I don’t think there’s a perfect Jim Thompson adaptation, a film that completely ‘gets’ his sensibility. Not the way Cockfighter and Miami Blues ‘get’ Charles Willeford, and The Hot Spot and Dead Calm ‘get’ Charles Williams.
Thompson’s brilliant script collaborations with Stanley Kubrick, The Killing and Paths of Glory, contain more of the casual violence, cynicism, and sour humor of novels like The Getaway, The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me and After Dark My Sweet. All of these have been adapted, and all have their strengths.
In The Getaway there’s a moment where Doc and Karen McCoy are waiting to be smuggled into Mexico. They can’t stay at the ranch house, so Karen us given a flashlight, a rope and a sedative, told to climb down into a half-submerged cave and knock herself out for a couple of days. It’s harrowing and horrifying and absurd and funny, makes sense in the situation, and is unique to Thompson’s work.
The ending to The Grifters—minor spoiler ahead—involves a slit throat, being brushed off by the killer with the line, “It’s only one throat.”
Thompson’s tone is not cool, nor ironic, not sincere. It’s absurd and realistic at the same time. It’s the part of a story somebody tells you where they add “I know it’s too crazy to believe but I swear that’s what happened.”
Pop. 1280, my favorite of his novels, starts with a folksy, corrupt antihero and slowly reveals him to be apocalyptically insane. The Killer Inside Me and After Dark My Sweet, and A Hell of a Woman all involve characters lying to the world and slowly disclosing themselves to the reader. Difficult for a film to pull off.
The Getaway, directed by Sam Peckinpah from a script by Walter Hill, and starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, leaves out most of Thompson’s rancid sensibility, instead making the McCoys cool and the story a straight-ahead crime and action film.
Yet there are elements the film nails perfectly, specifically the sequence in the middle where Karen gets conned out of their cash by a train station grifter played by Richard Bright. Doc boards a moving train in pursuit, while Karen stews back at the station, possibly never to see him again. It’s a great sequence that Hill lifts entirely from the book (and echoes a scene with Bruce Dern in Hill’s film The Driver).
The sideshow appearance of the villain, Rudy Butler (played by Al Lettieri in the film) is toned down, but Rudy’s scenes are discomfiting and filthy, and also feel true to Thompson’s novel.
And there’s something in the way Peckinpah edits the opening scenes of Doc grinding away in prison, slowly reaching the point of desperation where he’ll send Karen to work out a deal to free him, that captures something of the book. Thompson’s characters often come from dirt. They’re not pretty and they don’t have a lot of options—which doesn’t excuse their actions at all, but exemplifies the world they hail from, nasty brutish and short.
The Getaway strips away most of Thompson’s style but what remains stands out, and the film works on its own terms, as a cool action heist film.
It’s also beautiful, especially the scene at the dump where Doc and Karen have to decide whether to split up or go on together. McQueen in a suit, McGraw at the wheel…stylish as hell.
The Grifters has a lot of great elements and talent behind it. Donald E Westlake adapted the script, directed by Stephen Frears, and produced by Martin Scorsese. The film starts Annette Benning and Angelica Huston and John Cusack. It’s faithful to the book in a way The Getaway isn’t. It’s critically beloved, and defines noir for a lot of people.
Despite that, it’s an oddly flat film, and I admit I don’t like it. The tone neither seems sincere not commited to ironic distance. It looks too nice, and the actors, great as they are (Huston and Benning especially), don’t have that grubby, filthy feel of the Thompson novel.
It has only one solid grifting scene, involving JT Walsh and Benning conning Texas millionaires with a stock market swindle. (Not a deal-breaker, but compared to David Mamet films like House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner which ooze love for con men and life on the margins, it’s curiously hands-off with a lot of the scams.)
Westlake—who probably knew better than anyone about the inability of filmmakers to capture a sensibility, given the wildly divergent takes on his Parker novels—wrote a great script. Frears is a solid director, but I wish the John Huston of Fat City and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean had directed it. Natural light and sweatier actors would fit the story better.
The Grifters is far closer in plot and story to Thompson than The Getaway, yet feels like it misses the mark by a wider margin. (Just my opinion—far better minds adore the film, and I can’t deny that Angelica Huston is great. I just think she should be starring with Susan Tyrrell and Timothy Carey.)
After Dark My Sweet, The Killer Inside Me, and Coup de Torchon (Pop. 1280) fall somewhere in between. Either the actors and the look are too pretty, or they’re just right but the script is scrubbed too neat. Either the violence is toned down, or played straight, or played for laughs.
Thompson ended his career writing novelizations of the TV show Ironside and films such as The Undefeated. Maybe that’s sad. Recently I saw John Vernon pop up in Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and while it was a little sad to see the great character actor from Point Blank and The Outlaw Josey Wales end in ignominy, it’s also kind of beautiful. If you’re a professional artist and you love what you do, you take what opportunities come. And sometimes that’s how it ends.
It’s only one career.
Excellent analysis Sam. What I am glad for is that Peckinpah didn’t try to film the real ending of The Getaway.
I enjoy your takes on these movies, thanks!