Lee was a pretty important character in the book and it seems wrong that he's not even a minor character in the movie. I'm wondering if it had something to do with the fact that in the book he was Chinese-American and this was the 1950s. I was kind of disappointed because he was my favorite character.
shareThey didn't arbitrarily leave Chinese people out of movies just because it was the 50s. The book is 7 or 8 hundred pages long and they were cutting out as much as they possibly could to come up with a manageable script. Thus, everything but the most crucial characters and incidents from the book's second half got the axe.
Lee was my favorite character in the novel.
And he was the one who loaned Cal the $5000, not Kate. Her character should not be made to be more attractive or sympathetic.
Please don't call someone a _____tard.
I recently read the book, which is a masterpiece by the way. I was tickled that my neck of the woods was featured in it in a small way.
However, the fact that Lee is left out of the movie is a total deal breaker for me. I have no interest in seeing it.
Lee's interactions and friendship with Sam Hamilton are reasons enough to include him in the movie--how he trusted Sam enough to drop the pidgin just around him and no one else. I can't downplay the influence he had on Adam, Cal, and Aron either. He's a major influence.
If all of those aren't good enough reasons, Lee's life story is one of the best parts of the book. It was a mistake to leave him totally out.
I can't believe it had anything to do with it being the 1950s because there was a Chinese-American character in Have Gun Will Travel which began in 1957. Well, maybe it did. The Have Gun character Hey Boy was quite subservient to Paladin and spoke pidgin. Lee was educated and only pretended to not be to match people's perceptions of his culture. Maybe the powers-that-be in charge of the movie adaptation didn't want that image out there which is a shame.
I think the crux of the issue here is that the movie isn't a full adaptation of the book. It's an adaptation of one particular section of the book (beginning when Aron and Cal are already teenagers and during the war) and is primarily concerned with focusing on the family dynamic of Adam, Aron and Cal - and, to a lesser extent, Kate. Therefore, anything superfluous to that or any characters whose main influence occurs earlier in the book is cut. Every Hamilton is cut apart from Will, Charles Trask and Adam's family history in general are never even mentioned, Abra's family history is condensed into a single monologue, etc. Lee, while a major character in the book, falls under this category - his primary connection to Adam occurs before Cal and Aron are born and for the first few years of their lives and his influence beyond that is only tangential. Since, as I said, the film starts when Aron and Cal are in their teens, it's sort of inevitable that he would be cut. If it were a full adaptation of the book, I'd agree it would be a monumental mistake to cut him; but for what it is, I'm afraid the decision does make perfect sense.
Also, for what it's worth, John Steinbeck himself gave full approval of the finished film, including the decision to only adapt the last third of it.