It’s a bit glib, but it’s fairly safe to say that Jim Thompson was probably the most hard-boiled among the better known hard-boiled writers of the mid 20th century. The new film version of his best known novel proved his work still has the capacity to shock thirty-three years after his death. At Sundance and elsewhere, “The Killer Inside Me,” directed by the very prolific Michael Winterbottom (“A Mighty Heart,” “The Road to Guantanamo”), inspired praise and walks out, particularly for some reportedly extremely rough and bloody scenes of violence perpetrated by Casey Affleck as the brutally sociopathic lead character against costars Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson. Being green band, this trailer merely implies the brutality, of course, but I don’t think it hides from it, either. This really does look like a likely career breakthrough role for Affleck.
This is far from the first time Thompson’s work has been on the screen. Stanley Kubrick was famously impressed with The Killer Inside Me, which came out in 1952. Thompson wound up working on two Kubrick classics, “The Killing” and “Paths of Glory,” but his cult fame had to wait until after his death in 1977, the year after the first film version of The Killer Inside Me was released to not much interest.
This time, though, that’s looking to be a very different story. Other notable Thompson adaptations include Stephen Frears’ memorable “The Grifters” with John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and Annette Bening from 1990, “The Getaway” (filmed by Sam Peckinpah in 1972 and Roger Donaldson in 1994), and Betrand Tavernier’s haunting 1981 “Coup de Torchon.” None of those were what you’d call family films, but it’s safe to say that this will be by far the most controversial of the bunch.
UPDATE: I just stumbled over an earlier European trailer which is really interesting and a bit more blackly comic. It’s courtesy of a 5/5/10 post made by Simon Dang at the Playlist. Dang also offers that the he thinks the violence has been played up perhaps a bit more than is the case — and this wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. In any event, the other trailer is after the flip.
