallone a long, impassioned speech to deliver, a speech in which he cries out against the injustices done to him and against the hippies who demonstrated at the airport when he returned from the war, etc. This is all old, familiar material from a dozen other films clichés recycled as formula. Bruce Dern did it in Coming Home and William Devane in Rolling Thunder. Stallone is made to say things that would have much better been implied; Robert De Niro, in Taxi Driver, also plays a violent character who was obviously scarred by Vietnam, but the movie wisely never makes him talk about what happened to him. Some things are scarier and more emotionally moving when they're left unsaid."

While all of that is true, I'll give Sly not just an A for effort, but I'm also going to go out on a limb and say he's probably not gotten his due for his performance in First Blood altogether. Whatever else it is, his awkward emotional outpouring is very genuine, and it's a satisfying end to the character's arc. 

Compare it to the end of Rambo, First Blood pt. 2, not just in tone but in execution. Speaking of:

Different scene, but you know, while we're here. Man! Never gets old. 

Other differences?

As Morrell notes, Teasle is much more one-dimensional in the movie, even though I've got nothing but praise for Brian Dennehy's performance.

Also: Rambo doesn't look very much like a hippie, does he?

But, as with Emmett's Agent-Orange-acne-covered face vs. Bruce Willis's handsome face in the adaptation of In Country, I can understand why they wouldn't want to hide their leading man's recognizable image too, too much. Of slightly greater impact is the fact that Rambo (and Teasle) survive.

To the tune of "It's a Long Road," no less. (Vocals by Dan Hill.)

All of these things certainly do undermine the message of the novel, but it's such a fantastic film that it's easy to forgive this.

Fans of CSI: Miami and Miami Vice will see a couple of familiar faces:

David Caruso

and Michael Talbott

The DVD has this curious feature where you can pause the movie at various points and access "Survival Mode:"

I didn't utilize it more than once or twice.

Two last things:

1) Apparently there's an off-Broadway play that discusses the differences between the novel and the film. Here's David Morrell with more info:

"The play is called Flooding With Love for the Kid, a line from the last paragraph of the novel. Zachary Oberzan wrote and stars in the one-character play. He pretends that the stage is his 200-square-foot living room in Greenwich Village and that the people in the audience are friends who’ve come to visit. For 90 minutes, Zach discusses the differences between my novel and the film. He portrays all the characters as he acts out scenes from the book, leaping off sofas, stripping off his shirt and whipping himself, using candles as dynamite sticks, etc. It’s wild. Zach goes all over the world, performing the play. If you Google “flooding with love for the kid,” you can see some of his performance."

and 2) More than once while reading, I thought to myself imagine if Rambo was black? 

I'm actually surprised no one has rebooted the story and cast an African-American (or any non-white) combat vet in the role. Normally this sort of race-swapping gives me a serious eye-roll, but really, make Rambo non-Caucasian and the novel's concerns are brought even more to the surface. It'd be a very provocative film, to say the least, but good-provocative, not just mindlessly so. You could even add the scene with the father and son and illegal moonshine still back in, so long as they, too, were non-Caucasian, and it'd work. Hell, even if they remained Caucasian - lots of dimensions to that scene whether they are or not, wouldn't you agree?

Update everything to nowadays in addition to making Rambo non-Caucasian? Now you're cooking with gas. A whole slew of intriguing stuff to work with: changed perceptions of vets, "We thank you for your service," prisoner torture, police brutality, the media's effect on the narrative and stoking outrage, etc.

Law and order / black and white, turned on its head?

Potentially savory food for thought. I wouldn't trust just anyone to make it; I nominate (the contemporary) Steve McQueen. (And Tarantino can steer the hell clear of it, please and thank you.)