STEPHEN KING once said of the novelist Jim Thompson: “He was crazy. He went running into the American subconscious with a blowtorch in one hand and a pistol in the other, screaming his goddamn head off. No one else came close.”

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Filmography: Michael Winterbottom
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The same qualities that made his books so arresting — Thompson’s wildness and originality and dark, violent sexiness — also made him immensely appealing to filmmakers. Stanley Kubrick signed up Thompson in the 1950s, the author’s heyday, and Sam Peckinpah hired him in the ’70s, near the end of his life. Both arrangements ended badly, however, and not just because Thompson was alcoholic and quarrelsome.
Thompson’s vision, though it seems made for Hollywood, is so singular that over the years it has proved remarkably resistant to movie adaptation. The two versions of his novel “The Getaway” — Peckinpah’s in 1972 and Roger Donaldson’s 1994 remake — are notoriously watered down and leave out the book’s most interesting feature: an ending in which the two central characters, a bank robber and his wife, descend into a physical and spiritual hell. Burt Kennedy’s 1976 movie of “The Killer Inside Me,” starring a young and hunky Stacy Keach, is a mess, a movie that can’t decide whether it wants to be a noirish mystery, a horror flick or a psychological thriller.
Oddly, the best movie versions of Thompson so far have been by directors who are European: “The Grifters,” directed in 1990 by Stephen Frears, an Englishman, and the Frenchman Bertrand Tavernier’s 1981 film “Coup de Torchon,” an adaptation of the novel “Pop. 1280,” which many people, including Donald Westlake (who wrote the screenplay for “The Grifters”), consider by far the greatest of the Thompson movies. Now Michael Winterbottom, another Englishman, hopes to join the list with his new version of “The Killer Inside Me,” which stars Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson and opens in theaters on June 18, as well as on video on demand.
Kubrick called “The Killer Inside Me,” which came out in 1952, “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.” The book is arguably Thompson’s best and embodies many of the difficulties entailed in translating his work to the screen.
It’s the story of Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff in a small Texas town, seemingly bland and ineffectual, who turns out to be a compulsive and heartless killer. So, to begin with, there are scenes of creepy violence, including a famous passage, describing the murder of a prostitute, that begins: “I backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at once.”
Like many Thompson novels “The Killer Inside Me” is told in the first person, and the reader eventually discovers that Lou is himself dead: he’s speaking to the reader from beyond the grave, as it were, and his narrative voice is as seductive and elusive as the one he uses to sweet-talk his victims. How can we believe a word he says? Robert Polito, Thompson’s biographer, explained in an interview: “Thompson isn’t like the writers he’s often compared to. He’s not like Hammett, Chandler, Cain. The books aren’t realistic. They’re much closer to phantasmagoria.”
Mr. Tavernier suggested recently that one reason Europeans make better Thompson movies is that they regard him as a serious, literary author, not just a pulp writer. Speaking from Cannes, where he was promoting his new film, “La Princesse de Montpensier,” he said: “There’s a metaphysical element in Thompson, and Americans always leave that out. They take out everything that makes the books great: the dialogue, the great humor. I see him more as a writer like Alfred Jarry, Henry Miller, Celine.”
He also complained about the two movie versions of “The Getaway,” and said about the portion of the book that had been cut, “You could make a very interesting film just from that part alone.”
In France, Mr. Tavernier recalled, “Pop. 1280” was published not in a cheesy paperback but in the highbrow journal Le Novel Observateur, where for some reason the population was reduced to 1275. “Whole novels have been written here about what happened to those five people,” he said, laughing.
“Pop. 1280,” like “The Killer Inside Me,” is set in Texas and is about a bumbling sheriff who sets about murdering some of the townspeople. Mr. Tavernier’s version, “Coup de Torchon,” began to take shape, he went on to say, only when he gave up trying to transpose the story to contemporary Paris and instead moved it to West Africa — a landscape with the proper degree of Thompsonian strangeness. He got the idea, he said, from rereading Celine’s “Journey to the End of the Night” and realizing the book’s descriptions of colonial West Africa were “exactly, exactly the world described by Thompson.”
Mr. Winterbottom, who was in New York recently for the Tribeca Film Festival, said he was originally interested in the work of another ’50s pulp writer, David Goodis, whose novel “Down There” was the source for Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player,” but the rights were unavailable, so he turned to Thompson instead. He was initially unaware of the 1976 version, and he said he still hasn’t seen it.
Unlike Mr. Tavernier or even Mr. Frears, who took certain liberties, Mr. Winterbottom was at pains to make what he calls a “very literal film,” one that deviates little from the text of the novel and is hardly watered down. His rendering of the beating scene is so graphic that at early film festival screenings some viewers walked out. He also expands on what is just a hint in the text and dwells on some of the characters’ liking for rough, sadomasochistic sex.
Unlike the Burt Kennedy movie, which in a flashback develops an elaborate Freudian explanation for why Lou is the way he is — scenes of his being beaten and watching his father have sex, as well as some metaphorical shots of underground mine explosions, just for good measure — the Winterbottom version, like the book, leaves Lou’s nature ambiguous. He might be a psychopath who was literally emasculated by his father, he might be a cold-blooded killer pretending to be a wounded psychopath to elicit our sympathy and understanding, or he might be someone whom any of the rest of us could turn into given the right (or wrong) circumstances.

www.nytimes.com