HELL ON CHURCH STREET and the Best Noir Books of All Time

The website Book Scrolling has placed my novel HELL ON CHURCH STREET on its list of the Best Noir Novels of all time. While I'm dubious of lists of the all time greatest anything, I am absolutely gratified to be be included on any list that includes the likes of Cain, Hughes, Simenon, and Thompson. So a big thanks to the folks at Book Scrolling.

It's a funny thing to have HOCS included on this list when the book is currently out of print. As some people may know, the last publisher of HOCS, 280 Steps, went out of business not long ago. I could have immediately placed the book elsewhere, but I want to shop it around. I'm slow about these things, and I'm going to finish the current novel I'm working on so I can sell them as a pair, making the process even slower. I'm satisfied in my own mind that this is the smart way to go about the process of placing HOCS in its next home. 

So I said all of that to say that I'm especially grateful to Book Scrolling for reminding people of my little book. HELL ON CHURCH STREET changed my life. It gave me a career in writing, it took me to France, and it has introduced me to many wonderful people. So I want to right by it. I'm glad it's still out there in the world making a little noise.  

AFTER DARK, MY SWEET: A Personal Reflection

I didn’t grow up in the forties or fifties, so I didn’t discover B-movies in their original form, as the second features stuck behind classier A-movies. Nor did I discover the world of film noir the way people did in the sixties and seventies, through the  midnight movies on TV that transfixed the generation of noir geeks before me.

No, I was born in 1975, which means I came up in the eighties and nineties. Appropriately, then, I discovered noir in the distinct fashion of a Gen Xer: I found it at the video store. There’s more to this story, though, a personal twist.

I was brought up in a devout Southern Baptist house where certain movies were forbidden. It’s tempting to go for simplicity here and say that R-rated movies were forbidden, but that’s not exactly true. Only certain kinds of R-rated movies were forbidden. Anything with sex. Sex in movies was bad. Totally bad. Every time. No sex. (Even PG-rated sex scenes could change the climate in our family den. Once a bra slipped off, the air would get thin, and I would feel the sense of bodily danger you get when you know God’s wrath is about to fall.) Anything with a lot of cussing was also forbidden. You were allowed one F-word in a movie. Maybe two. After that, things got a little tense.

Violence was okay as long as it wasn’t overly gory. Dirty Harry laying waste to a bunch of punks? Cool. Slasher flicks (which, of course, might also run the risk of featuring nudity)? Not cool.

Dutiful son that I was, when I was sent to the video store to pick out a movie I tried to avoid all of the aforementioned pitfalls.

When I was home alone, however, I was a deceitful little sleaze. I would, on occasion, sneak out to the video store to pluck some forbidden fruit (fruit that I returned as soon as possible to avoid any late fees).

Enter AFTER DARK, MY SWEET. 1991. The poster for this film — and thus the cover for the video box — was a picture of Jason Patric and Rachel Ward engaged in sweaty physical congress. The title sounded like direct-to-video sleaze. I vaguely remembered Siskel and Ebert saying the movie was great, but greatness was not on my mind. The possibility of seeing Rachel Ward naked was on my mind.

I secreted the video into the house and watched it when no one was home.

I learned two things about AFTER DARK, MY SWEET that day.

1. You don’t really get to see Rachel Ward naked. I would love to act like that didn’t matter to me, but it did. I was disappointed. Simply as a consumer engaged in a capitalist enterprise, I felt I had not been well served. I had, after all, paid money for the expressed purpose of seeing Rachel Ward naked.

2. AFTER DARK, MY SWEET is a masterpiece. It’s the best film noir of the 1990s, and one of the best films, period, of that entire decade. As a human being experiencing a work of art, I was transfixed.

Jason Patric (whose sweaty ass you do get to see, natch) and Rachel Ward are both beyond great. Patric’s character Kevin “Collie” Collins, disgraced former boxer and psyche ward escapee, was sort of my first anti-hero, or, at least, he was the first anti-hero I ever saw where I was pretty sure that what I was seeing was a man scraping up some last vestige of his willpower to do something that no one would understand. He tries to save Ward’s boozy widow from a goofy kidnapping scheme cooked up by a degenerate ex-cop named Uncle Bud (played with exquisite seediness by Bruce Dern). By the end, Collie dies face down in the dirt, gut shot by the woman he loves, but it’s all okay because he did it all for her.

And Rachel Ward taught me things about women that, at 17 years old, I didn’t know I needed to learn. She was lovely and leggy, but what made her fascinating was a sadness, a deep-seated knowledge that most dreams don’t come true. The moment she starts talking in the film, mocking Patric’s fumbling attempts at polite conversation — mocking, really, the whole idea of polite conversation — you can’t take your eyes off her. You get why Patric wants to save her, and also why he thinks she can save him. She’s the only person he’s ever met who understands his loneliness. In a way — in a beautifully noir way — they do save each other.

The film wasn’t arty, but I was aware of the director, James Foley. I was aware that I was watching a movie with a vision. Was it his?

Maybe, though it’s probably more correct to say that Foley brilliantly realized Jim Thompson’s vision. Ah, yes, I also discovered Jim Thompson that day in my family den. Who was the guy who wrote this story that was the saddest, most romantic, most thrilling thing I’d ever seen? Revisiting the film many times over the years as my love of Thompson’s novels grew, I realized that the scenes with Patric and the creepy psychologist played by George Dickerson are the most spot-on interpretations of Jim Thompson’s work that have ever been put onscreen. People think that Thompson’s novels are about psychos, or about violence. No, they’re about the last slender thread of decorum stretching and stretching until it turns translucent and you can see right though it to the terrible truth that will be unleashed the moment it snaps. AFTER DARK, MY SWEET gets that. It gets that beautifully.

Interview

The writer Alex Segura was nice enough to ask me to stop by his newsletter Stuff & Nonsense to talk about noir fiction and film. It was a nice conversation, and you can check it out here.

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

Lou Ford likes to beat and kill women. He also seems to get a genuine kick out of beating and killing men, but his real passion is putting a hurt on women--preferably women who love and trust him. This makes him a terrifying vision of unchecked misogyny.

Can such a character be presented accurately and ethically in a work of fiction, much less a work of pulp fiction? When Jim Thompson created Lou Ford and placed him in the 1952 novel THE KILLER INSIDE ME he seemed to invite this question, but like most of Thompson's work the book missed the attention of serious critics by mile. The casual perusal of a drugstore paperback spinner in the fifties would have summoned up an endless series of pulp novels featuring copious sex and violence. The male ego thrashed about in a lot of these books and took out much of its anger on the female body, so at first glance THE KILLER INSIDE ME seemed like just another book on the pulp rack. Yet even in this anything goes kind of atmosphere--an atmosphere in which the cover art and blurb advertised violence toward women-- THE KILLER INSIDE ME stood out over time. Its notoriety came from Thompson's mastery of two voices, the public Lou Ford and the private Lou Ford. To the citizens of Central City, Texas, Lou Ford is a Andy Griffith-type good ol' boy deputy sheriff, amiable and armed only with an unlimited supply of cornball cliches. This facade, however, is the real Lou Ford's satire of small town goodness. The man underneath is a bubbling cauldron of malice and resentment, but--and this is the key to the book's power--this private voice is devoid of passion. Ford narrates his secret career of assault and murder like a hardboiled detective narrating the process of an investigation. He isn't reflective or particularly preoccupied by his own psychology, but--then again--neither are most serial killers. Asked once how he could make a sport of killing women, the serial killer Ted Bundy told an interviewer, "Because I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet." That's not much of an answer, of course, but it had the virtue of being true.

All of this leads us to Michael Winterbottom's new adaptation of Thompson's book. The movie stars Casey Affleck as Ford, Jessica Alba as a prostitute named Joyce Lakeland with whom Ford has a secret relationship, and Kate Hudson as Ford's girlfriend. The film also features a stellar supporting cast of excellent character actors like Elias Koteas, Simon Baker, Ned Beatty, and Tom Bower. Good old Bill Pullman even drops by for a scene as a shrink (since his fifteen minutes as a leading man have passed, here's hoping that Pullman makes more such appearances). I've been talking off and on about this film since it was in preproduction. I'm a big Jim Thompson fan, and while I've never especially been a fan of Winterbottom, I am a happy admirer of star Casey Affleck. The film arrives, however, in a swirl of controversy. (To achieve actual controversy in the age of internet pornography and unending war is some kind of accomplishment.) Several critics have condemned the film's mix of sex and violence, and the theater where I saw the film refused to admit anyone under 17 even though the film is rated R.

This kind of publicity foregrounds an obvious question (how disturbing is it?) while pushing a far more important question to the background (what is it trying to do with the representation of life that it gives us?).

To the first question: it's quite disturbing. An air of menace hangs over everything. Violence and sex mingle again and again (to such an extent that eros and thanos seem like conjoined twins). And there are two separate scenes of a woman being pummeled until skin hangs from her face or her bladder bursts. This is a violent film, and not the kind of casual violence we're used to seeing in most movies. If you don't flinch in disgust at these scenes, there's something wrong with you.

So that's settled: the film is unsettling. But what about it? To what end is it attempting to unsettle us?

I'm not sure. In 1952, Thompson was shining a light into some very dark corners of the American psyche. In 2010, there's not much innocence left to loose. Most of us lock our doors out of fear. We hear stories everyday about brutality and rape and murder. Even the fecundity of Thompson's dark imagination would not have been able to keep pace with modern life. The news that some people are sick bastards ain't news, and calling the world a sick shithole is itself something of a cliche.
THE KILLER INSIDE ME is so well acted and produced that it nearly succeeds in obscuring the underlying reality that it's not saying much. Casey Affleck has become one of our best young actors, and his performance here is electric. At 35, he still looks like he's not too far out of high school, and his voice is one of the few distinctive voices left in movies: a squeaky I-just-hit-puberty mumble that seems perpetually positioned on the verge of an angry sob. He's an inspired choice for Lou Ford--not really jovial enough in his public presence, but simmering underneath with resentments. When he flashes his toothy grin to deflect attention from his true feelings, Affleck gets close to the heart of Lou Ford's double-persona. And yet...

One can't help looping back around to the question of the close ups. Why the close ups of Jessica Alba being punched repeatedly in the face? Why do they go on so long? The film needn't do this to horrify us. The first punch is horrifying. After that, it's just making the same point. (Violence is tricky. Less really is more.) A better question: why does she sit still for this beating instead of fighting back? Alba gives as good a performance as the part lets her, but Joyce Lakeland is little more than a body for Lou Ford to copulate with and kill. Is that how Lou sees her? I don't know, but it is how the film treats her.

Let's not dodge the main question, though: why does she sit still for her beating? The movie explains. After Lou has turned her face into a bloody gruel (all except for her lips, oddly), Joyce tells him she loves him. This is a departure from the novel, and it's a fatal one for the film. Firstly, it's a stupid addition. Joyce has just had her face hammered into little more than a sack of bone fragments. It's idiotic for her to tell her torturer that she loves him, even if she does. Abused women sometimes love the horrible men who abuse them, but people don't say "I love you" through broken teeth. It rings false. Yet the film plays this line straight because Winterbottom and his collaborators have made a fundamental mistake. The film takes the sadomasochistic relationship between Lou and Joyce and turns it into a kind of sick romance. He loves her. She loves him. He's insane, though, so he kills her.

In a weird way, this is actually something of a cop out. Thomspon's Ford is goofier, livelier, and finally colder than Winterbottom's interpretation. He has the essential component of every psychopath: a total lack of empathy. People aren't people to him. Yet in this film, Lou has real feelings for Joyce. They're sick, twisted, wound up with sex (and explained, sorta, in some slapdash Freudianisms toward the end), but they're real. Lou, in his way, loves Joyce. This addition only subtracts from the character. Instead of clarifying Lou, the film tries to apologize for him. He loves her but he's sick...

This leaves the audience with very little to hold onto. What are we to make of this unconvincing romance at the center of the film? And what, in the name of God, are we supposed to make of Joyce Lakeland? She's a sex object, a punching bag, and an all-forgiving victim--three variations on a fantasy. She's not a plausible human, though.

Thompson's book pulls off the same trick Hitchcock managed ten years later when he made PSYCHO: it puts you in the head of a killer. The thing about Lou Ford is that he doesn't really think he's all that complicated. He's wrong about this, of course, but he's got a clarity of purpose. He's got a scheme, and he goes about it with the vigor of a cheerful nihilist. For him, life is a sick joke that only he gets. Winterbottom and Affleck give us a Lou Ford who is, to a degree, tormented. He tries to console Joyce as he's pounding her face in ("It's almost over, baby"), and while this mix of cruelty and concern is genuinely upsetting to watch, it strikes a hollow note.

As it happens, over the weekend I re-read Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN about a pair of Mormon fundamentalist brothers who murdered a woman and her baby. The scene of the murder is chilling because the only witnesses are the murderers themselves, and their descriptions are told in flat monotones. They simply did not regard this woman and her baby as human beings. They reminded me, in some ways, of Thompson's Lou Ford.

The film's addition of the Lou/Joyce romance feels, in the end, like an attempt to humanize Ford. This only has the effect, however, of making him less human.

***

Here's the trailer for the film.

The Killer Cometh

Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me opened in limited release on Friday. It hits DC on July 2nd, but the controversy surrounding the film has already preceded it like a bad reputation.

I've been waiting for this film for over a year now, though honestly, at this point, I'm a little nervous to see it. I'm braced for a disturbing experience, and I remain hopeful that the film is a good disturbing experience--but I'm also open to the idea that the film is cynical trash disguised as art. Only a viewing of the film itself will provide an answer.

Until then, here are some interesting links.

First up, an overview of the long march from novel to screen. A film version was proposed a long time ago with two huge--and somewhat surprising--stars. Why did that adaptation fall through? And how do you now get people to commit to making a film this damn dark in an age of 3D blockbusters?

Second, "Filmed to a Pulp" is a wider look at the challenges of adapting Thompson for the big screen. This one is by Charles McGrath of the New York Times and is thankfully more interested in the film and its source than in the controversy surrounding it.

Lastly, here's an interview with Casey Affleck, the star of the film. No matter what comes of The Killer Inside Me, I think Affleck is a major talent. Anyone who hasn't seen Gone Baby Gone or The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford is encouraged to do so immediately.

The Killer Inside Me stirs more debate

As the already controversial The Killer Inside Me makes its bloody way toward a wide release sometime later this year, conversation about it has been building. Here's an interesting overview of the debate, including input from the stars of the film, by Salon writer Andrew O'Hehir.

And, of course, I've been writing about this movie for a while now: I talked about it last month, and before that in November of 2009. I started way back in December of 2008. I'd like to claim prescience on this topic, but anyone who'd read Jim Thompson's novel could have told you that a movie version would be tough stuff.

The Controversy over The Killer Inside Me

I've been following the filming of director Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me for some time now. Most of the recent news has centered around a brewing backlash against the film's graphic misogynistic violence.

Until I see the film itself, obviously, I can't have an opinion of it. The trailer is pretty hard stuff to watch, but I'll simply have to wait to judge the complete work.

I have two preliminary thoughts about this controversy, though.

First, I come at this subject with a deep hatred of misogyny. I've known, and loved, too many people who have been victims of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. I won't abide a film that traffics in titillating images of misogyny. The root of half the world's problems, it seems to me, is to be found in the fragile male ego and its simultaneous attraction to and revulsion of the female ego (and the female body). I can't stand to watch scenes of rape and sexual humiliation, and I often avoid films with these elements. If I do end up in a movie with this kind of material, I usually have to stare at the floor in the theater. Depending on how it's done, male-on-female violence either sickens me or enrages me.

Second, I love Jim Thompson. And part of what I like about Thompson, frankly, is that he's really good at probing the minds of woman-hating nutjobs like Killer's Lou Ford. The book I consider his masterpiece, A Hell of a Woman, is about the bifurcation of just such a mind.

Which brings us to the essential underlying question: is the onscreen depiction of an act a de facto celebration of that act? To put it more pointedly, can you show violence onscreen without glamorizing, sexualizing, or celebrating that violence?

It's a good question. Truffaut famously said that there was no such thing as an anti-war movie because war invariably ends up looking exciting onscreen. There's something to this observation, at least about war movies. The essence of drama, Howard Hawks once noted, was the fight to stay alive. In a war movie, no matter how gruesome or gory you make it, it's exciting to see people fight to stay alive. It is, in a word, dramatic.

Sexualized violence is a different story, it seems to me. Here we're talking about sadism, which is not the fight to stay alive so much as the receiving of pleasure from the pain of other people. This can be presented in a way that frightens rather than titillates. Of course, it can, and often has, been presented as titillation as well.

Are we to suggest that images of such violence, even prolonged graphic images of such things, are in and of themselves harmful? I don't know, but I don't think so. Perhaps my chief example here would be the brutal rape scene in Boys Don't Cry. This is one of those scenes that I simply can't stand to watch, but I think it is in the film to elicit our rage against the act and our empathy for Hillary Swank's character. It's also there to shed light on the psyche of the two rapists (whose repressed homosexuality figures into their assault). It's a gut-wrenching scene, but it's supposed to be a gut-wrenching scene.

One could argue that the bloodless wholesale PG-13 slaughter that we see in big budget action and horror films does far more to desensitise us to violence than what we see in the hard R of something like Boys Don't Cry. Whether or not The Killer Inside Me is misogynist trash or a serious exploration of a sick man remains to be seen. Either way, I have no problem with calling it like I see it. I hope the film is a masterpiece, but if it's garbage I'll be willing to call it garbage.

I'm glad that there are forums like Jezebel out there that are providing commentary on such things. Movies matter. Images have power. And patriarchy in all its forms needs to be challenged.

But it's too early to tell about this film. Context matters. The novel is the story of a man who kills people, mostly women. If such a story doesn't disturb then the filmmakers have failed. We should not be able to sit passively and watch a woman be beaten to death without feeling horrifed. I'm ready to go through that expereince if Winterbottom and his cast and crew are taking me somewhere ultimately worth going. If they don't, or if they simply fail, then I'll certainly say as much.

At the end of the day, as with any movie, everything will come down to the movie itself, the juxtaposition of images and sound within the frames of the film.

Color Noir

Mike Harvkey over at True/Slant has compiled a list of the fifteen best "color noirs." Of course, this brings us back to the matter of definition--can a color film be a film noir, or is noir defined by sharply delineated chiaroscuro cinematography? I come down on the side that says film noir is more about attitude, plot, and characterization than cinematography--but I'll also admit that part of my laxity when it comes to definition is that I'm a big softy who wants to include color films that I like.

I should add that black and white cinematography is the most beautiful art form I have ever encountered. While I love many color movies, I worship at the altar of Alton.

Still, Harvkey's list is an interesting one. Herewith are some thoughts on a few of his choices:

1. Desert Fury- One of the all time great bad movies. Total camp, totally over the top, but a lot of fun. Added bonus: it stars Lizabeth Scott in one of her few color films. She looks breathtaking.

2. Farewell My Lovely- (Harvkey misidentifies the name of the novel) This one is an odd choice since it's not that great a movie, and it's got some particularly muddy cinematography. Stars a too-old-for-the-part Robert Mitchum. Mediocre retro-noir. You're better off reading the book or watching Murder My Sweet, the 1944 b&w version with Dick Powell.

3. The Grifters-One of the great neo-noirs, a perfect adaptation of a superb Jim Thompson novel. If you haven't seen it, then get cracking. It's a sheer delight.

4. Leave Her To Heaven- I'd rate this as the great color noir. Gene Tierney stars as the worst obsessive girlfriend ever. And I mean, Ever. She looks amazing in color, though. Gotta give her that. Here's a clip of Martin Scrosese introducing the film in front of a live audience.

5. Chinatown-What can you say? A full-on masterpiece. One of the greatest films of all time. I could heap more superlatives on it, but I'll just say that not even my contempt for the director nor my exasperation with the star has dented my love of this film. Would it have been better in b&w? Maybe...

6. The Killers (1964)- Don Siegel's film is more of a remake of the Siodmak film than an adaptation of the Hemingway short story. It's got some terrific parts--namely the brutal performances of Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager as a couple of hitmen (is it me or did Tarantino clearly pattern Pulp Fiction's Jules and Vincent on Marvin and Gulager?). The movie also features Cassavettes being grumpy--always fun--and Ronald Reagan as a bad guy with a head full of pomade. Still, this is decidedly not a great movie. It's clunky in too many places, and it has way too much cheap back projection. It's good remake of a masterpiece. See the masterpiece first.

7. The Long Goodbye-I'll say it: I hate this movie. Maybe it's because I love Raymond Chandler's novel, and this film is a deconstruction of the book and the character of Philip Marlowe. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, if you like that sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you'll like. I mostly find it boring. (One added gripe: because Elliot Gloud stars as Marlowe here, someone picked him to read all of Chandler's novels on audiobook, and he does an awful job. Someone please record new versions of the books. My pick for an audio Marlowe? Campbell Scott.)

8. Vertigo-I don't know if I'd call Vertigo a film noir. I don't know what it is--except for, possibly, the best movie I've ever seen.

9. Le Samourai- I really like this stylish Jean-Pierre Melville hitman classic, but I have the same criticism of it that I have of many older hitman movies: the assassins don't seem particularly good at doing their jobs. Here, the hitman's plan is basically to stroll into a crowded club and commit a murder. Surely there's a smarter way to do this.

10. After Dark, My Sweet- Another brilliant Jim Thompson adaptation. Stars Jason Patric, Rachel Ward, and Bruce Dern. It's romantic, suspenseful, inventive, and tragic. After seeing it, you'll wonder why Jason Patric never became a huge movie star. Rachel Ward is sexy and sad at the same time, and Bruce Dern--well just remember the Bruce Dern Rule: any movie with Bruce Dern is automatically worth seeing. After Dark is a massively underrated film that no crime geek has any excuse to miss.

A Grisly Sneak Peek at The Killer Inside Me

An extended six-minute trailer is out for Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, and it's already getting people talking.

The novel--which follows the career of Lou Ford, a jovial deputy sheriff and secret psychopath--has a cult following of creepy intensity. It's a twisted piece of work, even by the considerably nasty standards of the author. A first person look into the mind of a murderer, it's uncompromisingly sexualized and violent, but the most shocking thing about it is the way it traps you in the pov of an abject nihilist. Of course, fashionable nihilism is everywhere today (from franchised torture-porn like Hostel and Saw to the glut of serial killer/hit man/assassin stories and novels), but Thompson went deeper with it than any of his many imitators have done since. His novels--and The Killer Inside Me, in particular--are about nihilism rather than a simplistic wallowing in its more tawdry forms. (In the interest of intellectual honesty, I should note that there are more than a few people who would disagree with that last sentence.)

Now comes British director Michael Winterbottom and stars Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, and Kate Hudson, and it looks like they are going to go all the way with Thompson's story. Check out the preview here, but be warned that this six minutes is a hard R. Send the kids outside to play.

There's already a backlash brewing against the movie. It'll be interesting to see the finished film and just as interesting to observe the conversation it engenders upon release.

I first wrote about this movie when it was still little more than a rumor.

Hit Me (1996)

Jim Thompson’s novels have had a good shelf life. The Killer Inside Me has been made twice. The Getaway, twice. A Hell of A Woman and Pop. 1280 were both adapted in France. 1990 was a great year for Thompson; After Dark, My Sweet and The Grifters were both neo-noir masterpieces faithfully adapted (more or less) from two of his best books. Of course, Thompson had been dead at that point for about twenty-three years, but somehow that injustice seemed fitting. Thompson always said he’d be famous after he was dead.

Maybe it’s a good thing he didn’t live to see Steven Shainberg’s Hit Me, a loose adaptation of A Swell-Looking Babe. Thompson’s book—the story of a hotel bellhop caught up with gangsters and a beautiful woman—was no masterpiece itself. It’s a second-tier work that is never wholly convincing. Still, the book had some good qualities, as well. It worked some of Thompson’s favorite themes—namely incest, betrayal and doom—and he clearly drew on his own experiences as a bellhop in a sleazy hotel to help him flesh out his story.

Shainberg’s film, on the other hand, jettisons the incest and many of the nuances (such as they were) of Thompson’s story. Now understand, it is fine with me if an adaption takes a book and changes it. A filmmaker need feel no fidelity to a text. My problem with Hit Me, however, is not that it’s a bad adaption of A Swell-Looking Babe, it’s that Hit Me sucks all on its own.

The film stars Elias Koteas as Sonny, a bellhop at the Stillwell Hotel. He works the lonely night shift, sells bottles of booze out the backdoor, finds prostitutes for businessmen, and goes home to his mentally disabled brother (Jay Leggett). One night Sonny is called up to the room of a disturbed but beautiful woman named Monique (Laure Marsac). She slits her wrists more or less in front of Sonny, but when he tries to call a doctor she stops him. It’s just a cry for help. Sonny, being the protagonist in a film noir, falls immediately in love with her. In addition to Monique, however, Sonny has other problems. He biggest problem is that he owes money to the hotel’s head of security, Cougar (Kevin J. O’Connor). He’s also in danger of losing his brother to social services. His problems get worse one night when Monique seduces him on the floor of her hotel room (in a scene that strives for sexiness but fails because you can’t keep from thinking about how damn dirty that carpet must be). Right after they have sex, she lets out a piercing scream. Sonny, it seems, has been set up.

He’s bailed out of this situation by a friend named Del (Bruce Ramsay). Del says he’ll settle the situation with Monique, but then he ropes Sonny into a scheme he’s cooked up with Cougar to rip off a big-time gangster (Philip Baker Hall). Complications ensue.

In the broad outlines, this is a film noir plot. In execution, however, Shainberg’s film (with a script by the novelist Denis Johnson) is an utter bore. It tries very, very hard not to be boring, but therein lies the problem. This movie bores you senseless with its weirdness. What is the tone supposed to be here? It doesn’t work as a piece of suspense. The big robbery set piece, in which people are killed and the world falls apart around Sonny, doesn’t work. It’s pitched too high. This is the kind of film where the actors scream at each other in a fruitless attempt to approximate intensity.

It’s also the kind of film where everyone is odd. Koteas, a gifted actor, gives an incomprehensible performance. What is wrong with this guy? How is the audience supposed to feel about him? Is this supposed to be funny? (if I have to ask, by the way, then it’s not funny) Sonny’s twitchy and odd. It’s impossible to believe his erotic fixation on Monique because it’s impossible to believe in him as a sexual being. He’s a loose collection of tics and mannerisms and screaming fits. The rest of the cast doesn’t fair much better. Leggett’s unbelievable as the mentally disabled brother (he comes across like an actor playing a mentally disabled guy). Marsac is supposed to be sexy and sad, but she mostly seems depressed. Even great character actors like William H. Macy and Philip Baker Hall can’t get much traction with their brief roles as, respectively, a cop and a gangster. The only good performance in the movie comes from O’Connor as the nerdy-looking thug, Cougar. His weirdness actually works, maybe because it’s an understated weirdness.

Hit Me is, more than anything, a failure of tone. It’s not a long movie—only two hours—but it is a long experience.

***

For more on Thompson's books and movies, check out this page.

The Second (or is it the Third?) Coming of Jim Thompson

For those of us who think that roman noir doesn't get much better than Jim Thompson, there is great news out there in Hollywood that Casey Affleck is going to be starring in an adaption of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. This great news for three reasons:

1. Jim Thompson was the greatest postwar crime novelist. No one was better at capturing the sick underbelly of American society during the Eisenhower years (and beyond). The Killer Inside Me is widely considered to be his best book, the archetypal serial killer story. Now, I have to admit that I've never been that big a fan of this particular book. I have other favorites. A Hell Of A Woman is, I think, his most complete novel--a brutal character study of a misogynist who gets what's coming to him. Savage Night, the story of the undoing of a hitman, is Thompson's most surreal trip (the last twenty pages are insane). After Dark, My Sweet is an oddly effecting Thompson romance of all things, a rare example of him writing about flawed but essentially good people. The Getaway is perhaps a little too consciously arty, but there are worse things you can say about a book. The Killer Inside Me is a fine novel, but JT told essentially the same story in Pop. 1280, a book I find more compelling. Still, I must say, the idea of an adaptation of Thompson's most highly praised novel is exciting. I'm totally open to a film that takes the story and interprets it into something great. Which has been done before...

2. It's been eighteen years since the great Thompson revival of 1990. By my count there were three great Thompson adaptations around that time.

• After Dark, My Sweet (1990) starred Jason Patric, Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern, and was so damn good it left you thinking, incorrectly, that director James Foley was going to be a great artist. It is the best Thompson film, a superb film noir that perfectly captures the romantic nihilism (there's a phrase for you) of Thompson's most haunting story.
• The Grifters (199o) starred John Cusack, Angelica Huston and Annette Benning and it's another top rate piece of work, a movie that goes all the way with the dark implications of the book's central relationship between a con man and his smarter, more ruthless, mother.
  
• Bertrand Tavernier directed Coup de Torchon, a French adaptation of Thompson's Pop. 1280. It takes Thompson's story of a small town Texas lawman gone very, very bad and it moves the action to French colonial Africa. It's a fine piece of work, all the better for proving that Thompson's work can translate.

So, there are at least three great Thompson movies out there (I have not seen Maggie Greenwald's The Kill-Off, nor Serie Noir, Alain Corneau's French adaptation of A Hell of a Woman; I have seen both versions of The Getaway, about which the less said is better). Thompson's work has proven to be extremely adaptable.

3. It looks like he's got a good crew of adapters this time around, too. Casey Affleck is a potentially brilliant choice to play Lou Ford, the small town deputy sheriff who moonlights as a serial killer. Last year, Affleck turned in a strong performance in his brother's tight, smart neonoir Gone Baby Gone. Even more impressive was his performance in Andrew Dominik's vastly underrated revisionist western The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (a film I recommended a couple of months ago). In his portrayal of Robert Ford you get a sense of the duality Affleck could bring to Thompson's most notorious two-faced killer. He'll be joined by Elias Koteas and Jessica Alba. The screenplay, encouragingly, is by Andrew Dominik and directed by Michael Winterbottom.


Filming begins in January. Keep your fingers crossed. In the meantime check out these cool ass sites:


The Killer Beside Me: The Jim Thompson Resource Page

Bleeker Books' Page On Thompson-Lots of good links on this one