Year:  1982
Rating: 6.0

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I am not sure exactly why but I put off watching this film for years. I think I even had it on VHS once upon a time. Part of the reason may be that I am a huge fan of Dashiell Hammett and I didn't really want to watch a film about him that wasn't very good and this film didn't have a great reputation.


Hammett was to a large degree the founding father of pulp hard-boiled detective novels. Everyone followed in his footsteps. One of those that followed was Raymond Chandler who wrote “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.” Hammett took what has been termed the Cozy Mysteries ala Agatha Christie and made them decidedly un-cozy. His writing is sparse and spartan with beautifully turned phrases and great descriptive passages.


The first time Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon sees the femme fatale Hammett writes this "A young woman came through the doorway. She advanced slowly, with tentative steps, looking at Spade with cobalt-blue eyes that were both shy and probing. She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow. She wore two shades of blue that had been selected because of her eyes. The hair curling from under her blue hat was darkly red, her full lips more brightly red. White teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made."


There are only two authors who I re-read - Hammett and Chandler. Every five years or so I go through their novels and it feels as fresh as it did the first time. I may recall the basic plot but the pleasure is in the writing. Fortunately or perhaps unfortunately neither of them wrote a lot of novels (though plenty of short stories) - Hammett wrote five and Chandler seven.


Hammett was born in 1894 and at a fairly young age began working for Pinkerton Detective Agency. Pinkerton was the premier agency at the time with a national reach. One of his jobs was to break up union strikes - something that bothered him all of his life as he had leftist views and he eventually joined the Communist Party in the 1930's which caused him major problems later when the HUAC hearings and the Red Scare came around. In 1922 while living in San Francisco he began writing short stories based on some of his cases and the people he came across that were published in magazines like Black Mask. During WWI he had joined up to serve in an Ambulance Service and while overseas he contacted tuberculosis that wasn't helped with his drinking and smoking. He coughs a lot in this film.


The film creates an imaginary chapter in Hammett's life - right before his first successful novel - Red Harvest in 1929 - when he is writing for pulp magazines and living in a run down low rent apartment. In this story Hammett (Frederic Forrest) is pulled into a case by an old friend and fellow Pinkerton Agent (Peter Boyle) who is looking for a Chinese girl in Chinatown and so is everyone else including the cops. Along the way, like in any decent noir, Hammett is deceived, beaten up, has his life threatened, has the cops warn him off and smokes too much. The film comes across as a too polished tribute to noir films with a special emphasis on The Maltese Falcon even including a Gutman type and a gunsel played by David Patrick Kelley who is famous for his creepy role in The Warriors ("Warriors, come out to play"). Throw in an actual black falcon statute on Hammett's desk and a taxi driver played by the original gunsel, Elisha Cook Jr.


But it never captures the proper mood as hard as it tries - and part of the reason why is the interesting backstory of the film. It was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and his studio Zoetrope. The studio made some great films of course but they had just produced the film One from the Heart with Forrest and it had bombed badly and this studio bound look and slick feel to it was painfully artificial. The same thing with Hammett. All the dark Chinatown alleyways and brothels feel totally artificial. There is no smell of corruption coming off of them. Coppola had hired the German director Wim Wenders to direct. Wenders had yet to make his most famous films (Wings of Desire being one of my favorite films ever), but he had directed enough films to distinguish himself as an eclectic independent auteur. It doesn't strike me that this fairly conventional mainstream film was a good fit for him.


He directed the film on the real streets of San Francisco with Brian Keith doing the Peter Boyle role and Ronnie Blakely doing the Marilu Henner role as the girl downstairs. Orion which was financing the film hated it. Completely. So they re-did it - completely - some saying Coppola took over but Wenders claiming that he directed most of this version as well - and it was all filmed inside and it is hurt by that. Apparently, the first version was tossed out. Kind of criminal.


As it turns out it isn't a bad film though it feels like it is coloring within the lines of a real noir. Forrest is its main strength and near the end gives a terrific monologue. Hammet would go on to fame with his books and the film versions of them - in particular The Thin Man series and of course the Bogart version of the Maltese Falcon. He also would go to become a scriptwriter in Hollywood where the pay was much better than from his books. It didn't work out for him - with his money he became an alcoholic going on benders for weeks - trying to write in his few periods of sobriety but after The Thin Man in 1934 Hammett never really wrote again other than a script for the second Thin Man film. His talent just vanished.