The rights to film Tropic of Cancer were bought by producer Joseph E. Levine in 1962 and the book was made into a film by Joseph Strick in 1965, with Rip Torn playing the character who is ostensibly "Henry Miller" and Ellen Burstyn in the role of his wife June. The film is a botch, with the normally excellent Torn playing "Miller" as a crazed satyr with no artistic sensibility. As Paulene Kael remarked, it is "so much less than the book that it almost seems deliberately intended to reduce Miller . . . to pipsqueak size."

One cannot help but wonder what might have happened if Miller had not turned down Stanley Kubrick's offers in 1958 — "holding out for the day when we really have freedom of expression."