It is virtually impossible to translate a short story into a quality film. A good short story captures a brief glimpse of the human condition, turns on a fleeting moment of confrontation or revelation; a movie derived from such a microcosm is usually afflicted with a bad case of inflation. Take The Swimmer, John Cheever's mythic pool odyssey. One of the finest short stories in a generation, it was magnified into one of the worst movies.
Similar misfortune has befallen The Angel Levine, Bernard Malamud's pithy and whimsical parable of an elderly Jewish tailor...
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