The Screengrab

This past week marked the thirty-first anniversary of the death of Jim Thompson, the cult-object writer who worked on the scripts of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory, but whose real gift to film history was a shelf's worth of pulp novels (The Killer Inside Me, The Getaway, The Grifters) so intense and obsessive in their seaminess that they amount to a double-dog-dare to the movies: You think you're the repository of forbidden daydreams? Put this on the big screen! Two versions of The Getaway, including one with Sam Peckinpah's name in the credits, softened the relationship between the husband and wife bank robbers on the lam (the star of the Peckipah version, Steve McQueen, having objected to the less cheerful elements of a screenplay treatment turned in by Thompson himself); Coup de Torchon, directed by Bertrand Tavernier and based on Pop. 1280, is in motherfucking French! Even the best of all Thompson adaptations, Stephen Frears's The Grifters, is handsomely mounted and has a good vicious streak but keeps it distance from the vortex of Thompson's deeply felt hatefulness; it maps the dragon's lair down to the last molted scale but resists the urge to fling you in there by your feet and nail the door shut behind you.

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What makes a movie a hit? Whatever it is, it's fascinating to look how moviegoing tastes change over the years. I hit upon the idea for a feature called "Yesterday's Hits" as a flipside to Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops, and I'll be focusing on movies that were initially popular but haven't sustained that popularity. To this end, I plan to ask three questions:

1. What made this movie a hit?
2. What happened to the movie's popularity?
3. Divorced from the original buzz, does the movie itself still work?

We'll begin with the highest-grossing film of all time, James Cameron's Titanic.

What made Titanic a hit? Titanic had something for everyone — adventure, romance, destruction, tragedy, cutting-edge effects, history, and protagonists to whom audiences could relate. Cameron mixed these elements so cannily that the movie became a must-see, even for those who almost never went to movies, like my grandfather, who trekked to the local cinema for the first time in fifteen years. But the film's biggest supporters were teenage girls, a underrepresented demographic, who famously saw the movie dozens of times.

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