Peter Rozovsky on hardboiled

In his blog I too rarely read Peter Rozovsky has started a new series of posts: he looks into the classic American hardboiled crime fiction. Here are his posts on Lionel White, Edward Anderson (Thieves Like Us), James M. Cain, Dan J. Marlowe and Robert Silverberg (admittedly a small one) and finally Dan J. Marlowe (again!), Paul Cain and Jim Thompson. He has also some other fascinating posts on different subjects, go read them all!

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Série noire

Alain Corneau is one of the most unsung and underrated French directors. He started his career in the early seventies with gritty crime films, like Police Python 357 (1976). Série noire (1979) is based on Jim Thompson's Hell of a Woman and I think it's a seminal film: it's the first in the new wave Jim Thompson film versions. (I think Burt Kennedy's The Killer Inside Me was still old wave. Though I have never seen it.) After Série noire came Coup de torchon in 1981 and then, some years later, The Kill-Off, After Dark, My Sweet and The Grifters, all in 1990.

Corneau's film is a quite slow-moving, but in the end an almost diabolically hysteric story of the downward spiral we so much love about Thompson's work. Patrick Dewaere jumps around like Woody Woodpecker on speed and gets sudden spurts of violence. This is the best part in Corneau's film - he handles arbitrary violence very well, with great verve. Violence is never portrayed as funny, but still the chaotic killings are the funniest parts in the film (especially when Dewaere places the gun in the wrong dead man's hand). The ending is very cruel, as befits a Jim Thompson filmatization.

The French title of course refers to the legendary book series Série noire that had almost all the important American and British hardboiled and noir writers. In English-speaking markets, the film was called... um, actually can't find that tidbit. Maybe it's never been shown in the English-speaking countries. That's impossible!

More overlooked films here.

Winterbottom's Killer Inside Me

Michael Winterbottom's controversial rendering of Jim Thompson's famous paperback original, The Killer Inside Me, didn't seem to make much impact in Finland. Maybe we're so used to looking at helpless women getting beaten and kicked to death we don't care. Many commentators here said the film is lame.

I watched the film recently on DVD and have to wonder: lame? what the fuck? I didn't see anything lame about this - it was a very powerful and unsettling experience, even though I'm pretty accustomed to read about rapes and beatings.

Winterbottom's film is very close to Thompson, but stays away from going into killer Lou Ford's head. He's seen from the outside, his own comments in the voice-over narration don't do much to deepen what we already see. I think this might be what makes the film lame to others. They want to see some crazy stuff happening, the guy going really insane and saying "boo!" and thinking perverse thoughts all the time. This stuff doesn't happen here - it would be just too easy and public-pleasing - and I really think this is the best way to film Jim Thompson.

I realized watching this that's it's been almost 20 years, since I read Thompson's novel. About time to revisit it, especially when the film made some things clearer that I hadn't understood the first time around. But I do remember that I wrote a review of the then new Finnish translation and compared it to Ellis's American Psycho and Donna Tartt's The Secret History, under the headline "The American Nihilism", and came to the conclusion that Thompson outwins both Ellis and Tartt in the harshness of his vision.

Winterbottom directs Thompson's Killer Inside Me!

Check out the promo trailer here.

A Jim Thompson short film

A student film based on a Jim Thompson short story "Forever After" has caused some controversy over at the Rara-Avis e-mail list. I didn't really watch this, but here's the link anyway.