At the same time town leader Chester Conway (Keenan Wynn) expects him to control the volatile situation at the mine, Lou is also dispatched by the sheriff to run a whore out of town. There’s a heated mayoral election and workers at the mines want to unionize. “Even when I’m asleep,” he says, “I’m working over problems.”īut Central City is sleepy only on the surface. He doles out advice and good-natured platitudes, and while friends and colleagues regard him as a bit dim, he is actually a man who has carefully studied human behavior in order to more effectively exploit it. Ford, in a fearless portrayal by Stacy Keach, is a gosh-darn charmer who patrols the small mining town of Central City. It’s a shame, then, that Burt Kennedy’s 1976 film adaptation of The Killer Inside Me is so willing to diminish the severity of psychosexual threat that deputy Lou Ford embodies. He didn’t hide from it in his own life, and he certainly won’t let you hide from it either. Thompson lays their souls out in front of you, complete and unadulterated, with no attempt to make their lives more palatable. Beyond that, however, it is a novel about some very broken people who positively wallow in their own dark hearts. It is, after all, a pulp novel, and must necessarily cater to the audience’s expectation for mass-produced sexual deviance. As the puerile pun of the book’s title will attest to, Thompson’s novel is also gleefully immature. It’s a disturbing portrait of a true sociopath, a small-town deputy with a psychosexual disturbance so big you could hang your 10-gallon hat on it. One of the great joys of Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled 1952 crime thriller The Killer Inside Me is its unflinching Freudianism.

The killer inside me book