Much of the recent debate about Long Goodbye revolved around
that movie's deconstruction and/or politicization of the book
on which it was based. So I thought it'd be interesting to
see the adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's 3 to Kill
(renamed after the movie), a novel that deconstructed and
politicized noir.
3 Men to Kill, directed by Jacques Deray, is a very good
political thriller, but the book was so much more. The basic
plot starts off the same. Michele Gerfaut comes upon a car
that has gone off the road. He drives the barely conscious
driver to the hospital, but leaves before finding out that
the man had not been injured in a crash, but had been shot.
Soon, two killers are after Gerfaut.
SPOILERS AHEAD
In the book, Gerfaut works for a large company. He is a
successful, management level sales rep married to a
successful press agent. They have two daughters. He left the
hospital because he wanted to get home after a late sales
call; the only reason he picked up the injured man in the
first place was because he was afraid someone might have seen
him and he would get in trouble for driving by an accident.
He felt no obligation to any social contract. He is
completely alienated.
The movie's Gerfaut had owned various very successful, cool
businesses in the past -- cars, motorcycles, etc -- but he
got bored and sold each for a profit. Now he is a
professional gambler, a cool loner played by Alain Delon
(which I will now call the movie Gerfaut to keep them
distinct). He left the hospital quickly because he was late
for an all night poker game. Since this character is
something of a genre stereotype, it's not so surprising when
he has the skills and/or luck to not only save himself, but
turn the tables on the hit men who are sent after him.
When Gerfaut disappears back to Paris after the first attempt
on his life, he contacts an old friend. The change in
background of that friend is very telling. In the movie, he
is a member of General Security (which seems to be like a
French FBI, is that right?). In the book, it is a political
friend of his from college days. The friend still lives on
the fringes. He gives Gerfaut an unregistered gun. Delon gets
his off his cop friend's corpse, after he is killed in
Delon's stead. Again, the book's Gerfaut feels no allegiance
to the society and finds it incredibly easy to just step
away.
Perhaps the biggest and most important change is the reason
for the killings. In the movie, Gerfaut is targeted by a
corrupt government official who is trying to cover up having
sold faulty arms to another country or having sold arms to
the wrong country (I didn't pay quite enough attention to the
details). The important thing is that there was a real motive
for the killings, someone with power was cleaning up after
himself. He was afraid the dying man might have said
something on the way to the hospital.
However, in the book, it was completely random and
nonsensical, a beam falling. An out of favor, corrupt soldier
from the Dominican Republic has gone into exile in France. He
lives well on the spoils of his corruption and is completely
forgotten by both the new Dominican government and his US/CIA
handlers. However, he still manages to convince himself that
someday someone will show up to kill him. He lives as a total
recluse, alone with his killer dog and his porn mags, and
hires a pair of freelance killers to get rid of anyone his
paranoid mind focuses on. Gerfaut is absolutely unaware of
this man until very near the end of the book, when he finally
traces back who is behind the attempts on his life. Gerfaut
kills him and then goes back to his old life as if nothing
has happened.
Delon is taken for a professional killer and the powerful man
who tried to have him killed tries to hire him. He refuses to
believe Delon's denials and finally succumbs to a heart
attack. His second, appropriately named LePrince, thinks this
is a good thing; now there is a dead scapegoat for the
scandal and things can go back to military-industrial
business as usual. He, too, tries to hire Delon. When Delon
again refuses, LePrince warns him that he is a loose end and
someday, somewhere . . . Delon coolly shrugs and says he
knows. The film ends when that day comes.
So the film is a good, but pretty orthodox political
thriller, questioning the system, but ultimately blaming all
of the trouble on a few corrupt individuals in a system that
allows them to flourish. In other words, we are in the normal
noir/hardboiled world and the seemingly cool hero is
ultimately screwed.
The book, however, sees everything flowing from the "social
relations of production," as it overtly states at the outset.
Not even the picaresque year on the run (as opposed to a
couple of days in the movie) cuts through Gerfaut's numbness.
He even claims amnesia when he returns, denying he himself
knows what did happen during that year. And in a very real
sense, nothing did. At the end, he slips right back into his
family, his job and everything is just as it was. The noir
hero does not even have enough of a differentiated existence
to be screwed.
Mark
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