Jim Thompson’s comic pulp novel Pop. 1280 is transposed from the sleepy South to listless Bourkassa, a French colony in tropical West Africa in 1938, as imagined by famed production designer Alexandre Trauner. Bertrand Tavernier preserves Thompson’s caustic observations on race and delights in his narrative in which henpecked “sheriff” Philippe Noiret becomes as lethal as his abominable citizens. (Film & Nothing But: Bertrand Tavernier)

In French with English subtitles