HAMMETT (1982)

 

[Image stolen from Wider Screenings]

As the picture fades up on the smoky visage of late ‘20s San Francisco, the following preface appears: “This is an entirely imaginary story about the writer Samuel Dashiell Hammett, who…in the words of one of his most gifted contemporaries…helped get murder out of the Vicar’s rose garden and back to the people who are really good at it.

“The detective story has not been the same since.”

Hammett, of course, is the author of The Maltese Falcon, a book and film that laid the floorplan for the modern day American detective story. A private eye is hired to find a mysterious object but after his partner is murdered during the investigation, the hero must look past the allure of the women, the danger of the men, and solve what has become a personal quest. Drawing from his own past working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Hammett told tough stories with a tight, spare style, about hard men existing in a labyrinth of criminals. 

In 1975 Joe Gores, another private investigator-turned-author cast Hammett as the lead character in his fictional novel of the same name, giving the struggling writer a famous “one last case” that would test his limits and his honor before giving new spark to his creative output. As in The Maltese Falcon, in Hammett the murder of a good friend and former partner draws him into a web of corruption involving low lifes and “big money”. Not too long after its publication, director and producer Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights to Gores’ book with the intention of  spearheading a new studio he’d established with fellow conquering hero George Lucas, American Zoetrope. Originally announced as a project with Nicholas Roeg, scheduling problems had Coppola looking elsewhere for a director. Having made up his mind that a European director would bring the correct mood to the project, Coppola approached German artist Wim Wenders, whose gritty The American Friend, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s own thriller Ripley’s Game, had garnered praise in both Europe and the United States in 1977. Wenders came on the job in 1978 to make his first American movie. But Hammett wouldn’t see a release until 1983.

The movie that hit the screen starred Coppola regular Frederic Forrest as the writer, who is introduced typing away at a (fictional) manuscript entitled “Caught in the Middle”. He drinks whiskey and succumbs to crippling coughing bouts due to tuberculosis (a result of the Spanish Flu he’d contracted during his stint in the Army prior to World War I), but he gets the story finished and the audience gets to see the pictures formed by Sam’s words: his unnamed protagonist—likely the famous “Continental Op” character of his pre-Sam Spade works—and a shady red-head parked on a lonely river dock, waiting to do a final deal.

Real life comes calling without so much as a knock on the door. Hammett’s old partner, James Francis Xavier Ryan (Peter Boyle, who also plays the detective in Hammett’s story), needs his help in locating a young girl, Chinese immigrant by the name of Crystal Ling, who has gone missing from a gambling den owned by notorious rascal Fong Wei Tau. Sam is cozier with the local law than Ryan, so he needs his old partner to be his go-between, his “tin mittens”. Sam asks his muse, Kit Conger (Marilu Henner), the inspiration for the story’s “Sue Alabama” (real name ‘something Greek and unpronouncable’, he writes), to keep an eye on things while he’s out with Jimmy. Tough gal, Kit, and easy on the eyes. The kind of woman who greets you at the door with a sharp remark, like she’d been standing there all day sharpening it. Along the way he plans to mail out his manuscript. 

They’ve barely stepped foot in Chinatown before they pick up a tail (David Patrick Kelly), a young punk with a ruined voice and taps on his shoes, always giving him away. After some noise, Sam and Jimmy are separated. Loses his manuscript as well. Not too long after the rest of the players sleaze out of the woodwork. Newspaper man Gary Salt (David Lynch hero Jack Nance) is doing a piece on the Chinatown slave trades. His cop buddies (R. G. Armstrong as Lt. O'Mara, Richard Bradford as Detective Bradford) are quick to warn him away, to forget he’d ever heard of the name Crystal Ling. Somehow everyone is tied to the recent suicide of business magnate C.F. Callahan. 

By now, Sam’s up to his neck in it. He checks with his own eyes on the streets: Pops (Royal Dano) who runs a newstand and sets aside bottles for Sam, as well as the new issues of Black Mask Magazine bearing his name; then there’s the Old Man at the pool hall (played by Sam Fuller in a don’t-blink cameo); his personal chauffer, Eli the ex-anarchist and hack driver (Elisha Cook, Jr.); finally old Doc Fallon (Elmer Kline) who did the autopsy on Callahan. Seems the rich man did himself in with a half-dozen or so blows to the back of his head with a blunt object. Finally, the mystery leads to the richest men in California, all tied together by refined thug English Eddie Hagedorn (Roy Kinnear in a terrific nod to Sidney Greenstreet, introduced in a bathtub). Took a lot of twists and turns to get there. Fake-outs, murder, drugs, prostitution, pornography, blackmail, betrayal—it’s all laid out on the table, end to filthy end, and winds up with Sam, Kit and Ryan all standing on that narrow riverside dock, where the story began. 

Hammett is a fine nod to the genre Hammett helped create and Hollywood worked overtime to polish. Sure, maybe the plot is more Raymond Chandler than Dash, maybe the dialogue is punched a little too hard—particularly by Boyle who seems to barking from cue cards—and maybe, sometimes, the whole thing seems forced. And bound to interior Zoetrope-built sets, Hammett’s San Francisco seems too cramped and all kinds of phony, particularly exterior street scenes. But it manages to work, especially with Forrest helping it along. As Hammett, he’s tops. In the end, if all the pieces don’t seem to fit, if threads are left dangling while others tugged too hard, maybe that’s because life is messy. An obituary just seems like a neat little package; all the fat and flavor gets trimmed to fit it all in. 

In 1982, Hammett premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and received critical praise, but its theatrical release was inauspicious. It spent more time on HBO than it did on the big screens and it wasn’t given a proper DVD release until 2005, and even that was a bare-bones disc packaged with a handful of other Coppola productions. The story behind the movie and its journey seems even more convoluted than the fiction. 

According to Edward Davis’ 2005 article forIndiewire, “Wim Wenders Discusses Painful 'Hammett' Collaboration With Coppola,Friendship With Nicholas Ray”, the 33-year-old Wenders walked in to what he would later call “a long, amazing experience” and a “too good to be true” experience that would last more than five years. Working with four different writers over the period, Wenders oversaw more than 40 drafts of the script before he started shooting. Coppola was lost in the jungle shooting Apocalypse Now, so most of Wenders’ work was done 

[Photo courtesy of Arrow in the Head.]                                                 “under the radar”. When he                                                                                                        began shooting, having already been denied Sam Shepard to play the title character, Wenders’ version had Brian Keith, Sylvia Sidney and his new wife, Ronee Blakely, in the major roles, with an expanded part for his friend Sam Fuller. Filming was done on location in San Franciso, and it was distinctly different from Gores novel (in no small part due to a dispute with Hammett’s estate who objected to some of the more “on the nose” biographical content). While he shot, Wenders reworked the ending, changed it drastically, and no one knew what to make of it. 

According to Indiewire: “Actually it had not much to do with the script and there were even characters they didn’t even know,” [Wenders] said with a chuckle. “And they looked at it and said, ‘What are you shooting here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, well, that’s the necessary ending for the film I’ve been making so far.' ” Suffice to say, production shut down immediately. Coppola then suggested Wenders stop the shoot and edit the film so he could understand the ending. “I didn’t have a choice anyhow,” Wenders said and then when he finished editing the film a year later, “Nobody liked it. At least the studio didn’t like it. Francis sort of liked it, but he said, ‘They think it’s way too lyrical and it’s about the writer and not the detective story we had given you’ …but they felt it was too slow and didn’t have enough action.”

Between 1979 and 1980, production on Hammett was halted while a new ending could be crafted. Coppola so liked what Ross Thomas had come up with he ordered the whole script rewritten. It took so much time that both he and Wenders were each able to shoot a new movie in the interim, with Coppola working on One From the Heart, which would lead to Zoetrope’s ruin, and Wenders shooting a personal exorcism of his experience in The State of Things.

Production resumed in 1981, after another waiting period so the sets could be rebuilt and Frederick Forrest could slim down, both consequences of One from the Heart. Once underway, the rumor mills began, with many sources insisting that Coppola directed the more than 90% of footage reshot. Sometimes Wenders disputes this, particularly in a 17-minute short documentary of the experience titled Reverse Angle. Sometimes he just avoids the question. 

Grudgingly praised at the time, Hammett is usually described as “messy” by contemporary critics, and that is a valid assessment. The mystery central to the story is a Gordian knot and solved in roughly the same way as Solomon, by simply chopping through it at the end, via a long –albeit beautifully-written and performed—monologue by Forrest. The fabricated studio sets do impose a sense of artificiality to the film and sometimes impedes the tone where the noir films of the ‘40s and ‘50s were able to work around such constraints. The camera work includes some shakey Steadicam but also a handful of grand crane shots swooping from rooftops to street level which add gravity to the picture. While Forrest and Henner display some crackling chemistry (they would marry and divorce over the course of the production), the real stars are art directors Angelo Graham, Leon Erickson, and Joseph Biroc’s photography, which brings every shot to life with a mixture of Edward Hopper and Will Eisner. Even some of the possibly intentionally-corny scenes—those out of Sam’s manuscript in particular—are beautifully composed, so it’s easy to forgive if an actor, especially Boyle, chews on the scenery a little too much. (Boyle, too, adds to the artificiality and never rings true as a person). Forrest and Roy Kinnear handle the tough guy dialogue the best.

The final product is flawed, to be sure, but is still a satisfiable little hard-boiled movie, standing tall between Chinatown on one end and Michael Winter’s version of The Big Sleep at the other end of the spectrum. Those familiar with Wenders more dreamlike work like Wings of Desire can imagine what his original now lost footage, photography first by Robby Müller (who would later shoot Wenders’ Paris, Texas), and then Philip Lathrop, whose work exists in the final cut just enough to allow him credit for 'other photography'.

Coppola wanted a European take on the American mystery, an outsider to look in and bring his own perspective. Ultimately, as far as the producers were concerned, Wenders was obsessed with solving the wrong mystery. As he writes on his official website, “Hammett: detective, writer—this aspect of the character fascinated me. And it was this aspect that blocked the shooting of the film for so long. I wanted to find a balance between the detective story and the story of the writer who begins to confuse reality with fiction.”   

Since the DVD is out of print, you can actually watch the whole thing HERE for just $1.99

THE MALTESE FALCON (1931) / SATAN MET A LADY (1936)

To all who decry the endless glut of remakes and sequels that seems to be pouring out of Hollywood and splashing all over our theaters, I’d like to offer some faint reassurance that this is nothing new. The biggest difference between the “sequel-itis” afflicting modern studios is lack of creativity in titling (Father of the Bride 2, really? Would “Father’s Little Dividend” really have gone over people’s heads?). Franchises have always provided the suits-that-be with quick no-brainer cash. Why do you think the Universal Monsters Classics sets come packed with so many “Bride Of The Son Of The Ghost Of The Return Of…” variations? It’s only when the laziness set in that we started numbering the rehashed sequels that we entered into Saw XIII ridiculousness.

As for remakes, today’s argument can be applied just as easily to the past. Audiences want something new, even if it’s merely something old in disguise. At least that’s the thought ingrained in the minds of studio-heads. When you further analyze why that thought exists, you run into William Goldman’s terror philosophy—all executives are terrified of losing their jobs, so they spend most of their time avoiding decisions. When it comes down to it, they’d rather do something that’s already been done before than dare anything new. Really, this is the human condition at work and it isn’t singular to the movie business. It’s only when the crackpot arrives on the scene that we learn the world is round or the Earth revolves around the sun. Lunatics challenge the establishment; the rational prefer the status quo. The opposite is only true when it comes to religion and politics.

So if you’re dismayed over all the retreads in the theaters—all the Friday the 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street “reboots—let me put forth this example: over the course of just ten years, Warner Brothers produced three versions of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon. And through this example we can take away an exception to the accepted “rule” that “the original is always better”. At least in this case, it took them ten years and three tries to get the damned thing right.

It is unlikely that I’ll get much hate mail or argument if I make the bold statement that the 1941 version, the one we think of as The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, is the best of the three (if you do take umbrage, will you at least concede that it’s better than the George Segal vehicle The Black Bird?) and deserves its respected status as bona fide classic. For whatever faults modern eyes may find with the filmmaking of the fourth decade, the 1941 version still holds its own as a taut, intelligent and entertaining hard-boiled mystery. As for the previous versions…

The first on-screen adaptation in 1931 starred Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels in the roles of Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaunessey (renamed Ruth Wonderly, presumably to “un-Irish” the character). Cortez and Daniels were popular silent actors who made the rare transition to the talkies and seemed like good choices for the roles. Cortez’s Spade is more glib playboy than detective; his introduction after a woman emerges from his office, adjusting her stockings. He removes a sign from his doorknob reading “Busy”. His affairs with both secretary Effie (Una Merkel) and Iva Archer (Thelma Todd) are more explicitly outlined here as well, as is his animosity with his partner Miles Archer (a much older Walter Long), who knows all about the affair. Also played broader are the novel’s homosexual undertones: Effie facetiously describes Joel Cairo (Otto Matieson) as “gorgeous”; Wilmer the gunsel (Dracula co-star Dwight Frye) is blatantly referred to as Guttman’s (Dudley Digges) “boyfriend”. Ruth is even stripped naked (off screen) and searched late in the film. As Spade, Cortez smiles all the way through, never hinting that he feels in danger at any time and exhibits not even the slightest remorse when Archer is killed early on in the film, which is the impetus for Spade to turn in O’Shaunessey/Wonderly in the end. Without this motivation, his refusal to “play the sap” for Ruth comes off not only as callous but misogynistic. He’s had his fun, he got his reward, he’s done with her. On to the next dame. Cortez also lacks the sense that he is controlling the situations, as Bogart does easily through presence and delivery. Though following the novel just as faithfully as the 1941, right down to the now-familiar dialogue, the 1931 movie has no gravity to it. Under the creatively bereft Roy Del Ruth’s indifferent and unimaginative direction, the movie is light and disposable—Guttman poses no threat, implied or otherwise—and seems to just float away after it ends.

Soon after its release, the Hays Production Code kicked into full gear in Hollywood and the 1931 Maltese Falcon was declared too racy for the suddenly delicate audiences. Unable to re-release it, Warner Brothers exercised their copyrights and decided to remake the movie from scratch. Brown Holmes returned to retool the script for the stylish director William Dieterle and crafted a comedy to star Warner darling Bette Davis. This time around, Spade, Archer, Effie and O’Shaunessey—in fact, everybody—is jettisoned in favor of sideshow performers. Swashbuckling leading man Warren William appears as the morally-questionable “Tom Shane”, hired to find the legendary “Horn of Roland”, now supposedly filled with jewels, for Davis’ Valerie Purvis, thwarted along the way by the actually-pleasant-for-a-villain Madame Barabas (Alison Skipworth). More screen time is given to ditzy secretary “Miss Murgatroyd”, which isn’t a bad thing considering she’s embodied by Marie Wilson (often considered the inspiration for future dizzy blonde characters like those personified by Marilyn Monroe). Wilson is daffy, compared to William’s sleazy and obsequious Shane, who again shows no real concern over the murder of his partner (Winifred Shaw as a fussy Astrid Ames) and even carries on openly with Ames wife in his own home. In the end, there is no nobility in his selling out Valerie and is so robbed of his reward. In fact, she allows a washroom attendant to turn her over to the police in order to screw over Shane, which is actually the most satisfying scene in the movie.

Moving with a better pace than ‘31’s The Maltese Falcon, Satan Met a Lady benefits from moving out of the apartments and offices that kept Cortez’s Spade confined. The biggest benefit to the film (which pains me to say as I’m no advocate of the actress) is Bette Davis. While Marie Wilson is fun, Davis dominates the scenes she’s in, bringing control to the all-over-the-place performance of her co-star Warren Williams. Davis’s Valerie doesn’t even attempt the charade of the damsel in distress and pleasantly manipulates Shane into one situation after another in order to gain the ram’s horn (and later just to see if she can maneuver him out of her hair entirely). Davis famously detested this role and the production, demanding “better things” from Jack Warner, which resulted in a suspension for failing to report for filming early in the production. She acquiesced for monetary considerations only (her mother’s failing health a primary concern) and to her credit brings the nearly-thankless role to life. She’s a bright spot amidst the mugging, the milking and the winking at the camera.

Better thought-of now than during its release, which was criticized for looking cheap and dull by the New York Times (which also called for a “Bette Davis Reclamation Project (BDRP) to prevent the waste of this gifted lady's talents”), Satan Met a Lady still pales (actually, it virtually vanishes) in comparison with the Bogart/Huston/Lorre/Greenstreet 1941 version (which all but beats up and takes the lunch money of the pitiful 1931 Cortez catastrophe).

With disappointing box office returns met by both 1931 and 1936 outings, it’s actually a bit of a surprise that Warner Brothers opted to revisit the story and produce the 1941 classic. The prevailing attitude at the time seems to have been that since they owned the story, they might as well get the most out of it. It was virtually a tossed-bone to first-time director Huston and meant as a vehicle for hoofer-turned-leading man George Raft, but he famously turned it down because he refused to work with first-timers and felt that appearing in a remake was beneath him—a clause he actually inserted into his contract. Raft’s notorious ego may have been a detriment to him, but it was a boon to mankind as his refusal of projects led to Bogart’s continual success (he also turned down High Sierra, which ignited Bogart’s career). Huston rewrote the script sticking very closely to the novel (though careful to downplay anything that would annoy the censors) and his cast and direction brought Hammett’s carefully-crafted world to immortal life.

So the next time you moan to the gods “why o why” are they remaking this or that or the other, maybe—an admitted longshot—the new version will improve upon the original. Or, as in the case of The Maltese Falcon, prove that the third time is the charm.

That being said, I await in cautious trepidation for the Coen Brothers’ take on True Grit.

(Both films are available on one Warner Brothers DVD for all of your comparing and contrasting delight. All three can be had on anniversary DVD of The Maltese Falcon.)