Softening Parker

The wait­ress kept ask­ing him if he wanted any­thing else.

It dis­trac­ted him from look­ing out at the street. She had a band on her fin­ger, so finally he said “What’s the mat­ter, don’t you get enough from your hus­band?” So after that she left him alone.

She glared awhile from the oth­er end of the counter, but he could ignore that.

—The Hunter, Richard Stark, 1962

Now the room was com­fort­able, illu­min­ated in pools of amber. Crossing to sit on the right side of the sofa, he said, “Tell me what you think you’ve got so far.”

“You’re a wooden nick­el, that’s all I know right now,” she said. “Linda usu­ally keeps white wine in the refri­ger­at­or here. Want some?”

She her­self did, of course; keep­ing the ten­sion held down below the sur­face was hard work. He said, “If you do.” 

She smiled. “At last, a human response.” 

—Flashfire, Richard Stark, 2000

Lee Marvin in Point Blank, John Boorman, 1967

Jason Statham in Parker, Taylor Hackford, 2013

While it is not likely to be remembered as any kind of major cine­mat­ic event, Parker was a pretty decent caper/revenge pic­ture that, con­trary to many expect­a­tions, did not entirely, or even in all that annoy­ingly sub­stant­ive a way, piss on its source mater­i­al, the above-quoted nov­el Flashfire by Richard Stark. The reas­on this dis­tinc­tion is more note­worthy than it ordin­ar­ily might be is that the Parker nov­els by Stark (a not-particularly-well-guarded pen name of Donald E. Westlake, who also wrote dozens of highly-regarded crime nov­els under his actu­al name) are rightly beloved by genre afi­cion­ados, who have long marveled at Hollywood’s seem­ing unwill­ing­ness to bring an undi­luted ver­sion of the char­ac­ter to the screen. This espe­cially giv­en the brisk, delib­er­ately flat storytelling of these pro­ced­ur­als, which play out for the read­er as clean vivid amor­al word-movies. 

The prob­lem a lot of the time, of course, is the amor­al­ity. Recently on Twitter, the former com­ic book writer turned tele­vi­sion scripter and pro­du­cer Gerry Conway, express­ing his dis­ap­point­ment at the new Parker film, described Stark’s ori­gin­al char­ac­ter as an “aut­ist­ic bank rob­ber.” That’s an inter­est­ing way of put­ting it. But it sum­mar­izes why a Hollywood story edit­or might con­sider such a char­ac­ter dif­fi­cult to “relate” to. The unfor­get­table open­ing of the first Parker nov­el, The Hunter, pub­lished in 1962, estab­lishes Parker as prac­tic­ally a T‑101 of 2oth cen­tury crimin­al­ity. After walk­ing across the George Washington Bridge into New York, he cre­ates an iden­tity for him­self, ran­sacks some poor sap’s bank account, and “raises” eight hun­dred 1962 dol­lars by three in the afternoon—seed money for his mis­sion, to retrieve the tens of thou­sands that a former part­ner has stolen from him. He is a man of very few words, not someone eager to start fights, but someone who does­n’t care about smash­ing a face in if that’s what it takes to get some­thing done. In short, he is what some might call a com­plete “badass,” and part of the enjoy­ment of read­ing the Parker books is in the unhealthy thrill of see­ing him get away with all man­ner of extremely anti­so­cial beha­vi­or and even enjoy­ing some of what his ill-gotten gains can by, although it isn’t too long into the series that one is giv­en to under­stand that the pro­fes­sion­al thief’s life can be as much of a work­aday drag as that of any office-bound stiff’s. 

Stark/Westlake admired the first English-language movie made from a Parker nov­el, 1967’s Point Blank, dir­ec­ted by John Boorman and star­ring Lee Marvin. While Marvin is an exem­plary Parker in every respect, Westlake noted in inter­views that when he cre­ated the char­ac­ter, he had actu­ally pic­tured Jack Palance. To judge from inter­views, Westlake, who died in 2008, was one of those artists who had a pretty thor­ough under­stand­ing of what they were about. Discussing Point Blank with Patrick McGilligan, he calls it “a ter­rif­ic film” and observes “the film is more styl­ized than the book, more man­ner­ist, where­as the Richard Stark books are very flat.” Whereas the Parker of The Hunter is prac­tic­ally robot­ic, Lee Marvin’s Walker (Westlake had a rule about selling the rights to Parker nov­els: unless the pro­du­cer was going to make a series of Parker films, they’d be obliged to change the name of the char­ac­ter), while excep­tion­ally grim and lim­ited in expres­sion, has a touch of atav­ism to him. Via the smashed-linearity flash­backs of the movie, the view­er­’s also giv­en the idea that Walker had some feel­ings to hurt; his rela­tion­ship to the partner-in-crime who jilts him, Mal Reese (John Vernon) is por­trayed far more warmly than in the book, in which Parker pro­ceeds war­ily and gets burned anyway. 

For all that, Point Blank rep­res­en­ted a pretty accur­ate rep­res­ent­a­tion of the Parker char­ac­ter in terms of men­ace and relent­less­ness. Westlake rated the never-released-in-the‑U.S. Mise en sac, made in 1966 and adap­ted from The Score, as “mod­est but good.” Godard’s Made In USA, let’s face it, does not really count as a Parker pic­ture. Westlake describes the dir­ect­or of the Jim-Brown-starring The Split (based on The Seventh) as “a lox,” and the movie’s pretty lousy, although it’s got a hel­luva cast, includ­ing Ernest Borgnine and Gene Hackman. 1973’s The Outfit, dir­ec­ted by John Flynn, who’d go on to make Rolling Thunder, was highly rated by Westlake: “[It’s] the one movie made from the Stark books that got the feel­ing right. The movie was done flat, just like the books.” You can judge this your­self by watch­ing the Warner Archive DVD of the movie, or com­ing to see it at the Brooklyn Public Library on February 26 when I present it as part of the series “Original Gangsters.” However. The movie does, in its final shot. make its main char­ac­ters rather more ingra­ti­at­ing than they are in the book. And there’s one scene that kind of exem­pli­fies just what Hollywood can­’t help but do with this kind of mater­i­al. In the 1963 book, also called The Outfit, Parker, now unre­cog­niz­able to many of his former asso­ci­ates on account of neces­sary plastic sur­gery, needs some auto­mobile ser­vice, and he gets into a spot of trouble at a Georgia garage-for-reprobates after a woman of the house, who had come on to him, accuses him of rap­ing her. Here’s how she’s described in the book: “She was very fat, forty or forty-five, with a fat white face under […] orange hair. She was wear­ing a dark blue dress with pink flowers on it.” Later, she is depic­ted as grin­ning at Parker, “show­ing spaces where she’d lost teeth.”

In the movie she is played by Sheree North, with all her teeth, look­ing like so. 

Anyway, I seem to be stray­ing from what I inten­ded as my point. While the cur­rent Parker movie has a little too much Parker-explaining-himself stuff (“I nev­er steal from people who can­’t afford it”) I was mildly sur­prised, when look­ing at the book from which the movie was adap­ted, that this Stark-penned Parker actu­ally IS a more social­ized char­ac­ter than the one we meet in The Hunter. In the eight-year run in which Westlake/Stark wrote six­teen Parker nov­els, he main­tained the char­ac­ter­’s grim prag­mat­ism but added some com­plic­at­ing factors, includ­ing a girl­friend and even­tu­al house­mate, Claire. Parker had accu­mu­lated enough part­ners who did not burn him that they could be brought togeth­er for a rel­at­ively epic Parker adven­ture, the ini­tial finale to the series, Butcher’s Moon. One of those part­ners, a funny, vol­uble stage act­or named Alan Grofield (who I always ima­gine as being played in a movie by Edward Norton…never gonna hap­pen…), is goofy enough to func­tion as a com­ic foil to Parker’s gruff­ness, and he’s more in line with the char­ac­ters Westlake cre­ated in his nov­els fea­tur­ing the rel­at­ive anti-Parker, John Dortmunder. (The Westlake omni­verse is one of the great under­ap­pre­ci­ated delights of genre lit­er­at­ure but too com­plic­ated to treat much here.) But the what one real­izes at the end of Butcher’s Moon is that Parker is in fact, rather fond of the guy, des­pite the fact that he allows him to be…well, I don’t want to spoil it for any­one. If you’re read­ing this you really ought to check out the Parker books, all but four of which are now avail­able from the University of Chicago Press.

The people who made Parker were smart to adapt one of the nov­els from the post comeback, or post Comeback (for that is indeed the name of the nov­el in which the age­less Parker returned, after an over twenty-year lay­off) run, not just because the old-school crimes that Parker com­mit­ted in the ’60s could largely only be com­mited in the ’60s, but because the Parker who came back IS appre­ciably dif­fer­ent from the guy in the first six­teen. He has­n’t become nice, not in the least, but he has acquired not the ven­eer but the actu­al cachet of an old pro who knows his dirty busi­ness inside and out and whose crim­in­al prag­mat­ism also con­tains an ele­ment of actu­ally con­scious restraint. Watching the movie without hav­ing looked back at the book first, I tried to recall wheth­er the char­ac­ter of the cop with an eye for Parker’s non-criminal help­mate real-estate agent figured in the book at all. (In the movie they’re played by Bobby Canavalle and Jennifer Lopez respect­ively.) He does, and in fact in the book he gets into a bit more of a cat-and-mouse game with Parker, and at the end of the book—this isn’t really a spoil­er, all things being equal—the two char­ac­ters prac­tic­ally banter with each oth­er. The Parker of The Hunter did not banter. 

This is not to say that Westlake/Stark com­prom­ised his cre­ation. He cre­ated Parker out of an intu­ition, and after a spell of writ­ing, real­ized this was a character/conceit that he could have some fun with. What fol­lowed was not a self-conscious stab at “char­ac­ter growth” or any­thing so bor­ing but rather play­ing with the para­met­ers of what he was doing so as to con­tin­ue hav­ing fun. That the Parker series of nov­els is so thor­oughly engross­ing is a testi­mony to both his instincts and skill. And the Statham/Hackford cine­mat­ic real­iz­a­tion of Parker is suf­fi­ciently in the spir­it of the ori­gin­al that I would not mind see­ing anoth­er such adapt­a­tion from these guys.