When he died in 1977, Jim Thompson left as his legacy a handful of crime novels. Never popular during his lifetime, he died-not forgotten-but virtually unknown.

With most of his books out of print, he seemed an unlikely candidate to acquire cult status, or attract filmmakers. Yet both have happened. Sam Peckinpah filmed The Getaway in 1972, and it in turn is the basis for the new version with Alex Baldwin and Kim Basinger. Several years ago, The Grifters was a major hit. After Dark My Sweet largely bypassed theaters and went directly to video stores.

Both The Getaway and After Dark My Sweet pose problems for filmmakers. What reads well and holds interest on a printed page doesn't always translate into suspense on film. Since both are pretty much straightforward executions of crimes by people who aren't very bright, there are not many subplots, surprises, or even dramatic endings. The problem is how to maintain interest, build suspense and keep the thing moving.

Peckinpah solved it by throwing away parts of Thompson's story, rewriting Walter Hill's script, creating new scenes, and using most of his technical bag of tricks. According to actor Alec Baldwin, that's one of the reasons Walter Hill wanted to remake it and film the original script that he had written. But in doing so, he apparently kept some of the scenes which Peckinpah had created.

While the original is hardly prime Peckinpah, it remains a good, solid action picture. Basically The Getaway is a combination of a robbery-gone-wrong and a chase film with a few doublecrosses along the way. In both versions the husband-Steve McQueen in the original, Baldwin in the remake-is sprung from prison after the wife-Ali MacGraw/Kim Basinger-applies her talents to the powers that be. Ben Johnson's prison warden in the original has become James Woods's crime lord in the remake. In return for his freedom, McQueen and MacGraw agree to rob a bank for Johnson, who supplies the not-too-bright gang members. Midway through the robbery, the plan goes awry, and one of the gang members is killed. McQueen shoots gang member Al Lettieri, takes the money and runs. Lettieri recovers, kidnaps a doctor and his wife and starts the pursuit that ultimately leads to a showdown in a sleazy border town hotel.

Through use of sound and crosscutting, Peckinpah created tension and built suspense when there actually wasn't much happening. He also threw in flashbacks, flash-forwards, and had dialogue begin in one scene and end as a voice-over in the unrelated scenes that followed. By the time The Getaway was made, action sequences shot in slow motion were more or less his trademark. But the technique which worked so effectively to create the lyrical blood ballets in The Wild Bunch, often seems self-indulgent when used to capture a child swinging on a rope over a river, or shotgunning the taillights out of a police car. Although there's violence, it was restrained enough to earn the film a PG rating.

Director James Foley's solution to building suspense in After Dark My Sweet seems to have been to write a vague script and rely on the persona of Bruce Dem.

The quirky, murky story has Jason Patric as a washed up, possibly brain damaged boxer who lost his temper and killed his last opponent. Escaping from a mental institution, he wanders into one of those nameless small towns in the southwest. Not that it matters, but he may or may not have lived there before, or maybe everyone he meets seems to know him simply because of his boxing career. Rachel Ward picks him up, takes him home to tend her palm trees, and to meet her friend, Bruce Dem. Bruce has been plotting for months to kidnap a child, and Patric appears to be just the dupe he needs to carry out the plan. But Jason isn't as dumb as he looks, and suspects he's being set up. As a result, for reasons that are never quite clear, he kidnaps the wrong child, then takes it back and nabs the right kid. After they feed the child some pie he goes into a diabetic coma and the plan starts to fall apart. The final resolution doesn't have much to do with the situation that sets it up.

The film has its problems. Scenes appear to be missing. Several times during a love scene the picture fades to black and stays there so long that one expects the ending credit roll to appear. Unfortunately, the pace is so slow that most viewers are not likely to want the missing footage back. It seems much longer than its 114 minutes. Why it's called After Dark My Sweet is anybody's guess.

For Patric this represents an outstanding performance in a lost cause. His boxer is at once dazed, confused, alienated, and as it turns out, not at all what he appears to be. In his wilder moments he makes Dern appear rock steady and normal. Too bad that the movie doesn't match his work. MM