Among the many plaudits published when the celebrated author Elmore Leonard passed away just short of a year ago was a list, printed in the New York Times in 2001, that laid out his 10 rules of writing. Terse and stripped of all pretense, it includes practical advice such as “avoid prologues” and, my favorite: “Never open a book with weather.” The list is a guide not to building up your prose but to chipping away at it until it’s “purged of all false qualities,” as the writer Martin Amis once described it.
Leonard, who wrote 49 novels over his long career as well as a smattering of short stories, was a towering presence in the crime genre, and his influence extended outside of the literary universe into the movies. Aside from the adaptations of his work — much of which can be seen in a retrospective of his film career at Anthology Film Archives, running July 10-27 — his minimalist narratives and rhythmically crisp dialogue became the defacto tenor of many a screenwriter, easy enough in its broad strokes to trace but difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce in its finest details.
The better known of Leonard’s crime novel adaptations — Steven Soderbergh’s delightful “Out of Sight,” or John Frankenheimer’s criminally underappreciated “52 Pick-Up” — will be presented in the series, along with some of the more obscure films, including “Pronto,” Jim McBride’s 1997 television adaptation of the novel of the same name (which would be the first screen appearance of a character named Raylan Givens, here played by James Le Gros, later embodied by Timothy Olyphant in FX’s still-running television show “Justified”).
The greatest appeal of the series is that it offers a chance to explore an earlier part of Leonard’s body of work, created before he turned his attention to rust-belt revenge yarns. Leonard began his writing career churning out pulpy Western novels and short stories, mostly, as he has said, because of their commercial appeal. There was a market for these kinds of stories and because of their popularity, a better chance at having them sold to Hollywood.
The best of these is Budd Boetticher’s “The Tall T,” based on a short story by Leonard called “The Captives.” A stark narrative about a hard-luck rancher who gets wrapped up in a kidnapping scheme, the film reverses the mythic formula of the Western — good guys and bad guys and the vast desert horizon — so that its definitions are more confusing and complex. The hero exists on the same plane as the villain, and the battle between the two is not who can draw their gun the quickest but who can outsmart the other.
The film has a rough-edged quality — a child is murdered within the first 20 minutes, almost offhandedly — that is very much the product of Boetticher, a former bull-fighter who came into filmmaking after acting as a horse wrangler on movies, hanging around the backlots, and working his way up the production ladder. His most famous films are the cycle of Westerns, all starring Randolph Scott, of which “The Tall T” is a piece. Each contain similar revenge narratives and in some ways act as critiques of the genre from within.
The sparse brutality of “The Tall T” would be echoed in much of Leonard’s later crime novels, which followed a similar formula of a man unwittingly pitted against forces that, in other circumstances, would be on the other side of the divide. And at the end of his career, with the introduction of the character of Raylan Givens over the course of several books and the television adaptation “Justified,” Elmore Leonard brought the two strands of his career together. It was no surprise that it worked so well.
