In Brief:
Adapting Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, director Michael Winterbottom flirts with danger. It's also safe to say that Winterbottom probably asked for trouble the instant he decided to film any novel by Jim Thompson.. As with Dick and the science fiction audience, a lot of noir readers weren't sure what to make of Thompson during his lifetime, and also like Dick, Thompson started producing more personal novels without success before turning to genre as a vehicle to convey the personal, not the least of which was his struggle to stay sane. Vortexes of obsession and violence, Thompson's novels are the unholy love children of Cain and William Faulkner; The Killer Inside Me's Lou Ford, played in the movie by Affleck, could as easily be a Faulkner character as Faulkner's Joe Christmas from Light in August could be a Thompson character. When I lived in Paris in the early '80s, I had French friends who exclaimed with incredulity, ?You haven't heard of the great American novelist Jim Thompson? This is the singular and fuliginous solitude that Jim Thompson knew, and with which the rest of us hope to never have a passing acquaintance.
