At the web site of The Criterion Collection, Francine Prose notes the luck of writers adapted for the screen by John Huston:

Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the page to the screen have convinced most writers that the odds of being purely thrilled by the movies made from their books are only slightly better than the odds of winning big in Las Vegas. That is, unless the director happened to have been John Huston.

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