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 LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963)

In 1963, larger-than-life-in-a-Hemingway-er-way director John Huston perpetrated a hoax on audiences far and farther. Not a huge hoax; actually more like a dirty trick. Thankfully, it was concealed inside a terrific movie.

A soft-spoken little thriller set amongst the near-royalty of the British top-most crust. After we witness a night-time murder and a name scratched from a list, we meet first Anthony Gethryn (George C. Scott), formerly of British Intelligence MI5, then unassuming writer Adrian Messenger (John Merivale). Messenger believes that a series of accidental deaths weren’t so accidental and that the men were likely murdered. He asks Gethryn to look into these seemingly unrelated events, then promptly meets his doom when his plane inexplicably (to everyone who is in the movie and not the audience) explodes. Before dying, Messenger manages to croak out a few disjointed sentences to the plane’s only survivor, Raoul Le Borg. Le Borg, as it turns out, was Gethryn’s Great War ally in the French Resistance, and he joins the former agent in his quest, now that it’s become personal. The main clue in Messenger’s utterings is the word “broom”, which Le Borg misremembers as “brush”. But who is giving the brush to whom?

Gethryn and Le Borg investigate Messenger’s list and their hunt takes them all over England, bringing them into contact with a crippled Cockney soldier (“Lost me barrel and keg [in Burma]”), a mysterious gypsy, an Italian food-cart vendor, and fox hunt protestors (“It’s the unspeakable after the uneatable!”), not to mention joining a couple of fox hunts themselves upon the Bruttenholm estate. All the while, the mysterious killer remains one step ahead of them, donning a series of disguises before revealing himself to be Kirk Douglas—er, George Brougham.

Incidentally, “Brougham” and “Bruttenholm” are both pronounced “broom”. And once we discover that old George is not only a distant heir to the Bruttenholm legacy but was also a prisoner of war in Burma with the entirety of the dead men on the list, it’s not too hard to place the rest of the pieces in the puzzle, especially when the corners are so well-defined and the size of dinner plates.

Ultimately, there’s not a lot of mystery in The List of Adrian Messenger, but there is an awful lot of fun. With Scott as our guide through the foggy underbelly of England to the magnificent grounds of the Bruttenholm estate, we meet a wonderful assortment of characters and red herrings. The opening credits boast a lot of names—Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum—and they’re present in the film in disguises, just like Douglas’ Brougham. In the film’s post-script coda, all the disguised cameo characters unmask themselves and reveal their famous faces. And we all laugh and delight in the trickery.

To modern eyes, the made-up characters are extremely easy to spot. Douglas’ first quick-change in a rest room, slipping out sclera contacts and replacing a bald cap, is still a marvelously-staged sequence, and was likely quite a shock to ‘60s audiences. Now that every film fan is world-weary, delighting in proclaiming “that’s so fake!” at every movie’s slight-of-hand, the masquerades designed by Bud Westmore in Messenger will be unlikely to impress. But if you’re heart isn’t two-sizes too-small, you’ll let it go and just have a good time.

But here’s where Huston’s hoax really comes into play. As it turns out, his trickery was not in the disguises but the disguised. With the sole exception of Robert Mitchum playing a sinister soldier, none of the famous actors are in the movie. They’re only in the unmasking sequence! Accounts differ as to who played whom and to what extent, but character actor Dave Willock definitely doubled for Douglas during some of the lengthier disguise sequences while the rest were likely portrayed by Space Patrol’s Jan Merlin. In fact, Merlin’s novel, Shooting Montezuma, involves the making of a movie where disguise and deception plays a key role. To add insult to injury, the legendary Paul Frees provided the voices for Sinatra, Curtis and Lancaster.

In the end, Huston makes monkeys out of us all twice. It’s up to the deceived to decide if it was a low-down rotten trick or a mastery of public relations. After all, he didn’t have to pay exorbitant fees for his cameo-ees, outside of a couple hours’ worth of scratch for the masking and reveal, and he still got some glamorous mugs for the curtain call and the advertising. You can’t say that Sinatra or Lancaster aren’t in the movie, just not in the way you expect. Not a rare rug-pull then and it’s still used today. The “Famous Face on the Box” Deception.

But that doesn’t make The List of Adrian Messenger any less a joy to watch than do the visible wires attached to the actors during the climactic fox hunt. It’s all Hollywood magic trickery, from the exciting but predictable plot (based on the 1961 book by Philip MacDonald) to the bombastic acting to Scott’s amused grin permanently-affixed beneath his impressive moustache. It’s a Golden Age film for an audience growing more and more sophisticated with each release.

Now, the usual sturm and drang: The List of Adrian Messenger can only be found on the Warner Brothers Collection DVD-R-on-Demand service, unless you want to try and catch it on cable (TCM runs it frequently). It might be one movie where the remastering is to its detriment. The clarity of the wires and seams (both in terms of make-up and plot threads) are made too visible by technology.

PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW (1971)

It’s always a good idea to view a movie in the context of the times during which it was made. Historical perspective helps you to appreciate, say, the narrative and creative editing employed in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (aka The Clansman) without condoning the central conceit that the Ku Klux Klan are the heroes of the piece. Understanding that there had been nothing like Citizen Kane seen in theaters before Welles popped it up there might help you stop yourself from declaring it “boring” in public, which will rescue you from getting your skull caved in by film scholars. Often, movies set in their contemporary times often serve as snapshots of history in terms of culture, fashion, politics and attitude. To that end, Pretty Maids All in a Row is a preservation of a singular moment in time—a specific ten minutes during the height of the sexual revolution, possibly just moments before the criminalization of “statutory rape”. 

The early ‘70s were a dynamite time to attend Oceanfront High School. There isn’t a single chick in your biology class that isn’t a stone fox and the female students seem to outnumber the males by about thirty to one. And hell, those boys are all football jocks—even Ponce De Leon Harper, the team’s “student manager”, is a decent-looking chap and pretty cool for a virgin. But that latter part is a drag, man. Being seventeen and never even touching a girl? What a bring-down. Fortunately for Ponce, Vice Principal and Guidance Counselor “Tiger” McDrew (Rock Hudson) has taken him under his wing. He wants to see the lad follow in his footsteps—go off to college, come back to the school to teach and coach, and be a master with the ladies. He even cooks up a scheme to help Ponce score with the new substitute teacher, Miss Smith (Angie Dickenson), who wears even less than the female students causing Ponce to walk funny every minute of the day. But there’s a real bummer harshing everyone’s vibe—seems there’s a serial killer on the loose at the school. Girls are turning up murdered, with notes pinned to their panties referring to them as “Honey”. I mean, like, who calls someone “Honey” any more?

Now the state fuzz is all over the school, Captain Sarcher (Telly Savalas) and his partner Follo (James Doohan) are questioning everyone. And that’s cutting into Tiger’s time with all his pupils. I mean, he has a lot on his plate. The “Testing” sign above his locked office door is always on, ya dig? And the big game is on Friday! You don’t think these murders are gonna interfere, do you? No way, man.

Okay, I’ve had my fun. Pretty Maids All In A Row has one of the strangest pedigrees of any movie in my recent memory. A black comedy based on a less-than-popular novel by Francis Pollini, adapted for the screen by Gene Roddenberry of all people, directed by Roger Vadim (in a funk over his recent divorce from Jane Fonda—who certainly didn’t take kindly to his casting her brother, Peter, as her love interest in Spirits of the Dead, not that that was the direct cause of the split), co-starring Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowell and “introducing” John David Carson, whose biggest claim to fame is that he was the runner up to play “David” on The Partridge Family. Other folks popping up include Roddenberry’s Star Trek pal Doohan as Savalas’ partner, and JoAnna Cameron (TV’s Isis).

The movie’s tone is all over the place and Vadim downplays the mystery aspect of the movie to concentrate on the sex romp. Shooting in his usual bland “soap commercial” style, Vadim frames everyone on a lateral plane and lets the dumb story play out. Fetishizing all the girls, amplifying the fact that young women were coming into their own sexually at the tail end of the ‘60s, high on women’s equality and the sexual revolution, there isn’t a single female character portrayed as anything more than an object of desire. Micro-mini skirts, skin-tight pants, high booted and bra-less, these “Pretty Maids” are that and nothing more. Even Dickenson is a characture babe, though her romance with Ponce is handled with more dignity and grace than any of the proceedings. For the most part, the movie is preoccupied with all of Tiger’s trysts with the female students. Let’s forget for a moment that he’s married and has a daughter, and let’s even forget that each of his partners is under seventeen, when does he find the time to teach and coach and do all the things he’s seen in the movie that make him so groovy to the students? He’s always in his office with one naked girl after another, his “testing” light on and door locked—in fact, “Lock the door” is his casual way of signaling that he wants to “make it” with whoever enters his room. Like every male fantasy played out in Penthouse Forum, every girl is ready and willing just for him. “My generation is more liberated,” explains Rita—played by “Joy Bang”. “We’re more in touch with our emotions.”

Swell. The fact that all of the murdered girls were sexually assaulted before being strangled never seems very important to any of the police—not to bumbling Keenan Wynn (constantly reduced to directing traffic by the irritated Savalas), not even to the hard-boiled Sarcher. In fact, the murders themselves seem to be little more than an inconvenience. After all, the best that anyone can say about the first victim is that she was a “great little cheerleader” (and only Ponce takes offense to that and only once). The funerals are all held at the same time, as a run-up to the big game (“We never practise on the day of a murder,” Ponce says to one of the players) and the only wet-eyes belong to Tiger—one student is idly blowing bubbles during the eulogy—and that seems to be because he lost a few great pieces of ass. Even when the murderer is unveiled, to no one’s surprise, it seems secondary to the fact that Ponce finally made it with Miss Smith and is on his way to becoming a ladies man like ol’ Tiger.

Despite a heavy campaign by MGM, which included a multi-page spread in Playboy, Pretty Maids All in a Row bombed when it was released, but not for the reasons you’d think. It appears that today’s society is far more outraged by teenage sexuality than that of the ‘70s. The main criticisms seemed to be leveled at Vadim’s uninspired direction and the bland performance by Carson (despite his early turgid turmoil depicted as intentionally hilarious). ‘70s audiences had no trouble with bubble-headed sex kitten Dickenson or swinger Hudson in his polyester pants and porno mustache. As Rita says, that generation was more liberated and not as hung up on those sorts of things. And at the time, Hudson, as Tiger, was the guy all the women wanted and all the guys wanted to be. Forty years ago he wasn’t a skeezy scumbag with a thing for little girls. That Dickenson has only a momentary lapse of conscience before bedding Ponce is secondary—she even explains that she wants it as much as he does. Their scenes together, however, do smack of amusing subversion. Their animalistic mating sequences were surely meant to parody Hudson’s squeaky clean pairings with Doris Day. (Though the mental image of Hudson mauling Day has to be upsetting to even the hardest cynic.)

So while this is all now embaressing at best and offensive at worst, to watch Pretty Maids with a level head, you have to ground yourself firmly in the times during which it was made. The casual approach to the murders is high black comedy; the swinging the pinnacle of hip. If you modern-day viewers can choke down your puritanical instincts in these days of post-Janet-Jackson-wardrobe-malfunction (and keep his lunch down during those sex scenes with Hudson), you will discover a biting, sardonic script at work. Much has been made of Daniel Waters taking inspiration for Heathers from Massacre at Central High, but it isn’t too hard to see Pretty Maids’ fingerprints on that seminal ‘80s movie.

But as far as the mechanics of the film, Vadim apologists have described his style as acutely “European”, so reducing females to the basics of their anatomy is less fetishism as it is liberal and modern (he even poses a naked Dickenson in a way to homage ex-wife Brigitte Bardot in his own And God Created Women…), but one man’s liberated is another man’s uninspired. Other “European” touches seem to be a disinterested approach to background sound and room tone—all of which seem to utterly disappear when the ADR’d dialogue pops up.

But there is also a good deal of delicious irony to be mined by modern viewing. Make all the jokes you want about Hudson’s real-life sexuality, Savalas smoking (though lighting the matches with his thumb is damned cool). Pause now, too, to make as many Star Trek jokes as you want; be sure to include references to Uhura’s and Nurse Chapel’s own micro-skirts (same costumer, after all). And let’s not forget to mention that this sex-and-murder hilarity fest was scored by uber-straight Mormon family, The Osmonds.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of Pretty Maids All in a Row will rely on your own sensibilities at the time of watching. If you’re squirming during the opening sequence of under-age ass-shots, you might be better off switching to something else. It’s likely that all the teen sexuality is what’s kept this movie from getting a legitimate DVD release—or even a cable restoration as the TCM print I watched was pretty worn, dirty and suffered from severe chemical “breathing” in the third reel. But then, I guess, if you feel guilty for getting turned on or off or whatever, someone is just going to accuse you something or other, so you’re damned no matter what you do. As for me, feeling dirty is always preferable to piety. Like Billy Joel sang, “Sinners are much more fun.”