LE JUMEAU (THE TWIN) ON BLU-RAY

by Nathaniel Poggiali
Last May, the Museum of the Moving Image hosted “Crime Scenes,” a series focusing on the film adaptations and screenplays of legendary novelist Donald E. Westlake. The weekend of screenings was organized by Levi Stahl, editor of the terrific Westlake collection The Getaway Car, and included John Boorman’s POINT BLANK, the Robert Redford caper comedy THE HOT ROCK and, of course, THE GRIFTERS, for which Westlake earned an Oscar nomination. We attended the opening night of the festival (POINT BLANK) and found the post-screening discussion featuring Stahl, Abby Westlake, Lawrence Block and Luc Sante, to be informative and entertaining.

Although the discussion focused partly on European translations of Westlake’s stories, the film series included only one European adaptation: MADE IN U.S.A., a bizarre Marxist re-imagining of The Jugger directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Later French-language Westlake films -- MISE À SAC, LE JUMEAU, ORDO, and Costa-Gavras’s critically praised LE COUPERET -- were not screened, but they are strong efforts and mostly successful at capturing the author's style. Sadly, those films have eluded American viewers thanks to spotty or non-existent distribution.

In 1984, director Yves Robert re-teamed with Pierre Richard, the star of his hit comedies THE TALL BLOND MAN WITH ONE BLACK SHOE and its sequel, for LE JUMEAU (THE TWIN), based on Westlake’s 1976 novel Two Much! Never officially released to the U.S., LE JUMEAU only recently became available with English subtitles in a beautiful-looking transfer available on region-free Blu-Ray through Amazon France.

Richard plays Matthias Duval, the womanizing, debt-ridden owner of an adult greeting card business, who invents a brother to woo identical twin heiresses (played by English twins Carey and Camilla More, the same year as their appearance in FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER). After Matthias seduces Liz Kerner, he slicks his hair back and dons a pair of glasses to become Matthieu Duval, Matthias’s identical twin brother and suitor of Liz’s sister Betty.

When Matthias finds himself engaged to Liz and Betty as part of an inheritance scheme, he’s soon running back and forth between offices and bedrooms, juggling identities in farcical fashion while the Kerners’ cadaverous attorney Ernest Volpinex (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) launches an investigation into the Duval siblings.

The film is remarkably faithful to Westlake’s novel and even uses a few of the tasteless (and often hilarious) greeting card messages. Richard, a deft comic actor, skillfully manages physical humor and projects the sleaziness and dishonesty of his character with surprising charm. Although the final, tonally jarring plot twists of the novel have been omitted -- Westlake purists may object -- director Robert finds an appropriately noir-ish atmosphere and builds tension, particularly in a dazzling sequence in which Matthias flees from a burning house.

Two Much! was adapted again in 1996 as a mostly forgettable comedy (starring Antonio Banderas, Melanie Griffith and Daryl Hannah) that barely resembles the source material.

The Cinematic Worlds of Johnny Handsome

by Philip Nathaniel Poggiali

John Mitchell Sedley is a professional thief nearing the end of a five-year stretch in the state pen. Face disfigured since birth, a cleft palate leaving his speech muffled and snorting, Sedley coped with derision and rejection as a youth by drifting into a life of crime. While on the inside, as the guinea pig in a rehabilitation experiment, Johnny goes under the knife to repair his cleft, chin, ears, brow and broken nose -- an alteration so extreme that even the convict's own mother wouldn't recognize him. Once in the free world, his new face should find him the respect he needs to live a clean life, or so his surgeon Dr. Katsouras believes. On the outside, Johnny attempts to go straight but can't resist the lure of crime. It's not long before he's casing the local small town bank and planning his double-cross for Jappy, the tightwad who couldn't bribe a cop to keep him out of prison.

She was looking at him appraisingly. "You're handsomer than Tully. You know that?"

He nodded and said, "I'll be the best-looking man in the whole cemetery."

John Godey's The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome was an old tale even for 1972, the one about the ex-con who tried to go straight but fell into bad habits, and whose bland appearance masked an intricate, brutal revenge. The writer's name was also a kind of mask, being a pseudonym for the late Morton Freedgood (who also wrote The Taking of Pelham One Two Three under the Godey moniker). Freedgood's noir-ish tone seemed fatalistic enough to justify a nagging sense of the familiar. Crime fiction tropes were trotted out to form a routine largely consistent with the retrogressive nature of the main character.

Freedgood's non-linear structure is unusual, and resembles Donald E. Westlake's experiments as Richard Stark (the Parker series also had its protagonist undergo plastic surgery). In Part One, entitled "Free World," the mysterious Mitchell introduces himself to Jappy and his gang of misfits -- including whiny Sunny and her dim-bulb boyfriend, Tully -- and pitches a bank job. Mitchell claims to have learned of the gang from a cellmate known as Johnny Handsome, a former employee of Jappy's who Mitchell says died in prison. What the reader isn't meant to know until the conclusion of "Free World," somewhere around page 70, is that Mitchell and Johnny happen to be the same criminal with different faces. Part Two, "Inside World," is a flashback covering Johnny's time in the pen and his surgery, and Part Three ("Real World") takes us back to the robbery and Johnny's plan to double-cross Jappy and walk away with the loot.

Screenwriter Ken Friedman received sole credit for adapting Three Worlds as JOHNNY HANDSOME (1989). I don't know if he penned the majority of the script, or if director Walter Hill had a lot of input, but whatever the case, there seem to have been wise decisions made in transition. Scenes were placed in chronological order, presumably to gain the viewer's emotional investment in Johnny at an earlier point. The ex-convict (portrayed brilliantly by Mickey Rourke) had a more sympathetic reason for getting revenge, in that his best friend Mikey (Scott Wilson) was murdered by their partners during a jewelry store holdup. Jappy and Tully, neither character very memorable or fully realized, were combined to give us the alternately sinister and pathetic Rafe (Lance Henriksen), while a few heavies were dropped and Sunny's role beefed and spiced up to the point where Ellen Barkin nearly walked off with the movie. And Lt. Shannon, the inevitable crooked cop who wants a piece of the action, was traded for sarcastic but honest Lt. Drones (Morgan Freeman), who dogs Johnny's every step and predicts the thief's fall as unwaveringly as his name would suggest. With his observations on the dubious moral character of ex-cons and the failure of reforming them, Drones voices the essence of both film and novel.

"Y'know, Johnny, you might fool this fucking quack and little sister over there, but I know you. I know who you are, and I know what you are. And we both know right where you're going. Don't we, Johnny?"

FULL CONTACT (HAAP DOU KO FEI) is a 1993 Hong Kong thriller (shot in Cantonese dialect) written by Nam Yin and directed by Ringo Lam. Humorous, stylish with action, steeped in corny melodrama and homoerotic male bonding, the film is an early 90s Hong Kong action picture through-and-through, and never captures the gritty, cynical spirit of either Freedgood's novel or Friedman/Hill's adaptation. But I do think that Lam borrowed a lot from Hill's visual style and, more significantly, imagined an alternate version of Friedman's story in which the Johnny character's friend is the one who betrays him, adding an interesting element to a rather generic revenge plot.

The Johnny figure is Ko Fei -- or Godfrey, or Jeffrey, depending on English subtitles and dubbing -- a Chinese bouncer in a Bangkok nightclub with a sense of ethics in opposition to his sleazy environment. Much like the Friedman protagonist, Ko Fei (Chow Yun-Fat) finds himself drawn into armed robbery to help a friend out of debt. He and buddy Sam (Anthony Wong) team up with the latter's flamboyantly gay cousin Judge (Simon Yam), and his bickering cohorts Yin and Madman, to rob a truck full of munitions. During the robbery Judge pulls a double-cross, Sam loses his nerve and, under pressure from his cousin, shoots Ko Fei and takes up with his friend's fiancée. Ko Fei, of course, is not dead, and after a few months in hiding he returns to steal the munitions from Judge -- the first step in an elaborate plan of vengeance.

"He looks awful familiar."

"There's no such thing as ghosts."

Lam, the director who brought us at least one unofficial Hong Kong remake of a U.S. production (WILD SEARCH, patterned on WITNESS) and who regularly lifts material from American genre pictures, seems to be an admirer of Hill and Friedman's approach. In addition to similarities of plot, both films open with jewelry heists in which a tastelessly dressed, sexually aggressive woman threatens customers, with pistol barrels shoved into the camera or photographed at such an angle that they appear larger than they are. Shadowy bars and deserted warehouse interiors are playing fields in both films. Ko Fei's appearance in the nightclub, after Judge learns the munitions have been stolen, resembles Johnny baiting Sunny at the bar in their first meeting after his release from prison. Like Hill, Lam has a fondness for trashy retro hairstyles, clothing and automobiles (the dance choreography, however, is basically of the period, especially a nightclub act set to Extreme's "Get the Funk Out").

The supporting villains seem familiar. Madman and Yin could be Rafe and Sunny of the Far East, or even, at times, Tully and Sunny. The femme fatale of JOHNNY HANDSOME was a greedy ex-prostitute. FULL CONTACT throws in nymphomania for comic relief (Yin: "I used to get it seven times a day! It's been a week now, and I'm tired of begging!"), moving further down a twisted path of the novel (Sunny, as written by Freedgood: "I can't stand three days without a man….If I don't get it at night, I can't go to sleep"). Madman, ignorant and incapable of thinking beyond his stomach and libido, is not a schemer like Rafe, but a stooge like Tully.

But FULL CONTACT is neither a remake nor an adaptation. Lam and Nam Yin do not include the disfigurement and plastic surgery elements. They're also far more compassionate with characters, allowing Ko Fei, Sam, and Ko Fei's fiancée, Mona, to learn from mistakes and atone for them. Ko Fei's ultimate goal is even noble: to deliver money stolen from Judge to a young woman horribly burned during the initial robbery.

The similarities are interesting, though, and I wonder how Lam would visualize The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome on film. With FULL CONTACT, we might have a rough idea.

Stark Views: The Violent World of Donald Westlake

by Chris Poggiali

After two roars from the MGM lion, we cut to tough guy Parker (Jim Brown) kicking open the door to his girlfriend Ellie’s apartment. He charges inside, searches the place, and finds Ellie (Diahann Carroll) sitting up in bed, dead, skewered to the headboard with a sword -- "stuck there like a scarecrow put away for the winter." Checking the closet, Parker discovers that the money from the stadium heist is missing, and then -- "Whoa, wait a minute!" some of you are yelling now, "I saw THE SPLIT and it didn’t start like that! And who the hell is this Parker guy?! Jim played McClain in that movie!" Yeah, yeah, I know -- but if the producers of THE SPLIT had been interested in making a great caper movie instead of just a mediocre action flick that wastes a once-in-a-lifetime cast, they would’ve stuck closer to their source material: The Seventh, a fast-paced, ingeniously plotted crime novel written by the late Donald E. Westlake, under his "Richard Stark" pseudonym. Published in 1966 as a 158-page paperback from Pocket Books, The Seventh tells the story of seven crooks who rob a stadium during a college football inter-conference game, and the violent complications that erupt before the take is divided. The title refers not only to the one-seventh share of the loot that each crook is due to receive, but also to the fact that this was the seventh novel written by Westlake under the Stark alias.

"Stark" is right. During their peak in the late 60s and early 70s, these cold, hard, stripped-down books were extremely popular in prison libraries across the country, due to the fact that the main characters are killers and thieves who always get away in the end. Twenty-four of the twenty-eight books are about ruthless criminal Parker -- possibly the toughest tough guy in the history of crime fiction --while other novels shine the spotlight on his frequent partner in crime, Alan Grofield, a wisecracking stage actor who commits armed robberies to support the community theatre he owns in Indiana. Parker is a professional crook -- "Banks, payrolls, armored cars, jewelers, anyplace that’s worth the risk" -- and his adventures focus on the elaborate heists in which he participates, as well as the inevitable carnage that follows, with a few exceptions: The Jugger, a strange mystery set in a small town in Nebraska, brilliantly pays homage to Jim Thompson’s "crazy sheriff" stories (The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280), while The Handle is surely to blame for all those mind-numbing men's action paperbacks that Pinnacle started mass-producing two or three years later. In Butcher’s Moon, Westlake tips his hat to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest by dropping Parker and Grofield into the middle of a complicated plot involving gangsters and corrupt politicians. Grofield’s first three solo ventures (The Damsel, The Dame, and The Blackbird) are clumsy, lightweight affairs that turn the fourth book, the downbeat and nasty Lemons Never Lie, into a sucker punch.

In 1973, Berkley Medallion Books reissued most of the Parker novels as a numbered adventure series, "The Violent World of Parker," in an attempt to cash in on Pinnacle’s popular Destroyer and Executioner series (the Coffin Ed and Gravedigger mysteries by Chester Himes underwent a similar facelift around the same time). Titles were changed -- The Score became Killtown, for example -- but Berkley screwed up the whole thing by assigning the wrong number to almost every book in the series! For maximum enjoyment, the Stark books should be read in a certain order (see list below), since characters from earlier stories return, and previous adventures are frequently referred to and sometimes even continued. Bett Harrow, the woman who sets up Parker for blackmail in The Outfit, is dealt with in the following book, The Mourner. The Damsel opens with Grofield still recovering from the gunshot wounds he received in The Handle. Parker spends half of Plunder Squad on the hunt for George Uhl, the double-crossing lunatic who fouled up a bank heist split in The Sour Lemon Score, and at least half of Firebreak tracking down a trio of losers, also from The Sour Lemon Score, who put a contract out on his life. In Butcher’s Moon, Parker and Grofield return to the Fun Island amusement park to retrieve the $73,000 that Parker stashed at the end of Slayground. The last three books (Nobody Runs Forever, Ask the Parrot, Dirty Money) form a trilogy focusing on Parker’s robbery of armored trucks during a bank merger, and the problems evading law enforcement and moving the stolen cash.

Westlake was the mad scientist of crime fiction for nearly half a century and the Stark books showcase some of his more daring experiments with style and structure. The Blackbird and Slayground both open with the same botched armored car robbery, told from two different points of view: Grofield’s in The Blackbird, Parker’s in Slayground. The two books share the same opening chapter, but go off in completely different directions; Grofield is captured by the police, then recruited by the CIA (!) and sent to Quebec on a silly James Bond-type adventure with a beautiful secret agent from Africa (the "blackbird" of the title); Parker, who gets away with the loot, ends up tangling with mobsters and bad cops in a shuttered amusement park only one block away from the scene of the robbery! Even more bizarre is the jaw-dropping plot twist in Plunder Squad that sends Parker wandering into chapter eighteen of Dead Skip, the first DKA File mystery by Joe "Hammett" Gores. And then there’s Jimmy the Kid, the third installment in Westlake’s hilarious Dortmunder series (following The Hot Rock and Bank Shot), which has its hapless crooks using the nonexistent Stark novel Child Heist as the blueprint for their own bungled kidnapping attempt.

Big screen adaptations of Stark’s novels range from excellent to excruciating. The superb POINT BLANK (1967) departs from its source material (The Hunter) early on, while others are more faithful but not very strong as movies. Westlake didn't allow other writers to use the name "Parker," so Lee Marvin is Walker in POINT BLANK, Michel Constantin is Georges in MISE EN SAC (a.k.a. PILLAGED, based on The Score) (1967), Jim Brown is McClain in THE SPLIT (1968), Robert Duvall is Macklin in THE OUTFIT (1974), Peter Coyote is Stone in SLAYGROUND, and Mel Gibson is Porter in a second version of The Hunter, PAYBACK (1999), as well as director Brian Helgeland's revised cut, PAYBACK: STRAIGHT UP (2007). For Jean-Luc Godard’s MADE IN U.S.A. (1966), Parker became pretty Anna Karina as journalist Paula Nelson, in a political thriller bearing little resemblance to its credited source, The Jugger (though Westlake won a lawsuit against the film’s producer when he wasn’t paid for use of his novel).

Westlake himself wrote several drafts of a screenplay for The Score circa 1964-65, for a project that was to be directed by Ed Spiegel and produced by Max J. Rosenberg. Peter Yates was set to direct a Deadly Edge movie in 1972, but it was never made (Yates did helm a very good adaptation of Westlake's THE HOT ROCK the same year, however). Another unrealized adaptation, Butcher's Moon, would've reunited Charles Bronson and director Michael Winner immediately after their controversial hit DEATH WISH (1974), with a screenplay by the author of that film's source novel, Brian Garfield (who was one of Westlake's good friends and occasional collaborators); the project apparently fell apart when Garfield and Westlake expressed their dissatisfaction with the page-to-screen translation of Death Wish. In 2001, screenwriter Alexander Ignon penned an adaptation of The Green Eagle Score as a pilot for a Parker television series that never happened. More recently, Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez star in PARKER for director Taylor Hackford, based on Flashfire, which is set for release later this year.

The Novels of Violence by Richard Stark

The Hunter (a.k.a. Point Blank! - 1962) ***
The Man with the Getaway Face (a.k.a. The Steel Hit - 1963) ***½
The Outfit (1963) **½
The Mourner (1963) **½
The Score (a.k.a. Killtown - 1964) ***½
The Jugger (a.k.a. Made in U.S.A. - 1965) ****
The Seventh (a.k.a. The Split - 1966) ****
The Handle (a.k.a. Run Lethal - 1966) **½
The Damsel (1967) *
The Rare Coin Score (1967) ***
The Green Eagle Score (1968) ***
The Dame (1969) **
The Black Ice Score (1968) **½
The Sour Lemon Score (1969) ****
Deadly Edge (1971) ***½
The Blackbird (1969) **
Slayground (1971) ****
Lemons Never Lie (1971) ***
Plunder Squad (1972) ***
Butcher’s Moon (1974) ****
Comeback (1997) ****
Backflash (1998) ****
Flashfire (2000) ***½
Firebreak (2001) ****
Breakout (2002) ***½
Nobody Runs Forever (2004) ****
Ask the Parrot (2006) ****

Dirty Money (2008) ***

(This is a revision of an article that first appeared in BadAzz MoFo #4, April 1999, p. 70)