Jim Thompson And Noir Cinema

In previous posts, I’ve remarked on the influence of popular crime writing on the history of moving pictures, especially in the genre known as film noir and the far reaching influence of its style and values.  

I noted the writing of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, W.R. Burnett, and John Fante, who wrote hard boiled stylish stories about desperate dangerous people.  

Their writing reflected and illuminated their times better than so-called mainstream literature: beginning in the 1920's prohibition / mobster era and continuing through the Depression with existential and socially aware crime stories.  Into the 1940's with its cynical worldly post-war weary violence, and the paranoid angst ridden 1950's, their vivid stories were easily adaptable into cheap — mostly black and white, mostly B — movies.  

One writer I neglected to mention — and neglected to know at the time — was Jim Thompson (born 1906), who was a rough contemporary of the more famous writers but whose best work seems to have been written in the mid-1950's and early 60's.  

Thompson followed the time honored pledge of the worldly writer, writing about places, people, things he knew about.  Many of his novels are set in small southern towns he knew well.  He was born in Oklahoma territory, lived later in Texas, his father a local sheriff who was forced out of office by accusations of misdeeds, which haunted Thompson's childhood. (The central protagonists of some of his best novels, “Pop. 1980" and “The Killer Inside Me” were lawmen who are not heroes). 

He worked at many jobs, notably as a bellhop (used this in “A Swell Looking Babe”) during prohibition in an atmosphere of hustling, liquor, women, gambling.  He suffered a nervous breakdown early in life and many of his protagonists suffer from mental states that motivate and underlie their actions. 

During the Depression his politics were left leaning, being active in WPA writers project and the Communist Party. His novels are replete with the suggestion of class and race injustice.

For most of his life he was an alcoholic, but that illness did not seem to affect his prolific writing, at least during his most productive period.  

The novels I have read thus far vary from and expand upon the earlier work of the previous generation of writers. Reflecting the 1950's, his characters are more psychologically complex, often driven to their inevitable (though unpredictable and therefore exciting) doom by their fatalistic attraction to violent risks. Often seeing themselves as victims of injustice, they see their crimes as justified by a twisted sense of entitlement, the impulse for justified revenge, or explained as the way things must be. 

His novels revel in the notion that life is absurd, pointless except to survive and continue to exist without interference from hypocrites or other moralists.  His protagonists are anti-social in the sense of seeing their victims as mere obstacles to their existence.  Many characters fit the Thoreau model of leading “lives of quiet desperation”, that is until fate provides opportunities: meeting a beautiful woman or a con artist, being put into an anxious box by events.  Their adventures are like surreal dramas of the fantasies of all losers: success at sex, feeling the thrill of action, risking all at a chance to win the game, all the while knowing deep down that it will be futile.  

His insights into humanity are incisive, and his conclusions are among the darkest and least optimistic in popular literature. Heroes are rare in these stories.  Romance is often manipulative, for his characters love is not the cure. 

The stories are sexist, in tune with their time in that the central protagonists are mostly men, and women are sexualized --- although as in the previous generation of noir pulp writing, they are often empowered and independent, using their sexual natures to survive. Women are often victimized, rarely innocent, sometimes survivors.  

Psychological depth involves delving into perversion: incest, sadism, masochism.  Thompson's characters seem capable of anything to please or pleasure themselves. In his stories, crime often doesn’t pay in the end, though not because of a sense of values or morality. Rather, losers lose, irony and fate demand payment, and it is a zero sum game.     

His pulp novels were often published primarily in paperback form and on the book racks of the time their covers with leggy bosomy blondes and cigarette dangling gunmen would have been easily lost amid the crowded pulp titles.  He came to the attention of some Hollywood movie people, notably Stanley Kubrick, for whom he wrote some screen treatments (including a script for "The Killers" and "Paths Of Glory"), Robert Redford, Sam Fuller, and writer Harlan Ellison. When the few cognoscenti discovered him during his last years (he died in 1977), the movie adaptations began to flow.  

The first was “The Getaway” directed by Sam Peckinpah in 1972, starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, remade in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger). 

That was followed by “The Killer Inside Me” (1976) directed by Burt Kennedy and starring Stacy Keach as Sheriff Lew Ford.  It was remade in 2010 by Michael Winterbottom, starring Casey Affleck, with Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson.  

The French director Alain Corneau filmed a version of Thompson’s novel “A Hell Of A Woman” re-titled “Série noire,” (1979).  In 1981, “Coup de Torchon” an adaptation of Thompson’s “Pop. 1280" was released, directed by Bertrand Tavernier, starring Phillipe Noiret, with Isabelle Huppert and Stéphane Audran.  

Three Thompson novels were adapted into movies released in 1990:

“The Kill-Off” is one of Thompson’s novels that was a novelization based on a proposed screen treatment or screenplay. It was filmed by Maggie Greenwald based on her own screenplay which apparently abandoned most of Thompson’s plot and dialogue and sank into oblivion after a few decent festival showings.

“After Dark, My Sweet” was released in the same year. James Foley and Robert Ridlin adapted Thompson’s novel for a movie staring Jason Patric, with Bruce Dern and Rachel Ward. 

The most successful Thompson based movie of 1990 was obviously “The Grifters.”  The script was written by Donald Westlake who, along with director Stephen Frears, and lead actors John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Annette Bening, intentionally honored the novel on which it was based.  Frears in his commentary to the DVD shows his awareness of movie lore by referencing John Huston’s successful strategy in adapting “The Maltese Falcon” by filming the book with few thoughtful exceptions. Frears goes so far as to quote from the classic Huston movie by showing his femme fatale, “Lilly,” descending in a grated elevator as his climax.  

The 90's also saw the Baldwin / Basinger remake of “The Getaway” in 1994, and two years later, the release of “Hit Me” with Elias Koteas in Stephen Shainberg’s adaptation of Thompson’s novel, “A Swell Looking Babe”.  The next year “This World, Then The Fireworks” was released, starring Billy Zane and Gina Gershon as a perverse brother and sister.