A Hell of a Woman was also adapted in French as Série noire (1979). In the early 1990s, Hollywood resumed its interest in Thompson's writing and several of his novels were re-published. Three novels were adapted for new film treatments during that period: The Kill-Off; After Dark, My Sweet; and The Grifters, which garnered four Academy Award nominations. The Getaway was remade in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger in the lead roles but the film retained the happy ending of the earlier film. In 1996, A Swell-Looking Babe was released as Hit Me, and 1997 saw the release of This World, Then the Fireworks from Thompson's short story of that name. The latter film starred Billy Zane and Gina Gershon as a pair of twisted siblings. Cultural references[edit source | editbeta] • Thompson was a major influence on the songwriting style of Mark Sandman, the singer for Morphine (band) and Treat Her Right; see Sandman songs like "Murder for the Money" and "A Good Woman is Hard to Find". • There is a reference to Thompson's book The Killer Inside Me in the song, "Sri Lanka Sex Hotel", on the Dead Milkmen's Beelzebubba album, and in the song "Killer Inside Me" on MC 900 Ft. Jesus' album Welcome to My Dream. • David Thomas, lead singer of Pere Ubu, says of the band's album Why I Hate Women: "the back story for this album was the Jim Thompson novel he never wrote."[10] • Songwriter, guitarist, and singer John Wesley Harding, in an introduction to his song "The Truth" during the WXRT-FM Twilight Concert at the World Music Theatre in Tinley Park, Ill., on Sep 12, 1992, said the song was for anyone who had seen the 1950 American film Sunset Boulevard or "read a Jim Thompson novel." • Donald Westlake, who adapted The Grifters for film in 1990, satirized Thompson later that year in his own novel Drowned Hopes. This book features a character named "Tom Jimson" who is hard-boiled to the point of absurdity. • In the 1997 film Cop Land, which takes place partly in (fictitious) Garrison, New Jersey, the "Welcome to Garrison" sign pictured sixteen minutes into the film indicates that the population of the town is 1280, a reference to Thompson's novel "Pop. 1280". • On the Cable show Californication the character Hank Moody steals a book that he wrote called "South of Heaven", which is also the title for a novel by Jim Thompson. • Jim Thompson has been cited by Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbø as being a major influence on his style of writing, particularly because of the way in which he described the human mind and nature. Major works[edit source | editbeta] • Now and on Earth (1942) • Heed the Thunder (aka Sins of the Fathers) (1946) • Nothing More Than Murder (1949) • The Killer Inside Me (1952) • Cropper's Cabin (1952) • Recoil (1953) • The Alcoholics (1953) • Savage Night (1953) • Bad Boy (1953) • The Criminal (1953) • The Golden Gizmo (aka The Golden Sinner) (1954) • Roughneck (1954) • A Swell-Looking Babe (1954) • A Hell of a Woman (1954) • The Nothing Man (1954) • After Dark, My Sweet (1955) • The Kill-Off (1957) • Wild Town (1957) • The Getaway (1958) • The Transgressors (1961) • The Grifters (1963) • Pop. 1280 (1964) • Texas By the Tail (1965) • South of Heaven (1967) • Nothing But a Man (1970) • Child of Rage (1972) • King Blood (1973) • Jim Thompson Omnibus (1983) (republished in 1995) • Jim Thompson Omnibus 2 (1985) (republished in 1997) • Fireworks: The Lost Writings of Jim Thompson (1988) • The Rip-Off (1989) References[edit source | editbeta] 1. ^ a b Robert Polito. Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. p.373 2. ^ a b King, Stephen; "Big Jim Thompson: An Appreciation" pp vii–x in Jim Thompson's Now And On Earth Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, New York (1994 trade paperback edition; ISBN 0-679-74013-9. The emphasis is his.) 3. ^ a b From an interview in the 1998 North American DVD version of The Grifters film. 4. ^ Jim Thompson at the Biography Project 5. ^ Burnett, Jay. "Things Are Not As They Seem". The Penniless Press On-Line. Retrieved 21 High Priest of the Godless: A Jim Thompson Primer COLUMN BY CRAIG CLEVENGER MARCH 20, 2013 5 COMMENTS IN: • FILM • JIM THOMPSON • NOIR • PRIMER • PULP FICTION inShare0 Before there was film noir, there was the roman noir, the dark novel. What Americans of the mid-twentieth century called pulp fiction was simply the contemporary incarnation of the dime novel or penny dreadful of the previous century. The lurid stories behind the lurid covers were considered lowbrow trash and indeed, many of them aspired to be nothing but the same. But one man’s trash is another man’s dark worldview, as evinced by the French embrace of these tales from the godless gutter of the New World. It’s no coincidence that we still use the French term to describe the genre; no less than Existentialism’s poster boy himself, Albert Camus, credited James M. Cain’s noir classic, The Postman Always Rings Twice, as the inspiration for his own classic, The Stranger. So it was no surprise at all when, about fifteen years ago, I was prowling through the stacks in a bookstore on the Avenue des Champs-Élyseés and found French translations of the heavyweight champ of American noir writers, Jim Thompson, filling an entire shelf, end-to-end. It was a bittersweet sight. Every one of Thompson’s books was out of print in the U.S. at the time of his death, only to be resurrected courtesy of the Black Lizard imprint roughly a decade later and thus confirm the author’s own prophecy, that he would be posthumously famous. Jim Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory in 1906. His writing was autobiographical, to a certain extent. Before the oil fields (Roughneck), he was a bellhop with a knack for catering to the shady requests of hotel guests (A Swell-Looking Babe), and readers can see hints of his family history throughout his work, most notably the disgrace of his lawman father. It’s tough to give a cursory overview of Thompson, given that he wrote in excess of thirty novels, to say nothing of his writing for film and television. With that in mind, here are a few highlights, most of which have, conveniently, been adapted to film (some more than once). The Killer Inside Me (1952) We’ll start with the easiest. It was the most recent of film adaptations, but it’s also the most arguably well-known from Thompson’s body of work. The narrator, Lou Ford, is a small town sheriff and is not just corrupt, but a bloodless sociopath. He hurts people for his own amusement and murders them for little more, except when he’s murdering them to cover his tracks. Some have suggested that this novel was one of the first forays into writing from the standpoint of criminal psychopath; whether that’s true or not, it was certainly one of the best. Buy The Killer Inside Me from Amazon.com Pop. 1280 (1964) Though published twelve years after The Killer Inside Me, the two novels are often referred to as siblings by critics and fans of Jim Thompson. Both are told in the first person and narrated by lawless lawmen recounting their small-town body count for the reader. The key difference is that Thompson took the wholesome, toe-scuffing, aw, shucks veneer of Lou Ford (as brilliantly portrayed by Casey Affleck) and cranked it to eleven with Sheriff Nick Corey, who narrates Pop. 1280 with an exaggerated Li’l Abner cornpone dialect that belies his recreational bloodletting. So pronounced is Nick Corey’s hillbilly persona that the only thing more frightening than his appetite for blood (and everything else; both his libido and table manners are formidable [the amount he eats throughout the novel verges on science fiction]) is how much he revels in ripping off his metaphorical mask when confronting a victim. I’m particularly fond of Pop. 1280, because I think it has one of two particular passages (both Thompson’s) that sum up the noir genre so neatly, it could almost be a manifesto: “I’d been in that house a hundred times, that one and a hundred others like it. But this was the first time I’d seen what they really were. Not homes, not places for people to live in, not nothin’. Just pine-board walls locking in the emptiness. No pictures, no books—nothing to look at or think about. Just the emptiness that was soakin’ in on me here. “And then suddenly it wasn’t here, it was everywhere, every place like this one. And suddenly the emptiness was filled with sound and sight, with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought people to… Because that’s the emptiness thinkin’ and you’re already dead inside, and all you’ll do is spread the stink and the terror, the weepin’ and wailin’, the torture, the starvation, the shame of your deadness. Your emptiness.” That's pure noir, right there. Buy Pop. 1280 from Amazon.com The Grifters (1963) The plot behind The Grifters is interesting and fairly straightforward. Roy Dillon* is a con artist. So is his girlfriend. And his mother. Along with the tensions arising from the parties the three have respectively pissed off, there’s a rising tension between Roy’s mother (Lilly) and his girlfriend (Moira) that verges on Oedipal, with respect to Roy. This is not the first time Jim Thompson’s work ventured into such territory. There were similar overtones in A Swell-Looking Babe, as well as a pair of incestuous siblings in his short story, This World, Then the Fireworks. *The surname Dillon was the pen name Thompson used in some of his early short stories, as well as that of the main character in his first published novel, Now and on Earth, and Frank Dillon, the narrator of A Hell of a Woman. Buy The Grifters from Amazon.com After Dark, My Sweet (1955) I mention these two novels in succession only because they were both released as films the same year, 1990, heralding the Jim Thompson renaissance along with the Black Lizard reprints. But while the Stephen Frears adaptation of The Grifters was a critical and commercial success, After Dark, My Sweet was largely ignored. That’s a shame because, in my opinion, the latter is not only a better film (which is not to say The Grifters wasn’t any good; it was beautifully done, and Frears did a stunning job making L.A.’s MacArthur Park look very period-noir while making the story contemporary, not to mention the performances of the cast), but is also one of the most faithful book-to-film adaptations I’ve ever seen. Kevin “Kid” Collins is a homeless drifter living hand to mouth in the hinterlands of the California desert when he’s taken in by a widow as a caretaker for her withering estate. Collins, it turns out, is a former champion prize fighter but by most every measure he acts as though he’s lost by more knockouts than he’s won. Taken for a sap by the widow Fay Anderson, Kevin Collins is roped into a kidnapping scheme by the widow and one “Uncle Bud” (of dubious relation but most definitely a scumbag). And as all things noir must, their plan goes awry. While Jim Thompson approached storytelling with a journalist’s eye and bare-bones prose, he could also be experimental at times (most notably in Hell of a Woman, when the narrator suffers a break with reality and the ensuing prose veers into William S. Burroughs territory, and The Golden Gizmo which features, yes, a talking dog. Sort of.). In After Dark, My Sweet, Thompson surprises us with a prototypical unreliable narrator. Buy After Dark, My Sweet from Amazon.com A Swell-Looking Babe (1954) Unlike the others I’ve covered here, this one has yet to be touched by Hollywood, to the best of my knowledge. Nonetheless, it’s one of my favorites. Drawn from Thompson’s own experience, it’s the story of Dusty Rhodes (Really, Jim? Really?), a bellhop who has to walk the line between doing favors and running errands for the high- and low-class criminal guests of the hotel, while at the same time keeping his nose clean and doing his part to keep the place “respectable.” As in, no prostitutes. And in 1954, that meant screening lone female guests and being on the lookout for undercover detectives. As you might guess by the title, one particular guest slips through the check-in screening and all hell breaks loose. On a side note, just as Sheriff Nick Corey’s voracious appetite always stood out as both amusing and puzzling, so here does the sartorial preoccupation of A Swell-Looking Babe’s main character. Buy A Swell-Looking Babe from Amazon.com Thompson’s body of work makes a thorough survey of everything a rather daunting task. A quick web search will yield plenty of other titles and again, courtesy of Black Lizard, the bulk of Thompson’s novels remain in print to this day. Full disclosure: the obvious omission from the above is The Getaway, which has been twice brought to the big screen, but is one of the few Jim Thompson novels I’ve yet to read. Don’t ask. But in addition to those summarized above or mentioned in passing, there’s South of Heaven (1967), The Alcoholics (1953), Cropper’s Cabin (1952), Recoil (1953), and the list goes on.
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