Hammett

The troubled production history of Hammett far out-shadowed it’s extremely limited release in 1982, and the film has largely gone unseen since. That’s a great pity, because it’s a clever and beguiling neo-noir mystery and the visual sheen is spectacular. Frederic Forrest plays Dashiell Hammett, the writer who once worked for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency and went on to invent the American private eye novel with Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man. Visited by an old friend from the agency, Hammett agrees to help him track down a prostitute, Crytal Ling, and gets sucked into a plot every bit as complicated as one of his own stories…

Wim Wenders took over the project from Nic Roeg, but producer Francis Coppola had final say over the look and feel of the film, which was made at his Zoetrope Studios at the same time as One from the Heart. Wenders wasn’t a good fit for the decadent house style, or, really, a genre that requires intricate plotting. Nevertheless, on its own terms, Hammett is a heady tribute to the progenitor of noir, Forrest might have been born to play him, and the production design and lighting immerse us in San Francisco of the 1920s, as it might have appeared on the cover of Black Mask magazine.

Film buffs will be thrilled to find Sylvia Sidney, Sam Fuller, RG Armstrong, Royal Dano, Jack Nance, Richard Bradford and Elisha Cook Jr among the supporting cast.

A neo-noir classic, it looks like a series of Black Mask covers drawn by Edward Hopper, has a bluesy score by John Barry, dazzling sets by Dean Tavoularis (production designer on the Godfather trilogy) and is allusively cast (eg, Elisha Cook from The Maltese Falcon as a Bay Area cabbie). A stylish, entertaining movie.

Philip French, The Observer

A stunningly achieved fiction about the art and mystique of creating fiction… Wenders’ double-edged examination of what Spade later called ’the stuff that dreams are made of’ is rich and audacious, as much a homage to bygone Hollywood as to Hammett and the ’roman noir’ he pioneered: almost entirely studio-shot, bit-cast with iconic veterans, hauntingly scored. Forrest incarnates the writer as a rumpled but uncreased Bogart; Boyle is the archetypal Archer-type loser; the whole cast plays just one beat away from the genre staples their characters would become in print and the movies. One to savour.

Time Out

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