Set in Chicago, The Screaming Mimi concerns a string of slashing murders of pretty, young women. But it wouldn’t hurt to get introduced to Brown’s work in this vein via the novel under discussion here. If you don’t know his mystery stories and are interested, I suggest you begin with his first such book, the Edgar Award-winning The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947). The Screaming Mimi was the fifth in a long run of crime novels penned by Brown (1906-72), who also wrote sci-fi books and a ton of short stories. Let’s look inside that film a little, in relation to Brown’s literary effort. In any case, regardless of what anyone thinks about the connection between that feature film and Brown’s novel, there is no such controversy when it comes to the 1958 movie that shares the book’s title. Truth be told, though, the film’s story is far from a straightforward adaptation of the book’s plot. I’ve read that Argento eventually came around and confessed that his movie owes a debt to Brown’s novel. In that post, I mentioned that while many have always considered it a given that the Italian director’s superb debut is based on The Screaming Mimi-a 1949 American crime novel by Fredric Brown-Argento didn’t credit the book as such at the time. In 2014, I wrote an appreciation of Dario Argento’s 1970 giallo film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |