At the risk of sounding like an idiot (but what else is new?), I must admit that James Sallis’s original novel lost me. Oh, I finished it. It’s short enough. You can hit a fly with this book and not kill it. You can read the whole thing over a cheeseburger and fries just about. If you’re confused over Sallis’s back-and-forth leaps through time in his story of a hard-boiled movie stunt driver who’s known to lend out his talents as a getaway man for criminal heists, the book at least ends before you get frustrated. Sallis’s prose is so noir, the book should be printed on solid black pages. It’s too much, at times, overcooked in malaise until it’s the only flavor. It’s another obstacle to get through without much help from the distant central character.
The film adaptation is an improvement—and not merely because the story is more linear. The book’s night-world overload hits the screen with beautiful unreal style by director Nicolas Winding Refn with cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel. The story is Basic Pulp, but Refn’s direction deserves to be recognized as an important film noir statement for the present. The Expressionist black-and-white of the old days gives way here to screaming color among the shadows. Los Angeles vistas sprawl with a million lights. Street lamps glow a malevolent orange. Bad neighborhoods are battered and seedy with sickly old flourescents. Foregrounds and backgrounds offer bold color contrasts that would have pleased Mario Bava. Even cheap apartments and motel rooms outshine the usual drab cliches without taking us out of the scene. It’s a world full of promise and danger that’s somewhere in every sparkling inch of the wide screen.