Itâs Murder at the Movies!
Patricia Highsmithâs third novel, The Blunderer (1954), opens with a fateful flight from the movies. Bookstore owner Melchior Kimmel buys a ticket for a film called Marked Woman, 1 even though he is oblivious to its sexed-up poster and, for that matter, to the film itself (TB 1). 2 Kimmel is merely looking for an alibi, timing his arrival at the theater so that he will be seen by people before sneaking out again to go through with his plan for killing his wife. The two existing adaptations of the novel flesh out the scene in different ways: Claude Autant-Laraâs Le meurtrier ( Enough Rope , 1963) presents Kimmelâs trip to the cinema as a flashback that may or may not be imagined by Walter, his antagonist, during his own excursion to a movie-theater, and due to the mediumâs lack of introspection, it remains for the viewer to decide whether Kimmel (whose thick-lensed glasses suggest that he is unlikely to get much pleasure out of anything visual) is executing a carefully hatched plan, or whether it is the film that triggers his murderous rage. Andy Goddardâs A Kind of Murder (2016), by contrast, runs with Highsmithâs original concept, with Eddie Marsan playing a far more cold-blooded version of Kimmel, who makes sure the other patrons notice him entering a screening of BUtterfield 8 (1960). Still, the nexus between going to the movies and committing murder is equally present here, an impression that is supported by the credits which are laid over Kimmelâs entrance into the theater: they inform the viewers that they are watching âa KILLER FILMS productionâ.
The scene is an apt emblem of Patricia Highsmithâs own rather ambivalent attitude towards cinema, an institution of which she remained notoriously suspicious. Not only was she reported to generally dislike the movies (including those based on her novels), she remained a firm opponent of television (Schenkar 2009, 275), though both media provided a regular source of income for her throughout almost half a century. But there was not much love lost between Highsmith and the adaptation industry; it arguably remained a passionless marriage of convenience. If Kimmel (a bookworm reluctantly drawn from his natural habitat) seeks out the movie theatre to prepare for the kill, Highsmith occasionally did the same in order to make a killing, and the two endeavors sometimes conflate in her work. Howard Ingham, the protagonist in The Tremor of Forgery (1969), is a novelist who travels to Tunisia to try his hand at a movie script (in spite of knowing that âfilm scripts, even television plays, were not his forteâ, 4), but he ends up killing someone with his typewriterâan event that appears to inconvenience him mainly because the typewriter will need a repair job (TOF 102). Highsmith may have found the dark humor in writing for the screen, yet her tempestuous reactions to the films based on her works strongly suggest that the process of being adapted was rather painful to her.
Highsmithâs books have always served as a popular source for film adaptations. There has been no decade without at least one new Highsmith adaptation in the United States as well as in Europe since Alfred Hitchcock turned her debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), into his classic suspense film of the same name (1951). The list of directors who have adapted Highsmith includes renowned filmmakers like Liliana Cavani , Claude Chabrol , Todd Haynes , Anthony Minghella , and Wim Wenders , which means that studying a cinema based on Highsmith affords plenty of opportunities to assess the work of particular auteurs and their methods and approaches. These adaptations provide a cross-section of adaptation strategies that reflect shifts in moral ethos, industry practices, cinematic movements, gender politics, and different media representations. The longevity of Highsmithâs popularity as a source for adaptation opens up the possibility for dialogue between adaptersâfor instance, when Claude Chabrol makes a film of The Cry of the Owl ( Le cri du hibou , 1987), he may be more interested in the Hitchcockian motif of voyeurism than in adapting Highsmith. 3 At the most extreme, this approach produces âindirectâ adaptations of her work which go so far as to obliterate her signature altogether, no doubt encouraged by Hitchcockâs characteristic appropriation of source material.
In addition to opening up a dialogue between individual filmmakers (rather than just between Highsmith and her adapters), this book addresses the different adaptive strategies, the evolution of film noir (including its themes and aesthetics across different time periods and filmmaking-traditions), queer identity politics, and the fragility of genre conventions which are simultaneously enacted and subverted in Highsmith adaptations. While these films owe a considerable intertextual debt to influential 1950s auteurs like Hitchcock or Douglas Sirk , they do not simply follow in their footsteps, and thus cannot simply be categorized as new iterations of well-known genres. What we call a Highsmith adaptation entails a degree of adaptation in a different sense of the word, as characters like the highly adaptable Tom Ripley (see Schwanebeck 2013), not to mention Highsmithâs various other murderous con men, adapt to traditional scripts (of identity, class, gender, and genre) but expose them to be hollow and out of date. Highsmith films reflect this state of affairs through various adaptive and aesthetic strategies, and their glossy, period-drama surface is often deceptive. The way they repeatedly revolve around the notions of (identity) forgery and criminality (themes which are addressed in various chapters of this book) suggests that there is, ultimately, something criminal about the very idea of adaptation to begin with, as Thomas Leitch emphasizes in his opening chapter.
Highsmithâs thematic focus on adaptation itself (especially in the generic context of film noir) extends to the notions of crime and illicit desires, which makes the films resonate significantly with paradigms as diverse as noir, queer cinema, and melodrama. At their core, Highsmith adaptations are psychological thrillers in which the façade of respectability is always threatened with the eruption of violence and the discovery of skeletons in the closet, and in their own way, they reiterate the rise of postwar noir with their stories of everymen who allow themselves to be corrupted when opportunity knocks. In the process of adaptation, the postwar political subtexts of Highsmithâs heroes may not exactly have been obliteratedâeven Wendersâ dreamlike Highsmith homage The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) is a portrait gallery of Americaâs forgotten, subaltern subjects of the postwar eraâyet they are often buried, palimpsest-like, underneath layers of postmodern playfulness. By a curious coincidence, Steven Spielbergâs Saving Private Ryan (1998), the quintessential story of All-American heroism, casts three actors in the squadron of upright young soldiers who would subsequently play Tom Ripley. 4 There is a certain logical consistency to this curious constellation, not least because the spectrum of the actorsâ roles suggests historical continuity. The men returning from the war would advance to become the high achievers of the postwar era, yet watching Matt Damon take off James Ryanâs uniform and put on Tom Ripleyâs (borrowed) Princeton jacket a year later provokes a nightmarish thought that always resonates as subtext in contemporary melodrama about phonies: âthe possibility that the idea of the unique American individual was not just hiding beneath a phony mask, but rather no longer existed at allâ (Cheever 2010, 7); an idea that permeates Mad Men (2007â2015) as much as it does Sloan Wilsonâs Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), published the same year as the first Ripley novel and an intriguing companion piece to the latter. 5
This kind of cultural environment produces a characteristic branch of film noir in the postwar years, on which Highsmith leaves her own characteristic stamp. In typical noir fashion, her novels firmly reject the idea ...