The Screengrab

Jim Thompson was tailor-made for Hollywood success.  He worked there for some time, and found early success with no less august a personage than Stanley Kubrick; he worked on the screenplay for Kubrick's terrific late-period noir The Killing and wrote the stunning war movie Paths of Glory in its entirety.  Later on, a number of very fine films would be made from his novels, including two different versions of The Getaway of differing success, as well as The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet, and Coup de Torchon, Bertrand Tavernier's masterful adaptation of his Pop. 1280.  Thompson's books carried a bleak criminal sensibility that was perfect for the noir era, and he wrote terrific, snappy dialogue that sounds great coming out of actors who have a feel for his work.  Due to a combination of bad luck (many of his projects were prematurely scuttled by studio interference or money problems), politics (he was blacklisted in the McCarthy era due to his leftist leanings), and his own personal demons (he was plagued by alcoholism and innumerable other issues), Thompson never became the motion picture legend he could have been.  Though critics have rediscovered his work, previously relegated to pulp status, and he's undergoing a similar reassessment to Raymond Chandler, many of his best books remain unadopted for the big screen.  That's a shame, but not as bad as the fact that what's arguably his greatest accomplishment -- the nasty but near-perfect noir novel The Killer Inside Me -- actually did get made into a movie, but a movie that's been almost entirely forgotten, and with good reason.

With The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson created one of the most chilling portraits of pure psychotic evil ever committed to paper, but it's not just a bloody thrill-ride trash novel the way that serial killer novels developed in later years.  Lou Ford, the novel's main character, is a man of surprising depth, and Thompson's unfolding of the character is a psychological portrait that transcends its pulp origins and becomes something worthy of Dostoevsky.  Ford is the sheriff in a small mining town in Montana, trusted by everyone; he's such a folksy character, straight out of cowboy art, that even his fellow townsfolk, hearing the endless cliches and banal observations he spouts, think of him as somewhat simple-minded.  But Lou Ford has a secret:  a twisted mind and a history of dark childhood abuses by his physician father have turned him into a monster.  He's far more intelligent than he lets on, putting up his stupidity as a show to allay suspicion from his grim hobbies.  As he puts it, "When things get a little rough, I go out and kill a fewpeople, that's all."  In fact, part of his downfall is that he assumes everyone else is as stupid as they think he is.  Ford is under no illusions about his future:  he describes himself as "waiting to be split down the middle", the inevitable result of the double life he's committed to lead.  But in the meantime, a lot of people are going to get hurt by the man Lou Ford is, and the man people think he is.  In 1976, Western veteran Burt Kennedy (Welcome to Hard Times, Support Your Local Sheriff) brought Thompson's greatest novel to the screen.  

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Usually, Hollywood is a tad standoffish about tackling the great novels. If they do it right, they win the admiration of critics, but risk losing the mainstream audience, who will think of their project as snooty and highbrow. If they do it wrong, people still won't go see the movie, plus the critics will turn the whole thing into a laughingstock. Producers are generally willing to let someone take a crack at one of the classics once and only once, and then only if they're an established filmmaker and there's nothing too controversial about the book. How, then, did not one but two movie versions get made of one of the most inflammatory, misunderstood and potentially dangerous books of the 21st century — a book that not only quite openly asks us to identify, to a certain degree, with an effete intellectual pederast, but which was written by one of the pioneers of postmodernism? Some might suggest that certain producers and/or directors simply jump at the chance to cast a movie starring a hot nymphet, but we are not so cynical here at the Screengrab, oh goodness no. We will not speculate how it came to pass that two high-profile film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant, subtle, subversive and daring story came to pass — one of them, by a titan of the silver screen, made less than a decade after the novel's publication and the other, by a flaky British director whose movies have always been a heartbeat away from softcore porn — and instead focus on the respective qualities of the two films.

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Up until now, the "No, But I've Read the Movie" has focused on great works of western literature, and assessed the movie versions to see if they can possibly stand up to the titanic reputations of the novels upon which they are based.  That ends today!  For today, we will focus on one of the most successful, and yet overrated and overblown, works of the western canon:  Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.  It's a novel that helped launch her career as one of the preeminent authors and philosophers of our time, but as a novel, it's hokey, overlong, bloated, and filled with characters one dimension short of being one-dimensional; and as philosophy, it's incomplete, inconsistent, and unable to look past its own epistemological shortcomings.  Rand's ideology of Objectivism became hugely popular, just as her novels became huge best-sellers, but whereas most literary adaptations were doomed to failure because what makes a great novel rarely makes a great movie, anyone daring to tackle her endlessly preachy books would be faced with the prospect of improving on the original, rather than dumbing it down for the format.  Given the runaway success of The Fountainhead -- Rand's story of an incorruptible architect who refuses to compromise his craft to satisfy the demands of the masses -- it was inevitable that there would be a film adaptation.  The question is, how would it handle such a patently unworkable premise and fundamentally unbelievable storyline?

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Like a handful of the better noir and pulp writers, Patricia Highsmith has undergone a bit of a positive critical reappraisal of late, although one has to wonder if critics and casual fans are more interested in her actual writing than her bisexuality, alcoholism and often-controversial personal life.  Whatever the case, the rediscovery of Highsmith's books in recent years was followed by a spate of interest in adapting her works for film.  Naturally, the most attention was focused on the so-called "Ripliad", her series of novels featuring the amoral, cynical trickster and killer Tom Ripley; while 2002's Ripley's Game, bouyed by a tremendous performance in the lead role by John Malkovich, was the better film, 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley got far more attention and made far more money.  This was thanks largely to a successful marketing campaign, a coincidental tapping of the zeitgeist, and the fact that several of its stars were at their peak of popularity.  There have been other Ripleys (Highsmith herself loved Alain Delon in Rene Clement's Purple Noon) and other filmed versions of Ripliad novels (Wim Wenders made a memorable, if confused, version of Ripley's Game as The American Friend in 1977), but none has stayed in the public consciousness as the one that teamed the recently deceased Anthony Minghella with Matt Damon.

In most ways, The Talented Mr. Ripley is the best of the Ripley novels, and one of Patricia Highsmith's best novels overall.  It was the purest expression of her fascination with anti-heroic figures who carried around a silent delight in their defiance of law and propriety; it also featured some of her most coolly murderous prose, the quality of her writing that critics most admire.  Her deliberate, incisive writing seemed almost subversive at times, so plainly and nastily could she capture those who circumvented decent society.  But it was not without its flaws, most noticably her writing of female characters:  Highsmith seemed either incapable of writing female characters as deep and dark as her male characters, or uninterested in doing so.  Anthony Minghella's filmed version, with a solid cast and a big budget, had a chance to to capture all the strengths of the book while addressing its weaknesses.

WHAT IT HAD: Minghella was riding a peak of success at the time The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed, having won widespread popular and critical acclaim with his previous movie, The English Patient.  His lead actors were equally hot:  Matt Damon was as popular as he'd ever be, as was co-star Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law was enjoying some level of success in the U.S. for the first time.  Cate Blanchett scored a key role that helped launch her big-screen career, and Minghella staffed the picture with solid character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Philip Baker Hall in supporting roles.  It's also a gorgeous film, with breathtaking locations, beautiful cinematography (by John Seale) and stellar set design and period costumes.  Whatever its flaws, Ripley takes no shorts with its look and feel.

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The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are often considered the two greatest acheivements of detective noir prior to the post-war era.  It's by no means incidental to their reputation that both starred the pitch-perfect Humphrey Bogart, nor that in both films, he portrayed a classic private eye created by one of the standout pulp witers of the previous decade.  Though both have been rescued from dime-novel oblivion by later critics who were able to pick out their substantial literary talents from the low-level hackwork that comprised much of 1930s pulp, Raymond Chandler's reputation has outstripped Dashiell Hammett's, and rightfully so; Hammett was an outstanding technician and a keen drawer of character, but he lacked Chandler's transcendent style, his keen psychological insight, and his stunning sense of place and time.  Still, he shared with Philip Marlowe's creator a love of language, and he was by far Chandler's superior in terms of complex, inventive plot, which made his books natural fodder for movie adaptations.

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Graham Greene's impact in motion pictures wasn't quite as vast as his impact on literature, but it was close. (We're referring, of course, to the English novelist, not the Native American actor, who, despite some fine on-screen performances, has yet to produce the Great American Novel, or even the Great American Indian Novel.) In addition to producing some of the finest novels of the 20th century, he was also a noteworthy screenwriter and helped bring The Third Man into existence, thus creating a classic film and one of Orson Welles' most notorious characters. (He was also a prominent, and often highly engaging, movie critic until he had the bad taste to point out the obvious fact that many of Shirley Temple's fans had something more than a pristine interest in the child actress' talents.)

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William Golding's gorgeous, stirring, menacing, dark and telling masterpiece Lord of the Flies is a natural for film adaptation. Despite a plethora of fine internal monologues (especially from the young mystic Simon), it's packed with external action, a solid plot, beautiful settings, a bunch of terrific set-pieces, and, thanks to the book's status as required high school reading, a sizable audience of filmgoers who are already familiar with the plot. It's so much a part of our popular culture that it's become parodic shorthand, so there's no chance that its terrifically appealing story wouldn't resonate with moviegoers. And it's got something for everyone: elements of comedy, high drama, adventure, action, and even science fiction. So why has it never had a truly successful movie version?

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For a book that's often referred to as one of the all-time great unfilmable novels, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary has a long and storied history on the screen. It's been adapted for the cinema no less than six times, and an additional five adaptations for the small screen. The most well-received version, however, is Claude Chabrol's 1991 adapatation. It was widely praised at the Moscow International Film Festival when it debuted; it got Chabrol his first-ever Golden Globe nomination; and it was especially beloved in France — and who better to judge the success of an adaptation of one of France's greatest novels by one of France's greatest filmmakers than the French? Then again, there's always the counter-example of Jerry Lewis to argue against their taste as a nation. It's understandable why so many moviemakers have been drawn to the story of Emma Bovary; she's one of the most fully fleshed-out characters in all of fiction, entirely believable and completely three-dimensional. Her flaws run as deep as any character in modern literature, and her personality is as recognizable today as it was when the book was published in 1857. However, it's also understandable why so many adaptations of the book go astray; Flaubert's greatest strength as a writer was not his ability to draw deep and true psychological portraits — though that was an ability of his rivaled perhaps only by Dostoevski, his true power lay in his ability to realize those portraits in cool, elegant prose unparalleled by his peers. Due to the essential difference between the media of film and literature, much of that prose, and the incomparably refined descriptions and turns of phrase that made Flaubert's work so compelling, are inevitably lost in a filmed retelling. But in Claude Chabrol, Madame Bovary found perhaps the one director who truly shared the novelist's style and sensibility. Did he deliver a film worthy of the novel? Or was it just another misstep?

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Although much more commercially successful, the "L.A. Quartet" novels by the disturbed but fascinating noir novelist James Ellroy — consisting of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz — didn't represent the great artistic leap forward that his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and the upcoming Blood's a Rover) did. The latter books were the ones that really lifted Ellroy from skilled genre specialist to ambitious and near-brilliant American novelist, representing both his own development as a writer and his desire to see the noir novel shed its genre restrictions and take its place amongst great literature. Even if one argues that White Jazz is the real transition — and many people have, convincingly — The Black Dahlia is a rough piece of work, somewhat formless and definitely formulaic in a way that his later books would avoid. While it features many of the same themes of sexual obsession and moral ambiguity that would mark his later work, it remained somewhat inextricably bound in the bad parts of pulp and the tendency to police-prodedural tropes. That said, the "L.A. Quartet" books are far more straightforward narratives, with less emphasis on the black depths of psychology and more to carry the narrative than chopped-up internal monologues. No one has yet attempted to film any of the "Underworld U.S.A.", but if it ever happens, the results will likely be a less successful film than L.A. Confidential; the qualities that make it a lesser novel — overemphasis on plot, weaker internal monologue, and a grounding in the archetypical qualities of film noir — are the same ones that made it a better film. The Black Dahlia, for all its faults, is an eminently more filmable book than The Cold Six Thousand. Or so you might have thought until Brian De Palma showed up in 2006 and proved you wrong, wrong, wrong by burping out this mishandled disaster of an adaptation.

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Truman Capote's In Cold Blood:  A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences was born to be a movie.  The book was an immediate best-seller on its release in 1966, and plans were afoot to film it almost before it rolled off the presses.  Capote's improbable inspiration was a 300-word piece in the New York Times — then, as now, little more than a blurb — about a murder in a remote corner of Kansas; something about it captivated his imagination, and he spent the next seven years crafting, along with his friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee, a masterful true-crime story about the pointless killing of the Clutter family.  Just as Capote had no idea at the time how obsessed he would become with the story of the Clutters and the murderous drifters, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who took their lives, the public had no idea that the book he wrote about them would launch a new genre of fiction — the 'non-fiction novel' — and stand out as an early example of what would become known as 'the New Journalism'.  It would also cast a huge shadow over Capote's life and career; of all his works, none save Breakfast at Tiffany's would so resonate with the public.

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It's hard to think of a movie more divisive — both at the time it was filmed and today — than Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian social satire A Clockwork Orange.  The novel was already controversial enough (the film, as brutal as it seemed upon its release in 1971, actually toned down much of the book's violence, and substituted a consensual sex scene for Alex's rape, in the novel, of two preadolescent girls), and while the film did what it could to make a savage treatment of youth violence palatable to censors, it still earned an X rating in the United States and raised such objections in the UK that Kubrick voluntarily withdrew it from release, and stipulated that it not be shown there again until after his death. 

Even beyond that, both book and movie are plagued with inconsistencies, misinterpretations, and resentment:  the novel was released in the United States without its critical final chapter (it was finally restored in 1986), which entirely changes the reader's perceptions of what had gone before.  Kubrick himself had only a minimal interest in remaining faithful to his source material (which had been given to him as a gift by his friend and favorite writer, Terry Southern), while Burgess — paid only a pittance for the film rights — had his own misgivings about a movie version of his then-notorious book. "I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita," he said, "would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complementary pornograph — the seduction of a minor for the one, for the other brutal mayhem.

The writer's aim in both books had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of words."  A Clockwork Orange was, indeed, made not out of words, but out of images, and it was those images — often of vicious sociopathic behavior to which the viewer is made an uncomfortable witness and even accomplice — that defines the movie just as the elegant (and deliberately deceptive) use of language defines the book.

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Today, the Screengrab introduces a new semi-regular feature, in which we look at movie adaptations of high-profile novels.  Movies based on books are a dime a dozen -- or at least they were before around 1998, when every single movie became based on a television show that originally aired between 1971 and 1983.  But movies based on good books are still rare enough to warrant a closer look, possibly because the qualities that make a good book are rarely the same qualities that make a good movie.  Great novels tend to focus on philosophy, psychology, and internal narrative, while great movies often emphasize action, movement and dialogue.  All too often, the word "unfilmable" is applied to truly ambitious and complex fiction, as if the very idea of encapsulating on screen what so impresses us on the page, and nowhere is this more obvious than in 1991's Naked Lunch.  David Cronenberg, with his literary pretensions, obsession with mutated human bodies, and appetite for the grotesque would seem to make him a natural for making a movie version of William S. Burrough's infamous Beat-influenced black comedy; but even with a like-minded director, filming Naked Lunch would be an uphill battle.  It's not a narrative novel in the traditional sense -- or any sense, really; it's more a series of vignettes, impressions, monologues and riffs, more like a heroin-soaked jazz fugue than a story.  Even if Cronenberg could find a way to make Burroughs' masterpiece palatable to an audience without getting an X rating (Burroughs was rather fond of notions like talking assholes and rectal mucous), could he make any narrative sense out of a non-narrative novel?

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