![]() It is as faithful as it can be to Thompson’s work, and that is one of its high points as well as one of its problems. The latest tackling of Thompson comes from British director Michael Winterbottom whose The Killer Inside Me is a fascinating and quite flawed version of Thompson’s 1952 novel. Both movies ended with Doc and Carol McCoy off to Mexico with a satchel of cash in the novel, they find that money doesn’t buy them happiness, to say the least. The Getaway, both Steve McQueen’s 1972 version and the 1994 one with Alec Baldwin, is, admittedly a guilty pleasure, though not as faithful to the book. Even Donald Westlake who wrote the screenplay for The Grifters liked it best. According to the same Times article, Coup de Torchon is considered the best adaptation of any Thompson movie. British director Stephen Frears gave us the excellent The Grifters in 1990 while Frenchman Bertrand Tavernier’s 1981 film Coup de Torchon was an adaptation of Thompson’s novel Pop. ![]() The most successful filmings of his novels have been by Europeans, as the New York Times recently pointed out. Yet there was certain poetry in the way he could look into a person’s soul and see nothing but darkness. This hard-boiled author, whose career began in 1942 and lasted through the early 1970s, had a noir vision that often bleak. ![]() Jim Thompson’s novels do not come easily to the screen. ![]()
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