The Good Earth, part 2

This weekend we rented The Good Earth on our Netflix. The movie came out in 1937 (the book was published in 1931), and Luise Rainer won an Oscar for her performance as O-Lan. Interestingly enough, Rainer is currently the oldest living Oscar winner (98, I think, unless she has died recently and I don't know it), and she was the first actress to win back-to-back Oscars.

Back to the movie--I did like it. Yes, there were some differences between the book and the movie; aren't there always? But I did not have too much trouble with most of the differences. The viewer does not know that the baby who dies was actually killed by O-Lan, but that fact is made clear in the book. The twins, boy and girl, are left out of the movie; Wang Lung has only three children rather than the five he has in the book. Although the uncle is not a good person in the movie, he is not painted nearly as evil as he was in the book. I guess there was just no way to get it all in. I really did not mind most of these differences; however, there was one major one that I thought should not have been left out of the movie.

In the book, Wang Lung tells his sons as he is dying in the end to never sell the land. The sons agree, but look over his head and smile at each other. So you know that they are going to do whatever they want once Wang Lung is dead. On the other hand, the movie ends with Wang Lung alone after O-Lan's death standing in his field making a soliloquy about the land, how it has indeed been "the good earth."

When I told my husband about how the book ended, he could not believe that the two endings were so different. The movie ending is not only absolutely nothing like the book, but is not even in the same spirit or vein as the book. The ending absolutely changed the perception of what would happen to Wang Lung's family in future generations and was totally not in keeping with the one of the themes of the book, the constant rise and fall, feast and famine.

Still, I'm glad I saw the movie, even though the ending spoiled it for me.