Could a movie really capture what a novel is trying to say? I think most people agree that a book is always better than the movie version. For over 70 years, screenwriters have been using literature to create its masterpieces and flops alike. According to film critic Frank McConnel, "Films are always competing with books as the primary source of stories" (Internet). A very popular story that film director, John Huston, attempted to capture is the Civil War classic novel by Stephen Crane, "The Red Badge of Courage". Written in 1895, Crane's novel destroys the fallacy that war is exciting and full of heroism and glory. The 1951 screen adaptation of "Red Badge" closely follows the novel and inherits some of the positives and negatives found within the book. Although Huston's movie adaptation of the novel was filled with outstanding battles scenes and exceptional actors, it had many flaws that kept it from becoming a great film.
             Films are not always entirely successful – to attempt to condense an entire book into a little more than an hour is a difficult task to accomplish. Unfortunately, we are left with the feeling that too much has been left out, resulting in only a fragment of a movie. In filming "Red Badge," Huston faced this same problem. The original version of the movie was two-hours long; however, the film was badly cut by MGM to only 69 minutes. Further hurting the film was Huston's poor decision to make the movie black and white. Crane's novel, by its very title, is filled with color imagery and color symbols. Without the use of color, the novel would be bland and boring. Crane's use of color imagery is why the novel became such a success. From the first passage of the book, we read about color in the fields, "As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors."...