Slideshow

Troy Kirby

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Jim Thompson kicked ass

If you ever want to learn how the underbelly thinks (or thought during the 1950s), I would suggest you start reading Jim Thompson books right this second.

The Getaway is his most famous, because of the 1972 film with Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. The book goes off in a different direction than the screenplay. Trust me, when Doc McCoy reaches El Rey, I believe he learns the lesson of "no place is a sanctuary, no man not a criminal."


The 1994 version of The Getaway stinks. I've included that trailer mainly to show how bad it was in comparison. When the trailer doesn't look as good as the trailer for the original, you know it is bad.



Another book that has been made consistently into a film, and suffered, has been "The Killer Inside Me." This was Jim Thompson's first book, likely his best, and proves that not every piece of literature needs to see the silver screen's adaptation.


"The Grifters" was actually a better movie than a book. I believe it is because the book takes a long way around a short subject and the movie just gets to the point that the Grifters were just weird people. Especially Angelica Huston's role as Mommy who loves her son enough to kill him.



In short, Jim Thompson wrote a lot of his novels in 3-4 weeks. Rarely editing his books. Some were really bad, but he survived because he just kept writing... Something to live by, especially when his books went out of print during the late 1970s and only came back to print in the last decade (because a publisher thought they could make a dime off of it).

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