Some great books have made great movies. It's a safe bet that many people, asked to reel off their top five, would name one of the following: "The Godfather" (Mario Puzo); "A Clockwork Orange" (Anthony Burgess); "Blade Runner" (from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"); and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Arthur C. Clarke).

The Maltese Falcon

Notice none of these great books is an English Lit. classic. It's a fact that movies based on books drawn from the less highbrow corners of the library -- say, genre fiction, edgy, neglected, regional stuff or children's books -- make better screen experiences than literary masterpieces do. So try movies based on science fiction, horror, murder mysteries, anything to do with war or police procedurals.

If you insist on being literary, choose a movie that takes a classic and plays with it rather than going all Merchant-Ivory. Sorry, but Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo beats Laurence Harvey any day. Five to try:

Death in Venice

You could hardly get more highbrow than Thomas Mann, on whose 1912 novella this 1971 movie by Luchino Visconti is based. This is the exception that proves the rule: No film ever caught the essence of a work of literature better. It's the music that ignites the magic: the obsessive, High Romantic strains of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. But there's the setting, too: torpid, plague-ridden Venice at the height of a prewar summer. And Dirk Bogarde, creepily memorable as the pathetic aging writer smitten with love -- as everyone in the city is smitten with sickness -- for a beautiful adolescent Polish boy staying with his family in the same beachside hotel. The movie is slow, but no more so than our own sunlit passage to decay.

The Maltese Falcon

This is the movie that made Humphrey Bogart a star back in 1941, playing Dashiell Hammett's ultra-hardboiled private eye, Sam Spade. The film, which was John Huston's debut, is still the last word in fast, tough and cool, just like Hammett's books. The plot is all murder, thievery and double-crosses up to here (don't even ask about the falcon), but it's not what you watch for: You watch to see Bogart do that drawling thing with the cigarette, face down Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet, and try to keep a step ahead of ice queen Mary Astor.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

In 1967, Australian writer Joan Lindsay published a piquant little horror story about a party of girls from a stuffy boarding school who, on St. Valentine's Day, 1900, went on a picnic to a great volcanic rock formation from which some never returned. In 1975, a young Peter Weir turned this mysterious tale into one of the most haunting movies of all time. And there's scarcely a drop of blood in it. Oddly, the luminous Anne-Louise Lambert, who played the lost golden girl Miranda, disappeared from movies herself after making this classic.

Clueless

For those who must have their cinematic Jane Austen fix, this is so the one. Amy Heckerling's clever, funny, light-as-a-feather 1995 transposition of "Emma" to a contemporary-Californian key is way sharper than the literal-minded Gwyneth Paltrow version of the same novel, arguably Austen's best. Valley Girl Alicia Silverstone is twittier than Austen's Emma (and prettier than skinny Gwyneth's), but she captures that complex and frustrating heroine's foibles, like, totally.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

For a complete change of pace, get Tony Richardson's 1960 film version of the landmark British working-class novel by Alan Sillitoe (Sillitoe did the screenplay himself, so you know you're getting the book's heartbreaking, angry essence). Shot in apt black and white, it tells the story of a boy in a reform school, a social rebel and petty thief, who is chosen to run for the school in a cross-country race. Rat-faced Tom Courtenay is faultless as the boy, torn between his disgust with the school, the system, life, everything and his secret wish to win. Running carries a lot more metaphoric weight here than in the better-known "Chariots of Fire," though so uninsistently that you don't even realize it till the movie's long over.