[Tourmaline]

Originally Posted by John Maddox Roberts

You have to understand that this movie was based on a novel by the peerless Charles Willeford who was, shall we say, an unconventional writer. He was in the tradition of Jim Thompson, only better educated. He wrote some truly hilarious crime novels without writing a single thing that was conventionally funny. He has puzzled critics for decades. Roger Corman produced another Willeford novel adaptation, "Cockfighter." It was directed by Monte Hellman. It was Corman's sworn policy never to put his own money into a film and he never lost a dime while he adhered to that. He broke his rule and bankrolled "Cockfighter." Sure enough, it was a flop, though it became a much-admired cult movie.

Charles Willeford had an LA connection, albeit limited. Quite a character.

Willeford was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1919. Following the death of his father from tuberculosis in 1922, Willeford and his mother moved to the Los Angeles area. After his mother's death in 1927, also from TB, he lived with his grandmother Mattie Lowey on Figueroa Street near Exposition Park until 1932. At the age of thirteen, in the midst of the Great Depression, he boarded a freight train in Los Angeles, assumed a false identity, and—passing as a seventeen-year-old—traveled by rail along the Mexican border for a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Willeford [

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