Played in all earnestness as a tribute to the private
investigator sub-genre of crime fiction, Scott Frank’s adaptation (which he
also directed) of Lawrence Block’s A Walk
Among the Tombstones is about as grim and nihilistic a treatment as you’re
likely to see in a mainstream movie. The character Matt Scudder featured in
more than a dozen of Block’s books and some of those have been adapted to the
screen before. But Frank, who is no stranger to pulp fiction and mystery
stories involving a tough PI (Frank wrote the screenplay adaptations of both Get Shorty and Out
of Sight), doesn’t bother trying to reinvent the genre or to put a new
spin on it. A Walk Among the Tombstones
is effective classic mystery storytelling. It’s more hard-edged and just plain
evil than any adaptation of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade ever was, but the
hallmarks are there.
