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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 37 |
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BOOK & FILM |
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BY JIM THOMPSON  |
MY SWEET |
BY JAMES FOLEY  |
Foley's film stuck close
to the classic noir novel
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
It's easy to figure out why Jim Thompson's slim novel "After Dark, My Sweet" waited 35 years before someone finally turned it into a motion picture. You can almost hear the studio boss yelling at the guy who first suggested it as a movie:
"Are you nuts? The main guy is an escapee from the loony bin and his leading lady is an alkie. If that's not bad enough, they kidnap a kid! And damn near everybody in the cast gets killed! Who's gonna pay good money to see that?"
Well, as it turned out, not much of anyone. James Foley's 1990 film version of "After Dark, My Sweet," was not exactly a box office bonanza. Still, a lot of critics found things to like about it. And it turned out to be one of the most faithful adaptations of Thompson's dark, twisted noir tales ever put on the screen.
Thompson still remains a cult figure on the American literary scene several decades after his death in almost total obscurity. He had always predicted he wouldn't be famous until maybe 20 years after his death. As a matter of fact, he became a "hot" property almost exactly on that schedule. Now nearly all his 29 novels--most of them paperback originals from the 1940s and 1950s--are back in print and scholars are poring over his unique contribution to American fiction in the genre of literary noir.
Thompson always had an affinity for film and he ended up writing screenplays for two of the best, career-making films by director Stanley Kubrick--"The Killing" and "Paths of Glory." The French, who first recognized the genre of noir, turned two Thompson books into acclaimed films: Bernard Tavernier's "Coup de Torchon," based on Thompson's "Pop. 1240," and Alain Corneau's "Serie Noire," adapted from Thompson's "A Hell of A Woman." Burt Kennedy filmed "The Killer Inside Me" in 1976 and Sam Peckinpah filmed Thompson's "The Getaway" with Steve McQueen in 1972. Roger Donaldson remade "The Getaway" in 1994 with Adam Baldwin and Kim Basinger.. Stephen Frears filmed Thompson's "The Grifters" in 1990, earning rave reviews. For a time, it seemed there was a rush to see who could get Thompson projects on the screen first.
Most of Thompson's stories were about troubled people on the fringes of society who wind up in a crisis of one kind or another. In "After Dark, My Sweet," the hero is ex-prizefighter William "Kid" Collins, who's haunted by his memories of beating a man to a pulp in the ring. Unable to control his outbursts of extreme violence, he has spent the past several years in a mental hospital. When we first meet him, he has escaped and is going nowhere fast as a drifter in the American southwest.
In a small town saloon, he's befriended by a good-looking widow, Fay Anderson, who's attracted to his handsome face and lean, trim body. She's a lush, sliding down the tubes rapidly, but she latches onto Collins--she calls him "Collie" because "you look like one"--and draws him into a plot being made by her associate, "Uncle Bud" Stoker, to kidnap the little boy of a rich family living nearby and collect big ransom.
Thompson's lean, grim tale is really about Collins' struggle with his own conscience as he finally realizes he's being set up to steal the boy, then take the fall for his co-conspirators. He begins to feel protective toward the little boy, who turns out to be afflicted with a severe case of diabetes, and that makes his relations with Uncle Bud and Fay go sour very quickly.
In the film, little known Jason Patric played Collins. He has remained on the fringes of stardom ever since. His last big role was the legendary Jim Bowie in this year's "The Alamo." Fay was played by Rachel Ward, whose biggest part was the female lead in TV's "The Thorn Birds" miniseries in 1983. Uncle Bud was played by veteran Hollywood bad guy Bruce Dern.
Foley's film follows the original storyline quite closely. Its primary concession to box office concerns was a decision to make Fay less the fall-down drunk that she is in the book and not quite so nasty a bitch. (She's still nasty enough, though. When Collins tells her he doesn't "get the point," she tells him to feel around on top of his head!) The film also shows us a good deal more bed-bouncing between Collins and Fay than Thompson could get away with in 1955--and the finale is shifted to an airport, which makes a bit more sense as the site for a showdown between kidnappers and police.
Without a real hero to root for in Thompson's downbeat novel, the film shoves Collins into a quasi-heroic situation, making him the only one with any obvious moral or ethical values. Given that Collins is an escapee from a nuthouse, Thompson's comment on the general level of American values certainly seems cynical, to say the least.
If the Collins character was just a bit more appealing--and Patric's rather goofy performance more interesting--"After Dark, My Sweet" might have been one of the most successful attempts at bringing Thompson's truly offbeat point of view to the movie screen.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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