11/22/63, written by Bridget Carpenter

11/22/63 was a superb and inventive book, written by Steven King, about time travel back to the 60's to save JFK from assassination.  Bridget Carpenter's eight-hour film version, originally shown on Hulu and now available on DVD, makes a few necessary changes, which I am not crazy about:  particularly eliminating the first-person narrative, which gave us considerable insight into Jake Epping's thoughts and only let us see and know what he saw and knew. This could have been done with voiceover in the film -- one of the many pleasures of films of the forties -- but in this day and age it was probably necessary to expand a minor character into a companion of Jake's and also allow us to see Lee Harvey Oswald and his preparations for the fatal day.  Also, there is less time spent on Jake's enjoyment of the three years he has before the assassination (shortened from the book), as he gets pleasure out of teaching and the music and dancing of the period (the detailed production design is by Carol Spier).  His courtship of Sadie (touchingly played by Sarah Gadon; James Franco is Jake) is intensely romantic, setting us up for the sad result.  King has added the interesting idea of when one tries to change the past "the past pushes back" and we see this happening constantly.  There is even the suggestion that Jake's intervention made things worse, similar to what happened in Jack Fiinney's Time After Time (1995) in an attempt to save the Titanic.

One of the many pleasure of this series (J.J. Adams was a producer and there were six different directors) is the use of veteran actors.  I particularly liked Annette O'Toole and, especially, Constance Towers, who plays Sadie as an old lady after Jake resets time and he and Sadie never meet in the past.  Towers was in two films by Samuel  Fuller (The Naked Kiss,1964 and Shock Corridor, 1963) as well as two by John Ford (Sergeant Rutledge, 1960 and Horse Soldiers, 1959) so there is a logic to have her, in a sense, represent the past.

This is an unusual case of a good book made into a good film, possible only because of the increased flexibility in the amount of time one can now devote to a film on various platforms such as Netflix and Hulu.