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THE GODFATHER (1972)
Have you actually read the 1969 novel by Mario Puzo that became one of the greatest movies ever made? It's not bad: Don Vito Corleone and his son Michael are there on the page, along with Tom Hagen, Kay Adams, Luca Brasi, Capt. Mark McCluskey, Sonny and Fredo and Connie — the whole famiglia. But — no disrespect — it's no Godfather, not the Best Picture-winning Godfather of Francis Ford Coppola, who shaped Puzo's Mob story into a modern American epic of family, corruption, loyalty, and consequence. Is it possible to even read the names Vito and Michael Corleone without picturing Marlon Brando and Al Pacino? No, it's not.

THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974)
How towering is producer (and action-sequence director) Irwin Allen's disaster-in-a-burning-high-rise whopper? So towering that it took two pulpy novels to provide the tinder for Allen's follow-up to his disaster-on-a-cruise-ship whopper The Poseidon Adventure. The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson were both appropriated by screenwriter Stirling Silliphant for cinematic conflagration. And what do we remember? Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain, Jennifer Jones, O.J. Simpson — and, of course, the song ''We May Never Love Like This Again.''

KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979)
Avery Corman's hot-button-pushing 1977 best-seller cleverly coincided with an intense American interest in issues of divorce, child custody, feminism, and gender-defined parental roles. Director and screenwriter Robert Benton's adaptation did the book one better, shaping the script (with its issues made for afternoon talk shows) for the shining talents of Dustin Hoffman and shooting star Meryl Streep — and picked up five Oscars, including Best Picture.

ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980)
Movie greatness requires more than just some memorable business with a plate of French toast. Making his directorial debut with assurance (and presaging his future filmmaking taste for stories about bottled-up men), Robert Redford works with Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, and a beautiful young Timothy Hutton as tormented son Conrad Jarrett to get at strata of withheld feelings more compacted than even novelist Judith Guest could imagine. Another inspiration: casting Judd Hirsch as Con's menschy psychiatrist, thereby frustrating all future therapy patients whose shrinks don't look and behave like Hirsch.

THE VERDICT (1982)
Law-trained author Barry Reed wrote four novels steeped in legal machinations. But only one of them sparkles with the polish applied by screenwriter David Mamet, director Sidney Lumet, and star Paul Newman as run-down alcoholic Boston lawyer Frank Galvin. Mamet's extraordinary ear for dialogue — not just Mamet-speak, but the common sound of man talking to man — is matched by Lumet's expertise with the silent spaces between words.


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