Dash and Lilly
                                                                                                               
Director: Kathy Bates
Year: 1999
Rating: 6.0
Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman. Love can be an endurance test. Most of us fail it. Through thirty-years of fights, cheating, whoring, bitterness, drunkenness, failure, success, sickness and political persecution, they stayed together, in love. Both of them could be so shitty to each other at times but something kept them coming back. From his many trysts with prostitutes, his benders and her leaving him. From angry words, resentments and envy. Watching this, you want them both to just go away. They seem rotten to the core of their insecurities and ego. Very unlikable. But they passed the test and by the end as he is slowly dying and she is always there, it suddenly becomes touching.



Hammett is played by Sam Shepard, Hellman by Judy Davis - both much more attractive than the real people they play. It wasn't looks that brought them together but wit, cynicism and words. The love of words put down on paper. Hammett was already famous for his crime novels, The Maltese Falcon being his latest; she was a script reader at a film studio with ambitions to become a writer herself. Their story is to some degree a version of A Star is Born. Hammett was to write only one more novel - The Thin Man - based on them. Hollywood and the money killed his writing - he became a notorious drunk - and a nasty drunk - with a voracious need for prostitutes. Money still came in from his earlier writings through films based on them and book sales but he was often nearly broke as he got older.



Hellman on his advice turned to playwriting and became a huge success with The Children's Hour and Little Foxes. As Hammett says at one point "I frittered it all away". Why he never wrote again is a mystery. The drink, the inability to write anything but crime? They both got caught up in the blacklisting era - Hammett went to jail and Hellman had to take the fifth at the Congressional hearing. Both had been politically to the left in the 1930s as were so many - in particular Hellman who was pro-Stalin for years believing the bullshit propaganda of an egalitarian society in Russia. This is directed by Kathy Bates - I had no idea she directed as well - mainly TV shows but a few other TV movies. In the cast are Bebe Neuwirth as Dorothy Parker, David Paymer as Hellman's first husband and Larry Luckinbill as her lawyer. This was on the whole an ugly picture of their relationship but they only hurt themselves and endured.