Stanley Kubrick never threw anything away. On the other hand, he didn't have much of a filing system, and when he moved - permanently, it turned out - from Hollywood to London in 1962, a great many things went astray. Among them was the sole copy of a film treatment called "Lunatic at Large," which Mr. Kubrick had commissioned in the late 's from the noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson, with whom he had worked on "The Killing," a 1956 bank-heist story that became his first successful feature, and then on 1957's "Paths of Glory."
[...] His finished screenplay has the feel of authentic Thompsonian pulpiness. Set in New York in 1956, it tells the story of Johnnie Sheppard, an ex-carnival worker with serious anger-management issues, and Joyce, a nervous, attractive barfly he picks up in a Hopperesque tavern scene. There’s a newsboy who flashes a portentous headline, a car chase over a railroad crossing with a train bearing down, and a romantic interlude in a spooky, deserted mountain lodge.
The great set piece is a nighttime carnival sequence in which Joyce, lost and afraid, wanders among the tents and encounters a sideshow’s worth of familiar carnie types: the Alligator Man, the Mule-Faced Woman, the Midget Monkey Girl, the Human Blockhead, with the inevitable noggin full of nails.
Link
Thanks Marie-Claire!
