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Jim Thompson - Celluloid Survival by Adrian Wootton |
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| Jim Thompson |
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Like most of the great American crime novelists, Jim Thompson worked for, and in, Hollywood and saw his work adapted for the screen. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Thompson’s work has also had longevity and retained a vital, relevant currency amongst film makers over the last four decades, since his death in 1977. Michael Winterbottom's new film version of Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, is the latest evidence of this fascination and before considering why the writer remains a popular inspiration, it’s worth going back to the beginning; at least in movie terms.
By the mid 1950’s, Jim Thompson had already completed his most prolific pulp-writing period, churning out a stellar series of the hardest of hard-boiled fiction. This was also, coincidentally, the point at which most people regard the end of the great watermark in the first generation of great pulp fiction writing (Chandler died, Hammett was silent, Cain has moved away from crime fiction etc). Similarly, the film noir movie cycle was also drying up; detective/ cop shows were moving to TV and the public wanted different things (reflecting cold war paranoia). But it was precisely then that Thompson struck up a friendship with tyro-director Stanley Kubrick, who saw the grit, brutal violence, dark humour and dark truths of the novelist’s work. Thompson worked on the screenplay of Kubrick's heist masterpiece The Killing (which was infused not only with McCarthyite paranoia but the naturalistic semi-documentary 'realism', shooting style, atmosphere and attention to details etc that was a feature of films such as Anatomy of Murder and Naked City). Kubrick's producer, James B. Harris, was a guest of Noir in Fest some years ago and shared his vivid memories of knowing Thompson at this period. Unfortunately, although the novelist had a large hand in the screenplay of Kubrick's subsequent anti-war classic Paths of Glory and wrote a still unpublished and unproduced, original screenplay, his relationship with enigmatic Kubrick was not covered in glory and soured over screen credit (or a perceived lack of it). With Thompson really reduced to a footnote in Kubrick's ever more glittering movie career, he was (like many noir writers of the era, such as David Goodis) left earning bits of cash by doing hack work for a variety of US TV shows, during the late 1950’s and the 1960's, in between occasional bursts of novel writing.
It was in the last decade of Thompson's increasingly troubled life (little original writing, alcoholism and ill health), after an abortive attempt working on a project for Robert Redford, he became involved in Sam Peckinpah’s production of The Getaway, that would be the first film adaptation of one of his own novels. Essentially an action vehicle, and a rather good one, for Steve McQueen; who allegedly didn't like Thompson's original script. As a result, the novelist once again found himself on the wrong side of the movie business and had his screen credit relegated to the margins. For Thompson, it was to be his last real work as a screenwriter but not his last encounter with Hollywood. This period, of early to mid 197O's, saw a resurgence in interest in the hard boiled crime genre in American cinema, both relating to the classic and contemporary writers (also, as academics and critics were starting to write seriously about the genre and its creative talents). Consequently, there was a plethora of great, good and wacky adaptations and homage’s to the genre i.e. Robert Altman's version of Chandler's Long Goodbye, Peter Yates’ Friends of Eddie Coyle, based on George V. Higgins, John Flynn's The Outfit adapted from Richard Stark, Roman Polanski's Chinatown, and Dick Richard’s nostalgic version of Chandler's Farewell My Lovely. Very appropriately, Richards got the ageing (and ailing) Thompson to take a cameo in this film, sort of representing his whole generation of writers, whilst amusingly, playing a fictional character in one of his greatest rival’s works. This was a lovely late bow in the cinematic spotlight. This was followed by a mediocre adaptation of Killer Inside Me, arguably his most disturbing, innovative book, directed by Burt Kennedy, that Thompson hated. Unfortunately, this critically lambasted and commercially unsuccessful film was to prove a singularly inappropriate epitaph for Jim Thompson, who passed away at the age of 71, on the 7th April 1977.
For a few years after Jim Thompson's passing it looked like his life and career might fall into literary and cinematic obscurity but he was saved by two factors. The first was the French love of American noir writing and in a period where various, now mature and not so nouvelle vague, directors (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol) and their younger competitors were turning again to pulp scribes for inspiration and re-imaging, Alain Corneau, first of all, translated Thompson’s novel, A Hell of a Woman into the 1979 film, Serie Noire. Then, Bertrand Tavernier came along with the frankly brilliant Coup de Torchon (1981). Resetting Thompson's novel, Pop. 1280, in French Colonial West Africa, at the turn of the 20th century, he created a masterpiece and it is still the only great, non-English language version of Thompson’s novel in the film canon.
On the other hand, in the latter part of American Reaganomics, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, sprang a resurgence in smart, gritty, low budget USA indie noir/chiller films, that were soaked in the broken underbelly of America. These films, roughly grouped to together as American Gothic (or neo-noir), had as a touchstone Jim Thompson's nihilistic world view. While most were indebted to him, rather than adapted from him (i.e. The Hitcher, Near Dark, American Gothic, Blue Steel, Bad Influence, Red Rock West), it did encourage young film makers to try and re-interpret his work (which was also at the time unfeted and therefore very cheap to option). Indeed, both Maggie Greenwald’s, stunning, tough and totally unsentimental version of The Kill Off in 1989 and James Foley's stylish After Dark My Sweet, demonstrated that Thompson’s work could fit right into modern zeitgeist without requiring any significant re-working. This was confirmed in spades by the frankly wondrous version of The Grifters in 1993, which brought a stellar creative team together: Martin Scorsese as producer, Stephen Frears as its British director (with what may still be his best American movie) and the scintillating penmanship of the brilliant veteran noir novelist Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark) to lick the script into shape. For Frears and Westlake it was a dream collaboration and Westlake (who confided to me that he always felt Thompson's work was one draft from perfection because of how he wrote in such a manically rushed manner for pulp publishers and thus he had tried to give script that added polish, potentially missing from the book.) His greatest realised writing for the movies, arguably one of the greatest adaptations of a Thompson novel, The Grifters revived publishing and film interest in his work and thrust him back, for a few years at least, into the popular public spotlight.
During the latter part of the 1990's, Thompson's name never quite faded away from view; with a short story, The Frightening Frammis, being adapted as an episode of The Fallen Angels TV series, in 1993; the big budget but very dull remake of The Getaway, in 1994; Hit Me a mediocre version of A Swell-Looking Babe in 1995; and 1997's This World, Then The Fireworks, a small but well realised version of one of Thompson’s lesser known works.
Then as if by magic the Thompson 'boom', or at least its occasional production line ended and there was a hiatus of nearly 13 years. Maybe the rights became too expensive, maybe film makers thought Thompson was exhausted, certainly film versions of Dashiell Hammett, contemporary novelist James Ellroy and others such as Elmore Leonard seemed to be preferred. Until that is, along came British director Michael Winterbottom and his partner producer Andrew Eaton with this years Killer Inside Me. Intriguingly, Winterbottom had never made a crime thriller before and his work has tended to be eclectic, edgy, often political and not really operating in set genres, making this a major new departure. Even more intriguingly, it wasn't supposed to be a Jim Thompson book he was adapting at all. I know this because I had a very small personal involvement. Michael Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton wanted to make a British set, contemporary version of Thompson's American crime-writing contemporary David Goodis and his novel Down There (which aimed to be as far away as possible from Truffaut's classic 1960s French adaptation Shoot the Pianist). I did actually see treatments, and some script/ dialogue of this project but although work was proceeding intensely on it, it was abandoned because of rights issues (a French actor producer held the film options and wouldn't do a deal with the British film makers). By this point Michael Winterbottom decided he really was going to make a crime thriller anyway and then went full on into the idea of doing something not just based on a American crime novel but set and shot it in USA; using authentic period setting of a classic noir book. The result was The Killer Inside Me, co-written by Winterbottom and John Curran, which premiered in the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals.
Arguably one of the most intense and faithful versions of one of Thompson's major novels (if not his most major!), except for the fact it dumps the novelists, first person, pop-Freudian explanations of why the leading character, Deputy Lou Ford, is such a homicidal maniac. Thus, The Killer Inside Me perfectly renders the, perverted eroticism, disturbingly detailed violence, the savagely deterministic storyline and the pitch black comedy of its source material. On release, however, it divided critics; drawing accusations of misanthropy, pornographic depictions of violence and outright misogyny. The debate about the film was perhaps most intense on its summer 2010 release in the UK, where there was a loud discussion in the newspapers, radio and TV on the film’s merits or otherwise (and I admit I was very firmly on side of the filmmakers). Unfortunately, perhaps because of the controversy, people weren't driven to the film but deterred from it and Killer Inside Me failed at the UK box office.
One hopes this is not the fate for Killer Inside Me elsewhere, including Italy. Noir In Fest seems the perfect place to present this rather special adaptation, that reaffirms the ever flexible, almost plastic art of Thompson; whose post-modern edge, the character’s selfish, sometimes psychotic and entirely believable motivations, unencumbered by sentimentality and black and white morality, remains astonishing, modishly, now.
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