Filmed to a pulp

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.....

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. The same qualities that made his books so arrestingThompsons wildness and originality and dark,violent sexinessalso made him immensely appealing to filmmakers. Stanley Kubrick signed up Thompson in the 1950s,the authors 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.

Thompsons 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 GetawayPeckinpahs in 1972 and Roger Donaldsons 1994 remakeare notoriously watered down and leave out the books 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 Kennedys 1976 movie of The Killer Inside Me,starring a young and hunky Stacy Keach,is a mess,a movie that cant 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 Taverniers 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 theatres on June 18,as well as on video on demand.

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The Killer Inside Me is arguably Thompsons best and embodies many of the difficulties entailed in translating his work to the screen. Its 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. Like many Thompson novels,it is told in the first person and Lous narrative voice is as seductive and elusive as the one he uses to sweet-talk his victims.

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. In France,he recalled,Pop. 1280,where for some reason the population was reduced to 1275,was published not in a cheesy paperback but in the highbrow journal Le Novel Observateur. 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.

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. I was wary of making it too explicit, Winterbottom said. These things happen,and how do you understand them? I was interested in what a killer is like,in what people are like. Another pitfall of Thompson adaptations is excessive noirishness and Winterbottom was also at pains to avoid that. His movie,which was shot in Oklahoma,Thompsons birthplace,is positively cheerful lookingon the surface anywaywith sun-drenched exteriors and candy-coloured 50s automobiles.

Affleck,as Winterbottom pointed out,has a gift for being quite still and making you curious about whats going on inside his head. Winterbottom,who has made about 20 films since 1995,is probably best known for A Mighty Heart,with Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl,and for 9 Songs,the most sexually explicit movie shown outside of a porno house. That his reputation is not greater may be because he has no signature style other than restlessness. He has made comedies and semi-documentaries,a western,a road movie,a sci-fi epic,a small ensemble drama and versions of both Jude the Obscure and Tristram Shandy,while turning down the chance to make high-profile Hollywood pictures like Good Will Hunting and The Cider House Rules.