You Can Have it Twice: The Celluloid Jim Thompson
In the 1930s, writers like Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain made some serious headway toward rehabilitating crime fiction. What had long been dismissed as a gutter genre aimed at lowlifes, the undereducated and the psychically damaged started to be taken more seriously as a legitimate literary form. The success of film adaptations of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Postman Always Rings Twice only helped matters. With the exception of Cain (who could get pretty nasty), the books themselves remained fairly traditional and straightforward tales of stalwart detectives on the trail of nogoodniks and sinister types. It’s up to the detective to solve a mystery, see that justice is served, and once again re-establish the conventional social order.
When the second generation of American hardboiled fiction began to emerge in the ’40s and ’50s, writers like David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Horace McCoy and Cornell Woolrich more often than not followed Cain’s lead. Reflecting the nation’s postwar ennui and paranoia. Their novels became much darker, more violent, more nihilistic, and deeply disturbed. The new world had grown more openly depraved, and there was no social order left to restore. The focus moved away from do-gooder (if eloquently wisecracking) detectives toward the criminals themselves. It could be argued that the crime pulps of the ’50s effectively undid all those advances in public perception, returning crime fiction to the gutter that spawned it.
Of that second generation, no one was darker, harder boiled, or more nihilistic than Jim Thompson, whose novels (The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280, Savage Night, etc.) often blurred the line between crime fiction, black comedy and psychological horror. The son of a corrupt sherriff (a character type that would appear in several of his novels), Thompson was born in Oklahoma in 1906, and led a life almost befitting one of his characters. Even if he didn’t exactly lead a life of crime, he certainly led a life near crime. As a hotel porter in Ft. Worth, Texas during prohibition, he often found himself procuring booze, heroin, and hookers for the guests. He had a nervous breakdown at age nineteen. He worked in oil fields and at newspapers. He smoked and drank hard, and though having received little formal education (which may have been a blessing), started writing for true crime magazines. He took a different approach than most, though. Instead of writing straightforward journalistic accounts of tawdry murders, heists, and sex crimes, Thompson would often re-write newspaper stories as first person accounts told from the criminal’s perspective.
His first novels, which came out in the ’40s and were wildly ignored, were good but standard-issue (if incredibly bleak) semi-autobiographical dramas. But when he moved to the pulp houses and began concentrating on crime fiction in the early ’50s, that’s when he shoved and kicked the form to the breaking point. Given readership was small and you couldn’t exactly hope for much by way of media coverage, Thompson, working in obscurity, had a free hand to do whatever the hell he wanted. Not only did the violence and sex become more extreme (by ‘50s standards), as he had with the crime magazines he started writing first-person narratives told from the perspective of characters who were not only criminals, but were often slowly revealed to be complete psychotics. Beyond even that, though, he was writing experimental novels more akin to what was going on in European fiction at the time than what you’d generally expect from the pulps. Thinking of it now, he’s more reminiscent of short-form Celine (minus the strident anti-semitism) than Mickey Spillane. He played with the style and form, often slipping into unexpected Surrealist fantasy and deranged internal monologues. In 1954’s A Hell of a Woman, for instance, Thompson begins with a first-person account of a struggling door-to-door salesman living with a shrieking harridan of a wife. After he takes up with a sweet and innocent young woman, he begins to concoct a heist that would give them enough money to run away together. Simple enough. Then at the halfway point, when the shrewish wife walks in on the narrator and his girlfriend, the novel stops dead. Thompson then backs up to the beginning and tells the same story over again from the same character’s perspective, but slightly askew. Only after the voice in alternating chapters switches between the two sides of the man’s split personality do you realize the story is being told by a paranoid schizophrenic. Reading the novel cold for the first time, it was both maddening and exhilirating to see a writer who wasn’t, say, Faulkner taking that kind of insane chance.
On top of it all was his nail-spitting hardboiled prose, which couldn’t be touched for its tough hopelessness: “How in the hell could you win? You were right on the beam— playing all the angles, doing things twice as well as you thought you could and getting some breaks thrown in. Everything was swell, and you were a bright boy and a tough boy. And a punchy booze-stupe without enough guts to string a uke could come along and put the blocks on you.”
Nope, Thompson beat them all into the dust, but no one noticed.
In 1955, Thompson, who by then had released about a dozen novels which were all but completely ignored, moved to Hollywood, where he was commissioned by Stanley Kubrick to write the screen adaptation of Lionel White’s racetrack heist novel Clean Break. Kubrick had read Thompson’s books, admired him deeply, and often cited The Killer Inside Me as one of his favorites. Eventually released as The Killing, the film based on Thompson’s adapted script was Kubrick’s first studio feature, and starred Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook, Jr., Marie Windsor, and the utterly mad Timothy Carey. THe film’s fractured and jumbled narrative (as well as its unreliable narrator), though still pretty alien to American movie audiences, were pure Thompson, as was that downbeat ending. The whole thing was summed up in Marie Windsor’s dying words, “It’s like a bad joke without a punchline.” By the time the film was released, however, Kubrick himself had taken the sole screenwriting credit, relegating Thompson to the subservient and questionable “dialogue by.” Thompson apparently shook off the slight, and re-teamed with Kubrick for 1957’s Paths of Glory, with Kirk Douglas,. Once again the film co-starred Timothy Carey, and once again Thompson got the shaft, receiving only third screenwriter credit, after Kubrick and the author of the original book. Still, he soldiered on, writing a treatment for Lunatic at Large, an original film that was set to be the third Kubrick-Thompson collaboration. But after being conscripted into directing Spartacus, Kubrick reportedly misplaced Thompson’s manuscript, and the project never materialized.
After that, while still publishing on average one novel a year, Thompson started writing for television, if sporadically. Through the mid-‘60s, he would produce scripts for episodes of Mackenzie’s Raiders, Convoy, and, oddly, Dr. Kildare. And after that work faded, he started writing novelizations.
It wasn’t until the early ’70s, after publishing so many novels and working on some respected films that anyone in Hollywood finally came up with the idea of actually turning one of his novels into a movie. The likely reason was that so few people had actually read any of his novels. It’s not surprising, then, that the first director to contact him was Sam Fuller, a man whose background and way of thinking closely paralleled Thompson’s own. Fuller was a big fan of the often brutal stories, and wanted to film Thompson’s 1958 novel The Getaway, about the ugly aftermath of a supposedly simple bank heist gone horribly wrong. Thompson’s screenplay stayed true to the source, which is what Fuller wanted. When the Fuller deal fell through, however, the script was handed to Sam Peckinpah, whose own nihilistic self-destructive tendencies likewise put him on a par with Thompson.
Peckinpah signed Steve Mcqueen and Ali MacGraw to star, which at the time was akin to having Bogart and Bacall. But McQueen, who was both ultracool and box office gold, was also an overbearing asshole. In the past he’d walked off the production of The Great Escape, refusing to return until the script was rewritten to make him the film’s hero. In the case of The Getaway, he thought Thompson’s script was too dialogue heavy, so demanded more action sequences be added, preferably ones that would allow him to drive fast cars. To this end Walter Hill was brought in to jazz up Thompson’s script. Although Thompson would later insist that what viewers mostly saw up on the screen was his work, Hill was given sole screenwriting credit, and once again Thompson got a shiv in the back.
It’s still a fucking great film, at turns nasty and ugly and cruel, with a supporting cast that includes Ben Jonson, Dub Taylor, and Slim Pickens. But.
Love the picture as I do, it was the first major example of the curse Hollywood would inflict on nearly all the Thompson adaptations that would follow. While the core story and characters remain true to the book (too a point), in the end it feels less like a Thompson movie than a Walter Hill movie. It’s no small point that this remains the only Thompson adaptation to date with a happy ending. What made Thompson’s novels so unique and so memorable were the above mentioned insane parts: the mad internal dialogues, the psychologically damaged characters, the unreliable narrators, the Surreal interludes, and the always unpredictable storytelling style. Take those things away. and what you often are left with are some fairly run of the mill crime stories about murders or heists. Problem was those Thompson trademarks are almost impossible to bring to the screen. In a way, he’s like Poe, whose own stories were likewise often first person accounts told by paranoids and madmen. And as with Poe, most directors simply choose to ignore the rampant and wilding weirdness, focusing on the bones of the story itself. It’s simpler that way.
While the 1972 film ends with Doc McCoy (McQueen) and his wife Carol (MacGraw) having a friendly encounter with a farmer in a pickup (Pickens) before driving happily and safely across the border, well, let’s just say things take a few strange turns in the final quarter of the original novel. It’s written in a completely different tone and style from the rest of the book, almost like something from an alternative cartoon universe, but it’s that sharp and dirty detour after Doc and Carol escape across the border that makes the book what it is. Audience members who went to the trouble of tracking down and reading the book afterward would likely be not only disappointed, but confused and possibly mortified as well.
(The same omission, only more so, was made in the 1994 version directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. That’s understandable though, given it was a remake of the Peckinpah film right down to the Walter Hill script, rather than a new adaptation of the novel. But I prefer to pretend this film doesn’t exist, so I’m not even sure why I’m bringing it up here. Forget I ever mentioned it.)
A pattern was beginning to develop. Hollywood’s interest in Thompson would come in quick, sporadic bursts, maybe once a decade. In 1975, three years after The Getaway was a hit, director Burt Kennedy, known almost exclusively for his work on Westerns, obtained the rights to Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, which I guess is sort of a Western. The book, which remains Thompson’s best known, is narrated by Lou Ford, the easygoing and friendly (if cliche-prone) deputy sheriff in a small West Texas town. He has a sincere, gentle sympathy for the downtrodden, but at the same time is a reluctant puppet of the richest and therefore most powerful man in town, Chester Conway. Only over time does Ford reveal himself to be a murderous schizophrenic who every now and again simply kills those people he finds undesirable or inconvenient. He calls it “The Sickness.” There’s a long back story to The Sickness, but he’d been able to keep it at bay for a good long time before the novel begins.
Stacey Keach, who played a few similarly unbalanced characters around that same time, is pitch-perfect as the deceptively amiable and understanding deputy, as is the great Susan Tyrrell (re-teaming with Keach after 1972’s Fat City) as the scheming hooker Ford is ordered to run out of town. The rest of the cast includes Keenan Wynn, John Carradine, Royal Dano and Don Stroud.
Despite the simplified and toned down storyline, a few character changes and a couple additional scenes, the remarkable thing is Kennedy, generally identified with a genre rarely remembered for its psychological complexity or outright weirdness, goes to greater lengths than most to try and stick closely to the source novel. Beyond being merely gritty and at turns shockingly brutal, the film includes the splintered and sometimes incoherent internal monologues and occasional paranoid fantasies. Only in the final quarter of the film does the storyline veer sharply away from the book, and if you know the final quarter of the book, you can likely understand why. Maybe in an odd way it was for the best Thompson had nothing to do with the film.
That same year, ironically enough, Thompson was asked, as a form of tribute, I imagine, to make a cameo appearance in Dick Richards’ faithful adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, with Robert Mitchum. It would be his one and only screen appearance. Thompson died almost penniless two years later in 1977 at age 70, and at the time of his death, all his books had gone out of print in the States.
They were still in print in France, however, which is little surprise. The French have always had a knack for recognizing and elevating neglected American cultural detritus. Jerry Lewis aside, in the 1960s it was French film critics who identified and labeled film noir as a dominant postwar genre, and french literary critics who salvaged and celebrated the work of several forgotten pulp writers like Thompson and David Goodis. A few years after Thompson’s death, two French film adaptations went into production: 1979’s Série noire (based on A Hell of a Woman) and 1981’s Coup de Torchon, based on Pop. 1280, with the latter remaining the best remembered. Director Bertrand Tavernier took Pop. 1280, another Thompson novel about a simple and friendly but psychotic and murderous small-town sheriff, and moved the goings-on to French-occupied Senegal in the 1930s. While it remains a very good film, hailed by Thompson scholars as one of the most faithful adaptations of his work, to my mind anyway the heavily Frenchified story loses most if not all the deep and twisted Americana that remained such a defining factor in his writing.
Not long after Coup de Torchon was released (and this may be coincidental or not), a new publishing imprint, Black Lizard (overseen by crime novelist Barry Gifford), began reissuing classic but long-forgotten pulp novels, especially Thompson’s. It was only then, some thirty years late, that Thompson finally reached a wide audience in his own country and came to be recognized as one of the most dangerous, inventive, influential and important crime novelists America had ever produced. Suddenly Thompson was being taught in college courses and his praises were being sung in respected literary journals and the New York Times.
As his grim and nihilistic tales of madness and violence began percolating through a suddenly much more receptive pop cultural landscape, Hollywood once again took notice, and a number of Thompson films went into production. For the first time, the name “Jim Thompson” actually became a selling point.
For her second feature, writer/director Maggie Greenwald became the first to exploit the Thompson resurrection with 1989’s low-budget indie number The Kill-Off, based on Thompson’s 1957 novel. It only makes sense the renaissance would begin with an under-the radar indie film, as it allowed Greenwald, as Thompson himself found, to take on the ugliness and viciousness without flinching, and try out a few unconventional narrative tricks without having to answer to a roomful of marketing executives.
Accentuated by a spare and subtly unnerving score and recurring shots of crackling phone lines stretched along an empty Texas highway, the film jumps quickly and willy-nilly from character to character to character, doling out bits of information slowly and piecemeal. In that it echoed the source novel, which was told from about a dozen different perspectives. As a result it takes some time to start piecing together who these people are, what their relationships are, or just what the hell is going on. The one thing that’s clear is that most of them are seedy, demented, unpleasant and vindictive. Not all the central characters from the novel are here, and a few that are have been altered a bit, but still.
Luane (Loretta Gross) has a taste for vicious gossip. Everyone in town has a dark secret, she knows them all, and uses them to manipulate the people around her. She’s also convinced she’s deathly ill, and refuses to leave the house. Her much younger husband Ralph (Steve Monroe) is a half-wit who works at the arcade and takes up with a conniving local prostitute.. Pete (Jackson Sims) decides the best way to save his struggling tavern is to turn it into a strip joint. And Bobby (Andrew Lee Barrett), the son of the influential local doctor, is a vengeful, drug-dealing sociopath. They all live in a small Texas town, and their histories are tangled and sordid.
Again the original story has been drastically simplified, and Greenwald takes a few liberties with the characters, their relationships and the ending, but the tone is reminiscent of Twin Peaks, though much more bleak. In proper Thompson fashion, no one is innocent, no one is admirable, no one’s even nice. And to say none of them end well is putting it mildly.
I don’t know why, but you wouldn’t normally expect a female writer/director to come closer than most anyone to translating the Thompson style and atmosphere to the screen, but Greenwald has crafted an unblinking look at human ugliness, with every frame infused with a sense of doom. Even the performances, which might at first seem unpolished, even amateurish, are really upon closer examination only mildly exaggerated, I take it intentionally so, in a reflection of the pulp aesthetic. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it.
It was a busy time for Thompson’s literary estate, with two more high-profile major studio adaptations going head-to-head in 1990. Stephen Frear’s bright, slick and stylized update of 1964’s The Grifters was criticaly acclaimed, nominated for some Oscars, and helped pave the way for the likes of Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects a few short years later.
Tough as iron Lilly Dillon (Angelica Huston) works for a powerful and terrifying mobster (the great Pat Hingle), laying heavy bets on long shots at the racetrack to level the odds. When she was 14 she gave birth to Roy (John Cusack), who’s grown up to be a small-time grifter working the short con. And Roy’s girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening) is a hooker and con artist herself with dreams of a big score. THe streamlined shaggy dog plot ambles briskly through a dozen twists and detours and, again, things don’t end well for much of anyone.
The screenplay by popular crime novelist Donald Westlake retains a few whispers of Thompson’s original—a couple scenarios, a few lines of dialogue, a few strong hints of incest (a regular Thompson theme)—but it’s all so clean and hep and Hollywood. There’s no overarching sense of isolation and despair, none of the palpable viciousness you’d expect. It always struck me (once again) as more a Westlake film than a Thompson film. Maybe that’s to be expected, given Westlake’s own public praise of his forebear seems reluctant and grudging at best, and he’s mocked Thompson’s style in his own work.
It remains a solid piece of contemporary filmmaking, but ultimately the Thompson connection is about as tenuous as H.P. Lovecraft’s connection to Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond or Poe’s connection to Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat. Still gotta admit that orange scene is pretty great though.
Although similarly updated and slick and stylish, James Foley’s film version of Thompson’s 1957 novel After Dark, My Sweet, released around the same time as The Grifters, may veer just as far away from the source novel’s characters and plot, but at least hews a shade closer to the book’s overall atmosphere of hopelessness, loneliness, and stark failure. Which might help explain why it was such a box office disaster.
Kevin “Kid” Collins (Jason Patrick) is a scruffy and unshaven former boxer who’s just escaped from an asylum. Patrick’s delivery and dead stare make it clear collins might do a little better by himself if he got back on the meds. He nevertheless gets hired by a beautiful alcoholic widow (Rachel Ward) to help fix up her dying farm. It’s a familiar and tired set-up that gets a bit more complicated with the arrival of an ex-cop known as Uncle Bud (the eternally, intensely crackers Bruce Dern), who tries to recruit the kid in a cockamamie scheme to make a lot of money by kidnapping a rich man’s young son. Although Collins is nuts, he still has enough slivers of sanity left to want nothing to do with it. Unfortunately the further complication of a creepy doctor with certain unwholesome designs on Collins convinces the kid Uncle Bud’s doomed plan is the preferable alternative. As is to be expected with Thompson, though, things go horribly wrong and nothing ends well for anyone.
While ultimately bleaker and nastier than The Grifters, Foley’s picture remains a little too polished and Hollywood, the characters just too darned pretty to be taken seriously as viable stand-ins for Thompson’s ruined and mad lowlifes. Not a bad film, no, and bless Foley for sticking with the ending, but as with most studio productions he seems hesitant to dive headlong into the novels tough and dirty depths. Apart from the atmosphere, the film remains an ultimately safe and entertaining Hollywood crime picture.
(Although people seem to believe for some reason a remake of The Getaway came out two years later, those people are mistaken.)
After having tried their hand at tapping into Thompson’s newfound respectability and finding that among mainstream audiences anyway he remained about as popular as he had been in his lifetime, the major studios pretty much gave up at that point. So it waas back to the low-budget indies, where he belonged. It was in 1994 that director Steven Shainberg decided to make his feature debut with an adaptation of 1955’s A Swell-Looking Babe.
Released as Hit Me (the title’s double meaning was clear, but likely still scared audiences away), the film starred Elias Koteas as Sonny Rose, a desperately sad, desperately frustrated, and just plain desperate 30-year-old bellhop at a seedy hotel. He libes with his obese developmentally disabled brother Leroy (Jay Leggett), owes money to a two-bit loan shark, has a boss threatening to fire him, and sees his old friends doing much better than he is. After he hooks up with a beautiful but insane and suicidal French guest (Laure Marsac) and learns a high stakes poker game is set to take place in one of the hotel’s suites, Sonny puts two and two together, right? If he had enough money he could get away from all that and get Leroy the care he needs. So he signs on with a foolproof scheme to rip off the card game. Well, by now you can guess about how smoothly all that turns out.
Let me pause right here a moment to point out that the above story, apart from a bellhop and a hotel, has absolutely nothing to do with anything in Thompson’s novel. Even the character names have been changed. That said, I’ll still maintain that Shaimberg’s film—and this may be blasphemy—is actually a helluva lot better than the novel.
First and foremost, Koteas, who’s still yet to receive the recognition he deserves, has never been better. He embodies a Thompson character, all the deep despair and anguish etched into his face. Leggett is just as good as a prototypival Thompson half-wit. And unlike most directors, who either completely ignore the abnormal psychology which permeates the books or turns it into a cartoon, Shainberg takes a much more subtle approach. Instead of relying on voiceover (and admittedly there is little of Thompson’s prose or dialogue here), he captures Sonny’s damaged psyche and worldview quietly and subconsciously, using set decoration and lighting to reflect a character who is in way over his head and drowning fast. Also much more so than most of the directors who preceded him, Shainberg beautifully captures the simple, sad dreariness of the Thompson universe. It’s a profoundly melancholy picture, even if in the end the characters are a shade too sympathetic and comparatively gentle.
Three years later in 1997, South African born Michael Oblowitz directed one of the more unlikely entries in the Thompson filmography. With so many great novels still unplucked (South of Heaven, Recoil, and especially Savage Night), Oblowitz optioned one of Thompson’s more notoriously wicked and dangerous short stories, This World, Then the Fireworks. While incest plays a role in a number of the novels (and is at least hinted at more or less bluntly in several films), rarely was it so front and center as it is here. Maybe it makes sense Oblowitz would go after such sordid material, given he’d benn deeply involved with NYC’s nihilistic No Wave scene of the late ‘70s. He uses the opportunity to take the lessons of 1989’s The Kill-Off, ratcheting them up to new and giddy levels of delirious inhumanity.
As per usual he takes the core of the original short story and runs a crazy zig-zag pattern with it, but still pretty much makes it work, even if the final film doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the source..
The same year he co-starred in Titanic, busy character actor Billy Zane stars here as Marty Lakewood. On his fourth birthday, Marty and his twin sister Carol watched as their father (who was naked at the time, as was the woman he was with) blew a cop’s head off in the street. His father went to the chair, and Marty and Carol fell into an intense incestuous relationship. Both grew up to be cold and calculating sociopaths. Marty is now a very good but arrogant and unscrupulous journalist living in Chicago with his son and obese wife. After revealing the depths of corruption at play within the Chicago police department and city hall, he’s forced to flee town, leaving his family behind and returning to Los Angeles to be with his mother (The Golden Girls’ Rue McClanahan) and especially his sister Carol (Gina Gershon).
Carol is now a prostitute and just as mercenary as Marty, and let’s just say they pick up where they left off, and how. In the central subplot, after creepily and crassly seducing a female cop (Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee), Marty schemes to steal her beach house. Marty and Carol start working together, not giving a good goddamn about anything or anyone else, and many bad things happen to the people around them. Meanwhile, their mother frets about what monstrous children she’s spawned. Beyond simple incest, Oblowitz seems to delight in piling on other taboos, including murder, sexual abuse, and matricide, playing much of it (as I read it anyway) as black comedy.
The score is a mix of fake noir film music (a genre unto itself marked by solo wailing saxophone) and early ‘70s crime movie, which is telling. Although Oblowitz ostensibly kept the story’s mid-’50s setting, he makes the same mistake most directors do when it comes to period pieces, by neglecting to take little things like hairstyles or dialogue into account. Only a few spare lines of dialogue from the original story were preserved here, but it doesn’t much matter, as Marty’s VO, which runs throughout, comes directly off the page. Zane’s flat, emotionless mumble (apart from a few bursts of faux-Biblical ranting) make his Marty frightfully effective. Less can be said about Gershon’s Carol, who just seems to be hypnotized much of the time, though it is fun to see Rue McClanahan play so wildly against type. And while the ending is not as bluntly tragic as you’ll find in most Thompson films, the fact a couple people are left alive somehow only makes things that much worse.
Oblowitz got his start making music videos, and while there are flashes of that kind of pizzazz here, he keeps them mostly subdued. Enough so anyway they don’t rob the film of it’s soul. And that soul, I’ll tell you, is one sick, twisted and mean-spirited bastard, which may be why Tri-Star never saw fit to release the film on DVD. That itself, it seems, was symptomatic as screenwriters and dorectors drew closer to producing an honest, faithful and true Thompson adaptation.
It would be over a decade before anyone else took a stab at bringing Thompson back to the screen. After the Thompson renaissance of the 1980s, a number of plans were floated to produce a new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me. Quentin Tarantino wrote a script for a version set to star Brad Pitt and Uma Thurman. That fell through when it was deemed too violent for a post 9/11 world. Other versions were proposed that would star Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio as Lou Ford, and all I can say is thank god they all evaporated before it was too late. That landed the project back with the indies and British director Michael Winterbottom, whose fearless 2010 version, unlike any previous adaptation, left international audiences shocked, nauseated, and feeling very, very bad about things.
John Curran’s script doesn’t cling nearly so closely to the novel as the Kennedy adaptation, choosing instead to expand a few of the novel’s minor subplots while ignoring a few of the major storylines completely. The new film focuses on Lou Ford’s twisted background, his complicated relationship with Chester conway, and the arrival of a reporter (nowhere to be found in the novel) who’s been suspicious of Ford for years. As with the Kennedy version, the final quarter of the film, clever as it may be, bears little resemblance to anything in the book. That wasn’t the problem so many critics and audience members had with the film, though.
Casey Affleck, who admittedly is no Stacey Keach, is nevertheless still charming and terrifying as Ford, Jessica Alba is most definitely no Susan Tyrrell as the hooker, and Ned Beatty is fantastic as ever as the power-mad Chester Conway. In a small but pivotal role, Elias Koteas appears in his second Thompson film, this time as the reporter. The picture, which is stylish but not overly so (Winterbottom had earlier directed the self-consciously postmodern 24-Hour Party People), is gorgeous in its own dour, grimy, apocalyptic way, the dialogue throughout is a fine bit of Thompson mimickry, and Winterbottom clearly has a deep reverence for the material, even though he doesn’t stick to it by a long shot. That was the problem. Along with not shying away from the crazy internal monologues or the paranoid fantasies which begin cropping up in the film’s second half, he also maintains the book’s deliberate and leisurely pace, punctuating it with unexpected explosions of extremely brutal and grotesque violence far more extreme than anything conceivable in 1975, most of it directed against women. Thirty-five years earlier there were hints of the sadomasochistic relationship between the deputy sheriff and the hooker, but Winterbottom, far beyond what appears in the novel, makes no bones about the depths of Ford’s sadistic tendencies. What so disturbed audiences wasn’t simply how savage those particular scenes were, but how long they went on. And my, how they went on! On and on and on. The S&M is hinted at briefly in one or two scenes in the book, no more than that, but Winterbottom makes them the film’s centerpiece, even tossing in a few other women to feel Ford’s wrath. Given the sixty-plus years between the novel and the film, it could be argued the new adaptation remained, at least in spirit, an honest reflection of Thompson’s bruised and scarred world.
Although the film made a bloody splash at the festivals, it never got much by way of a theatrical release. You know how squeamish those mainstream audiences can get when they’re forced to see the world as it really is.
For the moment that appears to be that, which is too bad as it seemed filmmakers were at last getting a solid handle on how to honestly translate Thompson’s books. At present, still with an awful lot of books out there, there seem to be no more Thompson adaptations in the immediately forseeable future. Who knows? Maybe we’ve come to simply accept Thompson’s world as our own now and forever, so there’s nothing shocking in it anymore. More likely, the blinders have grown so thick and wide we just don’t want to be reminded that people are sick and venal creatures, or that we’re all fucked.
The final and appropriate irony, with very rare exceptions, is that when audiences really did see Thompson’s work on the screen (in The Killing, Paths of Glory and the Getaway), his name was barely attached to it if at all, and when his name was front and center (in The Grifters and After Dark, My Sweet), what audiences saw on the screen had precious little to do with anything he wrote.
by Jim Knipfel