I first heard of hard-boiled writer Jim Thompson around 1990 when his books were suddenly the hottest properties in Hollywood. That year, The Grifters and After Dark, My Sweet were both adapted for the big screen, which subsequently cast a spotlight on director Maggie Greenwald’s 1989 indie version of The Kill-Off. Other Thompson novels were quickly optioned or re-optioned, though, like all trends in Hollywood, the vogue for his work quickly faded, and these projects never materialized. The next interpretation of one of his novels came four years later in the form of a weak remake of The Getaway mounted as a vehicle for married stars Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. My love of hard-boiled fiction combined with my admiration for the movie interpretations of The Grifters and After Dark, My Sweet prompted me to read a few novels by the writer, whose heart was surely filled with darkness. Despite the sick, unlikable characters, the violent deaths described in graphic detail, and the harsh, bitter take on small-town America, I enjoyed his writing immensely. I liked his sparse, take-no-prisoners writing style and his experimentations with narrative point of view.

For weeks, I have anxiously awaited The Killer Inside Me, English director Michael Winterbottom’s recent adaptation of Thompson’s most critically acclaimed book, and I wasn’t disappointed. Winterbottom has turned out a terrific traditional film noir—the perfect visual counterpart to Thompson’s hard-boiled prose. Most of the familiar visual and narrative conventions of classic film noir are used effectively by a director who knows how to pull viewers into the main character’s warped world. The “me” of the title is Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff in a small town in Texas during the 1950s. He seems gentle, quiet, and even dim on the surface, but he is a cold-blooded sociopath whose proclivities for violent sex and murder are awakened by a prostitute with a taste for rough sex. Lou ends up killing several characters, some of whom seem quite close to him, and the narrative becomes a contest between Lou, who thinks he is covering his tracks, and his associates and coworkers who are suspicious.

The story unfolds entirely from Lou’s perspective: He narrates in a voice-over, and point-of-view shots depict characters and events through his angle of vision. Lou Ford is an example of the untrustworthy protagonist, whom viewers are forced to identify with because he is telling the story and because characters and events are often seen directly through his eyes. Yet, his mental instability makes him unreliable, so his opinions are not valid, he overestimates his intelligence and his skills, and the viewer never really knows his exact motivations. Was he the victim of the perversions of his father’s mistress? Bits and pieces of his childhood are shown in flashback to suggest this idea, but this could also be Lou rationalizing his sick behavior, like he rationalizes why he has to kill his victims. Ultimately, he may just be a sick, twisted sociopath pulling us into his bloodlust. The untrustworthy protagonist is a staple of hard-boiled fiction and film noir, often befuddling those unfamiliar with the genre.  However, the difference in this story is that Lou is also the killer: He’s not the investigator of the mystery; he is the mystery, the reason for the investigation. And, because we understand the narrative from Lou’s perspective, we—like Lou—never know how close he actually is to getting caught. The exact details of the investigation by his law enforcement peers are kept from us, like they are kept from Lou. This is an unusual structure for a mystery—to be distanced from the discovery of clues—but hard-boiled fiction and film noir are renowned for atypical narrative structures, including flashbacks within flashbacks or experiments in point of view.

LOU FORD STARES INTO A MIRROR, A VISUAL CUE TO VIEWERS THAT HE HAS TWO SIDES TO HIS CHARACTER.

Lou’s double-sided personality makes The Killer Inside Me a doppelganger story (a narrative about a character with a hidden, dark side to his/her persona). The title alone telegraphs this idea to the viewer: On the outside, Lou is an easy-going deputy who spouts home-spun clichés, but this masks the dark ferocity inside him. The film employs the standard visual cues for a doppelganger narrative, including mirror shots and close-ups with Lou’s face half in shadow and half in light. Medium shots of Lou gazing in a mirror, suggesting that there are two Lous, pepper the film from the beginning. Lou glances in the mirror in his hallway in the second scene before the first murder, setting us up for what is to follow; he is reflected in the mirror in labor leader Joe Rothman’s office, because Rothman senses his true nature; he looks into the mirror after killing one of his victims. The doppelganger lighting occurs in several scenes, including the point when he returns from the prostitute’s house, covering up his visit to her from his girlfriend, and the shots after he murders a suspect in jail.

THOUGH HALF THE FILM OCCURS DURING THE DAYLIGHT, THERE ARE MANY SCENES IN LOW-KEY AND HIGH-CONTRAST LIGHTING, WHICH IS CONVENTIONAL FOR NOIR. SHADOWS INDICATE THAT SOMETHING IS BEING HIDDEN.

The visual conventions for the doppelganger narrative are part of the legacy of German Expressionism. Doppelganger stories dominated German cinema during the 1920s, and the Expressionists used them as a kind of warning about the necessity of controlling our dark impulses. To the Germans, everyone has a dark side that needs to be kept in check, and we are all capable of losing control of it or giving in to it under the right circumstances. In other words, according to the Expressionists, all of us carry a little bit of wicked Lou Ford inside us. Given the title of the book, “The Killer Inside Me,” I can’t help but think that Jim Thompson felt that way, too.

That makes the controversial violence in the film all the more disturbing. Several reviews and feature articles have called out two scenes in which Lou Ford pummels women with his fists as examples of extremely graphic violence that is unbearable to watch. Rumors abound that viewers have walked out of the theater during these scenes. While fans of contemporary horror films see a higher volume of blood and gore in the Saw series or the Hostel movies, the violence in The Killer Inside Me is more disturbing partly because it is depicted in a more naturalistic context and partly because we understand the story and experience the violence through Lou Ford’s first-person perspective. During the violence, the camera sometimes assumes his point of view , so we are looking at the bloody and bruised victims through his eyes as though we are him–as though we committed the  brutal beatings. The killer inside me, indeed.

Jim Thompson, an alcoholic given to that melancholy peculiar to artists, never quite conquered Hollywood in his lifetime, and after his death in 1977, those novels optioned by various producers were turned into uneven films at best.  Thompson began working in Hollywood in the mid-1950s, picking up extra money by writing episodes for such television series as Mackenzie’s Raiders, Cain’s Hundred, and later Dr. Kildare. He also collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the scripts for The Killing and Paths of Glory. By the mid-1960s, drink had gotten the better of Thompson, and he never seemed to have two nickels to rub together. During this time, he wrote novelizations of popular television shows and movies, such as Ironside and The Undefeated. He wrote a screenplay for actor/producer Tony Bill that started out to be an original story but ended up as a variation of his novel South of Heaven. First titled Hard Times, then ‘Bo, the film was supposed to star Robert Redford as a Depression-era hobo, but the project never advanced beyond the screenplay. As much as I like Redford, I can’t see him as a Thompson protagonist.

STEVE McQUEENS STARS AS DOC McCOY IN 'THE GETAWAY,' DIRECTED BY SAM PECKINPAH, WHO KNEW SOMETHING ABOUT DEPICTING VIOLENCE.

In 1971, Paramount bought Thompson’s novel The Getaway to turn into an action-driven film starring Steve McQueen that was to be directed by Sam Peckinpah. Thompson wrote a couple of versions of the script in addition to some rewrites of key scenes, but McQueen and the film’s producer, David Foster, did not like his approach. They hired Walter Hill, who became a popular director of action fare in the 1980s and 1990s, to rework the material. The Getaway was the only film made from one of Thompson’s novels during his lifetime, but the writer was not pleased with it, primarily because the film covers only the first half of the novel. The end of the novel finds the protagonist and his wife, who were played by McQueen and Ali McGraw in the film, destroying each other in a way that did not fit McQueen’s image. Thompson complained to the Screen Writers Arbitration Committee about the way Foster had misguided him during the writing process and about Hill’s participation.

Thompson wrote over thirty novels in his life time, finishing his last, King Blood, in 1973. He died in 1977 after a series of strokes. Though Thompson never fully understood how to handle working in the film industry, his experiences in Hollywood are strangely fascinating. I am no authority on Thompson, and I have refrained from discussing his career and writing at length because it is beyond my scope of knowledge. However, I do know cinema history, and I found his experiences in Hollywood to be very telling. They reflect the difficulties that many novelists endure while navigating the scriptwriting process; writers who use their novels to express their personal visions—and demons—are generally not successful in adapting their work for Hollywood. The Hollywood film consists of a series of conventions that define it—the importance of star images in casting, genre formulas, visual techniques that replace the written word to convey meaning, and happy endings—that novel writers rarely understand. Conversely, the film industry is not always able to translate what is most appealing about a novelist’s work into a Hollywood film.

Below is a list of earlier Thompson adaptations and movie oddities that I find compelling for different reasons. I don’t claim that they are the best adaptations of his work, or the most faithful. But, they are an interesting part of the legacy of a pulp-fiction writer who exploited the type of lurid characters and sensational detail so appealing to Hollywood, which rarely did justice to his novels.

The Getaway (1972). Though Thompson was disappointed in the film, McQueen and Peckinpah make a good team, with the director bringing out the strengths of the actor’s ultra-cool star image in this action drama (see also Junior Bonner). And, Sally Struthers surprises in a secondary role as a young woman seduced by the thrill of violence. And, Peckinpah’s understanding and use of cinematic violence matches Thompson’s own insight into darker impulses.

SALLY STRUTHERS, WHO COSTARRED IN 'ALL IN THE FAMILY' AT THE TIME, IS TERRIFIC AS A GOOD GIRL SEDUCED BY THE DARKNESS.

Farewell My Lovely (1975). Thompson had nothing to do with the script for this adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel. Instead, he appears in a small role as Judge Baxter Wilson Grayle, whose beautiful young wife lures Philip Marlowe into her web of secret identities and murderous schemes. The casting of Thompson, who is a literary heir to hard-boiled kingpin Chandler, serves as an hommage to both. After he was cast in the film, Thompson joined the Screen Actors’ Guild, which allowed him to receive some much-needed health insurance. After years of drinking, his health was rapidly deteriorating at this time.

The Killer Inside Me (1976). I confess that I have not seen this version of the film, which stars Stacy Keach in the role of Lou Ford, but I would love to compare it to the current version. By most accounts, this version by old-school action-adventure director Burt Kennedy is not very good, but it features a terrific cast of 1970s character actors, including John Carradine, Susan Tyrrell, Keenan Wynn, and Julie Adams. And, I am interested in how the conventions of the era and the conservative taste of the filmmakers affected the depiction of the violence and unsavory characters.

IN THIS 1976 VERSION OF 'THE KILLER INSIDE ME,' STACY KEACH STARS AS LOU FORD.

Coup de Torchon (1981). The novels of Jim Thompson were treated as literature in France rather than as pulp fiction, and his work was held in high regard as he toiled in relative obscurity in America. In this acclaimed drama, director Bertrand Tavernier transferred the action of the novel Pop. 1280 to a French colony in Africa but managed to capture Thompson’s themes and visualize his style. On a side note: the Hollywood film Cop Land, directed by Thompson fan James Mangold, pays hommage to the same novel  with a close up on a sign that reads “Pop. 1280” as a character drives into the New Jersey town where the action takes place.

The Kill-Off (1989). This is another film that I have not seen, so I can’t vouch for its effectiveness as a popular movie. However, I am curious about how a female director interpreted Thompson’s penchant for violence against women in this story about the murder of a small-town busybody. The remarkable feature of the book is the use of multiple first-person narrators. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, whose psyches are stripped bare as they tell their part of the story. This unique narrative structure does not seem conducive to a film interpretation, and I would like to see how writer/director Maggie Greenwald handled it.

THE KILL-OFF WAS DIRECTED BY MAGGIE GREENWALD.

The Grifters (1990) and After Dark, My Sweet (1990).  Until Winterbottom’s film, these two noirs are probably the best adaptations of Thompson’s work because of the excellent casts of popular actors willing to play unlikable characters, the smart scripts with edgy dialogue, and the direction by Stephen Frears and James Foley, respectively, who had creative control of the material. Both of these R-rated films had a general release in the cineplexes. However, that was twenty years ago, before Hollywood studios abandoned producing movies for adults. In contrast, The Killer Inside Me, which is no more radical in its style or content that these two films, is in limited release only, playing mostly the art-house circuit. It’s a pathetic commentary on the way today’s Hollywood is driven by marketing executives who have succeeded in dumbing down the average studio release to cater to the tastes of adolescents and children.