Home › Rip Van Winkle › Book vs. movie

Rip Van Winkle: the book vs. the movie

Faerie Tale Theatre: Rip Van Winkle (1987) — Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, with Harry Dean Stanton as Rip and Talia Shire as his wife · Rip Van Winkle (1978) — Will Vinton's Oscar-nominated Claymation short, about half an hour — no current US release to link to

Read first, or watch first?

Read first — and for once the book is not the bigger ask. Rip runs about an hour read aloud, less if your kid reads it alone, against a fifty-minute film; the two cost a family roughly the same evening, which is not true of a single other book on this site. Do it in the other order and the film hands over its ending, which is the only surprise the story has. The adaptation is worth chasing afterwards for Harry Dean Stanton, who plays Rip as genuinely sweet rather than merely lazy, but chasing is the word: it is a 1987 television episode sold on disc, not something waiting on a streaming tile. The Claymation short from 1978 is the other good one, and it is currently easier to find in a library than to buy.

What the movie changed

The wife gets a name

On screen she is Wilma, played by Talia Shire, and the film gives her scenes and grievances of her own. Irving never names her at all. She is 'Dame Van Winkle' from her first sentence to her last, described rather than heard from, and the story never once takes her side — which is exactly why watching an actor play her changes the whole balance of the thing.

Coppola took an hour

Faerie Tale Theatre ran half-hour episodes; this one runs about fifty minutes, opened the show's final season, and was scored by the director's father, Carmine Coppola. The extra time goes into the Catskills themselves — painted backdrops and moving miniatures of the mountains on the horizon, lit for sunset.

The frame comes off

Irving hands you the tale third-hand: found among the papers of a dead Dutch historian, vouched for in a signed note, then followed by a postscript of travel jottings. The film drops all three and simply tells the story straight. It is the sensible screen choice and it costs you the joke that the whole book is built on.

You are told who the strangers are

The film identifies the ninepins players as Henry Hudson and his crew. In the book Rip meets them, serves them their drink, and never finds out; the Hudson explanation arrives twenty years later from Peter Vanderdonk, the village's oldest inhabitant, as something his father supposedly saw once.

What only the book has

The repainted sign

Rip's village inn has become the Union Hotel, and the old signboard with the ruby face of King George is still hanging there — repainted. The red coat is now blue and buff, the sceptre is now a sword, and underneath, in large characters, it says GENERAL WASHINGTON. Irving tells you the American Revolution happened by describing one piece of pub signage.

The postscript nobody films

After the story ends, Irving adds Knickerbocker's travelling notes: a spirit who lives on the highest peak, opens and shuts the doors of day and night, hangs up the new moons in the sky and cuts the old ones into stars, and when she is displeased sits in a black cloud 'like a bottle-bellied spider in the midst of its web.' Two pages, and stranger than anything in the tale itself.

Rip losing track of who he is

Standing in the crowd, looking at his own grown son propped against a tree exactly as he used to be, Rip says: 'I'm not myself — I'm somebody else — that's me yonder — no — that's somebody else got into my shoes.' Films play the homecoming for comedy or for pathos; the sentence on the page does both at once.

Irving's jokes

'A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.' The plot survives adaptation. The sentences do not, and the sentences are why the story is still in print.

Making it a movie night?Find the 1987 film on Amazon →

Ready for the real thing?Get the free ebook →

Film links are Amazon affiliate links. Works both directions, by the way: how to use a movie to spark the book →