If film noir suggested a dark side to the American dream, it was significantly limited in how dark it could go, thanks to the Hollywood Production Code. Meanwhile, American culture as a whole was limited in the extent to which it could directly critique American society during the years of the original noir cycle, first out of a need to show solidarity with the American cause during World War II and then because of the repressive McCarthyite atmosphere of the postwar years. Nevertheless, certain pulp novels of that period were able to go beyond what the Code allowed in film in terms of social critique. And while some of these novels—such as William Lindsay Gresham’s left-leaning novel Nightmare Alley (1946) or Mickey Spillane’s brutal right-wing novel Kiss Me Deadly (1952)—were adapted to film noir, the process required a considerable amount of bowdlerization. Thus, novel adaptations in the original noir cycle typically drew upon earlier novels, such as those by the hardboiled trio of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain. Meanwhile, the novels of Jim Thompson, in some ways the most “noir” of all 1950s novelists, were simply too extreme for the original noir cycle[1].
It should then perhaps be no surprise that, after the collapse of the Code opened the way for neo-noir, filmmakers immediately began to draw upon the rich trove of noir material represented by Thompson’s novels. However, even neo-noir adaptations typically had to water down the original material considerably, at the loss of much of the distinctive texture of Thompson’s work. Of the neo-noir adaptations of Thompson’s novels, After Dark, My Sweet is probably the one adaptation that is actually closest in spirit to the (1955) novel on which it was based [3]. This unusual faithfulness to a Thompson original, meanwhile, was enabled partly by fact that the original is relatively mild in content by Thompson’s standards and partly by the fact that the novel version of After Dark might simply be unusually cinematic to begin with. Polito notes that the novel “exchanges the verbal or structural pyrotechnics of its predecessors for bold, cinematic imagery. Thompson, in fact, projected After Dark, My Sweet as a movie right from conception” (372).
After Dark, My Sweet is in many ways a classic example of lost-man noir, the kind of noir in which Thompson specialized, creating some of the most thoroughly lost men in all of American literature, typically expressing their sense of exclusion from the American dream through their own first-person narration. After Dark is narrated by a character whose sanity is questionable at best, creating a great deal of interpretive instability due to the unreliability of the information supplied to us by that narrator. The novel is narrated by one William “Kid” Collins, whose first name has been changed to “Kevin” in the film, presumably to avoid the potential corniness of his being called “Billy the Kid” (though he is almost never addressed by his first name, anyway). Collins is a former professional boxer and escaped mental patient, whose psychological downward spiral was apparently hastened when he lost his temper and killed an opponent in his last prize fight.
Collins’ former profession aligns him with an important subset of noir films that focus on boxers, typically using the competitive ethos of boxing as an oblique commentary on capitalism, with boxers standing in for exploited workers (and played by leading noir actors such as John Garfield and Humphrey Bogart). Key noir boxing films include Body and Soul (1947), The Set-Up (1949), Champion (1949), and The Harder They Fall (1956). Meanwhile, there are also a number of characters in film noir who are clearly mentally ill. For example, Richard Widmark originally made his mark as an American actor playing deranged characters in noir films, with his turn as Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) standing as an iconic noir performance. Where Thompson’s work stands apart from the original noir cycle is that deranged characters in film noir are typically villains or otherwise marginal characters. In Thompson’s novels, the deranged characters are centered, typically serving as protagonists and narrators. They may commit villainous, even heinous acts, but there is a certain amount of sympathy for them due to their marginalized social status and their potential lack of rational control over their actions due to mental illness.
In the film version of After Dark, Kid Collins is played by Jason Patric, who also serves as a typical noir voiceover narrator. Patric is an actor who is known for his good looks, but here he is ill-shaven and ill-groomed, with a wild-eyed look that well conveys his troubled condition. Voiceover narrators in film (whose narration is supplemented by so much action on the screen) dominate their texts less thoroughly than do the narrators of novels (who are typically our only source of information). Moreover, voiceover narration is used sparingly in this film. Still, Collins is also strongly positioned as the film’s point-of-view character, so we really see almost everything from his perspective. Unfortunately, that perspective is a bit shaky due to Collins’ precarious mental condition. The instability of Collins’ perspective is reflected effectively in the film, sometimes through strictly visual effects. In some scenes, for example, we see him moving about like the ex-athlete he is, leaping and running about quite gracefully. In other scenes, he shuffles along, dragging his feet as if he has trouble walking. Such changes are not explained in the film. Does Collins’ physical ability vary with his psychological mood? Might he even have multiple personalities? Or does he at times simply feign disability in order to appear less threatening and more sympathetic?
As the action begins, Collins arrives (on foot) at a small desert town in the vicinity of Palm Springs (which, in the 1950s, was fast developing a reputation as a resort spot for the rich and famous). Collins, against his own best judgment, immediately stops in at a bar, where he quickly runs afoul of the bartender (and the bar’s owner), whom he punches out, indicating his quick temper (though the barman is also unaccountably rude to him). In the bar, Collins also meets the film’s femme fatale in the person of widow Fay Anderson, played by Rachel Ward, who had played such characters in the noir spoof Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and Against All Odds (1984), a neo-noir remake of the noir classic Out of the Past (1947). Fay, however, is a somewhat unconventional femme fatale in that she greets Collins in with a combination of seductiveness and outright hostility, as when she decides to call him “Collie” because he looks like a dog. Collins accepts this appellation willingly, though some of her insults cause Collins (clearly sensitive about the matter) to insist to her that he isn’t stupid, despite what people seem to think. Whether or not he is actually stupid is never entirely clear, though it is certainly clear that he is not in full possession of his faculties, presumably due to the impact of having taken so many punches during his boxing career. The lonely Fay, meanwhile, seems to suspect that he is stupid but also finds him attractive.
At times Fay slinks about seductively like a classic femme fatale, but at other times she seems much more vulnerable than the typical femme fatale. Much of the experience of watching this film involves trying to solve the riddle that she presents both to us and to Collins. Indeed, one of the key elements of this film that aligns viewers with Collins’ point of view is that we join him in trying to figure out how much sympathy we should have for Fay, while at the same time remaining wary of her potential dangers. Fay is also an unusual femme fatale in that she does not seem to be the primary architect of the scheme in which she ensnares Collins. Instead, that would be the man she calls Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern), though he is not her uncle and he isn’t named “Bud.” He is identified as an ex-police detective, but exactly who he is remains a cypher. His entire life seems to consist of cooking up get-rich-quick schemes, while convincing others to carry out those schemes and take most of the risks that they involve. Fay seems fully aware that it is a bad idea to get involved in Bud’s schemes, but she seems to go along almost out of sheer exhaustion, weakened too much by alcoholism and widowhood to have the will to resist. The relationship between Bud and Fay thus makes Fay as much a victim of Bud as she is a manipulator of Collins. That Uncle Bud has so much success manipulating them both suggests a characteristic that is often found in the world of Thompson’s fiction: in a world of ultimate meaninglessness and moral uncertainty, anyone willing to choose a course and stick to it has a track to power over others.
The Uncle Bud scheme that lies at the center of this film involves a plot to kidnap the young son of a rich local family and to hold him for ransom, a plan that runs into several snags and undergoes several revisions. Collins doesn’t like the plan from the beginning, but he wants to please Fay and Bud, essentially the only people he knows in the world at this point. He thus goes along with the plot but tries to rearrange the plan to make it less dangerous for the boy. Bud, meanwhile, starts rethinking the plan in order to blame everything on Collins while cutting Collins out of the ransom money. Thus, we have the typical noir plots and counterplots, creating a paranoid atmosphere in which it seems that no one can trust anyone.
One very Thompsonesque complication that occurs along the way involves the introduction of an additional character who makes little contribution to the plot but does add subtle hints to the atmosphere of vaguely defined corruption and perversion that pervades the film (and much of film noir). This character, Doc Goldman (George Dickerson), meets Collins early in the film and immediately sizes him up as an escaped mental patient. The doctor offers to take Collins in, offering him food and shelter (and nearly freeing him from the clutches of Fay and Uncle Bud). The doctor never does anything overtly problematic to Collins and seems superficially well-intentioned, but (as played by Dickerson) he exudes a sense of moral ambiguity that suggests he might be up to no good. Thus, Payne (reading the novel) sees the doctor as “well-intentioned” (103), while Ebert (reading the film) believes that the doctor’s “concerned and kindly manner … masks sexual desire” for Collins. However, while it is true that Dickerson’s performance adds an air of potential menace to Goldman’s character that is not directly expressed in the novel, the texture of Thompson’s fiction is such that readers know to suspect everyone they meet in his pages.
In any case, Collins flees the doctor’s home and winds up back with Fay and the kidnap plot. Once the boy is kidnapped, however, more complications arise. A diabetic who depends on regular insulin injections, the boy falls into a diabetic coma and seems on the verge of death. Fay and Uncle Bud at this point seem unable to deal with the situation, but Collins, who has seemed to be basically well-meaning throughout, now rises to the level of hero as he breaks into Doc Goldman’s office, steals some insulin, and administers it to the boy, saving his life. Later, Collins proves himself able to outwit Uncle Bud, leading to Bud’s death at the hands of the police. As Payne notes, Collins does not unravel morally and psychologically like the characters who are most associated with Thompson’s work. Indeed, the novel and film both end after Collins reaches what Payne sees as an “affirmation of moral certainty,” giving his life a demonstrable purpose at last by sacrificing himself in doing the one thing he knows will save the lives of both Fay and the kidnapped boy (100). Thus, McCauley has seen Collins as a “true savior—rather than a deluded savior like Lou Ford of The Killer Inside Me or Nick Corey of Pop. 1280” (189).
Polito, however, cautions against simplistic readings of the novel’s ending. He agrees that the film depicts Collins’ last sacrifice as a noble, even Christlike gesture. At the same time, he suggests that the essentially identical ending of the novel is presented with more nuance, allowing for an interpretation of Collins’ final sacrifice as “at once heroic and the culmination of all his childish, infantile impulses” (372). After all, the film ends as Collins, having been shot by Fay because she thinks he is about to kill the boy, quietly and poignantly drifts into death. In the novel, though, the dying Collins recalls Fay having earlier mocked him by comparing to a dog. Then, in a Thompsonesque touch of weirdness, he barks like a dog as he dies. Eliminating this final touch might be the film’s biggest compromise, its greatest concession to Hollywood propriety.
After Dark, My Sweet was unable to attract a substantial audience when it was in theaters, but it did attract some critical praise. Meanwhile, its reputation has grown over the years. Reviewing the film fifteen years after its initial release, Roger Ebert gave the film four stars (his highest rating). He declared the film to be “one of the purest and most uncompromising of modern films noir,” noting in particular the ending, which he describes as “inevitable, heroic, sad and flawless.” All-in-all, Ebert describes After Dark as a classic example of film noir, noting how it checks all the boxes for the definition of a film noir. That observation is a crucial one. This film, thanks largely to its roots in Thompson’s fiction, has some seemingly unusual touches, but most of the ways in which it goes beyond the original noir cycle are entirely consistent with what the original noir films might have done had the Production Code and prevailing social attitudes allowed it. In this sense, After Dark is a quintessential neo-noir, illustrating well the ways in which neo-noir films deviate from the original noir cycle without really challenging the premises upon which that cycle was based.
Because of the overt threats to the health and even life of a child, After Dark, My Sweet probably could not have been made during the reign of the Production Code in Hollywood. Otherwise, though, it remains largely within the scope of the original noir cycle. Kidnappings (of adults) often occur in film noir, while the various plots and counter-plots among the three co-conspirators in this particular kidnap plot are absolutely quintessential film noir. Collins lacks the extreme mental instability of Thompson’s more extreme protagonists, such as Lou Ford; he’s really more of a hard-luck drifter, somewhat in the mode of Tom Neal in Detour. Fay might lack the single-minded devotion to the manipulation of others that is often associated with the femme fatale, but this character, in fact, is often endowed with moral ambiguity and with a background that to some extent supplies reasons for her actions that are beyond her control—think Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
All-in-all, then, After Dark, My Sweet is a typical neo-noir film in the sense that it borrows enough from film noir that those borrowings are obvious, lending the film an air of nostalgia for the original noir cycle. Its source in Thompson’s fiction also has a certain nostalgic aspect, especially given that the film was made during a resurgence of interest in Thompson’s fiction. All in all, while After Dark is already less extreme and more directly filmable than most of Thompson’s novels, this film adaptation does trim away some of Thompson’s rough-hewn weirdness keeping the film within the same general territory covered by other neo-noir films of its era and avoiding any direct challenge that might change the way we view the original noir cycle.
Works Cited
Ebert, Roger. “After Dark, My Sweet.” RogerEbert.com, 13 March 2005, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-after-dark-my-sweet-1990. Accessed 19 October 2023.
Hinson, Hal. “After Dark, My Sweet.” The Washington Post, 24 August 1990, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/afterdarkmysweetrhinson_a0a997.htm. Accessed 20 October 1990.
McCauley, Michael J. Jim Thompson: Sleep With the Devil. New York: Mysterious, 1991.
Payne, Kenneth. “Billy ‘The Kid’ Collins: Jim Thompson’s Enigmatic Savior in After Dark, My Sweet.” Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 33, no. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 99–111.
Polito, Robert. Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. Vintage-Random House, 1995.
Notes
[1] Thompson did participate in the original noir cycle in one sense, apparently writing most of the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1955), even though Kubrick was credited with writing the screenplay, while Thompson received a credit only for additional dialogue.
[2] During this period, there was also a film adaptation of a short story by Thompson, entitled This World, Then the Fireworks (1997). Later, in 2010, The Killer Inside Me was adapted again, more faithfully. That adaptation is discussed in the next chapter.
[3] It might be noted, though, that at least one reviewer of the film on its initial release (Hal Hinson) complained that its visual style was a bit too slick and “fancy-pants” for the texture of Thompson’s novel.