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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