Cinema: Dead End

It always takes the movies a little while to catch up. The so-called "black humorists" of the early 1960s—Joseph Heller, John Barth, Terry Southern among others—are only now beginning to have their books made into films. On the face of it, they make prime movie material. Crazy, anarchistic, sometimes scurrilous, they seem to offer endless visual possibilities for acerbic comedy. But the problems of adaptation are also uniquely difficult. Much of the wit of these books comes not from situation, but from tone and style, brittle qualities that tend to disintegrate before the...