9. “52 Pick-Up” (1986)
The story behind “52 Pick-Up” must rank as one of the strangest paths to the screen that an Elmore Leonard picture took. Optioned by the legendary (not necessarily for the right reasons…) Cannon Group honchos Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, Leonard turned in a script that was then completely rewritten into the 1984 film “The Ambassador,” a political thriller that bears no resemblance to the novel, directed by J. Lee Thompson, and starring Robert Mitchum, Ellen Burstyn, and in his last screen appearance, Rock Hudson. (We didn’t include as part of the main list, because, in Leonard’s words, “It has none of my characters, none of my situations, nothing.”) Then, two years later, Golan and Globus remade it with a rather more faithful adaptation, directed by John Frankenheimer, and with Leonard retaining script credit. The film wasn’t especially well-regarded, but given that it’s a Cannon Films production, we were pleasantly surprised at what an enjoyably nasty little thriller it turns out to be. Roy Scheider stars as a L.A. industrialist who is having an affair with a much, much younger woman (Kelly Preston) while his wife (Ann-Margret) is distracted running for city council. But he’s confronted by a trio of blackmailers (John Glover, Clarence Williams III and Robert Trebor), who ask for $100,000 to keep his secret safe. When he tries to tell them he can’t pay up, they kill the girl and frame him for the murder. The film’s undoubtedly exploitation fare (barely a couple of scenes go by without a pair of bare breasts), but the sleaziness feels appropriate here in a way that it didn’t with something like “Cat Chaser,” while Frankenheimer’s fine handle on tension was still with him, resulting in a truly taut narrative. Scheider, whose star was fading somewhat, is actually excellent, while the villains, especially Glover, are tremendous foils. The whole thing falls apart at the end and becomes something closer to a traditional ’80s action film, but it’s a lot of fun until then, even if you do feel a bit dirty afterwards. [B-]
8. “3:10 To Yuma” (2007)
The most recent Leonard-adaptation you actually remember (even if many aren’t aware that ‘Yuma’ is a Leonard tale at all), the remake of “3:10 To Yuma” was in development for years — Columbia picked up the project in 2003 and people like Tom Cruise and Eric Bana were linked to the lead roles before the studio dropped it. But Lionsgate and Relativity Media picked up the reins and James Mangold finally got to make his western, with the hot-off “Batman Begins” Christian Bale as the hero and Russell Crowe as the bad guy. The script, by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas (and hewing close enough to the first adaptation that they shared credit with original scribe Halsted Welles, who died in 1990) follows most of the same beats, while fleshing out the characters a little more; so Bale’s hero Dan Evans is now an amputee out to prove his masculinity to his son (a strong debut from Logan Lerman), while Crowe’s Ben Wade has something of a Hannibal Lecter side to him, somehow. There are also a few new characters, including Peter Fonda‘s grizzled, cantankerous Pinkerton, and a soggy new mid-section featuring an inexplicable Luke Wilson cameo. Some of the changes are for the better — Ben Foster is terrific as Wade’s terrifying terrier of a right-hand-man Charlie Prince — and so little is broken about the conceit that it’s engaging throughout, particularly with Crowe giving one of his better turns and the typically solid Mangold at the helm. But the extra half-hour it has on the lean original sometimes feels too much like padding and an altered “darker” ending is unsatisfying on multiple levels (not least to Leonard, who told Vice a few years later “It’s just dumb. In the new one, he shoots his own guys, and then he gets on the train and whistles for his horse! I don’t know what that means. I have no idea. Is the horse going to follow him all the way across Arizona?”) Still, as present-day Westerns go, it’s a decent effort. [B-]
7. “The Tall T” (1957)
The very first Leonard-based movie to make it to the screen (based on the short story “The Captives,” and beating “3:10 To Yuma” to theaters by about four months),”The Tall T” actually does a lot more right than most of the adaptations that would follow over the next few decades. The second of seven B-western collaborations between director Butt Boetticher, writer Burt Kennedy and star Randolph Scott, known as the Ranown Cycle (“Seven Men From Now” had been the first of them the previous year), it’s a modest, but pretty enjoyable picture with a certain amount of Leonard flavor in the mix. Scott plays Pat Brennan, a former foreman, who loses his horse in a bet and is forced to take a lift with a stagecoach carrying newlyweds Willard and Doretta (John Hubbard and Maureen O’Sullivan). But the journey takes an unexpected turn when the coach is hijacked by a trio of outlaws (led by Richard Boone‘s Frank Usher), who kill the driver and take the three passengers hostage. Over the rest of the brisk run time, a game of wits plays out, with Usher developing a respect for Pat while Willard tries to sell his wife upriver, making it clear that he’s not the man she thought she was. Boetticher wrings all the tension you could ask for out of the scenario, until it explodes into an impressive gunfight at the end, while the dialogue here (“From now on, when you walk, you walk noisy”) has more fizz to it than in most Leonard adaptations, until at least the 1990s. It’s pretty minor in scope and scale; it doesn’t have much to say other than telling a story and fails to convince when it introduces a romantic aspect between Scott and O’Sullivan (who are both terrific, as is Boone), but for the most part, one could only wish that the rest of the Leonard adaptations that followed came close to being as solid as this. [B]
6. “Touch” (1997)
A definite outlier among both Leonard’s literary output and his screen works (it was written in the 1970s, but not published for a decade, in part because of its religious subject matter, in other part because it doesn’t quite fit his usual genre niche), “Touch” is a curious little film, but one with much to recommend it, and it’s certainly been overlooked over the last decade-and-a-half. Christopher Walken stars as Bill Hill, an down-on-his-luck evangelist who decides that Juvenal (Skeet “Johnny Depp Wasn’t Available” Ulrich), a young man purported to have a healing touch, is the person who could put him back on the map. He enlists an old friend, Lynn (Bridget Fonda, in the first of two Leonard adaptations of 1997) to get to Juvenal, but she falls for him, and things are further complicated by Catholic fanatic August Murray (Tom Arnold). It’s a rather bizarre cast and an even stranger film — whimsical, sincere, sharp and low-key. But given that religion has pervaded so much of his work, Paul Schrader was undoubtedly the right person to direct the film; there’s a thoughtfulness and soulfulness to the film that other filmmakers would have buried under cynicism. On top of that, he has a strong enough feel for Leonard’s voice (the writer praised him for, essentially, “shooting the book”) that it’s consistently funny, especially with Walken, Fonda, and even Arnold and Ulrich giving strong turns (plus fun side-characters like Gina Gershon and Janeane Garofolo knocking around the picture too). It’s unruly and a touch unsatisfying, but it’s certainly one of the most fascinating Leonard adaptations to date. [B]