Saturday November 07, 2009

THE KILLER INSIDE ME TRAILER. This looks all wrong:

Looks like a good Elmer, and Casey Affleck has the stuff for Ford. And it's a trailer, so I would expect the sex to be emphasized -- as might Jim Thompson, who was after all a pulp writer. But The Killer Inside Me is much less about sexual obsession than about self-hatred -- the way it drives you to the periphery of the world and makes you a monster, and makes other people monstrous to you -- like Elmer, running and screaming from the house, looks to Ford. Kubrick territory, certainly, and too bad he never got to it.

Actually Kubrick did work with Thompson. In his excellent book on the director, Michael Herr relates:

Jim Thompson had made him nervous when they working together on The Killing, a big guy in a dirty old raincoat, a terrific writer but a little too hard-boiled for Stanley's taste. He'd turn up for work carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag, but saying nothing about it -- it was just there on the desk with no apology or comment -- not at all interested in putting Stanley at ease except to offer him the bag, which Stanley declined, making no gestures whatever to any part of the Hollywood process, except maybe toward the money.

Thompson worked on Paths of Glory too, and Kubrick commissioned from him a script that never got filmed, though I see someone wants to try it.

There's a pretty bad film of the book with Stacy Keach, but Keach has Ford's clammy sorrow down cold. And it has Susan Tyrell. They make a good team.

The music in the trailer sounds awful. I always thought the score of a film of Killer should be entirely based on Genocide by Link Wray.