Retrospective: Elmore Leonard in Film

In an early scene of Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 film Get Shorty, Chili Palmer (John Travolta) has his expensive leather coat casually stolen by the well-known Miami wiseguy Ray “Bones” Barboni (Dennis Farina). In the original version of the script, the scene wherein Chili discovers his coat to be missing read very flat and straightforward. He harassed a coat-check clerk about his coat. The dialogue was, reportedly, something along the lines of “You better get me that coat back.  It was real expensive.”

Travolta, however, realized the strength of the source material, and intervened on this matter. Get Shorty was adapted from a novel by Elmore Leonard, who could perhaps be described as Raymond Chandler without the cynicism. Leonard was well-known not just for his complex crime plots – thanks to his extensive working knowledge of pulp crime novels – but also for his brisk, witty patois. He really got into the mouths of his characters, so to speak, allowing them to swap banter and shop talk as casually as you and I chat about the weather.

The resulting line of dialogue in the pertinent scene ended up being, “Do you see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, like Pacino wore in Serpico? ‘Cause if you don’t, you owe me 379 dollars.” There was color and richness in the very language of Leonard’s writing that Travolta was wise enough to insist upon, and Sonnenfeld was wise enough to include.

Elmore Leonard was better known in the literary world for his broad body of work, and he was well-respected in the crime novel circuit. Just as much, however, he was well-known in the film world for his multiple film adaptations and screenplays. Leonard not only inspired the 1995 hit Get Shorty, but also wrote the novel Rum Punch, which would eventually be adapted by Quentin Tarantino as Jackie Brown, and Out of Sight, which Steven Soderbergh and Scott Frank would adapt to film, and subsequently earn an Oscar nomination for in 1998.

Leonard began writing westerns way back in the 1950s, and his stories were always ripe for plucking by Hollywood bigwigs, who perhaps sensed his innate ability for interesting stories, complex plots, and rich, loquacious characters. One of his most famous stories was adapted to film twice, once in 1957, and once in 2007; “3:10 to Yuma.”

In the Delmer Daves original, Glenn Ford plays a dangerous rustler and murderer who is captured by a mild-mannered rancher (Van Helfin) through sheer dumb luck. Both men know that Ford’s gang will kill anyone they need to in order to free their leader, and our hero must get Ford onto the titular train before a shootout occurs. The subtle psychological interplay between the two characters – one moral, the other amoral – is the crux of the story, and makes for a great film. The 2007 remake had all the same richness, just with Russell Crowe as the criminal and Christian Bale as the rancher.

When westerns fell out of fashion, Elmore Leonard turned to crime novels, and was just as robustly adapted by Hollywood screenwriters, and even panned a few movies himself. The Big Bounce was made into two movies, 52 Pick-Up, a Roy Scheider film he penned himself, is often considered his worst.

Well-known auteurs of the 1990s fell in love with Leonard, and several of his stories made for some of the more memorable films of the decade. In addition to Get Shorty, a minor classic in itself (and perhaps one of the best films ever made about movies), we must contend with the notably twisted crime one-two punch of Jackie Brown and Out of Sight, made by Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh respectively. These are two important ’90s auteurs who recognized the brilliance and cinematic nature of Leonard’s seemingly cheap but markedly complex narratives. Even Paul Schrader eventually got in on the action with a less popular 1997 film called Touch, about a laidback twentysomething with recurring stigmata.

Quirky, brilliant, prolific, and loved by Hollywood, Elmore Leonard will be missed by two industries at once.

Here are Five Great Elmore Leonard Films:

Elmore Leonard: 1925-2013

• TRIBUTE: R.I.P. Elmore Leonard
  

• INTERVIEW: Elmore Leonard on ‘Justified’ and ‘Raylan,’ 2/1/12
  

Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and co-star of The Trailer Hitch. You can read his weekly articles B-Movies Extended, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind. If you want to buy him a gift (and I know you do), you can visit his Amazon Wish List.