© 2007 William Ahearn
Back in the late 1980s, when Jim Thompson was rediscovered and Black Lizard (and then others) began re-publishing his pulp novels, I owned just about the whole catalog. They were – for the most part – great reads full of violence and humor and dark environments littered with losers, psychopaths, swell-looking babes and conmen and killers. Whether Jim Thompson – or anyone else – is an important writer isn’t something that I’m concerned with. All I know is that Jim Thompson created his own twisted world and I loved passing through. While his books are very visual, they have rarely translated well into film and “The Grifters” is a perfect example.
The Grifters was one of Thompson’s later works and I was surprised that it was originally published in 1963. He had a long career in crime fiction novels from Now and On Earth in 1942 to somewhere into the 1970s.
Thompson had written several screenplays for – and had an odd and somewhat contentious relationship with – Stanley Kubrick and they worked on Kubrick’s “The Killing” together and several other films. According to one story, Thompson wrote a screenplay for the Sam Peckinpah film version of Thompson’s The Getaway but Steve McQueen nixed it and wanted more action. How much of Thompson’s original script survived into the film is in question. What isn’t in question is that “The Getaway” is one of the better films to come out of Thompson’s work although the script severed the dark and strange ending in Mexico (although it’s been ages since I read the book). It’s a good Sam Peckinpah film but it isn’t really Jim Thompson’s The Getaway.
What I remember as being the best film version of a Thompson book is “After Dark, My Sweet,” a movie made the same year that “The Grifters” was released. Unfortunately, I can’t find a copy and if I do I’ll update this section.
There are also two French films based on the work of Jim Thompson. “Series Noir,” (based on A Hell of a Woman) that I haven’t seen and Bernard Tavernier’s “Coup de Torchon” that I had seen shortly after it was released in the early 1980s and just watched again. Based on Thompson’s Pop. 1280, which is essentially a reworking of The Killer Inside Me, it is probably the weirdest but truest adaptation of a Thompson novel. Bernard Tavernier’s film doesn’t take place in Texas or some unnamed backwater in the American heartland but in Senegal, a French colony in Africa. Good stories can travel far and “Coup de Torchon” is considered by many to be the most faithful telling of a Jim Thompson novel and a really good film.
“Coup de Torchon” brings up an interesting issue of bringing books to film – especially Jim Thompson’s novels – in that finding what works in the book and translating that into film can be a deceptively easy thing to do. The French film isolated the story and moved that to a foreign geography and held true to Thompson’s soul even if it left his hat behind.
“The Grifters” bought the dazzle of slang and the color of crime in The Grifters and totally missed the point of Thompson’s somewhat anachronistic story. It’s an odd choice for a film adaptation because it really isn’t one of Thompson’s better books. Essentially, Thompson’s book is the story of a grifter on the verge of giving up the game and going straight. The film is a twisted mother and son story with con games as backdrop. Moira, Roy’s girlfriend (Annette Bening in the film), plays a much lesser role in the book and her enticing Roy deeper into grifting – going for the long cons, where the real money is – begins to solidify his choice to go legit. Her real role in both the book and the film is to provide a hinge for the ending.
What the film leaves out and what was essential to the book is that Roy develops a friendship with the new boss where he works (which was left out of the film entirely) and it’s the only time in his life that has ever happened. The film also leaves out the entirely unbelievable affair with Carol, the nurse his mother has hired to take care of him after the hospital. She was sterilized in the Dachau death camp when she was five years old or something like that. Now, that might be a novel on its own, but it’s a strange and pointless side road that goes nowhere in a story about grifters. And it also leaves out Roy being detained by the police in a bar where he’s running a game. This rousing by the cops is another argument for going straight and is also where Moira finally knows that Roy isn’t the matchbook salesman she never thought he was.
“The Grifters” just never clicked for me as a film. It played – in a contemporary setting – as one anachronistic scene with self-conscious slang to the next and never really believed the story it was telling. It was pretty successful at the box office in its day and nominated for all sorts of awards. That may be – taste lives on a very narrow spoon – but I think the film missed the real story of the book.