10 great films based on unfinished books

Given its near three-hour runtime, and the fact that it vaults between three separate epochs and contains a Russian-doll structure of subplots and storylines, it may come as a surprise that La bola negra is adapted from a meagre four pages of manuscript. The writing of the play of the same name by Federico García Lorca was cut short by his assassination during the Spanish Civil War, meaning the avant-gardist’s only work with an explicitly gay protagonist seemed destined to remain unfinished and therefore underacknowledged. 

Contemporary playwright Alberto Conejero, together with directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, expands the surviving fragment into a sprawling epic. In a gesture of historical restitution, this shapeshifting paean to forgotten queer creatives even conjures an alternate reality in which Lorca’s entire manuscript is miraculously rediscovered, intact.

There is an inherent sense of mystery to any unfinished text. Their missing parts and the circumstances surrounding their incompleteness (more often than not an author’s death) make them ripe for conjecture, speculation and the creation of lore. But filmmakers who attempt to adapt the in-progress works of canonical literary greats and boldly fill in the gaps risk courting extra scrutiny from ardent readers.

Even so, cinematic adaptations of unfinished texts, when done well, can offer a kind of closure the original text fundamentally cannot, or take the text’s beginnings and transform them into a fully fledged work of art. As La bola negra arrives on UK screens, we’ve chosen 10 adaptations that dare to tie up loose literary ends.

Director: Kaneto Shindo

Kaneto Shindo’s expansion on Shusei Tokuda’s unfinished serialised 1941 novel Shukuzu is a fittingly bleak adaptation of the realist writer’s work. (The film historians Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson described the film as “excessively explicit” to the point of painful viewing.) Until his death in 1943, Tokuda wrote in the confessional mode “Shizen-shugi”, painting raw, unsparing portraits of working-class Japan. Catching on to his less than flattering portrayal of the geisha system, the wartime censorship body, the Intelligence Bureau, pulled the plug on Shukuzu’s final installments.

Shifting the plot to post-war Tokyo, Shindo was the first filmmaker to undertake an adaptation of Tokuda’s work. The story follows Ginko (played by prolific Japanese actress Nobuko Otowa), who is sold by her cobbler father to work as a geisha and nomadically handed from one to the next, all the while trying to escape the tragic trajectory of her life.

Director: Orson Welles

One of an acclaimed trinity of unfinished novels by Franz Kafka, the manuscript of The Trial consisted of 161 loose pages ripped from various notebooks. Unusually, Kafka wrote the beginning and ending first, then worked inward. The final sequence of these handwritten scraps was decided upon after Kafka’s death by his literary executor and close friend Max Brod; so, the jury is out on Orson Welles’s shake-up of their order in his self-starring adaptation.

A vertiginous thriller, Welles’s version casts Anthony Perkins, fresh from Psycho (1960), as Josef K, a bureaucrat who stands accused of an unknown crime. Trying to get to the bottom of it, Mr K navigates both figuratively and literally the labyrinthine corridors of the bureaucracy, while his supposed ‘Advocate’ (Welles himself), who is actually his nemesis, menaces him along the way. Some suggest that since Perkins was closeted there is a queer subtext to this parable of the law, freedom, existentialism and dogged persecution.

Director: Basil Dearden

The kernel of the idea for The Assassination Bureau, Ltd was handed down a chain of multiple authors: Sinclair Lewis sold the premise to novelist Jack London in 1910; London wrote the heft of the book but could not conclude it before his death in 1916; while Robert L. Fish picked up the pieces and published the full volume in 1963.

Six years later, shortening the title, screenwriters Michael Relph and Wolf Mankowitz transformed it into a comedy romp with thoroughly 1960s sensibilities. A plucky female journalist (Diana Rigg) manages to pit the members of an assassination agency against their own chairman. Buried beneath the breathless shenanigans is a serious story about consumerism and wartime attitudes towards death.  

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

This queasy classic has its origins in the jottings of the 18th-century French libertine, the Marquis de Sade – from whose name the word sadism derives. The 120 Days of Sodom was penned in 1785 from behind the prison walls of Bastille. When the fortress was besieged by revolutionaries, Sade believed the manuscript to be lost, but it was preserved without his knowledge and finally published, almost 90 years after his death, in 1904.

Its depraved pages contain a veritable A to Z of perversions. Braving a screen adaptation, Pier Paolo Pasolini transposes the narrative to 1944 Salò. Sade’s premise of power-hungry men seeking the ultimate sexual gratification in an isolated chateau with imprisoned victims is transfigured into a commentary on fascism and consumerism. Prefaced with Pasolini’s own reading list, which includes the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Roland Barthes (who published critiques of Sade’s work), the film peels back the layers of Dante’s circles of hell and pushes the threshold, not only beyond Sade’s work but in every sense.

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner

Discovered among Ernest Hemingway’s office miscellany by his wife Mary, after her husband’s death, the trio of yarns she would title Islands in the Stream belonged to what he christened a “sea trilogy” (she also added a fourth story, ‘Sea-Chase’). Like pretty much all Hemingway’s works, this is a meditation on masculinity and mortality, centring on the brooding patriarch Thomas Hudson (played by Hollywood paragon of stoic manliness George C. Scott), a former painter turned sculptor. In the thick of World War II, Hudson’s three sons from two different marriages come to stay with him at his refuge from the fray in the Bahamas. 

Director Franklin J. Schaffner and screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc start with Hemingway’s unrefined, rough-hewn novel and sand it down into a decidedly airbrushed, oddly family-friendly, twisty action caper, jettisoning the fathomless, existential grief Hemingway’s protagonist endures. Yet the resulting film is an unexpectedly moving melodrama with a standout performance from Scott.

Directors: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub

Another of Kafka’s incomplete magnum opuses to get the screen adaptation treatment is Amerika, collated from a medley of anecdotes he was told by relatives who had travelled Stateside. The surviving text details one young man’s experiences of being down and out in the land of liberty, portrayed here as anything but. 

In French filmmaking duo Straub-Huillet’s film, things go awry early on for their main character Karl Rossman (Christian Heinisch) when he goes to bat for the rights of a humble stoker aboard the ship he is emigrating on. From there, his ill-fated voyage sees him disowned by his sole American relative, cast out on to the streets, desperately searching for a job and swindled by his supposed pals. Though never written, Kafka reportedly intended Karl’s story to end happily, fulfilling the promise of the American dream. No such solace is to be found here, with German filmmaker Harun Farocki humorously starring as one of the rogues who worsens this new expat’s plight.

Director: Claire Denis

Framed by the retrospective viewpoint of a man named Galoup (Denis Lavant), Claire Denis’ Beau Travail opens in Marseille, with the former soldier fretting that he is “unfit for life, unfit for civil life”. From this limbo state, he reflects on his hubristic downfall, which is where the narrative of Herman Melville’s unfinished seafarer story Billy Budd (written before his death in 1891 but not published until 1924) intervenes.

Though the Moby-Dick author’s novella and Denis’ film have vastly different settings and characters, the filmmaker and her co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau wrest from the book the basic dynamics between Galoup (in Billy Budd, the adversarial ship master at arms John Claggart) and his rival Sentain, aka Billy (Grégoire Colin). Denis metamorphoses these drafted characters into feuding, envious members of the French Foreign Legion battalion in Djibouti. The intricate choreography of her corporeal, pent-up drama turns military exercises into a spectacle of beauty – soundtracked by Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd-inspired opera and Eran Tzur’s moody score – to draw out the novella’s queer undertones. 

Director: Raoul Peck

A tribute within a tribute, Raoul Peck uses James Baldwin’s incomplete memoir Remember This House as the foundation for his documentary about the pivotal author and activist, as well as, in turn, the influential figures Baldwin commemorates: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Laboured over between 1979 and his death in 1987, Baldwin’s 30 pages of fragmentary but stirring notes and recollections are here narrated by the inimitable Samuel L. Jackson.

Baldwin’s life and those of the three men he repeatedly crossed paths with in the struggle for Black emancipation are spliced together with more recent footage showing how little the US has progressed in terms of racism. Baldwin’s writings also rove through cinematic representations of Black people, both pathbreaking and flawed, from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun to Sidney Poitier’s pioneering oeuvre. Part filmic history, part biography, it’s a rousing cinematic call to arms.

Director: Whit Stillman

Scholars quibble about whether Jane Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan – written circa 1794 and surviving as a series of 41 letters, rounded off with a brusque conclusion – is complete or not. Nonetheless, Jane Austen never put it forward for publication. Concerning the conniving coquette of the novella’s title (Kate Beckinsale) and her daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark), it was a rare Austen work to have remained unadapted on screen until 2016.

Borrowing its title (but correcting its title spelling mistake) from an earlier Austen story, her 1790 juvenilia Love & Freindship, Whit Stillman’s film brings a crisply irreverent mode that anticipated the modern new wave of period dramas – a decidedly new look for Austen. Despite its quippy style, it’s impeccably polished. Following on from his dissection of the haute bourgeoisie in Metropolitan (1990), the director found himself at home with the etiquette, frivolities and scandals of 18th-century England. Stillman even wrote his own novel, complementing Lady Susan, to coincide with his film’s release.

Director: Robert Eggers

Gothic master Edgar Allan Poe provided the initial inspiration for Robert Eggers’ second feature. His brother Max floated his idea for a screenplay roughly drawn from Poe’s ‘The Light-House’, written in 1849 and set on New Year’s Day 1796. The story is penned from the fictional point-of-view of an enigmatic man sent to take up a new position as a lighthouse keeper during a storm. Only three of his diary entries remain – and some suggest their abrupt ending indicates his demise.

What Poe would make of Eggers’ entrail-teeming, vomit-spattered riff on his maritime fable we’ll never know. The Eggers brothers push the action of this pitch-black fairytale forward to the 1890s and insert the character of the batty former sailor Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe). Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) is beleaguered by far worse than unruly weather in this loose adaptation, which has taken on a brilliantly horrifying life of its own.