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Director: Wim Wenders
Screenwriters: Dennis O’Flaherty, Ross Thomas
In memoriam: Frederic Forrest 1936-2023
By Roderick Heath
Wim Wenders’ Hammett is a movie hard to define. The Hollywood debut of Wenders, Hammett is a crossroads of cinematic styles and epochs. Revisionist neo-noir. Lush tribute to the moviemaking aesthetics of yore. An arty, meta-laced disassembly of those hallowed things. A musing on personal creativity in immediate relation with the evil in the world. A dizzy romp through hallucinated retro Americana by a freshly transplanted filmmaking imagination, offering his peculiarly European take on a film genre and writing legacy. It’s also one of my absolute favourite films, precisely because it’s such a peculiar and rarefied chimera. The source material was a 1975 novel by Joe Gores, a writer who, like the eponymous Hammett himself, had changed careers from private detective to author. Francis Ford Coppola executive produced the film through his American Zoetrope studio, one of several similar productions, including Coppola’s own One From The Heart (1981) and The Cotton Club (1984), which placed heavy emphasis on highly artificial and stylised productions and a variety of retro-flavoured pop artistry encoded in the product, balancing revisionist impulses with a fetishist delight in honouring bygone modes in movies and other arts and trying to prove the two could coexist. That audiences didn’t agree was made patently manifest when most of those movies were ruinous failures.
In a situation reminiscent of the making of Poltergeist (1982), Hammett was dogged by rumours that Coppola himself had forcibly reshot portions of it. Wenders still strenuously denies that, whilst acknowledging Coppola kept a heavy hand in supervising, and obliged him to reshoot portions of it, moving away from his original, more location-based approach. I believe Wenders, in large part because the film feels more like his than Coppola’s even as it’s moulded according to an artistic faith Coppola was dedicated to at the time. Wenders later reported there was no chance of fashioning a director’s cut of his original conception of Hammett because the footage had been junked. In any event, like some other mistreated, high-style relics of early 1980s screen culture, including Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983), it’s what actually remains that grips my attention. Hammett emerged as a witty, haunting, byzantine meditation on the meeting of life and art as well as an entertaining jaunt through a generation of beloved clichés, as viewed through the lens of the writer who serves as the film’s protagonist.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett has climbed slowly from the status of a popular author in a disreputable genre to being considered one of the truly important figures of American writing in the Twentieth century. Hammett’s writing was charged with deceptive artistry, uniting a hard and rigorous realism based in his lived experience as a private detective and the unsentimental, even radical worldview he formed in that time, and a Dickensian sense of human strangeness, pitched somewhere in the grey zone between reportage and funhouse mirror caricature, his stories and novels populated with deftly described types and perfervid grotesques. Hammett only wrote a few dozen short stories and five novels, quitting after publishing The Thin Man in 1934 and only writing a few screenplays afterwards, including the adaptation of his long-time lover Lillian Hellman’s Watch On The Rhine (1942). But, in part thanks to Raymond Chandler’s later proselytising on his behalf, and the success of films based on his work including John Huston’s trendsetting The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the popular series spun off from The Thin Man, Hammett came to be seen as, if not the creator of hardboiled crime fiction, than its first real master, its grizzled, gritty Dante or Chaucer, a man whose influence runs not just through his specific subgenre but the entire realm of realistic procedural thriller fiction as well literary writers. Hammett’s life was truly interesting if also, ultimately, quite tragic, beset as it was by illness, alcoholism, political persecution, and jailing, all leading to his early death in 1961. Hammett’s background as a writer who had really engaged in the specialised, rarefied milieu he wrote about gave his work authority and his artistic persona a rare gloss of mystique.
Wenders, on the other hand, was at the time of making Hammett a hot young director who emerged amidst the cadre of German New Wave filmmaker in the early 1970s. Wenders, born in Düsseldorf in 1945, made his feature filmmaking debut with Summer in the City (1970), and made his reputation with his second, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1971), an adaptation of a novel by the writer Peter Handke, who also wrote the film’s script and became one of Wenders’ regular collaborators. Wenders burnished his reputation with the so-called “road” trilogy of Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976), all portraits of rootless and alienated people, in between two idiosyncratic and defiantly personalised adaptations of famous American novels, The Scarlet Letter (1973) and The American Friend (1977), the latter an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game. After that, like his peer Werner Herzog, Wenders started making movies in America but never, entirely went Hollywood, remaining instead somewhat peripatetic and making documentaries alongside his features. Wenders managed to escape the contentious making of Hammett and soon made his two most famous films, Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), but those successes wedged him in an uncomfortable place between arthouse eccentric and popular international auteur. This led to a career that has ever since lurched between ambitious but divisive or even ignored labours like Until The End of The World (1991), The End of Violence (1997), The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), and Don’t Come Knocking (2005), as well as the popular and acclaimed documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999), a film that sprang from Wenders’ passion for music as subject matter.
Wenders was nonetheless at the height of his peculiar talent when he made Hammett, a film made more in the mould of the moody metropolitan textures of The American Friend than the stark, space-besotted eye of Paris, Texas but containing seeds of the same forlorn and blasted romanticism and portrait of people adrift in the American landscape. Hammett’s narrative method, blending fact and fiction and blurring any firm sense of distinction with its quasi-metafictional framework, is one that’s more familiar and popular today than it was in 1982. The script was written by Ross Thomas, who under a pseudonym had written the novel The Procane Chronicle, which also depicted a writer playing at being a private eye and was filmed in 1976 as St. Ives, and former actor Dennis O’Flaherty. The film begins and ends with a portrait of Hammett (Frederic Forrest) banging away with relentless zeal at his typewriter, Wenders imbuing that mundane labour with a sense of the epic as he film up through the keys whilst Hammett bashes them, as the heady world he knits in his mind flows down on the page. Hammett, holed up in his apartment in downtown San Francisco circa 1928 (the year before he would publish his first and perhaps best novel, Red Harvest), is creating one of the stories he’s becoming reputed for. The story is then partly acted out for us in a perfect simulacrum of a 1930s movie set depicting a waterfront locale, the kind where dry ice fog flows over studio tank water, the lights blink and glow like outposts in the subsconsious, and the infrastructure is tangled in a gritty-romantic manner.
Hammett’s recurring, hardnosed private eye character, known to posterity as the Continental Op (Peter Boyle), and his sultry female operative Sue Alabama (Marilu Henner) on a job. Sent to buy back some stolen pearls, the Op has been instructed to send a woman as go-between, and he’s chosen his sometime flame Sue: she loads up a derringer in preparation for danger. The Op hears a shot and dashes to intervene, only to find Sue has shot a man dead. The Op quickly realises however that Sue has actually just eliminated her partner in a con she set up, with the pearls clumsily stashed. Sue begs the Op for a two-hour window to make a getaway before he sets the cops on her, and he promises one, but doesn’t keep that promise, and Sue is quickly arrested. “Sue Alabama and I were almost married back in 25,” the Ops narration reports with the faintest breeze of tragedy wafting across the officially hardboiled tone, “I guess it’s just as well we didn’t.” Hammett’s work is interrupted as he lurches into his toilet for a violent coughing fit, sparked by the case of tuberculosis he’s still recovering from, as well as his penchant for nasty booze and cigarettes, but he eventually curls up his bed, pleased with the wad of inky manuscript in his grasp.
The way the fiction and fact weave about each-other in Hammett helps imbue its slippery, opiated textures. Wenders uses his visual language to suggest something unstable about the images on screen, most apparent in the reuse of actors in roles within and without the enacted story and the occasionally jagged and disjunctive editing. Wenders captures Hammett’s own mind stepping back and forth from his imagination with flash edits of the ideas, like the bags of pearls submerged in harbour water, the driving MacGuffin for a story that’s really about seeing someone you love make an awful choice. And whilst the film resists a twist a la Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2002) or Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007) where some portion of the drama on screen is revealed to all be unfolding within Hammett’s head, the way the two realms remain interwoven extends to the climax of the “real” narrative, which essentially reproduces the end of Hammett’s story with rearranged elements and a different but equally, tragically ironic outcome. Of course, Hammett itself is fiction being conjured for us by the filmmakers, and the film is happy in making the audience conscious of its own falseness.
Hammett awakens to find a man in his room, and quickly recognises James Ryan (Boyle again), his one-time mentor and partner as a private detective and the model for the Op, who’s easily slipped into the apartment and is reading the new story. “Her name wasn’t Sue Alabama,” Ryan notes, “It was Betty Philadelphia. And I did marry her, worse luck.” Ryan is well-dressed and prosperous-looking, and he’s in town pursuing some enquiry he doesn’t explain to Hammett, requesting only that his former protégé be his backup for a foray into Chinatown, and recalls that Hammett owes him one mighty favour since Ryan took a bullet for him back when Hammett was still green. Hammett wearily but willingly comes along for the ride, planning to mail off the story on the way, but before he gets a chance Ryan realises they’re being followed by Winston (David Patrick Kelly), a heavy dressed in black, and try to elude him by descending into a basement brothel. Ryan exchanges bullets with Winston, sparking chaos, and when the confusion dies down Hammett realises Ryan has vanished and his manuscript lost. Ryan fails to show up at the speakeasy they arranged to meet at, sparking Hammett’s odyssey through the streets and social strata of San Francisco in his bid to find what happened to both.
Forrest had caught eyes with his important supporting role in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and plaudits for his scene-stealing work in Apocalypse Now (1979), playing the terminally sane but out-of-his-depth nice guy Chef. Coppola, sensing a brand of hangdog American everyman potential in Forrest, tried with One From The Heart and this film to promote him to a leading man, a good idea that nonetheless didn’t take. So enjoyable and convincing is his inhabitation of Hammett however that over a decade later he got to revisit the role in Frank Pierson’s telemovie Citizen Cohn (1993), which briefly depicted the HUAC’s attack dog lawyer Roy Cohn trying and failing to make Hammett play ball with him. With his hair riven with premature grey but his arms still showing muscular strength, Forrest’s Hammett presents a quick-witted, intelligent, furtively romantic and able hero who is nonetheless far from being the kind of titanic tough guy his stories celebrate and the case he’s stumbled into needs. His Hammett grins ruefully as Ryan demands he honour his singular debt, accepting that such debts never get called in at convenient times, and turns momentarily charismatic and playful when he encounters a woman in library (Liz Roberson), whose name he doesn’t remember but perfectly recalls when and where they last met (“Christmas Eve, Nineteen Twenty-Four!), and gives her a congratulatory kiss when she mentions she’s now married.
Ryan, in his idealised remembrance of his old mentor, is that man, and Hammett is dogged by guilty fantasies of Ryan shooting him for taking what he taught him, the accumulated art and lore of a lifetime as a gumshoe, and selling “on the street in a cheap magazine.” Hammett’s retirement from detective work is meanwhile noted to have been partly inspired by his health and partly by political conviction. One of Hammett’s best friends in San Francisco is cab driver Eli (Elisha Cook Jr), who he describes as the “last of the IWW organizers,” (“Oh, that’s just Hammett talkin’,” Eli retorts, “What I am now is sort of an Anarchist with Syndicalist tendencies.”), which segues into Hammett explaining that he quit working for the Pinkerton Agency precisely because he was being forced to do strikebreaking. In the course of rummaging his way through the under, over, and in-between worlds of the city, Hammett begins to encounter sundry characters, who all prove mysteriously connected. He’s forced to keep eluding Winston, who starts tailing him and confronts another follower, the nervous, diminutive Gary Salt (Jack Nance), who claims to be a reporter working on a story about forced underage prostitution in Chinatown, and later hints he and Ryan are in competition for something.
Both men are connected to Crystal Ling (Lydia Lei), a beautiful young woman who once escaped the “cribs” of Chinatown, which are all controlled by top gangster Fong Wei Tau (Michael Chow). Hammett learns Crystal once found refuge with Mission manager Donaldina Cameron (Sylvia Sydney), where she met Salt. She turns up in Hammett’s apartment seeking temporary refuge, and Hammett agrees, only for her to be reported dead soon after. Hammett receives a brief telephone call from Ryan, whose curt, barely coherent instructions lead Hammett to the story of a wealthy city elder, C.F. Callaghan, who recently died, supposedly of suicide. Hammett learns from Doc Fallon (Elmer Kline) that Callaghan was actually, violently murdered, but the crime has been covered up. Winston eventually proves to work for the successful lawyer ‘English’ Eddie Hagedorn (Roy Kinnear), who represents the Callaghan estate and is trying to keep the secret. Hammett falls afoul of Fong when he tries to talk with him. Fong proves to be holding Ryan captive, and also has Hammett’s manuscript.
The tangle of plotting threatens in Hammett at points to become almost as dense and opaque as in The Big Sleep, which Chandler reported he even he didn’t entirely understand, but it does eventually resolve into something like sense. Hammett’s probing chiefly serves to bring him into contact with people who are supposed to be the authentic models for the characters in his tales, an idea made more obvious right at the film’s end when Hammett returns to his typewriter, the people he’s met now transcribed into fictional figures. Hagedorn and Winston, for instance, supposed be the inspirations for Kasper ‘The Fat Man’ Gutman and his gunsel Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon, whilst Ryan himself the closest to an equivalent to the Op, and Hammett’s personal proximity to Sam Spade is noted through the fact he’s known to his friends by his real first name. Hammett’s neighbour, the not-at-all mousey librarian Kit Conger (Henner again), has already become the immediate avatar for the tough dames and femmes fatale in his writing, and she is drawn into the case for real through proximity, sympathy, and fascination. “And for what?” Kit asks Hammett after their adventures land them in bed together, “A glimpse in the cesspool? A roll in the hay?” “A roll in the hay at least,” Hammett jests, before assuring her she did a good and noble thing helping him out when he needed it.
Hammett could be considered as perhaps the last of a cadre of films sparked in the 1970s, when a popular revival particularly of Humphrey Bogart’s oeuvre and the attendant mystique of the 1940s film noir helped inspire a revisionist movement, including Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975). Those entries took up the private eye genre as defined by Hammett and Chandler but dragged it into an unsparingly aware and sceptical zeitgeist, applying not just a modern filmmaking style but an updated thematic palette, one where social corruption and sexual aberration could be dealt with without euphemism or censor-pleasing. It also followed send-ups like Robert Moore’s The Cheap Detective (1978), written by Neil Simon and similarly preoccupied by recreating the look and feel of old studio movies. A successful TV miniseries adaptation of Hammett’s The Dain Curse (1978) also made the writer’s work popular again in a more straight-laced mould. Hammett extends the revisionist mode however, by calling attention to things like depicting a direct connection between capitalist might and political influence and police corruption, the more unsparing approach to noting the racism and exploitation apparent in the age in depicting a demimonde littered with underage sex slavery, and elucidating the precise underworld meaning of the word “gunsel,” which Hammett popularised, as a slang description of a homosexual hoodlum.
But Hammett also bends away from that revisionist style in its dense, non-realistic visual textures, with Wenders alternating between carefully dressed real locations and backlot recreations that aim for the oneiric quality found in old B-movies. Indeed, Wenders does his damnedest to turn that dreamlike quality into an entire aesthetic. Much like Herzog attempted with his remake of Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979), a movie Herzog said he made to try and exorcise the film’s grasp on his formative cinematic imagination, Wenders tries to assimilate a bygone movie style not just for the sake of nostalgic pleasures, although for those too, but to weave it into a personal mythos, to tap some elusive aesthetic meaning and accord with the deeper wells of creative impression. This elusive project motivates moments of self-conscious artificiality, as when Wenders films Winston lurking whilst watching Hammett and Ryan descending a staircase, with Kelly rear-projected into the image. This transforms a seemingly functional, plot-developing shot into something more peculiar, even surreal, but it’s the sort of thing that was also once part of the common fabric of Hollywood movies as a shortcut to achieving such functional shots. Hammett’s adventures come to resemble an anatomisation of the hidden, floating world lurking in San Francisco’s walk-down rooms and basements, its art deco skyscrapers and wooden stairwells, where entire little communities riddled with crime, sleaze, and secret potentates persist.
Hammett ultimately weaves an atmosphere that feels closer to the underworld fantasies of Fritz Lang’s The Spiders (1919) and Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) and the hallucinatory demimondes of Josef von Sternberg than to Huston or Howard Hawks or Anatole Litvak and their hard-edged takes on the private eye mythos. Or perhaps a more upmarket take on Albert Zugsmith’s Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962). One filmmaker who would take up where Wenders left off with this curious mix of styles was Bertrand Tavernier, for his similarly atmospheric and melancholy portrait of artistic outsiders, ‘Round Midnight (1986). Wenders presents his own, peculiar spin on the compulsory scene where the dogged hero is knocked out and doped up by the villains, when he’s taken captive by Fong. Hammett has a feverish dream in which a younger Ryan, working with an amused Crystal, is trying to revive Hammett to get him to help in an operation at the Mexican border. This situation that might be a distorted memory or a product of his authorial imagination, but certainly describes Hammett’s dogging feeling of being a letdown in his former, nobly macho profession. “Why can’t it be giant spiders and pink elephants?” Hammett groans as he instead treated to Ryan’s paternal disappointment as well as Mariachi bands and wind-up laughing Buddha toy rocking. This interlude of the entirely surreal resolves back into reality as Hammett wakes up and finds the door of his cell has been opened by a small girl, who then leads him to where Ryan is being held in a pit with rats. The warren under Fong’s gambling house proves barely less surreal than Hammett’s dreamscape, a pit of vice littered with Chinoiserie bric-a-brac and human traffic.
Wenders’ immediate follow-up, The State of Things (1982), dealt with a director trying to remake an early Roger Corman monster movie, as if offering a sardonic self-portrait of Wenders’ own plunge into a realm where pastiche and honouring are hard to distinguish and the cinematic dragon eats its own tail with voracious glee. Like the angelic hero of Wings of Desire, at least at first, Hammett plays at effective involvement with the world but is ultimately relegated to an observer, an instrument transmitting and transmuting its petty tragedies and perversities into something coherent and meaningful, and helps that world, and him, face themselves in the mirror. The journey of a spindly, life-battered hero through an alienated world where pathos and passion are elusively glimpsed across wastelands and through deceptive portals as portrayed in Paris, Texas is also plainly mooted here, even if the approach to filming is entirely different. Wenders’ ironic, distance-touched love of classic Americana imagery as explored in that film and subsequent efforts like Don’t Come Knocking is also in play, reflecting the exported idea of the country back at it.
Hammett is also, inevitably, crammed with cineaste reference points. Wenders homages Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927) by recreating its most famous stylistic flourish, a shot of a man uneasily pacing filmed through the floor made of glass. Wenders employs this in a sequence where Hammett visits a library to track down a newspaper article about Callaghan’s death, and overhears the clacking of Winston’s shoes on the next level, hovering in wait, with the clear floor used to communicate Hammett’s honed awareness as a former detective of what tell-tale signs mean. A slightly more arch but understandable touch is a lampstand in Hammett’s apartment being a facsimile of the Maltese Falcon as seen in Huston’s film. One of the two credited cinematographers on the film was the great Joseph Biroc, who had worked in Hollywood for directors including Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich over decades (and Wenders would with peerless sarcasm cast Fuller himself as a stand-in for Biroc in The State of Things), utilising his talent for deep-focus compositions in a film that has a rarefied look, the colours given a powdery, faded feel, dominated by blues and greys with flashes of muted yellow and other warms tones. A sense of legacy is also purveyed by the casting, which includes the likes of Cook, Sydney, Royal Dano (as speakeasy barman Cookie), and Fuller (as a pool sharp who advises Hammett on who to bet on in a boxing match) – faces and voices who seem to have the long-faded days of old Hollywood and such classical genre fare chiselled into their beings. At the same time Wenders smartly employs their then-contemporary equivalents in the wily character actor stakes, including Nance from Eraserhead (1977), Kelly from The Warriors (1979), and Fox Harris, who would go on to appear in Repo Man (1984).
R.G. Armstrong and Richard Bradford play Lt. O’Mara and Detective Bradford, a good cop-bad cop pairing Hammett has repeated run-ins with, modelled on Barton Maclean and Ward Bond in Huston’s The Maltese Falcon: Armstrong’s formidable O’Mara, when Hammett mentions that Ryan was seeking Crystal, offers his warning: “If you’re half-smart, you never heard of her. And if your fancy friend with the velvet collar’s half as a smart as you are which would only make him one-quarter smart, he’s never heard of her either.” “Well, that’s a lay-off speech if ever I heard one,” Hammett comments. The script is filled with such angular and amusing riffs on the classic brand of hardboiled dialogue Hammett helped lodge in pop culture. One of my favourites, one that pops into my head whenever some big new infrastructure project is announced, comes when Hammett regards a model for the proposed Golden Gate Bridge set up in the foyer of the city hall, and notes with peerless cynicism, “It’s gonna be the longest suspension bridge in the world – the graft’ll probably set a world record too.” Late in the film a cop asks him to sign a register for a bag filled with a million dollars in payoff money, inspiring Hammett to question, “First day?” His encounter with the rotund, boozy, seedy Doc Fallon sees Hammett bringing up the topic of Callaghan’s death: “What’s on your mind, Hammett?” “Suicide.” “My advice, don’t hestitate.” Wenders also get a jot of humour from the sight of two cops, assigned to show the stag film to their superiors and Hammett, returning to indulgent viewing once they leave.
Kline’s Fallon is an extremely effective riff on the Hammettian grotesque, laughing wheezily from sucking down speakeasy hooch whilst musing on Callaghan’s suicide, and commenting, when Hammett says he though he retired, “I got thirteen kids, Hammett. You don’t ever retire when you got thirteen kids.” Hammett, despite not being able to pay Fallon off as well as Ryan, slips him a bill for the privilege of looking at the autopsy report and then, noting his photo of his army of children with a grin, adds another bill to the donation. Kelly’s Winston meanwhile has a strangled voice that barely raises above a whisper as he delivers gaudy but ineffectual threats (“Why don’t you get your picture took, creep. Your momma won’t know you when I get through with you!”). A great little moment early in the film sees Hammett easily rumbling the lurking Winston as he pretends to be reading a newspaper whilst getting a shoeshine: “I knew a guy once used to disguise himself as a fire hydrant,” he tells the dim young thug, “Of course he had a small problem with the dogs…There’s a swell doorway across from my place and you can stand there all night long…” He finishes up with a teasing comment that he’s holding the newspaper upside down, which he isn’t, but Winston still needs to check. Cook, still a scene-stealing and energetic talent despite his age and frazzled look, is delightful as the cabbie who plays the crusty but stalwart man-of-the-streets offsider to Hammett, insisting, contrary to San Francisco lore, on calling the city Frisco – “I hack here lady, I call it Frisco,” he tells Kit when she corrects him, reacting in startled fashion, “You’re shittin’ me!”, when Hammett tells him his chauffeuring a million dollars, and showing up when needed in a crisis with a colossal old revolver.
Eventually Hammett delves to the heart of the mystery confronting him: Salt, whom Hammett describes pithily as a “short pornographer,” met Crystal whilst trying to write a news article on the Chinatown cribs, and found her an ideal partner in crime to instead set up a blackmail racket. O’Mara and Bradford show Hammett a stag film the pair shot, with Salt wearing a wolf mask ravaging Crystal’s Little Boo Peep: the film was designed to entice sexually repressed rich men. Several such men had their roll in the hay with Crystal in a fanciful bedroom set up in Salt’s photographic studio whilst, of course, Salt clicking away on a camera behind a two-way mirror. Callaghan was murdered by his wife when she caught him with Crystal, and now she’s trying to keep out of sight long enough for Salt to extract their price from the tycoons, but Ryan has complicated the deal by getting wind of it and cutting himself in. Salt is shot dead by Winston, with Hammett and Kit becoming accidental witnesses and also having stumbled upon the blackmail photos. Hammett scares Winston off by pretending to wield a gun and being rather better at stand-offs, and later visits Hagedorn to tell him what his boyfriend-cum-operative’s been up to. The perturbed Hagedorn shoots Winston dead when he tries to bash Hammett’s head in, and then arranges a meeting between Hammett and the blackmail victims, the upshot of which is Hammett is told Crystal and Ryan insist he be the bagman for the payoff.
The appeal of the private eye flick lay in the way it presented a variation on the Western evolved into the urban world of modernising America, still riven with the same rampant urges of raw power whether expressed with gun or bankroll, but contained and cramped by brick and steel, suggesting a way the same outlaw culture and mythos of masculine self-reliance could persist in that zone, carving a path between the forces of plutocracy and barbarianism. A similar mythos attaches itself to creative artistry itself, given tacit permission in the modern world to tell truth to power and walk a tightrope where it’s possible to both participate in and critique society. Wenders grasps that similarity, with his hero ultimately confronted by both the refusal of life to conform to the tight moral and narrative structure of a story and also the impossibility of both those extra-social postures. Hammett critiques this ideal even as it affects to honour it in the way the storyline ultimately perceives the players in the underworld game as battling a stacked deck against the real centres of power. When Ryan asks Hammett early on who runs San Francisco, the writer answers, “The same people who run every town.” Ryan knows what he means: “The cops, the crooks, and the big rich.” Hammett uses this formulation again later when he’s surrounded by emissaries from all three estates, and he delivers a stinging, memorable rant in warning to Crystal, who believes she can outwit and outrun the scions she blackmails: “You don’t really think they’re gonna let you waltz, do ya? Oh, you might get to Berlin or Constantinople — maybe even Hong Kong, wherever you’re going. But one day you’ll turn the wrong corner and wham! Curtains. No more Crystal!…You’re going up against a powerhouse, angel – the big steam.”
“The big steam” are nonetheless a circle of dweebs held together by their starched high collars – and one fairly calm fellow Hammett labels as the idle rich – lingering in various degrees of tense and resentful wrath whilst Hammett hands each a photo of them in the favourite sexual scenarios with Crystal, ranging from “The Poor Little Match Girl” to “Daddy’s Little Girl.” Hammett breezes through his confrontation with the big boys and their guard/lap dogs with perfect confidence, only to, once he merges, light himself a cigarette and note his own shaking hand with a chuckle – another nod to a vignette in The Maltese Falcon. Hammett’s first encounter with Crystal herself sees the accomplished young seductress and manipulator turning all her wiles on Hammett to, as she has with others including Salt and Ryan, make him a willing accomplice, putting on an singsong accent later revealed to be fake as she suckles on his fingers and mentioning repeatedly how she was “made to do such terribly wicked things” as a prostitute. Hammett remains sufficiently poised despite powerful attraction to sarcastically repeat her flattery (“Given that I am a kind man, a just man…”).
Other pleasures of Hammett are nonetheless more elusive and move beyond genre pastiche, particularly when it feels keenest to Hammett as just a jobbing writer and lost soul momentarily distracted by excitement. The sight of Hammett returning homewards after long nights swashbuckling through the demimonde, turning his collar up to the breeze as the bleary dawn light falls on the San Francisco skyline, contains the essence of some personal poetry. A marvellous vignette later sees Hammett again coming home, black and blue from the punishment taken at Fong’s, swapping words with a consoling neighbour and then ascending the stairs to his rooms, finding some kids playing hide and seek cowering on the steps, and shrugging noncommittally when the seeker down below asks if they’re up there. The fillip of wearily humane humour here contains nonetheless a devious metaphor for Hammett’s ultimate fate in refusing to play along with the HUAC, refusing to be a snitch even in a game. Another, vital contribution to the film’s overall texture, particularly in such downtime moments, is John Barry’s jazz score. Barry’s music weaves around the movie like blue cigarette smoke, signing it with teasing mystery and sad elegance, touched with that sonorous quality that was Barry’s special forte, befitting a movie that so often feels submerged in still, clear water, which is indeed the visual motif evoked in the opening credits.
The film’s production troubles manifest in some jarring edits here and there, but the only major aspect of the film that doesn’t work entirely for me is Henner, who seems out of synch with the arch dialogue patterns. Whereas Lei is quite marvellous in a relatively small role, but one important to the movie as a whole, as she needs to incarnate Crystal’s allure, potent enough to make fools out of smart and powerful men and run rings around whole systems, and gives Hammett the ultimate temptation when she proposes he come with her on her victory jaunt: “You can be my bodyguard-biographer, my lover, my lapdog,” she proposes, resuming the lilt of her false accent, only for Hammett to tell her the brutal truth as he sees it. Sadly, the film did Lei’s career no more good than Forrest’s. The film ultimately votes its official femme fatale a strong note of sympathy when she and Hammett confront each-other with masks off. Hammett angrily calls her evil for killing the woman who became her substitute in the morgue, to Crystal’s vehement retort: “What is evil? Show it to me. My parents sold me when I was nine for five thousand dollars. I turned my first trick with a Caucasian at eleven. At seventeen I am a millionaire. What will I be when I am twenty-one?” “Dead,” Hammett assures her.
The metatextual edge continues here not just in the way the final confrontation mimics Hammett’s story, which Ryan brandishes after paying to get it back from Fong, but in the way the characters conspire to act out the roles in it, and their responses to it. Ryan wants Hammett to rewrite it to accommodate his gone-bad triumph, whereas Crystal quotes its signal punchline, “He needed one hand for the money, the other for the gun – he wasn’t good enough to handle both,” with approving relish when the moment of truth proves to involve something very like that. Ryan, having made himself partner to Crystal, then tries to rip her off at gunpoint during the handover, but gets plugged full of lead by her with a secreted gun. The triumphant Crystal gets her urgent warning from Hammett, but vows, “I can beat them,” before driving off to her fate. Hammett surveys his dead friend, dropped pages of his story bobbing in the water by the dock, and kicks the rest of the pages in as well, as a final surrender to fate and disavowal of a tale that’s cost too much, ransacked his identity and art too deeply. “It’s not like in one of your stories is it?” Kit questions when Hammett returns to her, “It never is like a story,” Hammett sighs. He pauses for a long look at his reflection upon returning home, before resuming his work, finding a groove now that can bear him on to literary legend, if not actual happiness.
film freedonia 