Elmore Leonard's work continues to receive the big-screen treatment with this weekend's Life of Crime, a surprisingly sturdy rendition of the author's 1978 novel The Switch about two crooks' (John Hawkes and Mos Def) plan to kidnap a socialite (Jennifer Aniston) and the numerous, absurd complications that quickly ensue. It's the latest in a long line of adaptations of Leonard's writing, which has been the source for countless Westerns and crime movies that, with a few exceptions, have failed to capture his distinctively droll voice. Leonard, who passed away last year at the age of 87, was fond of slamming the worst of that lousy bunch — think 1974's Mr. Majestyk (featuring Charles Bronson), or 1985's Stick, which Burt Reynolds both starred in and directed. His disapproval was with good reason, since despite boasting stories that seem, on the page, a perfect fit for movies, Leonard's novels have rarely made the transition in faithful form. Which is funny, given how influential his style has become throughout pop culture.
The finest entry in the straight translations of his work remains Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino's 1997 spin on Leonard's 1992 tome Rum Punch. What Jackie Brown gets right that so many others don't is its conception of protagonists who are just slightly larger than life, and whose convincing (if just a tad exaggerated) emotional needs and hang-ups ensnare them in a web of intrigue, crime, and ill-fated tragedy, all of which plays out via a sprawling multi-character saga that's intimately attuned to its main players' alternately humorous and poignant conditions. Full of stock archetypes (the menacing psycho, the gruff thug, the femme fatale, the young punk, the regal beauty, the sensitive old-timer) made unique by their idiosyncrasies, Tarantino's film captured many of Leonard's tropes, but, crucially, didn't treat Rum Punch as wholly sacrosanct, instead making whatever changes Tarantino saw fit.
That's also what makes Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998) and Barry Sonnenfeld'sGet Shorty (1995) similar triumphs in the Leonard film canon: a willingness to tweak narrative particulars and storytelling focus (specifically with Out of Sight, which somewhat shifts the focal point from Jennifer Lopez's U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco to George Clooney's thief Jack Foley) in order to get at the underlying mood and attitude of their tales. Leonard's writing exudes a mixture of laid-back cool, pulsating sexuality, heated tension, and subtle melancholy, as well as a dry, bemused fascination with the foibles and failings of men and women. Transporting that sort of humorously world-weary, tough yet touching voice to the screen has been an arduous task for many, in large part because what defines Leonard's best books, from 52 Pick-Up to LaBrava to Swag to Killshot, is not just his particular characters and the Detroit in which they're often set, but a larger, underlying feeling.
And yet Leonard remains imprinted on so many movies of the past half-century, even ones that have no explicit connection to the author. Paul Newman's 1961 Hombre and Delmer Daves's 1957 3:10 to Yuma (and the 2007 remake) are solid versions of Leonard's early Wild West tales, but the lasting impact of those stories was their willingness to portray well-known types (the noble cattle rancher, the black-hearted scoundrel, etc.) in shades of gray, which has carried on to today. Leonard's vision of strong men who were half-good and half-bad helped spawn the following two decades' worth of revisionist oaters from the likes of Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) and Clint Eastwood (High Plains Drifter), who subsequently reimagined the desperado, the rogue, and the rest of the Old West's familiar faces. It's a mode that's now come full circle with Justified, FX's Timothy Olyphant-starring TV series about Leonard's Kentucky Deputy U.S. Federal Marshall Raylan Givens, which relocates an old-school Western vibe in a contemporary setting to pitch-perfect results, thanks in part to writing that, like Jackie Brown, plays fast and loose with specifics in order to stay true to Leonard's wry vision of gunslingers and outlaws.
Leonard's later crime books (52 Pick-Up, Gold Coast, Freaky Deaky, Cuba Libre) have likewise cast a long shadow over genre moviemaking. Steven Soderbergh's follow-up toOut of Sight, 1999's The Limey, also contains traces of the author in its marriage of righteous, vengeance-minded criminal fury and wistful regret and nostalgia — as well as its skewering of California (Hollywood and the entertainment industry being frequent targets of Leonard's satire, as in Get Shorty). That unique Leonard blend is also found in everything from Robert Altman's revisionist take on Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, to Stephen Frears's Jim Thompson-based neo-noir The Grifters, to Peter Yates's magnificent The Friends of Eddie Coyle, to Tarantino and Tony Scott's still-undervalued True Romance, a sprawling epic of crazy dreamers caught up in a tangled mess of drugs, theft, murder, and alluring women that feels like a tonal prequel to Jackie Brown. By treating screwed-up characters engaged in sometimes ugly, sometimes ludicrous behavior with both ironic detachment and empathetic good humor, Leonard's books have set the now-standard mode for current crime cinema and TV, even as they continue to prove hard to adapt into movies you'd actually want to watch.
