Though he was already dead, Frank Norris had a good year in 1909. His epic novel Th e Octop u s (1901) was brou gh t to th e screen by vision ary film artist D. W. Griffith—no other filmmaker has touched it since. Titled “A Corner in Wheat,” the film is a confident, bare-bones distillation of the novel’s hundreds of pages into fewer than fifteen minutes of viewing time. It is of course no substitute for the original, a point compounded by the fact that Griffith drew on a second Norris novel, The Pit (1903), also a rather long book
