Hemingway's tendency to write in the first person -- with his main characters speaking for themselves -- and the fact that he tended to set them in the many places he lived in real life, meant that his books often seemed at least somewhat autobiographical.

So there was a sense that George C. Scott was playing the great man himself when he took the lead in the 1977 film adaptation of "Islands in the Stream." (For example, Scott's character was a sculptor named Hudson instead of a writer named Hemingway.)

If anyone could meet the challenge, though, it was Scott, who has of course done well for himself playing characters who were both real-life and larger-than-life. Many best remember him as the great American general in the 1970 biopic "Patton" -- a role he reprised in the 1986 telefilm "The Last Days of Patton."

The latter film aired a year after he played Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the 1985 miniseries "Mussolini: The Untold Story."

If playing Hemingway seems like a daunting task, so, too, was the job of adapting his legendary prose for the screen. By all accounts, screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc succeeded -- he was nominated for a prestigious Writers Guild of America award for his job (though he lost to Alvin Sargent's adaptation of the Second World War tale "Julia").

"Islands in the Stream" was the first unpublished Hemingway story to be released after the author's death in 1961. Despite this fact, "New York Times" reviewer Robie MacAuley said "it is a complete, well-rounded novel, a contender with his very best."

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