Hammett (dir. Wim Wenders, 1982)
It’s an inviting idea: tell a fictional story in which a real author becomes wrapped up in events that mirror their own work. Off the top of my head, examples of this include Steven Soderbergh’s underappreciated Kafka, Shakespeare in Love, the frame narrative of that H.P. Lovecraft anthology Necronomicon: Book of the Dead, David Cronenberg’s brilliant non-adaptation of Naked Lunch, and, of course, John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe solving murders and caring for a pet raccoon in The Raven. While the actual quality of these films varies wildly, they do manage to escape the trappings of a traditional biopic, which tend to follow familiar story beats and, in the case of writers, cannot help but be a little boring if they actually focus on the tedium of writing.
Hammett, based on a novel by Joe Gores, does this for the author of Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man, and, unlike with the other films I’ve mentioned, has a subject that lends himself to this sort of fictional treatment. Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton agent prior to becoming a professional writer, so we don’t have to suspend belief in the way as watching Jeffrey Combs playing Lovecraft as an adventuring scholar and not a racist neurasthenic.
It is 1928. Samuel Dashiell Hammett (Frederic Forrest) has retired from the Pinkerton Detective Agency due to tuberculosis and is now living in San Francisco, writing for pulp magazines to make ends meet. His life is upended by the sudden arrival of an old colleague, Jimmy Ryan (Peter Boyle), who acted as a mentor to Hammett and served as inspiration for the Continental Op character that features in his stories. Ryan needs Hammett’s help navigating Chinatown for a case, which leads to a convoluted story involving Hammett losing a manuscript, human trafficking, blackmail, and some retrograde ‘yellow peril’ tropes that I’d like to think the filmmakers are trying and failing to subvert, but probably just used to buttress its period setting. Yikes.
The film isn’t great, even if it does capture some of the mood of Hammett’s work. The aforementioned plot points about Chinese immigrants is the most glaring issue–along with a scene in which our hero makes out with a teenager–and I was also disappointed that they did not do more with Hammett’s politics. He long claimed that he became disillusioned with the Pinkertons due to being employed by a strikebreaker and his involvement with left-wing activism later in life always read as atonement for his actions. The film does acknowledge this loosely with Hammett’s friend and ally, an anarcho-syndicalist cab driver and former Wobbly played by Elisha Cook, Jr, but displacing it onto an ancillary character makes it seem like a quirk instead of a defining trait.
There’s also the issue of the film’s murky production history. The story goes that the first cut Wim Wenders presented was so unsalvageable that executive producer Francis Ford Coppola reshot virtually the whole picture. Wenders disputes this version of events vehemently. I don’t know. To me, the film doesn’t feel much like what I associate with either of Wenders or Coppola’s best work and is just a modestly shot and acted mediocrity.
oliveresque 