Being different mediums, a novel can rarely, if ever, capture its essence in a film treatment. I had the misfortune of watching (highly watchable) The Man With The Golden Arm again shortly before I read the novel. Damn, the casting really put a crimp in how I visualized the characters in Algren’s novel, which ends in tragedy, unlike the film (well Zosh doesn’t make it, but what the hell) The film of Walk On the Wild Side also falls short of Algren’s novel. Maybe some day an intrepid film maker will find some hunky punk actor to star in Algren’s Never Come Morning. Although, I’ll say that the jazzy film score really keeps things hopping. Debate as much as you want about the two versions of Nightmare Alley, but at least Del Toro was truer to the novel, instead of Collen Gray stepping in at the end in 1947. The same holds true for Dreiser’s massive tome, An American Tragedy, which was made into A Place in the Sun with Montgomery Clift and Liz Taylor. It nowhere near captures the heart-rending pathos of the Shelly Winters character or the cowardly, mixed-up nature of the Clift character.