Based On The Book By

Jim Thompson’s thriller was published in 1958, and it was first filmed in 1972. The story centres on a career criminal Carter ‘Doc’ McCoy, his wife Carol and a psychotic accomplice called Rudy Torrento. They execute a bank heist in Beacon City, getting away with a cool quarter of a million dollars. Each man plans on killing the other afterwards but McCoy strikes first, leaving Torrento for dead in a dried up stream bed. As the McCoys take to the highway news of the Beacon City heist (and the corpses left as collateral damage) is all over the airwaves. The fugitives’ next port of call is the isolated home of a man named Beynon, the boss of the State Parole Board. For a large bribe delivered by Carol McCoy, it was Beynon who got McCoy out of the penitentiary well ahead of the time he was serving for his previous conviction.

McCoy still owes Beynon the largest part of the bribe, and as the two men talk, the drunken official implies that there had been more than just a financial transaction between himself and Carol while McCoy had been locked up. Carol, who had been waiting outside in the car, comes into the room and shoots Beynon dead. Then the McCoys abandon the highway in Kansas City and decide to head by rail to Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the story is about to get even more bloody. McCoy’s bullet had not killed Torrento, but been deflected by the buckle on his shoulder holster. Still badly wounded, Torrento gets himself patched up by veterinarian Harold Clinton, but then takes the vet and his wife hostage as he vows to find the McCoys and take his revenge. As they hop from one cheap motel to another Torrento beds Fran and forces Harold to watch:

‘Mrs Clinton smirked lewdly. Rudy winked at her husband.
“It’s okay with you, ain’t it, Clint? You’ve got no objections?”
“ Why, no. No, of course not”, Clinton said hastily, “It’s, very sensible.”
And he winced as his wife laughed openly. He did not know how to object. In his inherent delicacy and decency, he could not admit that there was anything to object to. He heard them that night-and subsequent nights of the leisurely journey westwards. But he kept his back turned and his eyes closed, feeling no shame or anger but only an increasing sickness of soul.’

In keeping with the ongoing carnage, Harold Clinton – soul first sickened, and then dead, commits suicide, while Doc manages to keep ahead of the game – just – by gunning down Rudy and Mrs Clinton.

The 1972 film, (trailer above) directed by Sam Peckinpah with a screenplay (eventually) by Walter Hill was ‘wrong’ from the word go, at least in terms of the book. It is hardly surprising that Jim Thompson (right) hired to write the screenplay, didn’t last long on the project and was sacked. Star man was Hollywood golden boy Steve McQueen. With box office hits like The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963) Bullitt (1968) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) on his resumé, he wasn’t ever going to be right for the homicidal and totally amoral Doc McCoy. The producers were probably of the mindset that they had the star, so to hell with the book. The film Doc McCoy is a criminal for sure, but he doesn’t murder people. He’s a Robin Hood or a (film version) Clyde Barrow. Beynon is the villain of the piece, and Rudy is working for him. This was the cast:

I’d better mention the 1994 version of the story. Starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger in the lead roles, it took even more liberties with the original story, in spite of (or perhaps because of) Walter Hill being on screenwriting duties. Wkipedia states, succinctly:
“The film flopped at the box office, but it enjoyed lucrative success in the home video market.”

As a critic once wrote of a record that flopped:
“It wasn’t released – it escaped.”

Back to the comparison between the Steve McQueen version of Doc McCoy and the original. Like the dreadful lawmen in two other Thompson classics (click the links for more information) The Killer Inside Me and Pop.1280, McCoy has a public persona:

“He was Doc McCoy, and Doc McCoy was born to the obligation of being one hell of a guy. Persuasive, impelling of personality; insidiously likable and good-humoured and imperturbable one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet, that was Doc McCoy.”

We soon learn, however, in the novel, that McCoy is a ruthless and stone cold killer. Rudy Tarrento is a monster, but he has something of an excuse. He is insane. Doc, though, is – by all interpretations – perfectly rational and in good mental health. In the film, after much ammunition is expended in various shoot-outs, Doc and Carol buy an old truck from a cowboy (played by the legendary Slim Pickens – left) and – almost literally – drive off into the Mexican sunset, full of life and love, with most of the loot intact. The ending of the novel is – to put it mildly – enigmatic. It has the feel of an hallucination. According to Steven King:

“If you have seen only the film version of The Getaway, you have no idea of the existential horrors awaiting Doc and Carol McCoy at the point where Sam Peckinpah ended the story.”

Doc and Carol, after avoiding the land border into Mexico via a fishing boat, end up in a mountain enclave ruled by a man known as El Rey. The last few pages read like something from a surreal nightmare, a kind of Twin Peaks world where nothing makes sense. Our less-than-starstruck lovers meet Dr. Vonderschied, a friend of the late Rudy. Each has asked the doctor to perform surgery on the other, and make sure that the medical intervention proves fatal. The doctor refuses both requests, and the book ends with Doc and Carol clinking glasses to celebrate their ‘successful getaway.”

Jim Thompson loved the theme of a corrupt small town lawman, as in The Killer Inside Me, but what makes Pop. 1280 different is that Nick Corey, Sheriff of Pottsville, basks in his reputation as a bumbling buffoon, whereas Lou Ford’s outward persona was that of someone who was fairly shrewd, but otherwise unremarkable. Both novels employ the first-person narrative. The Killer Inside Me was published in 1952 (click this link for a feature on the novel and its film adaptations) but Pop. 1280 came out in 1962. To date, it has only been filmed once, as Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate) in 1981. The French film was directed by Bertrand Tavernier and starred Philippe Noiret as the central character.

To judge from the lurid cover illustrations of the novel you would be forgiven for supposing that it was set in the 1950s, but it actually takes place around the time of World War One, probably before America entered the war, as we hear Corey ask a man reading a newspaper
“What do you think about them Bullshevicks? Do you reckon they’ll ever overthrow the Czar?”
Coup de Torchon, strangely, is set in French Colonial Africa just before the outbreak of World War Two. This trailer gives some indication of the ambience:

The novel is an astonishing blend of slapstick comedy, bizarre sex (Cory’s wife is in a relationship with her retarded brother) and disturbing violence. On of the comedy scenes makes it almost untouched into the film. Cory is bothered by an insanitary privy that sits just outside the courthouse where he lives. Unable to convince the town worthies to have it removed, he takes advice from a neighboring Sheriff, a couple of train stops down the line. Remember this the deep South, probably Texas, and automobiles are rare (although Thompson does give some of the characters telephones):
“I sneaked out to the privy late that night, and I loosened a nail here and there, and I shifted the floor boards around a bit.”
Next day, one of the town’s leading citizens heads to the privy, his breakfast having provoked an urgent response:
“He went rushing in that morning, the morning after I’d done my tampering – a big fat fella in a high white collar and a spanking new broadcloth suit. The floor boards went out from under him, and down into the pit. And he went down with them. Smack down into thirty years’ accumulation of night soil.”

Readers of my generation idolised Joseph Heller’s magisterial one-off, Catch 22, and I vividly remember a dramatic mood shift towards the end of the book. The clowning and absurdities are paused for a spell, and a cold wind – both literal and metaphorical – blows through the streets of the Italian town where Yossarian and his buddies seek their entertainment. The genial but seemingly harmless Captain ‘Aarfy’ Aadvark has just murdered an Italian prostitute, and thinks no more of it than if he had crushed a bug under his boot. I remember being shocked back then and, similarly, Jim Thompson, via Nick Corey, lets rip about the realities of hard scrabble small town America:

“There were the helpless little girls, crying when the own daddies crawled into bed with ’em. There were the men beating their wives, the women screaming for mercy. There were the kids wettin’ in the beds from fear and nervousness and their mothers dosing them with red pepper for punishment. There were the haggard faces, drained white from hookworm and blotched with scurvy. There was the near starvation, the never-bein’-full, the debts-that-always-outrun-the-credit. There was that how-we-gonna-eat, how-we-gonna sleep, how-we-gonna-cover-our-poor-bare-asses thinking.”

Nick Corey sets about framing first one person and then another for various crimes, executes four more with his own hand, mainly to keep his job, and his triple relationships with various women, namely his wife Myra, Rose Hauck and the rather aristocratic Amy Mason. He delivers a running commentary on all these manoeuvers, always in the same Good Ol’ Boy “Aaw shucks, God dang it honey!” homely vernacular, which only makes starker the contrast between the man he wants to appear to be and the man he actually is. Thompson also has a sly chuckle at the expense of the heritage of the American South by naming tow of Pottsville’s dignitaries Robert Lee Jefferson and Stonewall jackson Smith.

My French is nowhere near good enough to know how closely the film script kept to Thompson’s original, or even if there is a similar trope in French culture to that of the tumbleweed town in the American South, but Coup de Torchon retains the main characters and plot direction. The equivalent characters and actors are:

Nick Corey        Lucien Cordier           Phillipe Noiret
Myra Corey       Huguette                    Stéphane Audran
Lennie               Nono                         Eddy Mitchell
Rose Hauck      Rose Marcaillou          Isabelle Huppert
Amy Mason      Anne                           Irène Skoblene
Ken Lacey Marcel Chavasson      Guy Marchand

There are some books that cannot be filmed. It’s as simple as that. Mike Nichols made a brave stab at Catch 22 (1970) and, despite hiring a stellar cast, never quite recaptured the moral anarchy of the novel. Quite wisely, producers and directors have never attempted adaptations of any Derek Raymond novels. How would you even start to put I Was Dora Suarez on screen? It has to be said that Corp de Torchon was a brave attempt to capture the essence of Thompson’s caustic and abrasive novel, but since what happens in Pottsville is nothing short of a dive into the middle of a townscape imagined by Hieronymus Bosch, Bertrand Tavernier and his crew have to given full marks for trying.