Updike’s most famous character, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, appears in Insomnia File #26—or at least the Hollywood version of him does.

Blogger Lisa Marie Bowman writes about her late-night viewing—”You know how sometimes you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!”—and this time her wheel of fortune stopped on the 1970 film version of Rabbit, Run, which aired on TCM.

Her rather hilarious and insightful 3 a.m. reaction?

“Rabbit, Run is the epitome of a dumb lug film. In a dumb lug film, a male character finds himself living an unfulfilling life but he can’t figure out the reason. Why can’t he figure it out? Because he’s a dumb lug, with an emphasis on dumb. Usually the viewer is supposed to sympathize with the dumb lug because he doesn’t mean to hurt anyone and everyone else in his world is somehow even more annoying than he is. Typically, the dumb lug will have an emotionally distant wife who refuses to have sex with him and who is usually portrayed as being somehow at fault for everything bad that has happened in the dumb lug’s face. (Want to see a more recent dumb lug film than Rabbit, Run? American Beauty.) . . .

“Rabbit, Run is based on a highly acclaimed novel by John Updike. I haven’t read the novel so I can’t compare it to the film, beyond pointing out that many great works of literature have been turned into mediocre movies, largely because the director never found a way to visually translate whatever it was that made the book so memorable in the first place. Rabbit, Run was directed by Jack Smight, who takes a rather frantic approach to the material. Since Rabbit, Run is primarily a character study, it needed a director who would be willing to get out of the way and let the actors dominate the film. Instead, Smight over directs, as if he was desperately trying to prove that he could keep up with all the other trendy filmmakers. The whole movie is full of extreme close-ups, abrupt jump cuts, intrusive music, and delusions of ennui. You find yourself wishing that someone had been willing to grab Smight and shout, ‘Calm down!'”

Read the full blog entry, (which features an embedded trailer for the film that looks more like a parody of a Rabbit, Run trailer)