27 works across 28 centuries, back to Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel) and Iliad.
Following one thread, 4 works from No Country for Old Men to The Postman Always Rings Twice. Back to all 27 works
2007
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Contemporary American cinema. United States. In English.
The Coen brothers' 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel follows a welder who takes drug money from a massacre site in 1980 West Texas, the killer Anton Chigurh who hunts him, and an aging sheriff who cannot stop either. It follows the novel's plot and dialogue closely and stages it with the spare, suspense-driven style the Coens developed in their earlier crime films.
1972
Film by Sam Peckinpah
New Hollywood. United States. In English.
Peckinpah's crime film in which a paroled robber and his wife flee across Texas toward the Mexican border with stolen money, pursued by gunmen.
Stylistic influence, probable.
Peckinpah's film follows a couple fleeing across Texas toward Mexico with stolen money, ending in a shootout in an El Paso border hotel. Critics have linked No Country's motel gunfights, border crossing and wounded hero to Peckinpah's Texas crime films, and the film is set in the same early-1970s-to-1980 West Texas milieu.
1959
Jim Thompson
Postwar American pulp. United States. Written in English.
Thompson's paperback crime novel about Doc and Carol McCoy's flight to Mexico after a bank robbery.
Direct source, well documented.
Peckinpah's film adapts Thompson's novel, keeping the robbery, the double-crosses and the flight to Mexico. It drops the novel's surreal final section in the criminal haven of El Rey for a more conventional escape.
1934
James M. Cain
Interwar American hardboiled. United States. Written in English.
Short first-person novel in which a drifter and a roadside diner owner's wife murder her husband and then turn on each other.
Direct source, well documented.
The Coens have said James M. Cain was their main model for Blood Simple. The adulterous couple, the murdered husband and the lovers' mutual suspicion follow the pattern of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.
Stylistic influence, probable.
Jim Thompson worked in the hardboiled mode Cain established: terse first-hand voices, criminal couples bound by money and mistrust, and plots that end in ruin. The Getaway's fugitive husband and wife who come to fear each other echo Cain's lovers.
The line stops here: cain built the plot from newspaper coverage of the 1927 Snyder-Gray murder case and his own journalism.
