H.E. Bates Companion

Bates notes that fiction and film "are so different in scores of important aspects that the number of novels and stories reaching the screen without extensive alteration and even without what sometimes appears to be mutilation is very small indeed." Even so, he praises the film version of his own novel The Purple Plain, citing in part that "the unfolding of the tale...had already been expressed not in discursive, reflective style, but in sharply pictorial terms." However, in the case of an adaptation of The Darling Buds of May, Bates finds the change of location from Kent to Maryland, "the complete Americanisation of all the characters," and the title The Mating Game all to amount to "a mere pointless display of movie-world lunacy." In Films and Filming (May 1959, London, p.7).