What are the difference between the book The Color Purple and the movie?

• Alice Walker's novel The Color
  Purple is much darker and more complex than Speilberg's adaptation, which
  develops the comedy and the musical aspects more.  In the book, the men are meaner,
  crueler, more abusive, more sexist.  In the movie, they seem more like childish clowns,
  especially Mr. ____.  The book reads like tragedy and ends up like comedy only at the
  end.  The film introduces the comic/musical aspects much earlier and develops them
  throughout.


• Celie is a writer in the novel: she writes to
  God.  It's an epistolary novel.  Letters to God is the impetus of how the novel beings,
  as confession.  There's no such writing or confession in the movie: it's interior
  monologue done as voice over.  Speilberg only shows her writing to Nettie, not to
  God.

Some other, smaller
differences:

• There's no quilting in the movie.
   It's a major motif in the book.


• The movie shows more
  female's kissing (homosexuality) than the book (there's only Shug and Celie), which
  takes away from the power of the sexual
  experimentation.


• Again, the music is a major character in
  the movie (Quincy Jones was brought in to do the score), and there's more hymn singing
  and juke-joint cross-cutting to make it seem more like a musical than a novel.
   Obviously, this is a major reason why it becomes a musical on Broadway
  later.