November 1, 2006
SCRIPT AT LARGE
While this may be contrary to the auteur theory of film direction that posits that a director's actions directly imprint their vision on a script, it might be possible that Stanley Kubrick might have a direct influence on a film yet to be made. Although he passed away in 1999, a script was recently found that he commissioned early in his career from pulp icon Jim Thompson.
Despite its title, “Lunatic at Large” is not a horror story. It’s a dark and surprising mystery of sorts, in which the greatest puzzle is who, among several plausible candidates, is the true escapee from a nearby mental hospital. Mr. Clarke, the screenwriter, said that the recovered treatment (a prose narrative dramatizing an idea by Mr. Kubrick) was a “gem” but also “pretty basic,” and that he expanded it a bit, adding a new subplot, among other things, to make the solution less obvious. Mr. Clarke’s experience consists mostly of writing for British television, so he prepared for his new task by rereading Mr. Thompson and studying old Bogart films.
His finished screenplay has the feel of authentic Thompsonian pulpiness. Set in New York in 1956, it tells the story of Johnnie Sheppard, an ex-carnival worker with serious anger-management issues, and Joyce, a nervous, attractive barfly he picks up in a Hopperesque tavern scene. There’s a newsboy who flashes a portentous headline, a car chase over a railroad crossing with a train bearing down, and a romantic interlude in a spooky, deserted mountain lodge.
The Hopper that the Times refers to above is Edward Hopper, an early- and mid-20th Century painter who is probably most famous for his work "Nighthawks", which pictures a trio of people sitting at a flourescent-lit NYC diner counter in the middle of the night. Hopper's work is generally taken as portraits of urban isolation and disconnectedness. As an aside, I frankly think the Times is a being a little pretentious dropping the term "Hopperesque" into an article with no characterization. Sorry! Not everyone who reads your paper was an art history major. There's pedanticism and then there's just being obscurely supercilious. The preceding sentence is a perfect example.
Digressing, the script for Lunatic at Large sounds like a parallel of Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor. The former is about identifying an insane man on the outside of an asylum when society itself presents many candidates. The latter is set inside an asylum and presents the obviously insane inmates as emblematic of the outside society they're restricted from. If Lunatic at Large is ever produced, I think the two films would make interesting bookends to life in mid-20th Century America in a country riven with so many internal contradictions that it eventually cracked during the 60s. I don't know if Sam Fuller and Jim Thompson ever were acquainted with each other, but they were certainly kindred artistic spirits.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at November 1, 2006 4:12 AM
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