CAN LESS BE MORE? 'MANDOLIN' DIFFERS FROM THE BOOK.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Since they have been turning novels into films, literate movie fans have been saying the book was better.

``Captain Corelli's Mandolin,'' which opens Friday, is a big-time example of this phenomenon. Don't feel too bad if the title fails to ring a loud bell in your literary consciousness. Louis De Bernieres' novel, which leaves the ``Captain'' out of its title, never caught on over here the way it did in Britain, where it's sold an astonishing 1.5 million copies or so since its 1994 publication.

For whatever reason, the star-crossed romance built around a monstrous but relatively obscure historical incident - the World War II massacre of Italian occupation troops on the Greek island of Cephallonia by their former German allies - grabbed the British imagination as much as it upset some segments of the Greek population (more on that in a moment). Consequently, the film version opened in the United Kingdom last spring to excoriating reviews but went on to great box-office success.

Honing the story

Directed by ``Shakespeare in Love's'' John Madden and starring Nicolas Cage as the combat-inexperienced, life-embracing Italian officer of the title and Penelope Cruz as Pelagia, the Greek local who falls in love with the charming invader, the movie does away with much of the novel that doesn't address the central romance and Nazi crime. And it had to; De Bernieres' book was a highly discursive affair, told by multiple narrators (including, at one point, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini) and shot through with numerous historical, cultural and philosophical asides. Its narrative spanned the better part of four decades, from Greece and Italy's 1940 military confrontation in Albania to Pelagia and Corelli's tragic, much-too-late-in-life reunion as unfulfilled senior citizens.

But many critics of the movie argue that the filmmakers not only dispensed with extraneous prose, but systematically cut out the novel's most interesting and controversial plot points, while changing others in a craven attempt to find better acceptance among presumably complexity-phobic, happy-ending-happy American audiences who will be crucial to the $50 million production's profitability.

Among those elisions: the atrocities committed by the communist partisans Pelagia's fisherman fiancee Mandras (played by Christian Bale in the movie) joins; his subsequent attempted rape of her and the incident's suicidal aftermath; and the homosexuality of an Italian soldier whose self-sacrificing protectiveness of Corelli now makes little motivational sense in the movie.

``Look, the early chapters of the book have sections about Mussolini's cat,'' notes Kevin Loader, one of the film's British producers. ``Are we gonna put those in the movie? You have to make a choice about what you are going to carve out from novels. Any film is going to turn a novel into something completely different. What you have to do is find the bits of the novel that are its spiritual core, I hope, and then try and translate that into cinema. Along the way, you have to jettison a lot of material ... and particularly in a book like this, jettison a lot of very inventive stuff.''

Though he spent many years overseeing attempts to crack ``Corelli's'' adaptation nut, Loader faced a much bigger crisis once Cage signed on and his busy schedule forced the production into ``go'' mode. ``Notting Hill'' director Roger Michell, who had committed years to ``Corelli's'' preproduction effort, suffered a heart attack just as preparations were commencing to make the movie on Cephallonia, a relatively undeveloped island in the Ionian Sea between Greece and Italy.

Fortunately, Madden was both interested and available to take up the reins at short notice. Not short enough, though, to prevent him from taking the script process back to square one.

``Essentially, I said look, if I'm going to do this, I want to be able to find my own way through the material from scratch,'' Madden explains. ``I wanted to write the whole script from the bottom up in terms of the way that I saw the book and the kind of film that I wanted to make. In fairness to Roger, he'd been involved in other projects and what I saw was by no means a script that he would have shot.

``But it was different. That script was probably more of a straight distillation of elements from the book. I felt that the narrative strategy of the book was too different from what a film required in that it was so digressive, if wonderfully and charmingly so.''

Difficult task

Charged with putting both Michell and Madden's approaches on paper was Shawn Slovo, the South African exile who's autobiographical ``A World Apart'' has been her only previously produced screenplay. While pleased with the final product, she compellingly describes the agony of slicing up an admired work for screen conversion.

``Because it is a long, dense epic, it's a wonderful source for adaptation in a sense,'' Slovo notes. ``But at the same time, you have terrible choices to make. The other thing about it is that it's a huge success - in the U.K., anyway - and you don't want to mess with a best seller. You're just asking for trouble; people don't understand that a movie is not a book and you're just not going to please them.

``You couldn't tell everybody's story; we focused on the main triangle and lost a lot of the texture that was in the book. I think that disappointed a lot of the fans of the novel.''

Slovo defends most of the disputed changes, however.

``When you're doing a movie that deals with the Second World War, it seemed to me that you couldn't actually make the Greek partisans worse than the Nazis,'' Slovo says. ``The way that I think about the world, it's vital to me that that kind of distinction is made. Of course, there were atrocities committed on both sides; there always is in a situation of war. But when your partisan character turns out to be more villainous than your Nazi, I think there's something wrong with the story.''

Indeed, De Bernieres' passages on that subject were vehemently decried by left-leaning Greeks.

``The thing about Greek politics is that they are very complicated and have been very turbulent,'' producer Loader explains. ``There was a civil war in Greece immediately after the world war ended, and to some extent it's still being fought between the left and the right. There are a few, very vocal old communists in Greece who are determined to find fault with anything that doesn't toe the party line. Louis' book got into trouble with some of them, because he wasn't particularly balanced in his view of how the communist partisans acted in the latter stages of the war in certain parts of Greece.

``But we never intended to deal with that bit of the book in our movie. It's about what happens to Mandras on the mainland after Corelli escapes from the island.''

Ditto the attempted rape, which Slovo reports was filmed but, like Mandras' brutalizing partisan activity, came at a point in the book well after the screenplay's main action climaxed.

``The reasons why it was omitted had to do with the shape of the whole,'' she says, although on screen it seems to have more to do with making Mandras a much more sympathetic - and simplistically heroic - character than he was in the novel.

On second thought ...

One thing Slovo admits was a mistake was not making Carlo, the gay Italian soldier played by Piero Maggio, identifiably, well, gay.

``If I were to say there was one regret that I have about the adaptation, it's that that part of the story doesn't have the impact that it should have,'' she admits. ``But while I have to take some responsibility as the writer, it was very difficult to integrate that. It's a big, big portion of the book; you actually follow Carlo through Albania and he falls in love with his commander there, just a long arc.

``But it wasn't because we didn't want to portray a gay character,'' Slovo also notes. ``There's been the odd murmur that we had done this in order to placate our American employers and not to offend the U.S. box office. But that was far from the reason; if anything, let us be accused of incompetency and not homophobia.''

All right. But what about pandering to the uplift-favoring sensibilities of the most lucrative movie audience in the world?

``The other thing is they've said we put in a happy ending to satisfy the Americans,'' Slovo notes. ``But it had nothing to do with that. We just felt it was the way to go.''

At least they didn't send Ben Affleck in to fight a part of the war American servicemen never had anything to do with (which the Battle of Britain segment of ``Pearl Harbor'' did). And whatever the purist's complaints, the new conclusion has apparently met with general approval from British filmgoers.

``I don't know that the ending is dramatically different; I think the ending is chronologically different,'' Loader argues. ``The interesting thing is that, even with all the very passionate fans this book has in the U.K., a lot of them came up to me and said they were really pleased that we changed the ending.''

All of which could be a moot point as far as Americans are concerned, anyway, since we tend to prefer war films that focus on our involvement. And forget concerns about homophobia or downbeat endings; the main question is, can we even relate to a World War II movie that plays for most of its running time like a sunny Mediterranean vacation?

``I think there's just a kind of holiday reading thing about this for British people,'' Loader reckons. ``We view the story as sort of the ultimate holiday romance.''

Where love is concerned, she's on Cruz control

They danced at his birthday party, canoodled over lunch, went to Fiji together. But while promoting her latest release, ``Captain Corelli's Mandolin,'' Penelope Cruz declined to explain what was really going on between her and her new leading man, Tom Cruise, with whom she'll be seen in the holiday release ``Vanilla Sky.''

``It's something that I want to keep to myself and I don't want to talk about in an interview,'' the 27-year-old Spanish actress said in an interview several weeks ago. ``In this case, we're not going to get into details. Everything has already been said, no?''

Well, no. While allowing that she thinks Cruise ``is an amazing person,'' Cruz clearly does not want to address the question of whether their romance began while they were making Cameron Crowe's ``Sky'' last winter - and therefore could have been the cause of Cruise's unexpected divorce from Nicole Kidman. Cruz has previously been burned by rumors (never substantiated) that she had affairs with other leading men. They include a then-married Nicolas Cage while they were filming ``Corelli's'' and, before that, Matt Damon on ``All the Pretty Horses,'' when he was still seeing Winona Ryder.

``I stay away from gossip,'' Cruz explains. ``I don't look at it, I don't read it, I don't watch those shows. That's what saves you, the way you deal with it.''

- Bob Strauss

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Love by the book

Keeping `Captain Corelli's Mandolin' true to its source proved difficult for filmmakers

(2) Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz portray star-crossed lovers in ``Captain Corelli's Mandolin,'' based on a novel by Louis De Bernieres.

(3) Greek islanders John Hurt, center, and his daughter Penelope Cruz must share their home with Italian officer Nicolas Cage in ``Captain Corelli's Mandolin.''

Box: Where love in concerned, she's on Cruz control (see text)