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Robinson Crusoe: the book vs. the movie

Robinson Crusoe (1954) — Luis Buñuel's version; Dan O'Herlihy was nominated for Best Actor for it, the only Oscar acting nomination any Crusoe has ever got · Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) — The story moved to Mars, straight-faced and better than it sounds — Criterion put it out · Robinson Crusoe (1997) — Pierce Brosnan; the DVD is out of print in the US, so there is nothing here to link to

Read first, or watch first?

Read first — and this is one of the few books here where that is not really negotiable, because there is no adaptation that carries the thing the book is for. Every film is obliged to turn twenty-eight years of small competent work into ninety minutes of incident, and the small competent work IS Robinson Crusoe; watching first would teach a reader to expect a story that the page is not telling. What the films are genuinely good for is afterwards. Buñuel's 1954 version is the one to pick — it is the only adaptation anybody has ever taken seriously as a film, it keeps the full twenty-eight years, and O'Herlihy's Oscar nomination was earned in the long stretches where he has nobody to talk to. Watch it the week after and the family will spend the whole time saying that isn't how it goes, which is the best conversation a book-and-film pairing can produce. Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a separate pleasure and worth an evening of its own.

What the movie changed

Buñuel gives him a father to argue with

In the novel Crusoe's fever dream is a figure descending from a cloud in flame telling him he has not repented and now he will die. Buñuel replaces it with Crusoe's father, who appears to the hallucinating man to deliver an I-told-you-so and to say that God has abandoned him. It is the one moment where the film's director shows his hand, and it turns a religious vision into a family quarrel.

The dog's death becomes the crisis

Defoe gives the dog one clause. 'My dog was a pleasant and loving companion to me for no less than sixteen years of my time, and then died of mere old age' — and Crusoe moves straight on to the cats. In the film the dog's death is the thing that nearly breaks his mind, and the loneliness that follows is what makes Friday's arrival salvation rather than threat. O'Herlihy said Buñuel's whole reading of the book was a man who ages and almost loses his mind, and finds that companionship saves him.

Friday is put in leg irons

The film's Crusoe distrusts Friday, believes he is a cannibal who will kill him given the chance, and chains him. Nothing like this happens on the page: Defoe's Crusoe is armed and wary but never restrains Friday, who from the first hour is a servant by consent and by Crusoe's own account 'the truest, most loving, most sincere servant that ever man had.' The film is putting a question to the relationship that the novel never asks.

The 1997 version moves the island and kills Friday

Pierce Brosnan's Crusoe is wrecked by a typhoon off New Guinea rather than off the Orinoco; the film opens with Daniel Defoe himself being handed a castaway's manuscript; Friday works out that 'Master' means slavery and walks away from him; and at the end European slavers kill Friday, while Crusoe survives and comes home to a childhood sweetheart named Mary. There is no woman of any kind in Defoe's novel until the last two pages.

What only the book has

The balance sheet

Twelve weeks in, Crusoe sits down and does his accounts: 'I stated very impartially, like debtor and creditor, the comforts I enjoyed against the miseries I suffered.' Then the book prints the two columns. 'I am cast upon a horrible, desolate island, void of all hope of recovery' against 'But I am alive; and not drowned, as all my ship's company were.' Six rows of it. No film has ever found a way to shoot a ledger, and it is the moment the book turns from a disaster story into something a person can use.

The parrot says his name

He teaches Poll to talk out of sheer loneliness, and then, years later, exhausted after a day of paddling, he falls asleep in the woods and wakes to a voice calling him: 'Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe: poor Robin Crusoe! Where are you, Robin Crusoe? Where are you? Where have you been?' It is the only voice he has heard in fifteen years and it is his own words coming back. Both films have the parrot; neither gets near what that page does.

The long middle where nothing happens

Crusoe's second harvest. The fence he plants and re-plants. Three months making one earthenware pot that will stand fire. The umbrella he builds and rebuilds until it folds. Films need incident, so they compress twenty-eight years into set pieces; the book gives you the years themselves, which is the only way the reader ends up feeling how long twenty-eight years is.

The last two chapters, which almost nobody adapts

Crusoe gets off the island with a third of the book to go. He reaches Lisbon and finds that the plantation he abandoned has been quietly earning for twenty-eight years and he is rich; he refuses to sail home and crosses the Pyrenees in winter instead; a wolf pack attacks the party on the road and Friday baits a bear up a tree for the entertainment of everyone watching. It is the strangest, most abrupt hour of the book, and the 1920 Wyeth edition many people own cuts all of it.

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