Thursday Movie Picks #436: Book Adaptations

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is a fairly easy one, Book Adaptations. The bigger issue is picking three movies that I havent used before. Yesterday, I did a post on the movie Giant, which is based on a novel by Edna Ferber, so I decided to be a bit lazy and pick three other movies based on novels by Edna Ferber. And I didn't even pick what are probably the most famous movies, she has that many to choose from:

So Big! (1932, although I could have picked the 1950s version instead). Barbara Stanwyck plays Selina, who takes a job as a teacher in a Dutch immigrant farming community after she's orphaned. She gets married and has a son (Hardie Albright), but when he grows up he leaves for the big city to try to make a fortune, leaving Mom unhappy until he realizes there's more to life. Bette Davis has a supporting role as an artist hired by Albright to create an advertisement.

Come and Get It (1936). Edward Arnold plays a would-be timber baron in Wisconsin, who marries for money instead of love. His old friend (Walter Brennan, winning the first Supporting Actor Oscar) marries the girl Arnold was in love with, and a generation later, Arnold and his son (Joel McCrea) meet Brennan's adult daughter (Frances Farmer) and fall in love with the adult daughter.

Saratoga Trunk (1945). Ingrid Bergman plays a woman who has a past in New Orleans but has returned to find a rich husband, where she meets Texas gambler Gary Cooper. He doesn't have the money she wants, so they go their separate ways. Some years later, they meet in Saratoga Springs, where Bergman is now, still looking for that rich husband. By now, Cooper has made some money in the early railroad business, and he and Bergman team up together to defeat another would-be railroad baron. Or something. Ferber's books were generally epic in nature, and some of the movie versions have the feel of cutting a lot out; Saratoga Trunk is certainly one of those.